For many years the grove was the site of the Mission Festival for St. John's Lutheran Church. The last one was held there in 1925. The men would build a platform underneath the large cottonwood trees for the minister and the reed organ which they would transport from the schoolhouse. The crowd was seated on planks resting on small sawhorses. The men of the congregation had helped the city fathers build these sawhorses and had an agreement between themselves that the city would use them when they needed them and the congregation would use them for their festivals. Thus it happened that in later time the sawhorses were used during the week for free movies and for the Churches Mission Festivals on Sunday.

The women arrived with loaded picnic baskets. After the morning services the men would play horseshoe while the ladies filled the tables with food. The children would play games. People came for miles around, and many a young man found this an ideal place to talk to some young woman he had been admiring. It has been said that the first young man to come to this event with a car was busy giving rides to all the pretty young girls.

In the afternoon there would again be a church service, again the women would fill the tables for a lunch and everyone would go home enriched with the joy of fellowship and good will. Finally, as they built larger churches, the ministers agreed they would have their Mission Festivals in the Churches rather than pitch their voices against the rustling of the cottonwood trees.

The road next to the picnic grounds, being flat and grassy, provided an ideal camping ground for the traveling gypsies in their gypsy wagons. Although allowed in one spot only three days, they would move on a little way and then return to the same spot in about two weeks. They were great beggars. They would often ask for a drink of water from the house. Once inside, they could look around for other things to beg or simply slip inside their voluminous aprons. There was always a baby, in many cases a mythical baby, for who could refuse when they asked for milk for the baby? In return you would get a "God Bless You" if you contributed to them or a muttered curse if you hadn't. Once they came to the door of the Tomhagens with a large gunny sack. They wanted to fill the sack with a nickels worth of potatoes to feed the eighteen gypsies encamped there. They had as many as 70 head of horses with them, which they would trade to the farmers in the neighborhood. The Tomhagens remember the gypsies expecting to water all of their 70 horses from their stock tank. As the tank was filled by a windmill and the Tomhagens needed this water for their own livestock, they directed them to the creek only three-fourths mile away. This was not to their liking, you may be sure, but finally trudged away. Although the Tomhagens never caught any gypsies in the act of stealing from then, once when Andy was mowing the road he noticed a dry spot on the shoulder of the road where the grass refused to grow. He stopped to investigate, pulled back the sod, and found a large bunch of chicken feathers hidden

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