CMBRG booth at the Colfax Free Fair will focus on Dr. Felland
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By LeAnn R. Ralph
COLFAX — The theme for this year’s Colfax Municipal Building Restoration Group booth in the Commercial Building at the Colfax Free Fair will be Dr. O.M. Felland.
Dr. Felland, who practiced family medicine in Colfax for 45 years, died in May of 1974 at his home in Colfax at the age of 76.
Many longtime Colfax area residents will remember Dr. Felland.
Dr. and Adina Felland’s son, David, lived in the Felland family home on Pine Street until recently.
David Felland, age 96, died December 30, 2023, at the Divine Nursing and Rehab Nursing Home in St. Croix Falls.
David Felland had achieved the rank of Eagle Scout and graduated from Colfax High School in 1944. He served in United States Navy in World War II, and after he was discharged in 1946, he attended Augsburg College where he graduated with a degree in business. He spent most of his adult life living in Minneapolis, and in 1990, he returned to Colfax.
After David Felland passed away, Troy Knutson, one of Colfax’s historians, received permission from the Felland family to evaluate the contents of the house for local historical significance.
Some of the items Knutson discovered will be on display at the CMBRG fair booth.
Knutson also discovered a number of home movies dating back decades that were filmed in Colfax. He then began the slow, painstaking process of converting those movies to digital format.
The result is a nearly two-hour long video.
CMBRG members are hoping to be able to show the video, or at least parts of it, at the group’s fair booth.
The Journal Lancet
At the time of the June 4, 1958, Colfax tornado, Dr. Felland was the only physician in town.
Approximately two days after the Colfax tornado, Dr. Felland received a telephone call from a man he described as “my favorite instructor at the University of Minnesota Medical School,” J. Arthur Myers, M.D.
Dr. Myers was at that time the editor-in-chief of the medical publication “The Journal Lancet,” and he asked Dr. Felland to write an article for the journal about the emergency response in Colfax and what small towns without hospitals could do to prepare to treat injuries following a disaster.
After the article was printed in the Journal Lancet, it was made available to the public at the Colfax Public Library.
In his article, Dr. Felland wrote, “Twelve people were killed instantly; about 60 suffered severe injuries and were hospitalized; and another 50 suffered minor injuries, bruises, lacerations [and] shock … The entire village and community were stunned.”
In addition, about one-third of the houses in Colfax were destroyed, and many farms in the surrounding area “were completely demolished,” he wrote.
The high-tension wires for electricity were down in the streets, so the electricity was shut off. Telephone service was out, and because several water pipes were broken, the water supply also was lost, Dr. Felland wrote.
The doctor quickly determined that his office was not large enough to accommodate all of the injured, so he made the decision to use the basement of the Colfax Municipal Building as a first-aid station to treat those who were injured and to stabilizing those who needed to be transported to the hospital.
“My wife, who is a graduate nurse, several volunteer workers, and I were all ready for the patients as they arrived. We used flashlights at first, but soon someone brought a gas lantern, which served very well,” he wrote.
Dr. Felland brought a large supply of bandages and other items needed for treating wounds from his office to the municipal building basement.
First-aid training
In his article, Dr. Felland recalls that about 15 years earlier, in 1942 and 1943, he had given a number of Red Cross first-aid courses, both elementary and advanced, as part of the Civil Defense Program.
“Although we had more or less forgotten about first-aid and civil defense, on the evening of June 4, our first-aid courses proved invaluable,” he wrote, adding that many of those who had helped people out of the ruins of their homes and helped take care of people in the basement of the municipal building had either taken his first-aid courses or they had received first-aid training while in the military.
The result of having so many people trained in first aid was that “no simple fracture was compounded,” and although there were two patients with broken vertebrae, neither of them ended up paralyzed or with spinal cord injuries.
Since there was no hospital in Colfax, the injured who required hospitalization were taken to hospitals in Eau Claire, Menomonie, and Chippewa Falls, and as Dr. Felland noted, all of those hospitals were about 20 miles away.
