Voices from the Heart of the Land : Rural Stories That Inspire Community [1 ed.] 9780299227838, 9780299227845

Citation preview

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, takes its name from the Memorial Union Terrace, located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Since its inception in 1907, the Wisconsin Union has provided a venue for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to debate art, music, politics, and the issues of the day. It is a place where theater, music, drama, literature, dance, outdoor activities, and major speakers are made available to the campus and the community. To learn more about the Union, visit www.union.wisc.edu.

Voices from the Heart of the Land Rural Stories That Inspire Community

Richard L. Cates Jr. Edited by John Ingham

Terrace Books A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

Terrace Books A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 2008 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. 5

4

3

2

1

Printed in the United States of America Design and layout by Barbara Buckel Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cates, Richard L. Voices from the heart of the land : rural stories that inspire community / Richard L. Cates, Jr. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-299-22784-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Country life—Wisconsin—Arena—Anecdotes. 2. Farm life—Wisconsin—Arena—Anecdotes. 3. Arena (Wis.)—Social life and customs—Anecdotes. I. Title S521.5W6 C38 2009 307.7209775⬘78—dc22 2008019183 On the front cover: Dick Adamski, Seymour, Wisconsin, 1988. Dick and his wife, Evelyn, both born in 1923, are lifelong farmers raised on their families’ farms in the Seymour-Pulaski area, northwest of Green Bay. As of 2008, they have been married 58 years. They have four children and seven grandchildren. Their son, Rick, and his wife, Valerie Dantoin-Adamski, are very good friends of mine and are leaders in agricultural issues of our times. Rick says of his parents: “They do not expect a lot in return for their work other than respect and appreciation. They are true conservatives; they still know how to save, and they recycled their whole life—way before they were required to. Dad still takes care of the heifers and occasionally helps with milking.” On the back cover: The Cates family farm, Town of Wyoming, Iowa County, Wisconsin, 2004.

To Richard Sr. and Margaret Cates Charles and Nina Leopold Bradley Edward and Margret Klessig Who showed me love of land and community and how to listen

For Kim Johnson Cates My best and patient friend

CONTENTS Foreword, by Jerry Apps Foreword, by Sondy Pope-Roberts Prologue In the Beginning The Land 13 Roots Community Character and Characters Afterword Narrator Biographies Acknowledgments Author’s Note Glossary Illustration Credits About the Author

viii x xii 1 41 81 113 150 151 184 188 191 193 194

FOREWORD

T

he first revolution in agriculture started in the mid-nineteenth century. Ani-

mal power replaced hand labor. For hundreds of years farmers had planted their grain by hand, harvested it with a sickle, later a cradle, and threshed it with a flail. All slow, tedious, back-breaking work. But with the invention of the horse-drawn grain drill to plant the grain, a horse-drawn reaper to cut it, and a threshing machine to replace the flail, fewer farmers could do the work, and it was easier, too. And farms grew larger and rural communities changed. Starting in the early 1900s and continuing to the late 1940s, we witnessed the second revolution in farming. Tractors replaced horses. Electricity took the place of lamps and lanterns; combines replaced threshing machines. Hybrid crop varieties became available; commercial fertilizers appeared and crop yields soared. Once again, fewer farmers were

viii

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

needed, farms grew larger, and rural communities changed. Crossroad cheese factories, grist mills, feed stores, hardware stores, one-room schools, and churches closed. We are in the midst of a third major revolution in agriculture, where but a handful of farmers is called on to provide the food and fiber for the nation with enough production left over for exports to other countries. It is a time of computers and genetically modified crops, giant farms and equally mammoth farm equipment. All of these changes seem rather straightforward and the result of “progress” as many people would proclaim. But the meaning of these changes requires some careful examination. What have we lost as fewer people live on the land and as agriculture has moved from a relationship of people to the soil to treating a farm as a kind of factory, another production unit where profit and loss are the only concerns? Richard Cates, through the stories of a fascinating group of people who live in one township in southern Wisconsin, gives us a glimpse of what life was like in this rural community through much of the twentieth century. Through the spoken words of these rural folk we learn about love of land, of community and the importance of neighbors, and of the power of the story to communicate deeper meanings. Cates says we must remember — and can learn from those who knew the land intimately. His closing words speak volumes: “The choice is now ours: whether we choose to cherish and uphold their tradition along with the new . . . whether we choose to listen to and continue to learn from their voices . . . and whether we recommit to finding and fostering the values and the behavior that sustained and nurtured us in the past.” Jerry Apps, Writer Madison, Wisconsin RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

ix

FOREWORD

T

hornton Wilder may not have had it completely right in his play Our Town,

when he suggested that one could not go home again. Reading through Richard Cates’s Voices from the Heart of the Land: Rural Stories That Inspire Community, I was transported back to a time and place that is no more, and it made me homesick. Cates brings back the voices, their cadence and peculiarities, some so loudly that they echo still. Many a lesson is learned listening to the stories told and retold by those voices. Familiar faces, not seen in decades, come into view. People, only recalled fleetingly before, come and linger. The rich aromas of country life crept back into memory: huge feasts prepared for the men who were harvesting in the fields; pungent whey from the cheese factory being delivered for the pigs; freshly mown hay on its way into the barn; sweeping compound spread on the one-room country school floor each Friday after school; or the faint musty scent of the church usually closed up tight except for Sunday worship.

