Few people living today can say their father was a blacksmith.
But Ruth (Frykholm) Herren can.
The longtime first-grade teacher who has lived more than seven decades on Cowlitz Prairie north of Toledo will celebrate her 100th birthday in April.
Her grandfather, John Frykholm, a 37-year-old carpenter from Sweden, sailed across the Atlantic in 1882, seeking a new life for his family in the United States. He settled on a farm in Olequa, an unincorporated area on the west bank of the Cowlitz River north of Castle Rock.
“In Sweden if you had land, you were rich,” Herren said. “But he was a carpenter … so they never did too well.”
Three years later, he sent for his wife, Kristina, and their three children, including Ruth’s father, John Ewald Frykholm. Two in-laws also immigrated with them.
“I think how brave they were to come,” Herren said. “I suppose they came into New York and had to come out on a train.”
The couple raised four sons and four daughters. Kristina died in 1923 and John Sr. in 1939. They are buried at the Little Falls Cemetery outside of Vader.
Ruth’s father, who was born Oct. 3, 1877, attended a small school at Olequa until the fourth grade. As a young man, he traveled to California, where he learned the blacksmith trade. He moved to Centralia, lived in a rooming house on North Tower run by David and Flora Dale and worked as a blacksmith at the Centralia railroad depot’s roundhouse.
On Sept. 26, 1914, he married 24-year-old Beulah Clara Fountain, a teacher who was a dozen years his junior.
Beulah, who was born in 1890 in Missouri, traveled west to Washington with her widowed mother after her father died in 1904. They lived in the Skookumchuck area with her mother’s uncle, James Smith, and sold fruit and vegetables grown on their property. Later, Beulah taught in one-room schools near Centralia and Ethel. Her mother died in March 1914, and in September she married John Frykholm but had to quit her job.
“When I first started teaching they wouldn’t hire married women,” Herren said.
Beulah and John Frykholm lived at 1308 N. Pearl St. in Centralia. After Centralia railroad workers went on strike, John lost his job, so he built a small blacksmith shop beside his home.
The couple had two children, Howard, born in July 1915, and Ruth, born in April 1919.
Ruth went to Oakview School, graduated from Centralia High School in 1937, and attended two years of Centralia Junior College on the third floor of the old high school before transferring to Western Washington College of Education (Western Washington University today) in Bellingham.
She taught first grade at the old Logan School in Centralia and then at Lincoln. Her father died June 4, 1941, at 63. He’s buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in Centralia.
During World War II, Herren worked two summers in Seattle at the Boeing Company, first as an inspector in the spot welding shop on B-17 wing assemblies and then at a receiving warehouse on Jackson Street. The first summer she roomed with another Centralia teacher, and the second she stayed with three other girls in a house near the University of Washington.
During the war, when men left to fight overseas and many women took higher-paying jobs in defense industries, school officials scrambled for teachers.
Herren recalled a dilemma faced by her school principal, who taught seventh and eighth grades, when the teacher of the combined third- and fourth-grade class was sick.
“In all of Centralia they couldn’t get a substitute,” she said. “He was wringing his hands, wondering what to do.”
“I said, ‘Well, my mother used to teach.’ ”
“Go and get her!”
Herren walked over the viaduct to their home on North Pearl.
“She had already started her Monday wash, and when I explained it to her, she took off her apron, grabbed her coat and purse, and off we went.”
Her mother, in her early 50s, taught at Logan School for a month.
After Ruth married Bob Herren July 13, 1947, in the Centralia Methodist Church, she moved to his farm on Cowlitz Prairie and signed up to work as a substitute in Toledo. But that year, the old grade school on the hill where Fir Lawn Funeral Chapel sits today was crowded with 50 first-graders. After partitioning the old classroom in half, the principal begged her to teach full time.
Herren stayed home for five years after the birth of her two daughters and then taught at Vader Elementary School for 11 years. She returned to Toledo Elementary for another 17 years, retiring in 1982 after 35 years of teaching.
She still meets former students.
“Oftentimes they know me and I don’t know them because they have changed,” she said.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
