Posted on this website with permission from the Northfield News
By MAGGIE LEE
Staff Writer
Recently I was invited to the celebration brunch of the 124th birthday anniversary of Dacie Moses, held in the house she occupied for many years at 110 Union St. Dacie, whom I am old enough to remember well, would really have liked the celebration.
There was lots of music. The house was stuffed with young people and long-time friends. There was plenty to eat.
Dacie, whose real first name was Candace, worked for Carleton College many years and lived less than a block from the campus. If you don’t know the house, it has a wagon wheel adjacent to its front sidewalk.
Dacie was born in 1883 on a farm east of Northfield. Her maiden name was Kelley. A story in our files says that her father taught her to count while they were playing cribbage, a card game he had learned as a soldier in the Civil War. She still loved to play cribbage in her old age.
In 1906 she married Royal “Roy” Moses, a 1904 Carleton graduate. They lived in Minneapolis at first. But he was in ill health in 1909 and his doctor suggested more outdoor life. As a result he joined his father in a lumbering enterprise in Wisconsin. When he had regained robust health and was preparing to return to Minneapolis in two weeks, he was helping a neighbor in a house raising bee. Roy was struck in the head by a beam and was at first completely paralyzed. He never fully recovered, but he had the spirit to carry on in various types of employment.
His most important job, and the one I remember, was superintendent of the Northfield office of Northern States Power Co., located where Rocky Top Screen Printing is now, 427 Division. NSP furnished power for Northfield as well as for a large area of Minnesota. During part of the time he worked for NSP, Roy also served as city recorder, an elected office.
In the years when Roy was badly handicapped, Dacie went to work at the Northfield Cooperative Laundry, 503 Division, current location of the Rueb ‘N’ Stein. She worked hard there, mixing soap in a vat, mixing starch in a vat, even shoveling coal. At times she stood all day, ironing shirts.
After 10 years of that, F.J. Fairbank, Carleton treasurer, impressed with her work at the laundry, asked her to become his assistant. She held that job until she was 65. She thought she was retiring, but she soon returned to the campus as a part-time reserve librarian. After Roy’s death in 1960, she became a full-time librarian. She finally retired in 1969 at the age of 86.
Although she never attended Carleton, she was given an honorary master’s degree in 1969.
Roy had an excellent singing voice. In 1935 he was one of the organizers of the Northfield Male Chorus. Soon that group began holding its weekly rehearsals in the Moses home. Later, in 1955, Dixon Bond, then attending Carleton, rounded up 38 good singers and called them the Çarletunes. After that group disbanded, Bond selected eight of the best singers and called them the Knights. A member of that group suggested that they go over to the Moses house to rehearse. Dacie very much enjoyed that and soon the Knights were singing there three times a week. They were singing there at the recent birthday celebration as were the Knightengales, a young woman singing group.
For years Sunday breakfast had been important at the Moses house. Carleton kids and other friends of Dacie were invited. After it was realized that Dacie was short of funds, the students who loved Dacie’s hospitality went shopping for the breakfast groceries.
Dacie had always invited the kids to use her oven to bake cookies and, as far as I know, they had long had the good sense to furnish the ingredients for those. Dacie also encouraged the kids to play cribbage with her.
At her memorial service, the Rev. Gordon Forbes, minister of the Congregational-Baptist Church, said — according to the Carleton student newspaper, the Carletonian — “It will be hard to think of Sunday mornings without Dacie, the old house at 110 Union, usually crawling with people, now empty and alone. Surely there will be great emptiness. It will not be the same.” The story continued, “And yet, things are still happening at the little two-story building. Last Sunday morning nearly 20 people showed up for brunch — some familiar faces, some newcomers. That same morning, the Speckled Band practiced in the living room.”
When she died, Dacie donated her house to the Carleton Alumni Association.
She specified in her will that Sunday breakfast still be served and that the Knights still be allowed to practice there. So the home lives on as an informal student hang-out. A person lives in the house, but students and other friends are free to come and go … and bake cookies. There is always someone there for Sunday brunch.
I was told that there is a campus myth that Dacie left a trust fund for the house. But she actually lived month-to-month with her only significant financial asset being the house.
I’ll bet there aren’t many colleges that have something like Dacie’s house. Maybe none other.
— Maggie Lee can be reached at 645-1119.