x

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

While our world in Ray Hollow felt unique to me, it was no different than any of the other valleys that made up our bigger township. The narrow dusty road meandered past farmsteads that are no more. Cows were numerous and moved from pasture to barn on tightly managed schedules. Crops were rotated, tended, and closely scrutinized by neighbors. A little creek, usually dry but occasionally swollen and remarkably swift, snakes down through that valley. The one-room school, the woodshed, and the outhouses have long since been torn down. A new home now occupies the site but Cates allowed me to return there to join my eight classmates as we prepared for the Christmas program, went to the board to do our math, or played “fox and goose” down on the flat. Each of us privileged to call this township home are a part of the fabric. Cates allows the reader to see and hear the characters woven into it. He captures the essence of our township, the uniqueness of the citizenry, the moments of joy and laughter, hardship and sorrow, and the unspoken bonds that held it all together. Values were shaped by hard work, love of community, belief in a common good, and the sure knowledge that each of us was dependent in some way on each other and the community as a whole. Richard Cates has given us all a precious gift. If you long to capture the essence of life as it was lived here, or, like me, want to revisit a simpler, long-forgotten time, you only need settle down in a quiet spot with this book. Wilder may have been wrong — we can go home again. I did. Sondy Pope-Roberts Wisconsin State Assembly Representative Verona, Wisconsin Author’s Note: Sondy grew up in Ray Hollow, Arena Township; her parents, Dale and Lillian Pope, are “voices” in this book. RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

xi

PROLOGUE

T

his is a book about rural story, and it is about listening. It is not meant to be a

collection of nostalgia or things quaint. The story is about real people and their rural community, and the set of values that has enabled them to live rich and purposeful lives. Their notion of “community” — to our collective loss — is disappearing from the American social landscape. It is my hope that this book can begin to awaken us to heed the wisdom of these voices from the heart of the land, and to reinvent, among ourselves, a sense of community that will help reinvigorate and sustain our culture. Over a period of five years, beginning in the autumn of 2001, I sat with senior members of more than 30 rural families who live in, or within a stone’s throw of, Arena Township, Iowa County, Wisconsin. About half of them were born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. I asked them to tell me about their lives growing up in the rural township.

xii

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

All are farm families except for three: a cheese maker, a railroad worker, and a general store proprietor. Their stories, observations, and opinions — largely about family, working, character, community, and the land — crystallize the essence of what I believe to be our core human values: integrity, commitment, responsibility, citizenship, self-determination, decency, kindness, love, and hope. Their stories also illustrate how these values have given meaning and purpose to their lives and to their communities. I embarked upon this work first to celebrate a rural community, Arena Township — a place where there has been a shared sense of responsibility for each others’ well-being, a place where connections among individuals have fostered trust, a social compact that places a high value on helping each other. In addition, I wanted to pay tribute to those who have made a living from and near the land. We Americans have deep roots in the soil — if not in our own circumstances then through our extended families, forebears, neighbors, or the history of the region where we live. I think that farming — producing healthy food and taking care of our natural resources — is a high calling, worthy of our best and brightest citizens. As the world becomes more populous, and increasing demands further strain our finite natural resources, the importance of committed individuals who embrace a “land ethic” — the care and stewardShannon, Dick, Kim, and Eric Cates, 2006

ship of land as an essential component of a healthy, enduring community — is more important than ever. When I began this work, I felt that I would come to care very much for the people I spent time with and came to know; that notion is, in part, what gave me the confidence to get started in the first place. But I wasn’t ready for the extent to which their

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

xiii

stories inspired me. The absolutely non-coveting way in which all have lived is inspirational and endearing. The satisfaction they derive from their engagement with family, community, and good work on the land is the kind of satisfaction I believe all people wish

Prologue

for. The voices in this book talk about nurturing close relationships, and they have inspired me to understand that we are lucky if we are blessed with the opportunity to create such richness in our lives. I have held for all of my adult life the notion that we, as a culture, grow and thrive based on what we learn from preceding generations, if we will only listen. What is most important in this book is not the act of farming itself, nor whether the children of the narrators whose voices resound in this book are farming now. What is most important are the values expressed through the stories, and the lessons to be extracted from them. These values come from people who grew up on and near the land, as members of a caring community, and their wisdom must be kept close. No one before us in history has had exactly the same perspective that we do now, of course, and no one ever will in the future. We can’t again have the virgin soil, the sense of discovery, the technological simplicity, or the simple space which the forebears of our narrators experienced. We can’t say, “Oh, that was a great time and place, let’s do that all again.” But we can extract and savor the wisdom of the past and use it to help illuminate, for us, the road ahead.

Opposite page: Bob Demby’s father, John, driving his Advance Rumley Oil Pull tractor, mid-1930s

xiv

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

IN THE BEGINNING

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

1

In the Beginning

Arena Township Iowa County, southwest Wisconsin • 45,314 acres • village (of old Arena) platted 1848 • first U.S. Post Office, 1847

ARENA TOWNSHIP POPULATION 1940 936 2000 1444 CHEESE FACTORIES 1940 8 2000 2

First graduating class of Arena High School, 1910 as recorded by Jeanette Lloyd Demby, mother of Bob Demby, a voice in this book: • Vern and Orville Pfanku • Winnie Sawle • Leona King • Leslie Wilson • Edith Harrop

Arena Township schools before consolidation in 1962 • Helena was the first, in 1846 (some students walked four to five miles a day to attend) • then Dover, Coon Rock, Bawden, Ray Hollow, Mounds Creek, Hogan, Mill Creek, Pleasant Point, McCutchin, Blue Ridge, Meadow Vale, and Arena

COUNTRY SCHOOLS 1940 13 2000 0 WORKING FARMS 1940 230

Cheese factories in the 1940s

2000 12

2

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

• Mounds Creek, Mill Creek, Blue Ridge, Coon Rock, Hyde, Arena, Pine Knob, and Hwy K at Roelke Road

