In North Dakota: Cafe Life

This from the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican, Tuesday evening, Dec. 9, 1913:

"The village of Havana is located in the southern part of Sargent County, one mile from the South Dakota line and 50 miles from the Minnesota on the Aberdeen branch of the Great Northern.

"Previous to 1887 the village was known as Weber.

"Since then the town has had a steady growth and now has three large general stores, one bank, high school, drugstore, hardware, harness and furniture stores, millinery store, meat market, two hotels, restaurant, two farm implement houses, photograph gallery, undertaker, opera house and lodge hall, telephone exchange, two poolrooms, barbershop, two livery barns, one auto livery, blacksmith and machine shop, newspaper, three elevators, lumberyard and three coal yards, feed mill, creamery and flour mill and two dray lines.

"There are churches of the Congregational, Catholic and Methodist denominations. The German Lutherans also hold services in the Methodist church.

"The village of Havana was incorporated in the spring of 1904 and now boasts of a population of about 450."

Well, things change. The last time anybody looked, they counted 148 heads in Havana. The three large general stores are gone, and so is the bank, the high school, the drugstore and practically everything else. The Catholics and Methodists no longer have a church, but the Congregationalists and the Lutherans have hung on. Two years ago the restaurant, the Havana Cafe, went belly-up. For a while there the farmers shifted to the Standard Oil station down by the railroad -- now the Burlington Northern rather than the Great -- for morning coffee, but it got so crowded you couldn't curse a cat without getting a hair in your mouth, and finally somebody had to put their foot down. A town is not a town without a cafe, the farmers decided. Further, they decided to open their own.

The Farmers' Inn, run by farm families, is in the black and riding high. "Hey, you don't know how miserable it was," Jack Brummond, chairman of the board of directors, was explaining the other day. Outside, the wind came off the prairie hard enough to knock you flat, and in the park at the foot of Main Street the Dr Pepper scoreboard by the girls' slow-pitch softball diamond was threatening to leave the state. "This is the social crux of our community. If we don't have this, we live in total segregation. The only other place we have to see people is church."

Just then a farmer came in and poured himself coffee. "Windy where you been?" a coffee sipper asked. "It took off my hat, and that's the last I seen it," the newcomer said.

"I didn't think a restaurant would go when it first started," Daryl Bergh said and then dug into his eggs. "They started in that old one, the Havana Cafe. The building was falling apart. There was nothing left of it. You had to < shim up the table to keep your coffee cup from sliding off."