Mr. Larsen Colfax County, New Mexico

Mr. Larsen was born on the Island of Fyen, Denmark, May 24, 1844, and his early environments were those of the garden and farm. In the spring of 1866, at the age of twenty-two years, he came to the United States and located first in Moline, Illinois, where he worked at the trade of cabinet-maker. He spent one year in Moline, five years in Omaha, Nebraska, and a year and a half in Utah, being engaged in mining at the last named place. Then he returned to Nebraska, where he resumed farming, and the next seventeen years he carried on agricultural pursuits near Oakland. On account of failing health, the result of a serious attack of la grippe, he left Nebraska in 1891 and came to New Mexico, direct to Springer, where he bought his present farm. Although ditches had been built, the land was at that time without irrigation, and all the improvements here are the result of Mr. Larsen's well-directed efforts. He first put up a small shack, in which he and his family lived until 1903, when he built his present home, a comfortable, substantial house, the work of his own hands. In fact, he does nearly all the work on his ranch. He now has plenty of water for irrigation, and his fertile acres are productive of fine crops. Among his first work here was tree-planting. Today he has a fine orchard of fifteen acres, principally apples, with a variety of other fruits. He has twenty-seven acres of frejoles, eighty acres in oats and other grain, and fifty acres in alfalfa. He annually gathers three crops from his alfalfa fields and has harvested as much as seven tons per acre, the average amount, however, being five tons. Altogether he has 150 acres under cultivation, and usually keeps about one hundred cattle and eighteen horses.

Mr. Larsen is a member of the I. O. O. F. at Springer. His religious creed is Lutheran. November 10, 1874, he married Miss Elesa Pauline Hanson, a native of Copenhagen, who came to the United States in 1873. They have six children living, namely: Mary, wife of Julius Edwerson, of Springer; Minnie, wife of Charles Pearson, of Springer; Emma Louise, Louis Clemens, Charlotte Annie, and Florence Gertrude, at home.

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Source: History of New Mexico, Its Resources and People, Volume II, Pacific States Publishing Co., 1907.