Von Riesen family home

The Von Riesen family home is both a handmade family dwelling and the site of a painful surrender: Jake Von Riesen built it himself, but pressure from a neighboring car dealer ultimately drove him to sell it, and the house was carried away on a truck. Its disappearance in the summer of 1979 leaves more than an empty lot. It exposes the conflict between private attachment and commercial power, and between Jake’s sense of Christian obligation and his wish to defend what he had made.

Construction and family life

Jake built the low-slung bungalow of wood, brick, and plaster when he and Lottie were barely twenty, newly married and full of energy. The house held the marks of his attention to detail, including a long, covered porch where the family could watch electrical storms while staying dry. The replacement house was similar in general form, but it was not this house: it had not been built by Jake with the same loving care. The contrast makes the old home specific rather than interchangeable, a structure whose value lay in the history embedded in its construction as much as in its shelter.

Lottie remembered the couple’s early years through their exuberant use of the front yard. After Jake finished teaching and she finished baking and the other work of the day, they ran through the sprinkler on hot evenings, heedless of neighbors who thought such behavior unbecoming for a Mennonite couple. Elfrieda later remembered the scene as her parents’ version of a romantic film moment, with the sprinkler standing in for a famous fountain. The recollection gives the house a past of youthful play and intimacy, even as the neighbors’ disapproval places that private happiness within East Village’s watchful social norms.

Removal and the empty lot

Late one summer afternoon in 1979, the family stood in the street as the house moved down First Street, past the A&W and the Deluxe Bowling Lanes, and out onto the number twelve highway. Elfrieda repeatedly insisted that she could still see it, continuing until the moving house finally disappeared from view. Her refrain makes the departure a gradual loss: sight persists for a while after the home has already been uprooted, then fails at the point when there is nothing left to follow.

When Yolandi asked where the house was going, Jake said he did not know. He made a visor with his hand against the sun and stayed looking at the place where it had stood. Lottie, Elfrieda, and Yolandi got into the car, but Jake remained behind for what seemed to Yolandi an eternity. Elfrieda complained that the hot plastic seat was burning the backs of her legs; eventually Lottie gave a small, deliberately unobtrusive honk to turn Jake’s attention back to them. The gesture brings the family together again without making his loss disappear. Afterward, they camped in the Badlands of South Dakota while waiting for a few days to pass before they could move into the new house.

Sale, pressure, and responsibility

The family did not choose to give up the old home. The neighboring car dealership wanted the property to enlarge its parking lot, and its owner applied persistent pressure and made threats until Jake yielded and sold. The car dealer later framed the transaction as merely business, but that framing could not make it impersonal for the family whose house had been taken away. Jake had not wanted the sale; the transaction converted a lived-in home into commercial space and left its former site empty.

The pressure worked through more than the dealer’s demands. East Village had begun as a religious refuge, yet commerce and religious life had become closely entangled. As residents grew wealthier, prosperity could be understood as evidence of devotion, while money could be regarded as blessed by God. In that atmosphere, Jake’s resistance was made to carry a moral burden: holding out could be implied to mean that he was failing to be a good Christian. His attachment to the house was therefore tested not just against a more powerful business interest but against a community framework that made resistance feel like sin.

Lottie encouraged Jake to fight back, though her ability to challenge the domestic hierarchy was constrained by her position as a Mennonite wife and by the ease with which her views could be overlooked. Elfrieda tried to organize a petition among villagers against businesses expanding into people’s homes. Neither intervention could ease Jake’s persistent guilt or his fear that defending his property would make him sinful. His quietness, depression, long walks, and faith in reading, writing, and reason also marked him as an oddity within the community; the sale thus occurred in a social setting where his dissent already had little support.

Afterlife and significance

The family returned to its small town and settled in the new house, but the old home remained visible as an absence. From a lawn chair in the new front yard, Jake could look through trees across the highway toward First Street and see the empty place where his house had been. He had been displaced from a structure he had built himself, yet the vacant plot kept the loss in view. The house’s removal was therefore not a clean break: the family’s new residence stood in relation to the missing one, and Jake continued to encounter the result of the sale from his own yard.

The old home also stands at the threshold of Elfrieda’s decision to make her own mark. After the move, inspired by images she had encountered on rock, she developed a design built around her initials and the letters of All My Puny Sorrows. That later act belongs to her, not to the house, but its place in the sequence links the experience of losing a family landmark with her search for visibility and a durable sign. The bungalow’s departure is thus both a concrete property loss and a rupture in the family’s sense of place: it carries the memory of Jake’s labor and the parents’ early joy, while its empty site preserves the pressure, guilt, and powerlessness that ended their possession of it.