# Beltrami County, Minnesota ## The North Woods and the Homestead Trail For the Petrie and Helbig families, Beltrami County meant timber, homestead land, and the small farming settlements that grew up in the townships south and west of Bemidji at the turn of the twentieth century. It was a place reached on foot and by trail before it was reached by road. Mathias Petri was the first of the family to arrive. Born in the Luxembourg and Saarland borderland around 1846, he crossed from Antwerp aboard the *Westernland* and landed in New York on 1 April 1891. He and his wife, Katherine Riel, first settled at Avon, near St. Cloud, before pushing north. With his son John, Mathias walked the trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji and took up a homestead in Section 6 of Liberty Township. John homesteaded near Long Lake. They cleared land, farmed, and logged — the two occupations that would define the family in this county for the next half century. ## Liberty Township Liberty Township was the heart of the family's life in Beltrami County. By June 1905, Mathias, Katherine, and their sons John, Champy, and Victor were all living there, alongside the Helbigs — Robert "Traugott Wilhelm" Helbig and his daughters Gertrude, Marie, and Frances. Robert Helbig, a German-born baker who had once worked at the Indian school in Albuquerque, came to Minnesota after his daughter Gertrude married John Petri and settled into the rhythm of the north woods. He helped build local roads, laying the corduroy on the Long Lake road that survived for decades, and he was known among his neighbors as a man always at work, often for others. He kept a garden of Sweet William that bloomed for years after his house was gone. The families were bound together tightly. Gertrude Helbig married John Petri; her sisters and their households — the Klasens, the Sundhs — lived nearby. Herman Martin Klasen and Carl Alfred Sundh both farmed in Liberty Township across the 1920s and 1930s. Children of these families attended the Long Lake School. John Petri built a full life here in a short time. He logged, farmed, served as Justice of the Peace, and worked as U.S. Postmaster. On 9 April 1913, he was killed by a falling tree at the age of thirty-eight, leaving Gertrude with five young children — Mathias, Robert, Fred, John Jr., and Marie. John Jr. was two. Gertrude remained on the farm and later married a neighbor, Jack Erickson, farming the adjoining land, and in 1946 she married John's brother Champy Peter Petri. She was small in stature and lived to ninety-nine. The elder generation stayed close to the land they had claimed. Mathias suffered a stroke in 1921, was confined to a wheelchair, and died on 31 August 1925. Katherine Riel died 12 June 1932. Robert Helbig, in his declining years, was cared for in turn by his daughters; he died 17 December 1937 at the home of Maria Klasen in Liberty Township, aged eighty-seven. Herman Klasen reported the death to the township clerk. All three were buried in Bemidji. The children born in Liberty Township carried the family forward: Edwin Maurice "Matt" Petrie (1903), Alfred Petrie (1906), and Marie Catherine Petri (1908) were all born here. John Peter Petrie was born at home in Liberty Township on 2 March 1911, grew up attending the Long Lake School, and — after a spell working farms in North Dakota during the Depression years — returned to his father's homestead. He logged, farmed, and trapped there for the rest of his long life, remaining in Beltrami County until his death in Bemidji on 29 September 1997. ## Bemidji, Buzzle, and the Surrounding Townships Bemidji was the county's town — the place for weddings, burials, and the business of ordinary life. Nearly every family marriage was recorded there: Champy Petri and Sarah Marie Malterud in 1914, Victor Petri and Clara Roen in 1916, Robert Petrie and Gladys May Cooper in 1932, William Malterud and Marie Catherine Petri in 1933, Alfred Petrie and Ruth Mary Watkins in 1936, and Albert Fred Helbig and Agnes K. Schwartz in 1911. It was also where the family laid its dead to rest, in the cemeteries of a growing lumber town. Albert Fred Helbig lived in and around Bemidji from 1920 through 1950, farming near Liberty Township and marrying Agnes Schwartz, who lived in the area across the same decades until her death in 1972. William "Bill" Melbert Hilman Malterud, born in the county in 1896, and his family lived at Turtle Lake; the Malteruds had settled there as early as 1905. He died in Bemidji in 1986. The Cooper family came from farther afield. Charles Calvin Cooper, born in Pennsylvania and raised into adulthood in South Dakota and North Dakota, moved to Minnesota in the late 1920s with his wife Anna Elizabeth Bartosh. By 1930 they were farming at Maple Ridge with their children — Gladys May, William Perry, Sadie Harriet, and Eva Rose — where a grandson, George Thomas Cooper, was born at Pinewood in 1925. Sadie Harriet Cooper was born at Buzzle in 1922. The family later moved into Bemidji, where Charles lived out his life until his death in 1948. It was in Minnesota that Gladys May Cooper met Robert Petrie at a dance; they held their wedding dance at the Deer Lake Community Club to what Bob later called the largest crowd the hall had seen to that date. ## Leaving for the West The county's economy leaned on logging, and when work grew scarce many families looked westward. Robert Petrie and Gladys Cooper's three sons — Milton Ronald (1933), Vern Robert (1936), and Dale Richard (1937) — were all born in Bemidji. In 1937, following his brothers Alfred and Mathias, Robert mounted a small house on the back of a truck, packed his family and possessions inside, tied a stove and washing machine to the back, and set out west with three small children, camping along the way. They washed clothes in a Montana river valley, drying them on bushes in the sun, before eventually settling in Spokane, Washington. Robert is said to have added the "e" to Petri because it sounded less Polish. Others stayed. John Peter Petrie kept the homestead through it all, farming and trapping in Liberty Township into the 1990s. His sister Marie Catherine lived at Turtle Lake through the 1940s and 1950s before moving away, and returned to Bemidji late in life. For this family, Beltrami County was where the immigrant generation first put down roots in American soil — walked in on a trail from Park Rapids, cleared from timber, and held for nearly a hundred years.