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

3

4

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

A

rena Township is located in the magical “driftless” area of southwestern

Wisconsin, a piece of the northern landscape that the past two million years of glaciations just plumb missed. The area is underlain with old sedimentary rock strata — dolomitic limestone and sandstone — undisturbed since their water-borne genesis by the ancient oceans that covered the North American continent more than 250 million years ago. The land is well-watered and buried with glacial loess — literally, glacial dust from millions of years of the nearby sequential ice sheets grinding ice-on-rock — the stuff that makes the best soils in the world. As a result of having been spared the flattening effect of such a long and weighty mass of glacial ice, the land has been deeply carved by the actions of millennia of thunderstorm

Opposite page: The Cates family farm, 1996

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

5

torrents and deep snow runoff, a ridge-and-valley province of its own. Two principal waterways flow through Arena Township: Blue Mounds Creek, a designated trout stream, emanates from one of the highest spots in southern Wisconsin, townships to the south

In the Beginning

and east of Arena; and Mill Creek, its headwaters a trout stream, its origin the spectacular Governor Dodge Park to the southwest, a “grand canyon” of sorts in these parts. The waters of these cold streams and innumerable springs flow among the hills and down through the rich hollows of the township, making their way past Coon Rock — part of a last set of hills and outcrops — before the sand flats of the Wisconsin River valley, and, finally, emptying into the river itself. The joggings and meanderings of this great watery serpent, the Wisconsin, describe the northern limit of the township. From this point, the river continues west to join the wide Mississippi, a three-day canoe paddle distant. This is a maternal land: rounded hills softened by time and deep, fecund valleys teeming with life. Take a walk on a spring evening and breathe deep — the richness of the air, infused with that of the life-sustaining soil, is indelible; its effect intoxicating. On early August mornings, fog brews over the Wisconsin River basin and silently insinuates its way up the hollows — a kindred spirit, returning to share the sights, sounds, and life of the community — only to dissipate in the warm sun’s rays and take its leave well before dinnertime. Autumn air is cool and crisp, ideal for communal labor, harvesting the fruits of the earth; the world is aflame in a kaleidoscope of color — the oak’s

Old Blue Mounds Creek Mill, ca. 1900

6

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

russet, the yellows and oranges of birch, aspen, walnut, and elm,

and the reds of sumac and hard maple — grandly decorating the township’s celebration of life. No wonder this place has been home to so many for so long.

FROM PURSUIT OF THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH TO THE F IRST T HRESHING BEES Threshing — locally called “thrashing” — is defined as “separating the grain or seeds from straw or chaff by beating with a flail or a threshing machine.” Threshing has been performed with a flail — a simple hand-held “thrashing” tool — since the beginning of grain cultivation in the world, and certainly by the first agriculturists to inhabit what would become known as Arena Township. No doubt those first farmers also hand-threshed in “bees,” or communal work groups, because many hands, good humor, and community spirit have always made light work of a long and dusty task. Archaeologists tell us with some uncertainty that the first visitors to the township, hunters of the Paleo culture, arrived more than 10,000 years ago — having wandered across Canada from Siberia about the time the continental glacial ice was receding — in pursuit of prehistoric game: the mastodon, woolly mammoth, and bison. But as the climate warmed and the ancient game was effectively hunted out, the spruce forests of the area shifted to oak-type forests and eventually, as a result of frequent lightning fires, to oak savanna — grasslands in balance with oak forest. Three subsequent indigenous cultures — Archaic, Woodland/Mound Builders, and the Mississippian-Oneota traditions — flourished sequentially as more familiar game from fairer climes to the south — elk, deer, and to some extent bison — made their Threshing scenes

way to the township. Eventually these peoples settled in villages and later became

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

7

farmers — and most probably held the first “thrashing bees” — having adopted the triad of corns, beans, and squash nearly 1,000 years before the arrival of the first Europeans. At the onset of European settlement, Native American tribes in the area may have in-

In the Beginning

cluded Miami (1600s), then Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Potawatomi, Dakota Sauk (Sac), Mesquakie (Fox), and Kickapoo (Wisconsin’s Past and Present: A Historical Atlas, WI Cartographers’ Guild, 1998; the author would like to respectfully note that native American interpretations of the pre-European settlement history of this area may differ).

FROM EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT TO THE F IRST T HRESHING BEES WITH RAISIN-AND-APPLE PIE The first European visitor to Wisconsin, the French explorer Jean Nicolet, arrived in 1634. He was followed by commercial men, French fur trappers, and proselytizing men of the Jesuit cloth. An account from 1683 by one of the best-known early travelers in this region, Father Hennepin, describes “large prairies where you often see elk browsing.” Others of that time write of “prairies, interspersed with copses of wood [oak savanna] . . . grass is so high that a man is lost amongst it” and of “deer and buffaloes [bison]” (The Vegetation Threshing scene

of Wisconsin, Curtis, 1971). The first European person to be credited with settling in our area is Ebenezer Brigham, a lead miner, in 1828. Brigham traveled from Massachusetts down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi to join the Wisconsin lead rush of that era. He established his “diggings” and built a smelting furnace and a house just south of

8

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Arena Township at Blue Mounds. His home became a trading post, an inn, and a stagecoach stop. A few years later, as Colonel Brigham, he helped build and then command Fort Blue Mounds during the Blackhawk War in 1832. But Arena didn’t have mineral deposits that attracted the miners, and so the first settlements in the township appeared some years later, when settlers discovered the agricultural value of the territory. The families came from across northern Europe and began arriving here in the early 1840s. The first name recorded for posterity is John T. Jones, who arrived in 1843 and purchased farmland in parts of Sections 14 and 23; he is the great-great-grandfather of Grant Jones, whose voice is one of those in this book. In the decade that followed, many more families came to farm, all ancestors of those whose voices grace this book: Reeves, Knight, Sutcliffe, Linley, Harrop, Hamilton, Hogan, McCutchin, Hodgson, Porter, Dodge, Dawson, Salzman, Roberts, Demby, Lloyd, Lockman, Pfanku, Nelson, Sawle, Harrington, Hottmann. . . . Some of these first settlers came with the “British Temperance & Emigration Society.” This was a “benevolent society” organized in Liverpool by Robert Gorst (ascendant of the Pope family, whose voice is also represented in this book), Charles Wilson, and Lawrence Hayworth. The citizens of the “Temperance Society,” as it became known, laid out the village of Dover (previously known as Hayworth, Gorseville, or Reevesville) in 1845, in the northeast corner of the township. In 1853, a special election was held in the town of Arena for a proposition to raise money to aid the railroad. The proposition failed, with only 20 of the 49

