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Carroll Engelhardt, emeritus professor of history at Concordia College was born in an Iowa farmhouse without electricity, plumbing, or a working furnace. He started doing chores at age six, milked cows by hand from age eleven, helped put up hay and harvest oats, cleaned cow and hog barns, and spread manure on frozen fields until he left for college.

Professor Engelhardt is the author of four books: On Firm Foundation Grounded: The First Century of Concordia College for which he received the Red River Valley Heritage Society’s Historian Award; Gateway to the Northern Plains: Railroads and the Birth of Fargo and Moorhead; The Farm at Holstein Dip: An Iowa Boyhood, winner of the State Historical Society of Iowa’s 2013 Shambaugh Award for the Best Book Written about Iowa History the Previous Year; and Concordia Fair Doth Stand: The College Begins its Second Century, 1991-2016. He and his wife have lived in the Red River Valley for over fifty years.

Carroll's latest book, By the Sweat of His Brow sets the Probstfield family’s daily activities in the context of agricultural, social, and political history and opens a window on rural life at the eastern edge of the Great Plains from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. This meticulously researched, eminently readable book colorfully depicts a complicated patriarch, loving wife, and eleven children eking out a living. It will appeal to history buffs and scholars alike.