<body><div>“We never heard of trick or treat,” wrote local historian Ingrid Julsrud (born 1900) about her childhood in Houston, Minn., during the early 1900s. However, on Halloween, she and her childhood friends did dress up “funny” to visit their neighbors to have them guess who they were. She recalled Halloween being not as much for children as for “grownups who played pranks around town.” Sometimes, there were teenage Halloween dances at the high school, but some older youths also participated in the shenanigans, such as tipping over corn stacks. Everything looked different the day after the “spooks were out,” recalled Hollis Briggs of Houston (born 1887). “The next morning, everyone would run around and see what everyone else had done.” He added not even a well-stacked woodpile was safe. “On Halloween, things were moved around – anything. They would move a building if they thought they could move it.” Common movable targets included outhouses and buggies. “They always moved the outhouses out into the streets,” said Briggs, “just to make people work the next day to put them back. They weren’t very substantially built on top of the ground; it only took four people to move one.”If there were fewer than four pranksters, tipping over outhouses was another option. In the first two decades of the 1900s, more than half of the homes in Houston did not yet have indoor toilets or bathrooms, so there were plenty of privies. With the arrival of the city sewer system, indoor toilets were required. “Then the old outhouses disappeared, and the pranksters lost their fun,” added Julsrud.In those horse and buggy days, buggies were tempting targets. “Often, the old band stand in the park was filled with them,” wrote Julsrud. “Once, one was placed way up on the roof.” One morning after, the children came to the old red school house to find all of the entrances blocked with buggies.“We used to have a lot of fun,” recalled Clifford Orr of Houston (born 1895). “We’d go out and play a few tricks, but we never done nothing mean. We just might push a guy’s wagon and hide it somewhere. Sometimes, we’d push a buggy in the creek down by Hokah, but we never got very wild.” Orr remembered a buggy being placed on top of two corn cribs, where it stayed until spring.“We had an old Irishman for a neighbor, and my brothers would go by his farm,” Orr continued. “The neighbor would be hiding beneath a grain dray and say, I’m watching you boys.” The bovines-in-the-barn-exchange was another prank of preference. Men knew cows in those days like they knew cars in later years, recalled Julsrud. “So, when a man found a strange cow in his barn in the morning, he knew exactly who owned it. He promptly returned the cow and hoped that someone would soon return his.”Julsrud wrote about businesses in town having their windows soaped. Bars of laundry soap were used to “scribble on the windows.” Removal required a lot of scrubbing with warm water. When bar soap was replaced by powdered soap and no longer used for laundry, that prank became history as well. During World War II, the fats for making soap were diverted to manufacture of ammunition, so chemists developed laundry substitutes.Belle Coulson (born 1896) said she was not allowed out on Halloween except when she went with some neighbor girls to a party where the activities included hide ‘n’ go seek and bobbing for apples. “When we would bob for apples, you would see how many you could pick up from a tub of water without using your hands. You usually got good and soaking wet.”There were unusual occurrences around La Crescent, according to Frank Hafner (born1895). During his youth, “Why, some farmers would find their wagon box on top of the straw pile, and they would have a heck of a time getting them down.I’ll never forget my last night out,” he continued. “It was a dark night, and when the moon came out, we went between the ridge and run through the knolls and harassed our neighbor. Sometimes we were out until 2 a.m.”Art Beckman of La Crescent (born 1892) told of one high school experience when there was a skeleton in one of the classrooms. “During Halloween, someone had it hanging up on the flagpole.”Trick-or-treating, costumes and pumpkin decorations were later Halloween traditions. Janice Fitting of Houston remembers her grade-school days in Sheldon in the 1940s when there was no trick-or-treating but there were parties at school. They brought to school their homemade, self-decorated masks made of brown paper bags or white cloth sugar bags with holes for eyes and mouth.For trick or treating, mothers most often came up with homemade costumes. Duane St. Mary of Caledonia remembers being a tiger, a cowboy and Davey Crockett during the 1950s. His only Halloween trick came much later when on leave from the Navy, he arrived unannounced back home in Caledonia on Halloween evening. After some trick or treaters departed his house, he pulled the collar of his pea jacket up around his head and tilting his helmet forward, rang the doorbell and in a disguised voice said to his mother, “trick or treat.” After the short-lived ruse, he received a welcome-home hug (and probably edible treats). His mother said she thought he looked awfully big to be trick-or-treating. Asked about jack-o’-lanterns, Beckman replied, “We never thought of such a thing.” Orr agreed, “Years ago, we used to always plant pumpkins in the cornfield. We would feed them to the pigs or cows or use them for pumpkin pie.”But when pumpkins became associated with Halloween, they also became material for mischief. Both in Houston and Caledonia, broken pumpkins would be found in the streets the morning after Halloween. One Houston resident said they would preserve their porch pumpkins by taking them inside on Halloween night. Sources: “Halloween, From Tricks to Treats,” Houston County News, (Oct., 1981); Remembering Old Times, Houston During the Post Card Era, by Ingrid Julsrud (1993)</div></body>

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Peering at the Past – Strange Bovine in the Barn? It Must Be Halloween

“We never heard of trick or treat,” wrote local historian Ingrid Julsrud (born 1900) about her childhood in Houston, Minn., during the early 1900s. However, on Halloween, she and her childhood friends did dress up “funny” to visit their neighbors to have them guess who they were. She recalled Halloween being not as much for children as for “grownups who played pranks around town.”