Reflections: The Postcard That Solved a Mystery

How a $15 post card resurfaced the forgotten origins of a family's cherished retreat.

November 13, 2025 By Don Gabelhouse Jr.

I wholeheartedly support my wife and daughter shopping at antique shops, antique shows, and estate sales because that is how I have acquired some of my best old, collectible fishing lures and duck decoys. In recent years, they have also been purchasing old postcards that promoted fishing opportunities, many in the Otter Tail County, Minnesota, area. Some show catches of unrealistically huge fish that are crudely “photoshopped” onto the postcard. Others are paintings or cartoons of anglers and monstrous fish. Still others are photographs of area scenes and features. Most of these are what postcard collectors call “Real Photo Postcards” or RPPCs. Such postcards have a photographic image printed on postcard stock and, unlike lithographic or offset printing processes, show no pixels when magnified.

This past summer, my daughter Sarah found and purchased a RPPC on eBay that can perhaps best be described as a miracle, or at least supreme serendipity! Her acquisition initiated a process and pretty much solved a mystery that had gnawed on me for over a decade. The postcard, which she purchased for $15 from a postcard dealer in Olympia, Washington, was produced by the A. Pearson Company of Minneapolis, and is postcard number 5065 and hand labeled “Cottage At Stalker Lake, Dalton, Minn.”

When I first laid eyes on the postcard, my heart soared! It still soars every time I look at it. The size and proportions of the structure in the photo, its roof and rafters, the width of the siding boards, the location of the windows and the terrain make me certain that the photo on that postcard is of our cabin.

The cabin looks a little different now than it did then. Grandpa used lumber from a boathouse to wall in the screened-in front porch and there were a lot more trees surrounding the cabin back then. It appears that just enough land in the forest was cleared to fit a cabin. Given the storms that have swept through the area recently, trees that close to the cabin would drive my wife crazy.

Plat maps available online show that through the years, a number of individuals of Scandinavian descent have owned the property where our cabin now stands. Elias Halvorsen Berg owned it in 1884; Hans Olson had it in 1902; it belonged to Fjoslien Haarstad in 1912 and 1916; and Martin Iverson owned it, according to the 1925 plat map.

Uncertainty regarding when the cabin was built on the property has bothered me since 2011, when my wife and I acquired ownership of the property from my mother. Otter Tail County Assessor’s records say the cabin was built in 1937. That is the same year my grandparents saw that it was for sale while camping with friends at Iverson’s Resort (later Norway Beach Resort). According to my father (who was 13 at the time of that first trip) it was one of just three private cabins on Stalker Lake and was said to have been built by Lars Mohagen, who owned hardware stores, first in Wendell and later in Elbow Lake. Who builds a cabin or has one built and then puts it up for sale by the summer of that same year?

The postcard Sarah bought was used and sent through the mail in February 1936. It shows a sign on the large tree in the foreground that reads “L.N. Mohagen Wendell Minn.” The message on the postcard sent from Dalton, Minnesota, to Olympia, Washington, complained about four weeks of temperatures below zero, lows to -50°F, and the need to use an oil stove in the cellar to keep the house above 35°F for Mom. The photo was clearly taken during warmer times and indicates the cabin existed in at least 1935 and appears to have been owned by Lars Nikolai Mohagen.

A vintage postcard showing an old cabin. — Cottage at Stalker Lake, Dalton, Minn.

Thanks to the Deputy Recorder for Otter Tail County, I learned the ownership history since 1923 of Lot 12 Tordenskjold Township S34 R132 S041 in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, the property on which our cabin was built. On May 23, 1923, Martin Iverson and his wife Dora platted 20 lots in the southeast corner of Stalker Lake as Norway Beach. Many of the eastern lots became the resort. On December 19, 1925, they sold Lot 12 to L.N. Mohagen.

On September 13, 1931, Lars Mohagen and his wife Nellie sold the property to Harold W. Lylesett. Thanks to a 1979 radio interview of Lars and other information I found online, I know that Lars opened a hardware store in Wendell in 1932. During the Great Depression, preparing for a new business may have been a higher priority than owning a cabin.

Mr. Lylesett owned the property for about 5½ years and was trying to sell it in the summer of 1937, when my grandparents, dad, uncle, and aunt were camping at the resort. He owned the property until May 10, 1938, when he and his wife, Justina, sold it to Earnest E. Krantz. Mr. Krantz owned the property for less than four months and sold it to my grandmother on August 29, 1938. I wonder if he made a profit. It’s impossible to tell from the deed, as the purchase price for this and all three of the other transactions above were “one dollar and other valuable considerations.”

I contacted the City of Elbow Lake, Minnesota, asking if they could put me in touch with anyone in the Mohagen family who might know something about Lars’ cabin-building activities. They forwarded my request to the Elbow Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. The Executive Director knew Lars when she was a child and remembers that he was a clock maker and repaired her parents’ grandfather clock. She was good friends with Lars’ son and she and her husband eventually owned Mohagen Hardware after Harold Mohagen retired. I also consulted the Grant County Historical Museum, but they had no record of Lars building a cabin. They said newspaper columns containing Lars’ name were limited to who did what and who visited who, back in those days.

I may never know the exact date our cabin was built. But Sarah finding the postcard and then obtaining copies of deeds narrowed it down considerably. Bottom line, Lars Mohagen had to have built the cabin prior to 1931, when he sold the property. If I was to guess, I think he built the cabin in 1927 and the 1937 date in Assessor’s records amounts to a typo. The cabin is my most important possession. It, along with the land around it and the lake down the hill literally shaped my life. Thanks, Lars.