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The court house was built on the foundation of an old homestead. The previous owner had been a woman named Eva Kivinnen. She had been born in 1889 and was the daughter of Finnish immigrants who had fled during the Russian occupation of Finland. Eva was the fifth child in a passel of seven, but she was the first of the Kivinnen children to be born in the United States.

Eva’s father was a Lutheran minister, who upon the family’s arrival in Minnesota, heard the calling of God, requesting him to travel west to California, abandoning his tent-dwelling family to the whims of a arctic winter. The family had located to the area during the General Allotment Act of 1887.  They were given supplies, a map, and a patriotic nudge in the general direction, but very little warning about the climate.  After about a month of this nonsense, a man named Robert Erickson poked his head (among other things) through the front flap of Eva’s mothers tent. They had either two or three children.

Years passed. The minister returned. Legally it all belonged to him – the cabin – the barn – the fence – the wife and the newly arrived children. Eva was seven that spring.

At the age of 16 she was "encouraged" to marry Wallace Winkleman, who was the only son of her parent’s Dutch neighbors. Wallace’s parents had both died that same year from Influenza, leaving their only son responsible for their farm.

The couple were married for less than a year, when Eva discovered her new husband’s fondness for adolescent girls (Eva’s 11 year old sister). Regrettably, Wallace Winkleman was discovered at the bottom of a burnt-out haystack that same year, leaving his seventeen year old, pregnant wife as the only person entitled to claim his family’s legacy. She didn’t even have the right to vote.