Cheryl Sutter’s life as on the farm has come full circle

By JON WEISBROD jon.weisbrod@apgsomn.com

BLOOMING GROVE TWP. — You can take Cheryl Forrest out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of Cheryl Forrest.

It just wasn’t going to happen.

After graduating from Gustavus Adolphus College in 1969, Forrest soon got married, raised a family, watched her children start their own families and was proud of how she was able to influence generations of students as an English teacher for four decades, first at Hopkins High School for a couple years and then Henry Sibley for the next 38. She and her husband, Dan, had purchased a home on the outskirts of Burnsville shortly after they got married in June 1970 and where comfortable, happy and satisfied with their life. They shared a strong bond forged through similar upbringings in a quintessentially rural community in the 1950s and 1960s.

As the couple neared retirement, they began searching for land near Lakeville to perhaps start a hobby farm to help satisfy Cheryl’s innate agricultural instincts that had been fortified through 18 years of growing up on the farm. The notion of returning to the sprawling acreage of her homestead just north of Waseca had longsince been buried as Cheryl searched for a much-smaller plot to indulge her interests as a master gardener, horse enthusiast and general lover of all animals found roaming the barns she once called home.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing stuck. She kept “looking and looking and looking” and no matter the size, the price or the location, she just couldn’t pull the trigger.

“I guess I just thought I’d be looking forever,” she admitted.

Years of fruitless searching, though, was all about to come to an end when Cheryl and Dan came to a crossroads that just-so happened to intersect with a pivotal time in their daughter’s life.

The year was 2014 and Cheryl’s 176-acre farmstead had been laying dormant for the previous four years following the death of her stepfather, Raymond. Cheryl and Dan were recently retired — and after discovering that their daughter, Meghan Forrest, and their son-in-law, Yuuki Metreaud, were suddenly in the market for a new home — things just sort of fell into place for both sides.

Cheryl and Dan proposed that Meghan and Yuuki move into their Burnsville home so they could move south to Waseca and return to the farm, at least temporarily.

It’s been six years and they haven’t left.

“A farm was always in the back of my mind, but I’m not sure about my husband,” Cheryl said with a smile on a Wednesday fall morning. “As far as coming back here — back home? No, I didn’t think about that. But I said if we want a chance to move to the farm, this is it, and we did that. At the time, my husband said: ‘This is going to be temporary,’ but I guess it turned into permanent.”

Every family has a story

The Sutter-Lee farm traces its roots through Cheryl’s side of the family and dates back more than 150 years to 1861 when Cheryl’s great-grandfather, Alec K. Lee, immigrated to the United States with his father, Knudt Lee, from a “little town” in southern Norway called Vinje. The family first settled in Wisconsin before ultimately making their way to southern Minnesota and establishing a Lutheran church with a number of other immigrants from their tiny Scandinavian hamlet that sits roughly 100 miles west of present-day Oslo.

Alec and his wife, Betty, built their first home in 1888 on an 80-acre plot that has since more doubled in size over the last 130-plus years and blossomed into a six-building compound fitted with everything from a large refurbished traditional bright red barn, to a contemporary gazebo, to a white chicken coop.

“They say the first (home) was a sod house, although that’s just the story,” Cheryl said. “Everyone around here had log cabins. They built it right on the end of the big woods (and) sat just to the north. The stones are still in the ground.”

Alec and Betty raised most of their 11 children in what Cheryl called a loftstyle cabin before in 1913 building the home that stands on the property to this day. Cheryl’s grandfather, Knute, was the second-youngest of the bunch and would one day take the reins of the family operation that included a wide variety of livestock and crops at its peak.

Sutter

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