In 1913, soon after graduating from high school, Amanda Swingen left her home in Lake Mills, Iowa, and came to live in Hannaford, North Dakota, where her brother Henry Swingen lived with his wife, Anna. In order to prepare for an independent future she attended Valley City Normal School, and then taught in country schools near Hannaford.
In spite of the rigors of country school teaching - walking to and from school in inclement weather, building and stoking fires to keep the school warm, cleaning the school, eating daily lunches out of a lunch bucket, and keeping the children interested in learning and behaving - she always enjoyed the life around her. Barn dancing was the local fun and she attended her share of dances. While teaching at Revere she met a young man, Ludwig Larson, who ran the grocery store, the post office and the depot in Revere. Ludwig was the son of a farmer, Richard Larson, who farmed west of Hannaford. Ludwig and Amanda were married on Valentine's Day in 1918, in Minot, North Dakota. Their time together as man and wife was sadly very brief. The first World War took him away to camp. He contracted the dreaded influenza and died in October 1918. Amanda was pregnant at the time, but nevertheless she journeyed on the train to Camp McCoy to claim her husband's body, accompanied by Ludwig's brother, Walter Larson. This same year she also lost her youngest brother and her father.
In January 1919, she delivered a baby girl, Helen Lucille, not in a hospital, but at the apartment above the store in Revere where she lived. That spring she moved to Hannaford, living upstairs in the Andrew Fortney home, which was next door to her brother Henry Swingen. In 1923, she purchased the Aarstad home next door to the Lutheran parsonage, and with the exception of seven years in Moorhead, Minnesota, she lived there until her death in December 1954.
Her daughter, Lucille, graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and pursued a career of teaching home economics in Annandale, in Anoka, and the last 26 years in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1953, she was married to Warren Forslund, a civil engineering graduate of Iowa State in Ames, Iowa. Directly after their marriage they moved to Silver Bay, Minnesota, where Warren worked on the building of the taconite plant from 1953 to 1956. Since 1959, they have lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Warren worked at the University of Minnesota for 25 years. They live on Lake Johanna in Arden Hills, a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Source: Hannaford Area History North Dakota Centennial 1889 - 1989 Page 238