(gentle serene music begins) - [Narrator] Sometime during the winter of 1860 and '61, a Norwegian immigrant named Inglebrigt Severson left his wife and two young daughters on the Nebraska shore of the Missouri River, west of Vermillion.

Severson walked north across the frozen river and kept going crossing about 10 miles of flat virgin prairie, until he reached the low, but rugged bluffs on the Dakota side of the river.

He found a spot he liked and staked his claim.

He went back for his family and got going on the tough work of homesteading.

Jerry and Norma Wilson own the property now.

They live nearby and marvel at the location Severson chose.

- If I were Inglebrigt, crossing the river on ice in 1860, and coming through a head high prairie all the way across looking for a place to settle.

When I saw this place, I would do exactly as he did, I would choose this place.

It's you know, it's got good bottom land.

It's got woods, it's got some water.

It's got everything.

What else do you need?

- He made the perfect choice.

(gentle serene music continues) - [Jerry] Oral legend says that they lived in a dugout somewhere on this hillside but we don't know where.

And for several years, apparently, and then in 1869 or thereabouts, they built this house.

- The house is an important part of the history of the county we live in, because it is the oldest, standing former home, and it's built of logs.

It's built of local materials.

And it has a certain sturdy beauty about it.

I think that it was a place that when Inglebrigt Severson found, it seemed perfect.

- [Interviewer] Could you kinda just describe the home in terms of its size and land?

- Okay, it's, forgotten the exact length, but I believe it's a 24 by 17, two stories with a full basement.

The basement is built of secord side, big slabs of secord side, primarily.

And they were not even mortared when the house was built.

- [Interviewer] And how did you come by?

- Auction sale on the front steps of the courthouse.

It had been foreclosed on by a previous owner and we bought it at the auction.

- [Narrator] First thing Jerry Wilson did was to call a barn straightener he knew.

They tied all of the good logs together, lifted the whole structure and sought out several of the logs at the foundation of the house.

The Wilson's had 17 replacement logs milled from cottonwood which they brought to the site.

The materials are as close as possible to what the builders used, but there was no way to perfectly replicate all of the construction techniques.

- [Jerry] Their logs were hand-hewn with an adze and they were all tongue and groove and they had a double slope dovetail joint in the corners.

And once they got it all put together, like put three or four logs up, they would drill an inch and a quarter hole down through those logs and drive a sapling down in through them as a dowel.

So it was built to stay.

- [Narrator] It was built to last for generations.

And that's how it worked out.

Syrena Severson died of typhoid fever in 1876.

Inglebrigt lived long enough to pass the farm down to his daughters and that was in 1889.

- Inglebrigt and Syrena are buried just east of the house there somewhere, but there's no marker that we could find.

Their daughter, Gurina, married a man named John Rice, a recent Norwegian immigrant, a few years younger than her.

And they had eight children in this house.

The last of their sons, two Norwegian bachelor farmers lived here into their 80s.

And one of them died in a tractor accident up on the hill, turned a tractor over.

The other eventually had to go to the nursing home for his last days.

But so, basically from the 1860s to the 1960s.

- [Narrator] The Wilson's have several times needed to replace the old logs with new ones and they know the work will continue.

Their strong desire to preserve this bit of history isn't just for nostalgia.

Norma Wilson says that sometimes preserving the past and especially in terms of the land is a good way to embrace a brighter future.

- It's best for the earth, because tall grass prairie is so good at sequestering carbon.

It helps us to fight climate change.