Bio of John Currie (d.1948) Pine Co., MN USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, material may be freely used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material, AND permission is obtained from the contributor of the file. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by other organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for non-commercial purposes, MUST obtain the written consent of the contributor, OR the legal representative of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. Made available to The USGenWeb Archives by: Carol C. Eddleman This is a biography written by Marcia Thieling on April 8, 1977 and transcribed by Carol C. Eddleman March 12, 1999. The biography is of JOHN CURRIE as told by his son, CLARENCE CURRIE... Father John Currie went through the academy in Canada and was a teacher in Mt. Forest, Ontario before he came to the U.S. He came as a young man, about 21. He worked mostly at logging and on the railroad. He once was a foreman at a gravel pit at Mora for the railroad where he supervised 200 or 300 men who shoveled gravel by hand into the cars for the railroad bed. He never wrote a letter home and never talked about what happened to make him leave home, but it sounded as though it must have been some kind of fight. His brother, Will Currie, came to the U. S. after him and lived at Mora, also. John would often log in the winter. In those days (about 1882) they would leave the logs uncut and full length and drag them to the Rum River (Snake River). The logs would then be floated down the rivers either to Minneapolis or Stillwater where they would be made into rafts with a cook shack built on top of them Then the men would sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans on the rafts to sell the lumber. Clarence could remember many oldtimers who used to work in the woods in the winter and then float down the river in the summer. It would take all summer to float down and come back by steam boat One summer John Currie went down on one of the rafts. He swore after that he would never go south again, that it was an awful place fit only for riffraff. They used to get a shot of whiskey with their meals on the raft to "protect them against malaria." The summer he went down was around 1885. When the first railroad was built from the Cities to Duluth, anyone wanting a free ride to the Cities could get it by helping load cord wood for the engine at the various stops along the way. After John Currie married, they moved to Hinckley where he ran the drug store for many years. After this he sold real estate and insurance. he sold many of the farms east of Hinckley. He quit this during WWI. John Currie could speak fluent Chippewa, knew many of the Indians around Mille Lacs Lake well. When the game warden was having trouble with the Indians, he would stop and get him to go out with him to talk to the Indians. When they lived in town, many of the Indians whenever they came into town would stop in to see him, especially one named Chief Churchill. Soon after he and Amy Rachel Conger were married (July 7, 1888), they moved out to a timber claim north of Mora. In order to hold the claim you had to live on the claim for a year and pay a certain amount for the timber you took, and then you could sell the land. They sold it for around $1,000. It was maybe then that they came to Hinckley (about 1891?). When John Currie came down from Canada, the country was still virgin timber, but it didn't take long for the lumbermen to clean up the white pine. What virgin timber was left was killed by the Hinckley Fire (in 1894). After the fire, they logged off what was left and piled the logs in the creeks. It took them two years to haul all that lumber out. John Currie had been fighting the fire for days before it came to Hinckley. When the town started to burn, he came back into town and got his family out on the Eastern Minnestota train that made it to Duluth. The town started buring before the fire itself reached town because the air was so full of firebrands that they started it on fire. They had a cow that managed to find its way to the gravel pit (which was full of water) before the fire got there, so when they came back their cow was still alive and was the only supply of milk for miles around. John Currie came back days after the fire to help start cleaning up the town and to bury bodies. He swore afterwards that he buried the last person killed by the fire because he went by the graveyard and saw a last coffin that somehow hadn't been buried, so he stopped, got out his shovel and buried it. Of course the bodies were burned beyond recognition, so they didn't know who they were burying. As soon as the fire was out trainloads of lumber were brought in and they built the town right back up again. The surrounding country grew back up to popple (poplar?). There were big pine stumps left from the fire scattered all over the countryside, so people would use stump pullers, turn the stumps up, drag them to where they wanted the, turn them on their sides, line them up and make fences out of them. The whole country was full of that kind of fences. Later, many of the stumps were piled up and burned. White pine grew in heavy clay soil, Norway pine in medium soil, and jack pine in the sand. Cloverdale had a turpentine plant where they got turpentine from the Norway pine stumps left from the fire. They burned the stumps to get the tar and oil out, the stumps were turned into charcoal, and they refined the oil to get the turpentine. There was quite a settlement there then, and it was called Turpville. One summer John Currie moved his family out north of Cloverdale to get the kids out of town for the summer. They had just closed down the factory then. The Indians used to come with sleds to the cedar swamp and kill enough deer to last them for the whole winter. When the game warden would come to get after them, they would line up with butcher knives and scare the warden away. John used to laugh about it because he knew the Indians were bluffing and that some of them would have run if the game warden would have done anything. Footnote: John and Amy had eight children: Ethel, Earl, Beatrice, Clarence, John M., (Mabel) Genevieve, Sidney and Kenneth. John passed away on May 11, 1948 in the Cloverdale area east of Hinckley. For more information on John and his descendants see http://www.uftree.com/UFT/WebPages/CarolCurrieEddleman/CAROLFAM/index.htm