Ole C. Dahl, founder of Dalton, immigrated from Norway in 1865, first settled in Iowa, worked as a farm hand and painter, and after earning enough money brought his wife Oline and their six children from Norway; in 1867 the family left Iowa for Otter Tail County to claim a homestead, traveling separately again because they had no wagon before reuniting there. As in many small towns, the railway went through Dalton, and the town grew to include a post office, grain elevator, hotel, general store, blacksmith, jewelry store, and restaurant. For early settlers, skiing was mainly a way to travel through deep snow for food and supplies, but it later became a sport, and a ski jump was built north of Dalton, covered by snow carried up in bags by hand. Around 1915 Dalton held its first ski jumping competition, and by 1933 annual tournaments drew as many as 5,000 spectators; after the Dalton Ski Club was incorporated in 1939, its tournaments included participants from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, sometimes in such numbers that some had to be turned away. The longest jump recorded there in the 1940's was 144 feet. In 1957 the old, rotting jump was torn down so a new one could be built, but during deconstruction club member Walter Erickson was crushed to death by a falling support brace, and interest in ski jumping began to fade. In 1966 the new Walter Erickson Memorial Ski Jump was built, 26 feet higher than the original at 64 feet high with a 150-foot ramp and a 20-foot drop, but although 25 skiers took part in the first and last tournament that year, the jump was blown down the following year in a storm with gale winds estimated at 80 mph and was never rebuilt. Dalton's farming life also centered on annual threshing, when neighbors cooperated to use a costly threshing machine to separate grain from straw, beginning in early August after grain cut by horse-drawn binders had been set in shocks. Crews of about a dozen men hauled bundles on wooden racks, pitched them into the thresher, and used a small gas-powered elevator to raise grain into the granary, while women prepared two or three days of large meals for the workers, a labor remembered by Cora Loken as requiring breakfast at four a.m., lunches carried to the fields, a hot noon meal, fresh cake in the afternoon, and supper. This cooperative farm tradition is recalled by the annual Lake Region Pioneer Threshing Show in the fall, with working steam engines and threshing machines on a 40-acre site filled with historic buildings including pioneer cabins, a blacksmith shop, general store, schoolhouse, and church.