Olive and Clarence's Farm Years and a Sudden Loss

Dad

Our father, Floyd Raymond Guild, was born at home on a farm in St. Mathias Township, Crow Wing County, Minnesota on December 15, 1904, the same year his cousin seven times removed, Charles Warren Fairbanks, was elected as Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president. Floyd’s father was Daniel William Guild, who was born on May 24, 1877 in Williamsburg, Grand Transverse County, Michigan. Floyd’s mother was Olive Amelia Wooster, who was born on June 12, 1867 in Crow Wing County, Minnesota. Floyd was the fourth child of Dan and the ninth child of Olive. Floyd inherited Olive’s dark skin and long straight nose, his father’s hazel eyes and his grandfather Newton’s thick head of coarse black hair and prominent widow’s peak. He was, after he lost his round boyish face during puberty, hailed by all as the best-looking Guild ever. Floyd had two natural brothers and two natural sisters born of Olive and Dan Guild. They were Bessie, Clarence, Pearl, and Harold Herman—who died of meningitis at the age of 5 weeks. He also had four half-sisters and one half-brother as his mother, Olive, had previously been married to one Clarence Vosburg. Floyd’s stepsisters and stepbrother were Florence, Edith, Gertrude, Myrtle and Ralph Vosburg. All told, Olive bore ten children beginning in December, 1887, at age 19 with the birth of Florence, then for twenty more years to her last, Harold Herman who was born on September 13, 1907 when Olive was 29 years old. Eight of Olive’s ten children survived well into old age. Olive Wooster married her first husband, Clarence Vosburg, a 20-year-old farmer, of Dutch desent, on January 28, 1884 when she was 17. Married in St. Mathias, Minnesota, Mr. and Mrs. Vosburg immediately migrated on horseback to a farm in North Dakota. There, Clarence grew grain crops and corn. Olive bore 4 girls and 1 boy with Clarence Vosburg. After 15 years in North Dakota, they returned to Minnesota in 1898, where they rented a farm near the farm of Dan and Bernal Guild in St. Mathias. Less than a year later, Clarence Vosburg was killed while attempting to lift a huge field rock onto a stoneboat—a large sled-like steel skid pulled by horses—while clearing a fertile planting field. The boulder was being tipped upward when his wedge pole broke causing the boulder to fall backward, instantly crushing him to death. Reports that Clarence was killed by a rock slide, or while blasting a rock with dynamite, or by lightning are inaccurate according to accounts of his daughter, Myrtle Mae Vosburg Prescott as told to us by her son, Orville. Clarence Vosburg’s death in the summer of 1899, after fifteen years of marriage, left Olive, then 30, a widow with 5 children ages 4, 6, 11, 12, and 14.