Hamnavollan

A place of work and a means of livelihood for a growing family from the early 1900

The picture was taken in 1916. The daughter Ingrid died earlier this year, and the son Leif (second from right) died later the same year. The son Ingvald (not in the picture) was new-born, and died the year after. The daughter Olga (not in the picture) was fatally ill, and died the year after. Agnes (second from left) died in 1932, also from tuberculosis like her sisters and brothers. Arne (far right), Karl Oskar, (third from right) and Trygve (far left) all lived to establish their own families.

It was in 1904 that my grandparents August Martin Holm and Stine Jensdatter Nesset became a family of cotters under the Hamn farm in the Akset township at the island of Hitra. August Martin was originally from Sparbu, but came to Hitra already in 1894, at which time he married Stine whom he had met at Røstad Farm in Levanger. She came from Nesset farm of Utset township, Hitra, and worked as a maid servant at Røstad. August Martin was a farmhand. The first years after they were married they lived at Nesset, which was run by Stine's brother Iver. But the family grew, and in 1902 they already had 4 children. Nesset wasn't a very large farm, and the place was by this time getting a bit crowded.

They had to move out, and to start with they came to the Storvika farm on the south side of Hitra, as tenants. This must have been after the former owner of Storvika, Bastian Tynæs, emigrated to America (1902), but before Anton Haarberg from Agdenes became the owner (1905). Storvika was during this period the property of Jens Kristian Brun, who never lived on the farm himself. He had probably acquired the property by lending money to Bastian Tynæs.

While they were living at Storvika, August Martin initiated negotiations with Daniel C. Strøm on leasing a strip of land west of the cultivated land belonging to the Hamna farm. The area in question had a few small strips of cultivable soil, a bit of marshland, but mostly mounds of rock clad by wind-twisted pine forest, heathen and juniper. It was located towards the south, directly on the shore. Of cultivable land there were approximately 1 1/2 acres - sufficient for keeping a cow and an occasional calf, a few sheep, a small potato field and perhaps a barley field. The big attraction of the place was of course the easy access to the sea and the possibilities for catching fish and other seafood.

The lease contract was signed in 1904, and the same year August Martin built a small house on the place. He had bought the house from a farm located by the Hemne fjord - originally a timber "stabbur" (a traditional farm storehouse). He carefully took down the timber logs, marked each of them, and towed everything across the fjord after his boat - a distance of 7- 8 miles. From his landing place he pulled the logs from the shore, up a steep hillside, and re-built the house on top of a foundation wall that he had already put up using big rocks that he had cleared from the ground. Inside the foundation there was good, frost-proof cellar. Later he added a framework extension to the house, making it a total of approximately 550 square feet.

From the start they arranged winter quarters for the livestock - a cow and a few sheep - under the framework part of the house. As insulating material against the winter cold they used blocks of mossy peat, which in dried condition definitely is a useable material for conserving whatever heat the animals produced inside this temporary cowshed. Over the animals' room there was a "sval" - a storage room which towards the end of the summers was filled with hay for feeding the animals through the winter. The hay served as an efficient protection against the winter cold and winter storms hitting from the North Atlantic. Also the kitchen was located over the animals, with only an un-insulated wooden floor between. This meant that heat from the animals helped keeping a certain minimum temperature in the kitchen also during the coldest periods of the winters. Of course, also the smell of the animals was oozing through the wooden floor. To what extent this might have bothered the inhabitants of the house is not known. Nothing has ever been mentioned about it - they probably got used to it and lived with it without thinking of it as a problem.

Later a small cowhouse was built on top of a mound of rock east of the dwelling house. Without a hay storage, however - hay was still being stored partly in the "svala", partly in outdoor haystacks. From the first years of my conscious life I remember well that there were animals in that small barn, but in 1944 a new cowhouse with a large hay barn was erected west of the dwelling house. How this was possible at a time when all was marked by the second world war and the occupation, with scarcity and unemployment, is something I have kept wondering about for many years. I assume the job was done by the strength of the hands of my father and grandfather, without using much money. At this time Hamnavollan no longer had a status as a Cotter's place; the land was surveyed, registered and bought out in 1941.

After August Martin died in February 1945, his son (my father) Karl Oskar took over running the place, and the property was transferred to him in 1946. The acreage of the place was not sufficient to feed a family, and the access to fish and seafood in the fjord was accordingly still an important part of the basis of existence. In addition it was necessary to get income from work outside the place, and Karl Oskar took on whatever jobs there were available. This could be lumbering during the winter season, farm work where extra labour was required - in short, whatever odd jobs there were to be found. During the 1950'ies road construction started accumulating also at Hitra, and Karl Oskar took part in several projects.

Road construction meant at that time hard manual labour. The tools were pickaxes, spades and crowbars. Drilling holes in the rock for mining was done manually, and transporting soil, rocks, road metal and gravel was done by the help of wheelbarrows. Severe damages from physical strain was common among people that had been involved in this kind of work for a few years, and Karl Oskar was one of those. He had to terminate his career as a road constructor at the age of 57 years. His back was damaged, and after an operation the strength of his left leg was considerably reduced. After completing a re-education he got a job as a welder at a factory in Trondhiem, and the consequence of this was that Hamnavollan was actually vacated in 1964 - 1965.