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

9

votes cast in favor. Nevertheless, when the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad came through in 1857, a station was constructed in the village of Arena to the west and Mazomanie to the east, but none in Dover. So the good folks of Dover simply packed up

In the Beginning

and moved to Mazomanie. The railroad brought immigrants and prospectors, and it is said that several fourhorse stage coaches left the Arena station each day filled with the new arrivals to the area. Helena station, in the northwest corner of the township, was built in 1861. Churches sprang up: Congregational, Adventist, German Methodist — all in the village of Arena — and St. John’s Catholic Church in Mill Creek, the subject of some of the colorful Harrington stories in our book. The first grist mill was erected in 1852 by Henry Rowel and G. C. Meigs along Mounds Creek. It was later purchased by William E. Rowe and then purchased by the Sawle family in 1889; Theodore Sawle’s story appears herein. The first store in Arena opened in 1858. After fires in 1895 and 1908, most of Arena had been rebuilt from the north side of the railroad tracks to the south side. The general store was owned by Ohrt and Salzman at the turn of the century, then purchased by Reimann and Hamilton, then the Roberts family in 1914; John Roberts is a voice in this book. In the countryside, neighborhoods grew up in places like Helena, Dover, Coon Rock, Bawden, Ray Hollow, Mounds

Mounds Creek School operated from 1870 until 1962; photo was taken in 1990

10

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Creek, Hogan, Mill Creek, Pleasant Point, McCutchin, Blue

Ridge, and Meadow Vale. Each hollow or hill had its own country schoolhouse, many had a cheese factory, and yes, in time, each had a thrashing crew. These neighborhoods were a part of the larger rural community being forged all across the American countryside. And so a grand experiment began here in Arena Township. There was no lead or gold, oil or silver in the ground beneath these loess soils, the stuff of “dreams of riches.” There was, simply, good earth and space, fresh air, sunshine and rain. Folks came of their own will, five and six generations ago, from a world far away with nothing more in common than a need and a want to be free men and women, to own a piece of land, to raise a family, to build a community. How did it work out? How did they treat each other?

Old Dover Mill, ca. 1900

What were the values that “stuck,” passed down among families and across generations, which allowed families and communities not just to exist but to thrive? This is what our book is about. So listen closely to these “voices from the heart of the land.” Listen for the yearning and the pain, but also for the humor, the endurance, the affection, and the hope. Listen to the voices . . .

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

11

“I have been up to the maple woodlot in late May, when the leaves are just emerging, and it’s just as beautiful as the nicest cathedral you were ever in. Our farm has a tremendous history and so much family and friends that were fortunate enough to grow up on it and experience it. I am the fourth generation here; my grandchildren the sixth. I never felt that I wanted to do something else, never was a doubt in my mind. The freedom of choice and freedom of action that you have on your own farm is just unequalled, I think, and my wife Margret felt just like I did.” — Edward Klessig (1919-2006), dairy farmer, Saxon Homestead Farm, est. 1850, Cleveland, Wisconsin “So, one of the reasons democracy worked in this country was the fact that so many people came over here, and for the first time in their lives they were able to own land and they were able to be in control of their own lives.” — Richard Cates Sr. (b1925), farmer and trial lawyer, lifetime advocate for human dignity and individuals’ freedom “That land is a community is a basic concept of ecology; but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known but (latterly) often forgotten.” — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac “He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson “Once you have lived on the land, been a partner with its moods, secrets, and seasons, you can not leave. The living land remembers, touching you in unguarded moments, saying, ‘I am here. You are a part of me.’” — Ben Logan, The Land Remembers

12

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Opposite page: The Cates family farm, 2006

1

THE LAND

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

13

The Land

w

e begin in the mid-nineteenth century — six decades or more after our

nation first forged a government by constitution that sultry summer of 1787 in Philadelphia — with the stories of the northern Europeans who settled in Arena Township. These new immigrants left behind homes in the Old World and followed, we are told, a dream of freedom — perhaps the same freedoms that, nearly a century later, President Franklin Roosevelt so memorably identified: freedom of speech and worship, from want and fear. But they also came for land, a piece of the Jeffersonian ideal. Jefferson penned, “It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.” Land was available for those who would agree to call it home — to build a home and farm.

14

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

This chapter explores the relationship our resident narrators have with the land . . . home. The “voices” in our story descend from the first agrarian settlers in the township, and they have maintained a close relationship with the land. This relationship has permitted survival . . . but also much more. Long-term relationships with the land grew far beyond an appreciation for production — so many bushels of wheat or buckets of milk. A sensibility evolved that included aesthetic pleasure and even a spiritual connection with the land. Husbanding the land nourished bodies, but also souls. Accordingly, people increasingly came to appreciate, love and revere the natural world. And this developed into a pretty rewarding John V. Harrington, Mounds Creek, with Rubie and Dickie in the field, 1951

way of life.

