It’s still a ‘wunnerful’ life on the Welk family farm

STRASBURG, N.D. -- It has been decades since anyone has lived on the small farmstead that made this small North Dakota farming community famous.

But listen carefully. As visitors drive up from the gravel road, they can hear the “champagne music” flowing freely from the barn where Lawrence Welk used to play his accordion.

“His sisters would get so sick of him playing that thing that they would send him out to the barn,” said Welk’s niece, Edna Schwab.

Ten years after Welk’s death at age 89, people still visit his family farm, tune into reruns of “The Lawrence Welk Show” on public television, and join fan clubs celebrating the “wunnerful, wunnerful” orchestra leader.

Schwab is one of several local people who gives tours of the Welk farmstead two miles outside Strasburg, a town of about 550 people. A life-size cutout of the King of Champagne Music greets visitors as they walk into the sod house in which he, his parents and seven siblings lived. The homestead, which includes a summer kitchen, granary, buggy house, blacksmith shop, outhouse and barn, was restored and opened for tours in 1991.

This year about 3,000 people visited the site, about 100 miles south of Bismarck and two miles off the “Lawrence Welk” highway.

Welk left his family farm on his 21st birthday. He didn’t hit the big time for more than 20 years, with a 1951 TV appearance. ABC picked up his show in 1955 and it ran for 16 years.