# Bemidji, Beltrami County, Minnesota For the Petrie and Helbig families, Bemidji was the place at the end of the trail — literally, for the first of them. When Mathias Petrie and his son John walked the road from Park Rapids to Bemidji in the late 1800s, they were following the pattern of many immigrants drawn north into Beltrami County by the promise of homestead land and the timber that covered it. Mathias and his wife Katherine, both born in Germany, had first settled at Avon south of St. Cloud before pushing on to the pine country. They took up land in Section 6 of Liberty Township, while John claimed a homestead by Long Lake. Bemidji, the county seat and the nearest town of any size, became the anchor point for the family's births, burials, and business for nearly a century. ## The first generation Mathias Petri and Katherine Riel both ended their lives here and were buried in Bemidji, as was their son John Petri, the great-grandfather of this line. John's story is bound to the town in the starkest way. He had made a living logging, and he served the township as Justice of the Peace and as U.S. Postmaster. On April 9, 1913, a falling tree killed him at the age of thirty-eight. His son John Jr. was only a small boy. John was buried in Bemidji, and his death shaped the family that remained. His widow, Gertrude Marie Helbig, had come to him from Santa Fe, New Mexico — a "mail order bride," as she always told it, married to John in 1902 when she was nineteen and he twenty-seven. After John's death she stayed on the farm, married a neighbor named John Erickson, and finally, in 1946, married John's brother Champy Peter Petri, a farmer. Champy and his Minnesota-born wife Sarah had earlier lived in Section 10, and he too was buried in Bemidji. Gertrude lived to be ninety-nine, dying on August 25, 1982, and was buried near her people. Gertrude's own father, Robert "Traugott Wilhelm" Helbig, followed her north after her marriage. Born in Dresden, he had lived a colorful life in New Mexico before coming to Liberty Township, where he helped build roads, laid the corduroy on the Long Lake road, and was known for his gardens. He worked as a cook in a Minnesota logging camp, where he was once stabbed. In 1930 he was still in the area; when he could no longer live alone his daughters took turns caring for him. He died in 1937 while living with his daughter Maria Klasen, and Herman Martin Klasen reported his death to the township clerk. Robert was buried in Bemidji. Other Helbig kin — Albert Fred Helbig and his wife Agnes K. Schwartz, married in 1911 and living in and around the area from 1920 through 1950, along with Marie Mary Hedwig Helbig and Frances Kathryn Helbig — also made their lives in this corner of Beltrami County. ## The Cooper family arrives Charles Calvin Cooper, born in Shingle House, Pennsylvania, came to Bemidji by way of North Dakota and South Dakota. With his wife Anna Elizabeth Bartosh, born in Iowa, and their children, he settled here in the late 1920s and lived out his life in town. Charles and Anna appear in Bemidji through the 1939, 1940, 1942, and 1946 records, and Charles was buried here after his death in 1948. Their daughter Sadie Harriet Cooper was living in Bemidji in 1940, the year she married Ralph Paul Robinson, who was also in town at the time. George Thomas Cooper appears here in 1940 and 1943. ## Two families joined The marriage that tied the Coopers to the Petries took place on October 4, 1932, when Robert Petrie married Gladys May Cooper. They held their wedding dance at the Deer Lake Community Club — Bob said it was the largest crowd the hall had seen to that date. Robert had grown up in Liberty Township, one of John and Gertrude's sons; he did logging and trucking, and had met Gladys at a dance. Over the next five years three sons were born to them at Bemidji: Milton Ronald Petrie on December 31, 1933; Vern Robert Petrie on May 16, 1936; and Dale Richard Petrie on December 4, 1937. In 1937, like many families of the time, Robert and Gladys left. Bob mounted a small house on the back of his truck, loaded their possessions and their three small children, tied a stove and washing machine to the back, and drove west — camping along gravel roads, washing clothes in a Montana river, eventually settling in Spokane. Robert's brothers Alfred and Mathias had gone west before them. Alfred Petrie had married Ruth Mary Watkins in August 1936. The move scattered a family that had been rooted in Beltrami County for two generations. ## Those who stayed Not everyone left. John Peter Petrie — John Jr., the boy of nine when his father was killed — remained. Born at home in Liberty Township in 1911, he logged, farmed, and trapped near Bemidji, married Myrtle Mary Webster (later buried here) in 1934, and made his home in the area from the 1930s until his death. He was an avid hunter, fisherman, and trapper, a member of Our Redeemers Lutheran Church in Puposky and of the Bemidji Hangfire Black Powder Club. He died at his home on September 29, 1997, at the age of eighty-six, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery — the last of the family's long presence in the town where his grandfather and father had been laid before him. His sister Marie Catherine Petri married William "Bill" Melbert Hilman Malterud in Bemidji on September 21, 1933; the Malterud family, including Sarah Marie Malterud in 1930, was also part of the local community. Marie later lived in Ohio. ## What the place meant For this family, Bemidji was a working town in the north woods — a place of logging camps, homestead farms, community dances, and small churches. It gave them land and a living, and it took from them as well, most cruelly in the tree that killed John Petri in 1913. Some of the family lie in its cemeteries across more than eighty years; others carried Bemidji with them west, adding an "e" to the Petri name along the way and telling stories of the town for the rest of their lives.