For those of us who live on the land today, a balance must be found if our existence is to be fruitful, loving, and enduring. We need to recognize and foster a relationship with the land that grows beyond an appreciation for “bushels per acre.” If we are lucky, we learn the “wisdom of place.” Listen to our narrators’ voices as they tell us stories about finding that balance, about how husbanding the land nourishes both body and soul. Listen for the sensibility that evolved in the hearts and minds of these speakers, a sensibility that grew from a practical connection to a particular farm into an aesthetic appreciation of beauty and a spiritual connection with all of creation — a complete and fulfilling relationship with land and home.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

15

HOME “If the Land Could Talk”

The Land

Rod and Christine Anding, Coon Rock, 2003

16

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“I have pictures of my grandfather up the valley with a team of horses and I’m wondering what he must have been thinking when he was tilling the ground. . . . Oh, if the land could talk, tell us what those before us thought, what they were doing when they were here. . . . The land has a calling for me. “I look at the plow that I have down at the end of the road that my grandfather on the Williams side gave my parents for a wedding present. I guess they gave my parents a plow and couple head of cattle to help them get started when they were milking here. “We think we’ve got it rough. Well, I look at that plow and say I’d better not complain today about what I have to do because if I had to plow this farm with a walking plow . . . that instills in you at a young age the feeling for taking care of the land. I took the farm over in 1969, myself; I was the youngest in the family. But I remember working with my dad and milking and doing everything even when I was seven years old [1953]. But he was always out doing whatever it took to get the job done. You’ve got to live your life and enjoy what you’re doing. “When I drive down the back road and see the old Loy place, the Demby place, the old Pope farm, I start thinking about when my dad and I used to go thrashing with those families and the big part of the day was the dinner when we went to their house with the big thrashing crew, the community around that. I think about all the teams of horses that used to be out there. “And the fields had character, where you had saved a good oak tree somewhere in the middle. Mother and my wife, Chris, used to come down and we’d have dinner under an oak tree in the field. They’d bring lemonade and a bunch of sandwiches and we’d sit down there where it was nice and shady. I think about it.” — Rod Anding

Dean Swenson, High Point, ca. 1985

“On my mom’s side of the family there were five kids: There were two lawyers, two schoolteachers, and one took care of the house. On the Swenson side of the family there were eight children: Seven out of the eight were farmers [including Paul and Dean’s father, Kenneth]. . . . Well, you’d say that even Alma [the eighth] had a hobby farm; they milked goats and had a hardware store out in South Dakota. But the farming roots were there. “Now times have changed. Of course, back then a whole lot of the population were farmers. When the next generation came along — my generation — there are still no farmers on my mom’s side, and on my dad’s side there are 20 cousins, of which 8 were farmers. “Why do people stay on the land? Part of it probably has to do with the ‘can’t change now’ theory: We’ve been in it long enough, and it’s hard to disperse . . . do you want to get rid of the land, do you want to change, or just keep farmin’? And then there’s the ‘next year’ theory: that things will be better next year. And so we’re always striving for that ultimate that we think is within reach, but never quite. . . . That’s why we stayed, you know. We’ve been farming more than 40 years up here and you think, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been up here for 40 years.’ I told Jan when we started this, ‘If things don’t work out, you know, in 10 years we can do somethin’ different.’” — Dean Swenson 

Frank Schlough, Dover, 2005

“So, what got me to come back, what kept me here, farming . . . I don’t know, I can’t explain it. One thing was that I always thought my mother had to work awful hard on the farm, in addition to the work she did in the home. One of the big reasons I guess I stayed was because if I did it [a job on the farm], she didn’t have to do it. There were seven siblings; I had two older sisters and two older brothers, then two younger sisters. My sisters helped Mom in the house, and as they got older, did most of the housework. RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

17

The Land

“Our daughter and her family live here on the farm. The hardest thing for me, if I had to leave this farm, would be not being able to be as close to my daughter and her family; the grandkids mean the world to me. If we didn’t have the farm, who knows where they’d be living.” — Frank Schlough 

TIES TO THE LAND: A CONVERSATION Ruth Nelson: “I guess it’s a love of the land; it’s something we’ve always done . . . so we keep on doing it.” Carol Nelson: “To me, it’s the love of the outdoors. Being out, being independent. You can choose what you are going to do each day . . . besides milking . . . and no one’s going to tell you . . . if you want to take off, it’s your choice! Dad and Mom have always helped us. Dad, he was cleaning barn yet at 89; he raked hay, about six acres, at 90. Mom, she was doing the milk dishes for the milker buckets until she was 85. They were always outside. Mom was in her garden, her flowers . . . Dad was always out with the livestock, or on the land.”

Jerry and Deborah Nelson, Amacher Hollow, 2003

18

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Jerry Nelson: “I never left the farm. It is something I always wanted to do. I was fascinated from the start. It was born or bred in me. I can remember, like from three years old, being out watching the sows . . . the baby pigs. When Dad ran the farm it started more as a hog operation. I always say that my grandpa paid for the farm with draft horses, Percherons, and Dad paid for the farm with hogs; and I’m trying to do it with dairy cows.”

“I loved the farm as a whole. When I was in high school I made up my mind I was going to farm . . . you’re your own boss . . . if somebody stops by and you’re on an eightto-five shift, you can’t stop and visit with them . . . but when you’re farmin’ you can take time to visit.” — Dean Lucey 

Betty and Dean Lucey, Knight Hollow, ca. 1990

“A couple has to have a love for the farm, because it is a lot of hard work, and a gamble. But it is a wonderful way of life and a wonderful place to raise a family, that’s for sure.” — Elaine Drachenberg 

