Johan Martin Jacobsen

  Some years after wife Alma died in 1934, Johan sold the family land on the North Shore of Lake Superior to the Reserve Mining company near Beaver Bay, Minnesota, USA, where a taconite iron ore plant and shipping port was built. The widower Johan used some of the money from the sale to purchase the State Bar and Grill, 30 miles away in Two Harbors, Minnesota where he and girl friend of many years, Mary (Castner) Macdonald (divorced), lived upstairs. They may have been married but there are no family memories or records of such.

Mary had grown up in the restaurant business and had started up the Beaver Bay Lodge many years before so she was the one that ran the business. A lady, who as a teen, worked for Mary at the bar and grill said that Mary was a tough taskmaster but kind and that she smoked a lot. Mary was under 5' tall but cast a shadow large enough that a school built on the North Shore was named after her. She had put in many years as head of the school board.

The business venture was short lived with Johan and Mary, advanced in years and both becoming ill. Mary died from cancer in 1959. Johan went to live with his sister Alma in Duluth for awhile and then to a nursing home in Two Harbors where he passed away only 2 years after Mary, in the summer of 1961.

dmp 2021

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Til Amerika 03.07.1902:

https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/4754/25374/4