Palmer Alvin Stadum
Patriarch, Baker Electric lineman, hand-built model maker, and the human center of the REA electrification era in Benson County, North Dakota.
Baker Electric and the electric lines
In the late 1930s, most Benson County farms had no electricity. When the federal Rural Electrification Administration reached North Dakota, Baker Electric Cooperative became the local implementation — and Palmer was one of the men who ran the lines.
He worked long days across the flat prairie, setting poles and stringing wire to farmsteads that had never seen an electric light. The work was physical, cooperative, and consequential: a single line could change how a family cooked, heated, and communicated. Palmer did that work for years, farm by farm across the county.
1975 — Formal recognition
At the REA's 40th anniversary, Rugby Pioneer Village held a formal ceremony. Palmer was recognized for his role in the rural electrification of Benson County. For a man who did the work because it needed doing, not because it would be remembered, the ceremony was both fitting and unexpected.
Rodney attended alongside him and later described the event in detail in an oral history recorded in Rugby, 2019 — approximately 45 minutes of audio that forms one of the archive's primary sources for this era.
The workshop and the locomotives
After retirement, Palmer turned the same precision he'd applied to electrical work toward building model locomotives by hand. He machined parts, fabricated boilers, and assembled complete working models in his home workshop in Minot.
One of these — the "Scott" locomotive — he named for his grandson. It is a small, exacting object: the kind of thing you build when you're not trying to prove anything to anyone. Beverly later donated it, along with the rest of the collection, to the Rugby Pioneer Village in 2023.
Palmer and Signe
Palmer married Signe Marie Solberg in 1941 at York, North Dakota. They raised three children: Rodney, Beverly, and Peggy — all of them shaped by the cooperative ethic and the North Dakota landscape their parents inhabited.
Signe taught school in Cando for over 20 years. When Palmer died in Minot in 1999, she moved to Rugby in 2001, returning to the town where the family's story was most concentrated. She passed away there in 2003.
The geography of a life
Palmer was born in 1909 in Esmond, North Dakota, and the arc of his life traced a tight circle across the upper plains: Broe Township homestead, York, Rugby, Cando, Minot — always within the flat country between the Souris River and the Manitoba border.
He is buried with Signe at Saint Petri Lutheran Cemetery in York Township, Benson County — returning to the soil where his father Johannes homesteaded when he arrived from Norway in the early 1900s.
Palmer & Signe — in parallel
Two lives, the same years. Highlighted rows are years where both timelines share an event. Click either name to open their page.