Ron and Elaine Drachenberg, Mill Creek, 2001

“I moved to the farm at Mill Creek as a young married woman, and I lived there for 50 years until my husband, Gaylord, passed away. Those were the happiest days of my life; I wish I could have stayed, but after Gaylord passed away I couldn’t stay there much longer. I loved the cows. We had Holsteins, and milked about 14 cows. I always helped with the milking . . . hauled the cans to White’s Cheese [Mill Creek] Factory, and then washed the cans when I got home.” — Vivian Dodge  “The differences in being raised on a farm and raised in the city are striking. My sister, Judy, and I grew up in the city and we thought it was a good life. We had a lot of fun, spent a lot of time in and on the Madison lakes, hung around in the backyard playing basketball and doing things that kids in the city do. But our own kids, growing up on the farms, played together, and were down in the barn with their dad [Dean] from

Vivian Dodge, Mill Creek, 2003

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

19

The Land

the time they were five or six years old; they were a part of the family operation right from the time they were small. “All three of our kids, even though they hated going out and doing chores — and would grumble and mumble about it — look back now, and they realize how important that was and they say they would like to see that for their own kids. Our kids grew up knowing how important their work was to us, and that we couldn’t have managed the farming operation without their help. That was really important to them. I look at the difference in the way they were raised and the way I was raised, and I think the farming life was much better and much more family-oriented. “Our own kids have a deep love for the land and the farm; it is really the only home they have ever known. But we insisted that our kids go to college and then we insisted that they get away and ‘go do other stuff ’ just to make sure they saw the rest of the world before they committed to staying home farming. When Pam, our third child, graduated from high school, we literally had to kick her out the door, register her for college, and say, ‘You’re gonna go!’” — Jan Swenson 

Paul and Judy Swenson, Mill Creek, 2002

20

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“Our kids helped in the barn, as well. We’d take Kenny to the barn when he was a crawling baby and we had a playpen for him. We’d drag the playpen up and down the driveway. Kenny would start to bawl; one of the older boys would go get him a cat and throw it in the crib, and Kenny was all right until the cat decided he’d had enough . . . and then the cat’d leave. Then I’d go out and put the cows in the barn and I’d take Kenny and put him in the calf pellet barrel . . . he couldn’t get loose then . . . he’d eat calf pellets; he didn’t mind. I think he understood even at two or three years of age why he was there. I put him in there and the first time or two he made a fuss, but he realized, ‘Now it’s time to go in the barrel.’ There were strong connections between us.” — Paul Swenson

“I graduated from Barneveld High School in 1941. In the fall of that year I went down to Knight Hollow to begin doing housework on the Knight farm; Mrs. Knight had contracted cancer. Her husband and son, Burdette, needed help in the home. I would get seven dollars a week, and I didn’t have to milk; that was the first place I worked out that I didn’t have to milk . . . the summer jobs I had I always had to help milk . . . uffda! I went there in the fall of 1941, met Burdette, and married him in 1946, and never left the home until March 2003. Burdette died in 1993. I was the first person ever to move out of that house. The Knight family built the house more than 100 years ago and every one of them passed on before they moved out.” — Helen Knight

Burdette and Helen Knight, Knight Hollow, ca. 1990

THE GOOD EARTH “Barefoot Walking” “He that owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree; he owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution.” — Aldo Leopold

TRANSFORMATION: A CONVERSATION Dean Swenson: “So, I did a good job of teaching; I worked at it. My brother Paul was here on the farm . . . Paul and I thought we could farm on this farm together, so actually I came home and worked for Paul for five years before he bought the farm in the valley.” Jan Swenson: “You never saw such a transformation as there was from when RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

21

The Land

Dean was a teacher to when he came back to be a farmer. I wrote my whole Christmas letter on it that year. I was distraught because this was not where I wanted to be but I said the change in Dean was so remarkable, I said he was just like a man on fire. He was so glad to be back on the farm, he was so glad to be working for himself, he was glad to be here. His roots are here in the soil like nobody I ever knew in my life.” Dean: “I was so excited one time that I got up at one o’clock at night and headed for the barn; I thought it was five in the morning.” Jan: “He just couldn’t wait to get back to the farm, so whatever it was . . . it was so much better for him than teaching. Even though it was harder for me I could see it was a zillion times better for him, so I just said okay, we’ll make this work.”

Dean and Jan Swenson, High Point, 2002

Dean: “And then it goes back to my childhood days when I was the youngest in the family and the other kids were in school, I was home with my dad alone. I can remember walking behind the walking plow, picking up angleworms, barefoot walking, and the smell, and the nostalgia of all that just really . . . I can picture that . . . it’s in my background, and that was part of it.” Jan: “He told me we’ll try it for a few years and see how it goes . . . so more than 40 years later, here we are. I love seeing cattle walking in the pasture . . . getting exercise . . . they are healthy. I love the land, the beauty of the place.” 

22

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle “I figure I put in about 30 years of farming, about 30 years logging and saw milling, and 30 at the grist mill. . . . I just kind of enjoyed things.” — Ted Sawle Theodore “Ted” Sawle was born May 25, Mounds Creek. Ted is a living legend and 1905, in the same home on the Sawles’ “Rose- legacy, a gift to our culture. His stories are vale Farm” where I am conducting these inter- presented at intervals throughout the book. views in the autumn of 2001. In May 2005 I A LOT OF COMMON attended Ted’s 100th EXPERIENCE birthday party and he gave me and about “Oh, we milked by hand. We had our 200 others basswood first milking machine experiment in about bird carvings he had 1917. I’ll never forget my older brothers fashioned with hand saying, ‘Oh boy, we’ve got a milking matools he inherited chine, we’re going to get done early tonight.’ from his father. They were going to go to a dance that night. Ted was born blind Ted Sawle at 95, November 2000 So they started at four o’clock, and those in one eye, and yet his Jersey cows kicked that machine to pieces; fine handiwork, which includes furniture, boxes and carvings, is art- they never got done milking until about nine o’clock. So when you ran that milk ful and prodigious. He has a collection of old machine you got your exercise in, I tell you farm equipment, including a Rumley Oil Pull tractor with a steam engine, and a museum of that. “But my oldest brother, Rowe, he wouldn’t countless old hand tools, each with a story of let you on a gangplow with four horses until its own. No one embodies the spirit of the voices you were 11 or 12 years old. And then he in this book like Ted Sawle, centenarian from wouldn’t let you start down the field until

