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By Tim Ruzek

At age 64, Mamie Sheldon still was milking seven cows and gathering eggs from 200 chickens in 1937 while living with her dog Buster on a 210-acre farm along the Cedar River at Ramsey Mill Pond.

Widowed for nearly 25 years, Mary Walsh Sheldon – known as “Mamie” – wasn’t afraid of hard work or subzero temperatures that had frozen the Austin area the past two winters.

In fact, during those winters, Mamie “plowed through the heavy (snow) drifts down to the river and chopped holes through the ice so her seven cows could drink,” the Austin Daily Herald wrote Sept. 24, 1937, in a feature story with photos of her working on the farm.

Every morning, Mamie separated her milk for the nearby Lansing creamery and gathered eggs from her 200 chickens.

Mamie was known by her banker to always be one of the first to pay taxes. She did not have a radio or get the daily newspaper – she also didn’t’ drive.

“She doesn’t have a car but somehow on Election Day,” the Herald wrote, “she always gets over to the Lansing town hall to cast her vote for the Democrats.”

Despite what she didn’t have by that point in the late 1930s, Mamie still had “a good many friends, and there’s no one who knows her who doesn’t have a great deal of respect for Mamie Sheldon.”

Mamie’s cows roamed the woods on the Walsh farm atop the river’s hilly, eastern shoreline across from Ramsey Recreation Park (later Ramsey Golf Course). She was 12 when her family moved into the farmhouse on a “clearing at the edge of the woods.”

“Today, little old Mary, still living on the same clearing, goes after her cows in the woods, where she used to play 50 years ago,” the Herald wrote.

In 1885, her family moved from the small but flourishing village of Ramsey a mile away that was located at a rail station and juncture of two railroads.

She married local machinist James Sheldon in 1899 in Austin but he died in 1904 after months of battling a medical condition that led him and Mamie to move in with his parents in Minneapolis to be close to treatment. 

Sheldon had two daughters from his first wife who died in 1892 – four years into their marriage.

After her husband’s death, Mamie apparently moved to Albert Lea but moved back in at some point with her parents on the farm to help take care of them.

“Mary Walsh Sheldon isn’t dressed in worn overalls just because faded blue denims are in style this season; she’s been wearing ‘the trousers’ on the Walsh farm for eight years,” the Herald wrote in its 1937 feature on her.

“Eight years” was a reference to 1929 when Mamie’s father – Patrick “Paddy” Walsh, an emigrant from Ireland and one of the Austin area’s early pioneer settlers – died at age 85. Her mother died five years earlier.

After her father’s death, the Herald wrote, Mamie was “still there to carry on his Irish spirit.”

The Walsh farm’s woods overlooking the Cedar River at Ramsey Mill Pond were well-known locally as Austin businessmen in the 1920s worked with Mamie’s parents to lease land along the river for getaway cottages, especially in the summer.

Some of these businessmen had been part of large gatherings hosted by the Walsh family in a barn they built around 1915. 

As for Mamie, she mostly kept a low profile before and after the Herald’s 1937 feature about her hard work alone on the farm.

In 1963, however, the Herald ran her photo with the headline: “She’s 90 Now.” That news item on April 13, 1963, mentioned Mamie was living at an Austin group home for elderly women and 15 women attended her 90th birthday party.

Mamie died five months later.