During the next years Hamanvollan was visited only for a few, occasional summer weeks, and worked as a kind of holiday resort for us who had grown up there. Already when the house was vacated it was in a rather bad condition, and for many following years necessary maintenance was more or less neglected. The persons who were connected to the place were living and working in other, remote part of the country, and had their own homes and families to look after. Then Karl Oskar died in 1976, and the prperty was left to me and my sister Kari.

In 1981 I and my family decided to move to Hegra, and the distance to Hitra and Hamnavollan was from then on considerably reduced. We started using Hamnavollan more frequently, and it soon became evident that we had to make up our minds either to start rehabilitating the old house, or tear it down and put up a new one on the property. I chose the first alternative, perhaps mostly for sentimental reasons. The frail old house had after all served as a dwelling place for a large family through bad times and good times. It had been the scene of both happiness and grief, and it had shaped and put its marks the people living there. If it can be said that a house has a soul, then the old house at Hamanvollan would have one.

During the following years my visits to Hamnavollan became increasingly more frequent. Every available weekend, every Easter and summer holiday I spent there. These years developed into a continuous race against the decay. First I had to do something on the foundation wall; constructed of natural rocks it was vulnerable to ground frost, which gets a good grip under an un-inhabited and un-heated house through long winters, year after year. After that the roof and roof construction had to be examined and repaired. Old roofs are OK as long as they are maintained regularly, but after many years of neglect they were in a bad condition.

After the foundation was secured and the roof construction properly mended, the outer walls came next. The western end wall fell down when I started working on it, and in the end I had to replace almost all the framework of the western half of the house. All the windows were also replaced, and a couple of new ones were put in, and for the first time the walls of the Hamanvollan house were equipped with a wind blockage and insulation. Finally it was the kitchen floor's turn to be replaced. A consequence of the somewhat shaky foundation was a noticeably slanting floor; if one happened to lose some water on the floor it quickly ran straight to the south-westerly corner where it would form a small pond until it found way to drip through the floor boards. The floor beams were simply 3 moth-eaten round logs which were not attached to the foundation framework, but fixed on top of two other round logs placed on top of a separate foundation parallel to the foundation framework. A strange construction, which I had never seen the like of before. Anyway, new floor beams were put in place (this time fixed to the foundation frame), wind blockage and 20 cm insulation was included, and floor boards of Norwegian pine completed the kitchen floor. A new staircase up to the first floor was made, and this brought a conclusion to the reconstruction project I started 12 - 15 years earlier.

After this the house was hardly recognisable. Draughty as it was before the reconstruction started it could be compared to and old and untuned organ. A gale from south-west would have it whistling, wheezing and howling trough openings and cracks everywhere. If the onshore wind came in at full force from the Hemne fjord there were the same sounds, only in a different key. And draughty as it was, it was necessary to keep a big fire going continually when wind and cold were hitting. But now it was completely changed; no wind howling through walls and floors any longer, and once a fire is lighted in the fireplace the house gets comfortably warm in no time. One can really wonder what resources previous inhabitants of a draughty and un-insulated house put in to keep a minimum of heat through long and cold winters. Personally I do not wonder that much, because I know a bit about this. Already as a kid I took part in working on the peat marshland, which was the source for the most important fuel we used. Large blocks of peat were cut out and spread out on the turf. Then they were cut into smaller slices and put up in cairns to dry, and when the peat was sufficiently dry it was stored in a shed or in outdoor peat stacks. Getting it home was one of the worst jobs. Before the snow came it had to be carried in large sacks across one's shoulders, down a winding and steep path, until, sweaty and black from peat dust, one could empty the sack into the peat storage. But when winter came it was much easier. As soon as there was a sufficient amount of snow on the ground we could take out the sledge, put a tall frame on it and fill up with peat. Down the slopes it went more or less by itself - it was just a question of checking the speed so it didn't get out of control.

Today the houses at Hamnavollan - a dwelling house, a shed and a boathouse - are kept in a reasonable good condition. No luxury if considered by modern standards, of course, but the first inhabitants of the place would probably open their eyes wide if they had an opportunity of seeing the changes. Still, we have tried to preserve as much as possible of the original state of the house. The sitting room is actually more or less unchanged - the old, wide floor boards are still there, and the same goes for the inside wall panelling. This is, by the way, something that August Martin single-handedly converted from props (short logs used for supporting roof and walls in coal mines and other mines) that floated ashore after a Russian timber vessel shipwrecked and sank in the fjord around 1915. We have chosen not to install electric power. The heating is mainly taken care of by burning wood, although it must be admitted that we also use gas as a matter of convenience. Gas is also used in the kitchen for cooking.

Hamnavollan has become a reasonably comfortable place to spend a bit of time at. A peaceful place with uncountable memories - a good place to return to.