your coulter was set just right to make a nice clean furrow for the horse to walk in. He was darn particular on that, but he was that kind of a guy. “We bought our first tractor in 1916. It was an International Titan and we bought that for $1,000 with a three-bottom plow for around $200 or $250. It was quite an outlay at that time. The Titan was chaindrive, and two-cylinder; had good power but it was a bugger to shake, terrible vibration. “I enjoyed milking the cows after milling all day long, working until eight-thirty or nine doing chores. You could take your jacket off in the barn in the winter; it was nice and warm in the barn. I just kind of enjoyed things. I didn’t get married until I was 26, and by golly, I had almost a whole year of checks from the mill I had saved up. So you can see I didn’t run around too much either. I’ve got a lot of, I guess what you would say, common experience.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

23

The Land

“Anyway, in the middle of the ridge field there used to be the best sweet apple tree; and those apples’d be about that big! The field was cropped, but we’d go around that tree; it was a good-sized tree. I don’t know the name of the apple [variety], we just called it a sweet apple. There were other apple trees in the woods, as well. And then where we called the ‘back hollow’ there was a cool, clear spring, and a blackberry patch pretty good-sized.” — Emma Abplanalp



Emma and Adolph Abplanalp, Amacher Hollow, 25th wedding anniversary, 1964

24

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“I remember when I first took over the farm I wanted badly to put in a waterway. I went to the government office [currently, the USDA Natural Resources and Conservation Service and the Farm Service Agency offices] trying to see what I had to do to get a waterway put in on our farm. Well, I found out there is [government] ‘cost sharing’ to get a waterway put in; but I didn’t have the money to cover my portion of the cost. I met a contractor who wanted to do it for the ‘black dirt’ that, he said, was ‘in the way.’ “Well, there was no black dirt [that is, rich topsoil] that was in the way . . . . He was just going to take a whole bunch of black dirt in return for his labor. And all of a sudden, I put a stop to it. I said, ‘Jeepers creepers, it took millions of years to get the black dirt and it’s going to stay right where it is.’ “All my life, my dad would watch so we didn’t have deep deadfurrows in the field so the water would start to run. And we’d always have hay in the steep parts of the valley so it didn’t erode, and I’m thinking about giving black dirt away? Oh boy, all of a sudden it hit like me like a sledge. ‘No,’ I said, ‘forget it.’ That would really be the dumbest thing I could do. I left the trees in the valley and the waterway could wait. A couple of

years later I had enough money for my share of the expense. We put the waterway in and made a nicer farm out of this old valley.” — Rod Anding  “The best smell in the world is in spring, when you go out and get that fresh dirt turned up. . . . It has a smell all of its own.” — Grant Jones 

Grant Jones, Arena, 2005

“My husband, Ron, loved farming; mostly he loved the land. He was very conservation-minded. Ron’s mother and his aunt planted pine trees to keep the soil from blowing. And then when Ron and I got married we planted windrows of pine trees and would farm between them. Ron was very, very emphatic about not having soil blow . . . and he did a good job at that. He liked to drive around the countryside to see what was growing and what wasn’t . . . and he was always trying new things, always reading. With the irrigation and the [grain] drying system . . . and straight corn rows! . . . He just loved being out there.” — Elaine Drachenberg 

QUACK GRASS: A CONVERSATION Paul Swenson: “There used to be good black soil on top of the red clay on our home hill farm; if you can find a flat place there’d still be a little there. But the

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

25

original settlers had plowed so much of it . . . eventually the topsoil moved down the hills. Now it’s all in grass again; we’ve turned it back into a grass-based dairy farm.”

The Land

Dean Swenson: “I just read an article, somebody was saying, ‘It’s not all bad to have some quack grass in the corn fields because it holds the soil,’ and all this. And for the past 40 years everybody has wanted a perfectly clean cornfield. Now they’re talking about how a little quack grass wouldn’t hurt.” Paul: “I think a lot of us that grew up on the land take a lot of things for granted, but realize the need for change. I never owned a cultivator [to control weeds mechanically] until ten years after I moved over here. I did it just like everybody else — sprayed, and that was it. Conservation is a broad topic. John Hogan used to say, ‘If it wasn’t for quack grass these hills would all be down the Mississippi.’ And I thought about that a lot of times, because up until chemicals came along we had quack grass.”

Tony Brickl, Helena, 2004

Jan Swenson: “The soil became alive again when we stopped using chemicals.”  “We didn’t have any rocks in the fields in the creek bottom, we had too much sand . . . the sand ate up the rocks. Now, where the farms are gone, the brush is so thick you can’t even chase a dog through it.” — Tony Brickl 

26

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“When I was a kid, it was always my job to get the cows morning and night. The night pasture was behind the house and the darn cows would always be on top of the hill. They wouldn’t come when you called because there was a nice breeze up there. So you had to walk them home, down the lane across the hillside. There was no brush, no weeds out in the pasture, it was like a park. That’s what I really miss with fewer working farms in the township. Oh, I miss seeing all the fields being tilled and all of the pastures nice and clean where you could squirrel hunt, or go out in the fall and walk to the apple trees. “My dad always liked to go down to the creek bottom to show visitors to the farm the beautiful different flowers in the spring of the year. Every year now we have the Charlie Robb Memorial Trail Ride around Father’s Day, and everyone takes a ride down in the creek bottom to see the beautiful flowers.” — Rod Anding

Christine and Rod Anding and daughter Becky, 2005

 “I was born on this farm; I continue to sleep every night in the room where I was born.”— Ruth Pulvermacher

