Lake Sinai

        Sinai, the village in which stands The Little House on the Prairie, takes it's name from Lake Sinai, a couple of miles away. In 1907 when a railroad track was run from Sioux Falls to Watertown, the town was platted as a water stop for the steam locomotives. Lake Sinai Lutheran Church, stood a half mile west of the new town and that's the site of the cemetery where Joanne is buried.

      In the early days of white settlement some pioneers travelled by the lake, the shores of which had been recently burned by a prairie fire. The retreating glacier had deposited many rocks on the hills by the lake and one of the men said "It looks like Mt. Sinai" and the name stuck. Local pronunciation calls it "SignYai" which is somewhat near the Norwegian.

    During the 1930s the lake dried up and was farmed. When rains began to replenish it some farm machinery was inundated and never recovered, In the 1940s it was huge cattail marsh famous for waterfowl hunting. By the 1950s it was a small roundish lake perhaps a mile across each direction. Then came the 1980s and since with climate change and increasing rainfall it grew and grew spreading over seventeen hundred acres, flooding roads and farm places. 

     In its more original  configuration it was about two miles east of the farm on which I grew up but now is within a mile. My father owned a threshing machine and banded with other local farmers to thresh grain in the fall. Helmer Quail, and his son, Howard, were part of that "threshing run" as it was called. They lived a mile and half south east of our house. The lake has swallowed up their farmstead and now only the silo remains on a little island totally surrounded by water. Fortunately Howard had quit farming before the rise of the water and had moved his house to town.

     

     The soybean harvest has now begun. Combines that harvest a 40 foot swath at one pass make quick work of a field. About a week ago the temperature dropped to 37 degrees and there was some frost in low lying areas. It's almost to the time that a frost would be welcome to speed the crops drying and kill the green weeds in the field.

Takk for alt,

Al

             The driveway to the Quail farm was long and hilly and must have been difficult in winter.

                         The lonely silo marks the place where the Quail farmstead was.