On this date in 1994, The Forum’s Bob Lind profiled Kurt Quanbeck and his farm near Aneta, N.D., which featured a Norwegian-style stabbur built with Anund Roheim, a Norwegian violin maker. The stabbur, a kind of small storehouse, became a cultural landmark that attracted visitors.
Here is the complete story as it appeared in the paper that day:
Stabbur is a little bit of Norway
By Bob Lind, The Forum
In Norway, the small log buildings were storehouses for salted meat and other provisions.
On Kurt Quanbeck’s farm near Aneta, N.D., the small building built to look like its Norwegian ancestor is a storehouse for various artifacts.
It’s called a stabbur. Most in Norway were built 600 years ago; the one on the Quanbeck farm was built 10 years ago.
See more history at Newspapers.com
The base of the Quanbeck stabbur is 12 by 16 feet; the wider upper level is 17 by 16 feet and creates two bunk-like shelves where, in the Norwegian mountains, people could sleep overnight.
The Quanbeck stabbur contains old plows, dinosaur fragments from Montana, Indian artifacts from the Aneta area, an 1824 Norwegian immigrant’s trunk, and pictures of the Quanbeck ancestral homestead in Norway with its two stabburs, which inspired their counterpart near Aneta.
Kurt’s father, Sherman Quanbeck, visited the Norwegian homestead in 1983 and met Anund Roheim, a Norwegian violin maker who encouraged him to build a stabbur in North Dakota. Roheim later helped Sherman construct the $8,000 building with help from relatives and neighbors.
Sherman, a retired farmer and inventor with 24 patents for farm equipment and numerous awards, still visits the farm each spring to help Kurt prepare machinery for fieldwork.
The Quanbeck farm was homesteaded by Sherman’s grandfather, who emigrated from Norway in 1880, making Kurt the fourth generation to live there. The Quanbeck (or Kvambekk) family plans a reunion in Decorah, Iowa, with hopes that some will visit the Aneta stabbur.
Visitors from across the U.S. and Norway have already come to see the stabbur, and another was even built in Sons of Norway Park in Bismarck, inspired by the Quanbeck’s.
Roheim is remembered not just for his carpentry but for a humorous tale: he tried to make a profit by exporting a Cadillac to Norway, only to lose money due to taxes and transportation costs.
Despite that mishap, Sherman says there’s “nothing but happiness over the little Norwegian storehouse on the prairie Roheim helped build.”
Kate Almquist is the social media manager for InForum. After working as an intern, she joined The Forum full time starting in January 2022. Readers can reach her at kalmquist@forumcomm.com.