Lars Johan Stark emigrated from Sweden at age 24 in 1850, becoming an early postmaster and legislator in Chisago County. There's an unincorporated community named for him about 50 miles north of St. Paul, and Stark Road runs just north of Covenant Cemetery near Harris.
That small graveyard, lined with tall junipers, is a good place to focus on this Memorial Day weekend.
Nearly a century after Lars headed west to America, two of his great-grandsons — Army Air Corps Sgts. Russel Stark, 21, and Harvey Stark, 19 — headed back to Europe from Harris.
On Sept. 11, 1944, the Stark brothers climbed into their B-17 bomber, nicknamed the Arkansas Rambler, in southeastern England. The Starks, both gunners, were part of a nine-member crew. Their mission: Bomb Nazi targets in Leipzig, Germany.
Seven German fighter pilots swooped down during the B-17's second run at the target. Four of the American crewmen died in the ensuing crash near Neuhausen, Germany, including both Stark brothers and Sgt. William Dodge, 21, a radio operator gunner from Virginia, Minn.
Russ and Harvey were the younger two of Marie and Lawrence Stark's four children. Their father farmed and worked at a feed mill in Harris, according to the 1940 census. He and Marie Collins, a Wisconsin native, had married when both were 20.
After the Stark brothers died the same day in 1944, the War Department transferred their older brother, Pvt. Lorrie Stark, to permanent duty in the United States "in recognition of family sacrifice to the war." Lorrie would live to be a month shy of 90, while his kid brothers were among 9,765 Minnesotans killed in World War II.
Four years after the crash, on a mid-November Sunday, the Stark brothers' remains were reburied at Covenant Cemetery on the south side of Stark Road, following a memorial service at the Harris Covenant Church. By then, their parents had moved to Minneapolis. But they too would return to Harris, buried in the graveyard a mile southwest of town in the 1970s. When Marie Stark died in 1978 at 81, two years after her husband, her short obituary featured the words: "Gold Star Mother."