Esther Nelson Berglund Records

Aa photocopy of a sixty-six page handwritten autobiography begun on 23 May 1979 and completed on 23 October 1980 by Esther Berglund, age 89, to her granddaughter Linda (Berg) Lamzow. There is also a News Tribune clipping from 6 June 1982 picturing Esther.

Biographical Note

Esther Nelson Berglund was born on 27 April 1890 in Tacoma, Washington, to John Nelson and Emma Christine Swanson. She was baptized in the original First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tacoma in 1890. Her parents emigrated from Sweden and homesteaded in a small Swedish settlement called Welsh, Minnesota. They married in 1879. The family’s crops were destroyed one year from grasshoppers. Another year their hay barn was struck by lightning and destroyed. The following year a tornado destroyed everything but their house. They then moved to Tacoma, near Wright Park, and her father worked as a longshoreman loading and unloading boats and eventually earned enough to buy a small house in the wilderness.

Esther started school at Franklin School at age seven but stopped in the fourth grade to work at her aunt’s house for one month and started confirmation school with Pastor Frisk. She was confirmed in 1906 and then worked ironing in a hand laundry. As a teenager, Esther worked as a waitress but went back to doing laundry, and then did housework for Mr. and Mrs. Pease for a year until she met and married Carl Berglund in 1911. They had three children. They moved to San Francisco around 1929 to find work. Esther sang in the choir and taught Sunday School. Carl died of a heart attack in 1949. Esther moved back to Tacoma to be with her family and lived to be over ninety years old.