There were a variety of injuries, such as lacerations, body bruises, a crushed foot, crushed heel, fractures of the tibia, radius, ulna and humerus, broken ribs and shock.
Through the air
Two elderly women were thrown about 400 feet, and in addition to bruises, one had a broken arm, and the other had a compression fracture of two vertebrae, Dr. Felland wrote.
Another elderly couple were transported through the air riding the floor of their house and landed about a block away in a neighbor’s yard.
The man ended up with a broken foot, and his wife had a broken arm. Both of them were bruised and had lacerations.
Another young woman landed in a tree and “suffered only a laceration which required 6 or 7 sutures,” Dr. Felland wrote.
In the municipal building basement, the lacerations were doused with antiseptic and dressed with bandages, and bleeding was stopped with compression dressings.
Fractures were splinted, and people who were in severe pain were given morphine or Demerol.
At some point in the evening, several doctors from Bloomer arrived to help treat the injured.
Those who were treating the injured did not try to suture any wounds because they could not really see well enough to attempt suturing, and people who did not go to the hospital but who needed wounds stitched, came back the following day, Dr. Felland wrote.
Quickly
The people who needed to go to the hospital were on their way within an hour and a half, Dr. Felland noted.
Other accounts of the June 4, 1958, tornado noted that people with station wagons took patients to the hospital, and a man named Garlen Mittelstadt used his cattle truck to transport people to the hospital.
Dr. Felland said in his article that three physicians from Bloomer, Dr. Clauson, Dr. Murphy and Dr. Asplund, came to Colfax and gave assistance at the first-aid station in the Colfax Municipal Building and that other communities brought ambulances.
“As I write this, two weeks have passed since our disaster, and only about a dozen patients are still in the hospitals, and these, I think, will make good recoveries,” Dr. Felland wrote.
He also noted the community’s indebtedness to the National Guard, which arrived by midnight — the tornado came through around 7 p.m. — “to safeguard our village and community from curiosity seekers and looters.”
Although Dr. Felland does not mention it in his article, village residents and family members, needed a permit issued by the National Guard to get into the village.
Recommendations
Dr. Felland ended his article with seven recommendations.
Nowadays, communities have disaster response plans, and you can see the basic outline of such plans in Dr. Felland’s recommendations.
The first recommendation is to have somewhere that is a central location and that is equipped with cots, stretchers and blankets that can serve as a place to take the injured.
The second recommendation is to have people trained in first aid in the community and to make sure that each group of people or each person has a specified job to do that is identified before disaster strikes.
The third recommendation is to have plenty of first-aid supplies on hand.
Readers should note that while Colfax does not have a doctor’s office or a clinic, the village does have the Colfax Rescue Squad.
The fourth recommendation is to have emergency lighting on hand of some kind. In those days lanterns served as the emergency lighting.
The fifth recommendation is to have a water supply available that is independent of the village’s water supply. Dr. Felland notes one of his sons got water from a well that was located on “the other side of town.”
The sixth recommendation is to have a way to communicate with the outside world. Dr. Felland writes that every village should have a radio-telephone, such as the Colfax police car had at the time. Today there is cellular service with a variety of carriers, and police and ambulance services have their own radio systems for communications.
The seventh recommendation is to have pain medications on hand to control severe pain.
Dr. Myers
Included with Dr. Felland’s article is a letter from Dr. Myers dated June 25, 1958.
“Today I was delighted to receive your letter of June 23 and your splendid article on the Colfax tornado disaster. Your manuscript contains exactly what I hoped you would write. I am sure it will be of great interest and value to every reader of JOURNAL-LANCET…”
“My mind was so relieved to learn from your letter received today that all of your family came through untouched and your home was not damaged. For a long, long time I have had unusually high respect for you and your work, and I really worried the first few days until the casualty lists began to come through in the paper …”
CMBRG booth
The Colfax Municipal Building Restoration Group’s booth at the Colfax Free Fair will be open all days of the fair.
CMBRG typically holds a raffle to raise funds for on-going restoration efforts at the Colfax Municipal Building.
Be sure to stop by and say “hello,” and CMBRG members will be happy to show you what they have on display.
