January 3, 2002

Plains Folk: Doc Olson’s Rock Garden

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Such an odd piece of architecture is set down in the middle of Wyndmere, N.D. It looks eminently defensible, with its 5-foot stone walls, heavy rubble-stone gateposts, even a turret, but inside the walls are recreational fixtures–playground equipment, a picnic shelter, a barbeque.

The stone citadel-playground is the Rock Garden Park, owned and maintained today by the city of Wyndmere, but it did not originate as a public place. This striking stone environment was the whimsical creation of a country doctor who wanted to do something remarkable for his family.

The physician was C.T. Olson, a local legend described this way in the city centennial history: "Dr. Olson was the last of the ‘Old Time’ country doctors. . . . He was an excellent physician and surgeon. He was the last of the doctors who made house calls. He visited the patients at their homes in good or bad weather. In the winter he took Alfred Haugen or Frank Pruett along in his car to dig him out of the snow or the mud."

His office was in a two-story, brick, false-fronted business building on the west side of main; it still stands next door to the Senior Center. Over in the center, Henry Kjos says Olson was not just the last doctor who made house calls, but also simply "the last doctor we had here." Some people thought he was gruff. Jo Gannon, also at the Senior Center, says, "He was a godsend. He was a family doctor who delivered all the babies."

A godsend with grandiose ideas. His residence, which still stands at 552 5th St., was a turreted, gabled curiosity of Queen Anne lineage locally known as Belle Tower. And then there was the Rock Garden.

Olson doted on his wife Helen and daughters Joan and Patsy. In 1930 he hired a crew of men supervised by another local Olson, Sig, to build a massive stone wall around four lots in the block just south of his residence. Local story says the workers were mostly patients who could not pay their bills, and so the doc had them work out the balances.

They hauled glacial stone from farm fields south of town and laid up not only the walls and gateposts but also a gabled changing house in the southwest corner, and a tower abutting it. The changing house was put in for users of the tennis court, which was in the southeast corner of the Rock Garden. (Nobody seems to remember this, but the iron anchors and wires for anchoring the perimeter netting are still in place atop the walls in this section.) Inside the tower was a bubbling fountain; the water lines also fed a lily pond, and there were flower beds everywhere.

Sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s Doc Olson got cancer, lost a piece of his stomach to surgery, and decided he had to retire. He left town, no doubt to escape continued calls for his services, and deeded the Rock Garden to the American Legion.

Over the years care for the site was intermittent, so that in the 1960s some citizens and Legionnaires wanted to raze it. One veteran, though, James Little, protested and led volunteers in efforts to clean up and rehabilitate the site. The shelter house and playground equipment were installed. There are no more floral beds, no tennis court or lily pond, and the wrought iron gates are gone, too–but the fences and buildings are restored in good shape.

A fellow who later moved to Washington recalls both working on the garden walls for Doc Olson and washing the windows of Belle Tower for Mrs. Olson. He says Mrs. Olson paid better. I imagine that through those clean upstairs windows she could keep an eye on her daughters at amusement in their Rock Garden.

How compelling is this little Camelot of the plains, created as an act of love and beauty, and perhaps as a desperate stab at gentility in a prairie town. It languished with the demise of its builder, but remains today a magic place with power to transport any willing visitor.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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