Rites held Friday for Pioneer and Inventor, June 28, 1975

Funeral services for Roy A. Hurtt, 83, Hoople, were held yesterday at 2pm from the Hoople United Methodist Church, with Rev. Theodore Rath officiating.

Mr. Hurtt died Tuesday, June 24, at a Warren, Minn., rest home, where he had been a resident since 1970. Cause of death was Natural Causes.

He was born April 18, 1892, at Hoople, the son of William and Marian (Parsonage) Hurtt. His father pioneered in the Red River Valley from Ontario in 1879. They homesteaded near Hoople, where the family lived and farmed.

Mr. Hurtt attended a rural one-room school in District 76, Glenwood Township, Walsh County and attended to the 5th grade.

As a young boy his mechanical ability was apparent and he earned money repairing watches, clocks and motorcycles. Throughout life he invented and built many machines, beginning with the first gasoline tractor in the area in 1913; first volume potato cutting machine which mechanically conveyed, treated and sacked potatoes; first self-propelled swather, none other at the time-swather attachment could be removed and a spraying outfit attached; wood splitter run by a gas engine; trench digger run by a Ford tractor used for laying pipe or wire seven feet underground; first snowmobile from a Ford runabout. He also repaired clocks and watches for several years. After retiring he repaired electrical motors, tore down and completely reassembled them. He made his own winding apparatus from a cream separator frame. This continued until he was forced to give up for his health and eyesight.

During World War I he served his country in the 352nd Company of the 88th Div., US Army, as a machine gunner, and saw combat duty in the Alsace-Lorraine area of France. He returned to the family farm in 1919.

In 1927 he built the forerunner of the snowmobile, called the "skimoblie," made from Model T parts mounted on skis. With this he traveled across the prairie courting the former Alice Johnson, who become his wife at Grand Forks on Nov 16, 1927. Alice finished school through the 8th grade.

They resided in a house he built on the homestead, where he farmed with a brother, Frank.

Information submitted by Mrs. Roy Hurtt, Walsh Heritage Book, Volume 1, Page 375, Roy Hurtt Obituary, Family information from Lois Melland & Inez VanCura.[samuel hurt for family reunion 6 07.FTW]

Roy Hurtt (1892)