OCTOBER 16, 2025 – Today the past was the present.
By way of background, late this morning I drove up to the Red Cabin/Björnholm to meet a prospective buyer of miscellaneous old equipment that has been parked/stored at Björnholm for years beyond accurate count by anyone in the family. My brother-in-law Chuck had tentatively sold the bulkier items—a garden tractor and mower attachment, a small trailer for said tractor and a large old trailer that Grandpa Nilsson had had someone build for him back in the early 1940s and that Dad had completely rebuilt in the 1960s.
The tractor and the big trailer have been sitting where Dad last parked them some 20 years ago. He got so much use out of them that he’d probably reduced their per-use down to an amortized cost of under a cent.
The old trailer appears in some of my very earliest memories. It was fabricated from a 1930-something Chevrolet chassis, wood planks and boards, and various hardware that the fabricator had had custom-made by a blacksmith. Grandpa pulled it behind his yellow-with-green roof 1953 Chevrolet sedan on trips to and from the cabin. It was a summer fixture at the cabin and a winter fixture outside the garage of my grandparents’ house in Southeast Minneapolis. I remember rubbing my fingers across the numerous large beads on the single glass reflector attached to the left side of the tailgate.
After much of the wood had rotted, Dad tore the trailer apart down to the old Chevrolet chassis and saved all the specially made metal fittings. He then redesigned the trailer box, built a hinged wooden cover for it, and replaced the single glass reflector with two plastic ones and added a set of fully wired tail-lights. After several coats of fresh paint, the trailer looked as new as ever. The rebuilding project consumed many evenings after Dad’s day job at the courthouse. As a kid, I derived as much enjoyment watching Dad work as Dad did by doing the actual work. I remember his explanations for certain details, such as installing carriage bolts laterally through a couple of 2 x 4s to prevent them from splitting when threaded stays were attached to the ends of the lumber.
Another memorable item was the wooden cover. Dad wanted a slight curvature to it so it would shed water better, but this created some practical challenges for the cutting process. When he asked Mother—the mathematician/engineer—for assistance, she wasn’t of much practical help, other than to suggest he use a protractor and principles of geometry. So he did, and voila! Before I knew it, he’d put numerous sheets of paper together out on the driveway and made a full-size drawing of a perfect pattern. He then transferred it to the long 1 x 10 end-pieces of the cover and cut the curves by hand.
If Grandpa hauled the trailer back and forth to the cabin 100 times, over the decades that followed, Dad must’ve pulled it on 1,000 round trips.
The garden tractor was introduced to cabin life much later. Dad bought it used and deployed it mostly for hauling firewood from deep in the woods back out to the cabin. As with all his other tools and equipment, Dad maintained the tractor assiduously, and in return it gave him many years of dependable service. He purchased separately the trailer for it, which was essential, given its primary role in transporting tools and firewood.
After the Red Cabin was built, Dad kept us well-supplied with firewood. After he died in old age I had rare need of the tractor—or the rebuilt trailer, for that matter—and even years before Dad’s last trip to the cabin the equipment had fallen into disuse.
My sister Elsa and her husband Chuck, the exclusive users and stewards of the old cabin, had for some time been trying to dispose of the equipment I’ve described. Finally, just days ago, Chuck finally got a bite on a Facebook ad and asked me if I could meet the prospective buyer on-site at Björnholm. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
