I located this place back in 2007. The house sat on a 220 acre farm enrolled in CRP, a government sponsored set-aside program that pays farmers not to plow marginal and environmentally sensitive lands and instead plant them with native prairie grasses. With the contract up in 2008, the owner decided to not renew and bulldozed the farmstead and plowed up the native prairie for corn. The before and after photos were taken from the same perspective.

Luvsteun family stone. This original family stone was replaced in about 1910 and brought back to the farmstead and put in a shed.
Those shoes!!
It doesn’t get more touching than that.
Hi! Love that you’re breathing some life into all these homes, keep up the good work! Being a native Norwegian speaker, I thought I’d shed some light on the text on that lovely carved stone.
Not quite sure what a family stone is, and i only have this picture to go by- but at least this face of the stone is a tomb stone. Of Kjersti Lovstuen it says, but I’m gonna guess that might originally have been Løv-stuen, which would be leaf-livingroom, roughly translated. Those odd letters always get the axe pretty quickly! Anyway, her maiden name was Svendsrud, and the inscription at the bottom “Kjært er dit minde”, means dear is thy memory.
Best of luck!
This is sooo fun for me! I know lots of the families whose names are attached to the places. Just one thing — the correct spelling of Luvsteun is Lovstuen. You can verify with the gravestone. Adeline Langland’s (husband Walter, son Steve) maiden name was Lovstuen.