Harold and Ruth Pulvermacher, High Point, 1996

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

27

FARMING AND HUSBANDRY “I Loved All of It”

The Land

“All mankind lives on the fruits of the earth — the first and foremost necessary employment, therefore, is . . . called agriculture, husbandry, or farming.” — Webster’s American Spelling Book, 1831

“Planting rivets us to the ground sure as it did a thousand years or five thousand years ago. Greening is our planet’s greatest trick. For farmers it is enough to survive to supper, and the house blessed by the smell and dust of planting.” — Justin Isherwood, Book of Plow

Shannon, Peter, and Eric Cates with Guernsey cow, early 1990s

28

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“I loved all of it. I loved the cows . . . and I loved the land because there was never any rocks to pick, down in the hollow. If you went up on the ridge fields there were rocks. The hollow had good soil. And the cows were always very gentle. I don’t know, I was just a part of it. I was with the cows all of my life. “We grazed, and rotated fields. And we made silage. At first we piled it, and we’d fill ten big burlap bags each day and carry them up into the barn to feed the cows. Then we did build a new silo; and that was above the barn, so we didn’t have to haul up silage anymore. We had pigs, and we had chickens . . . everybody did then. “Burdette and his parents had Holsteins when I first came to the farm in the ’40s. But Burdette’s brother, Harland, had Guernseys on the farm below. The Holsteins far exceeded the Guernseys in quantity of milk, but when their milk check come it was always bigger than ours [because of the high protein and butterfat content of the Guernsey milk]. Harland gave us a couple of Guernsey heifers when we were married, and so that’s where the beginning of our Guernsey cattle started. We grew the herd till we were milking between 30 and 35 head.

“We had a two-unit Hinman milking machine at first. Then we did change over to the Surge milker, with the belt that you put over the cow’s back. We had an old tank right in the barn with us, we’d put the cold water in it every day and then we’d set the milk cans in to cool them. Later, we had to get a milk house, get a bulk tank . . . oh my, that was quite a transition. We were proud of the Guernseys and did a pretty good job with them, fed them well, kept good records, and they produced well. We took our milk to the Mounds Creek Cheese Factory; Clayton Shaul was the cheese maker.” — Helen Knight 

SERVING THE COWS: A CONVERSATION Paul Swenson: “When Richard Hottmann began farming he went 25 years and hardly missed a milking; he had probably the best start of this bunch in the town of Arena . . . but he was that dedicated . . . he never missed a milking. I think economics is certainly a factor. But I think about the guys that started farming when I did . . . Helmet Krauss as example . . . you got short of food you go out and shoot a pig because you wanted to farm so bad; and Helmet was capable of doing anything anybody could do, but he wanted to farm. Dick Keene is another one; he’s been very successful . . . but boy, those guys farmed on a shoestring and they did it because they really wanted to; and I’d say all along that you can still do that . . . but I might be wrong. “Richard was always a very good cow-man. And he never sold a good cow, whether she was a grade or purebred. He started with a home-bred herd and, eventually, more then 20 years later, he ended up with a purebred herd. He got his introduction to cattle when he was in diapers.” RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

29

The Land

Richard Hottmann: “I got started in the purebred business when I was in 4-H when I was ten years old. We were the Dover Dashers. I have loved working with the cattle. My wife, Claribel, is an animal lover. She didn’t want to part with any of the dairy cows; she’d have a terrible time when we had to sell a cull cow. We finally sold the cows [had a herd dispersal] in 2001.” Claire Hottmann: “I loved the cows, I didn’t love milking. I still cry about them once in a while. Don’t ask me about the land. People ask, ‘How many acres do you have?’ I know how many cows we milked.” Paul: “It was always a pleasure to walk into Richard’s barn . . . all of his cattle were good.” Richard: “Some were better.”

Claire and Richard Hottmann, Dover, 2005

Paul: “It’s like apple and blackberry pie . . . apple’s the best, but blackberry isn’t bad either.”  “I can tell you to this day, I like the smell of a horse’s breath. And I liked to be out plowin’ and that. . . . I loved plowing with the Titan tractor. So when I got out of high school in 1923 I thought I was getting out of jail. Boy, it just seemed so wonderful.” — Ted Sawle

Ted Sawle, Mounds Creek, signing bird carving at 100th birthday party, 2005

30

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

LOOKING BACK: A CONVERSATION Dale Pope: “I enjoyed the cattle. We had registered Holsteins, about 30 head when I was growing up, and the same number all the while Lillian and I raised our family here.” Lillian Pope: “We had one of the top herds in Iowa County.” Dale: “I didn’t work too much with horses growing up because my dad had one of the first tractors around, an Allis Chalmers and a two-row corn picker; oh, a little thrashing and silo-filling with horses. . . . We got electricity in 1936 or ’37; but didn’t have indoor plumbing until 1939 . . . before that it was ‘out in the cold.’” Lillian: “You didn’t linger . . . didn’t stay long. . . . I grew up milking them [cows] by hand. . . . We didn’t even have electricity when my family moved off the farm in 1945.” Dale: “Can you blame her for coming after me?”

Dale and Lillian Pope, Ray Hollow, 1994

Lillian: “I loved the land; I still do. I didn’t run tractors, though. I was asked to be Dale’s wife, not his hired man. Dale milked; I fed calves and washed the milkers. But I mostly took care of kids.” 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

31

The Land

“I had a reputation for being a pretty good farmer myself. . . . Before we bought my family’s farm, Virgil and I worked with his Uncle Wilbur for about five years, 1940 to 1945. I told Wilbur that ‘I was the one who milked cows by hand at home.’. . . Well, he went and hid his milking machine . . . took it up in the attic and hid it on us. I had to milk the cows by hand again for a few days. When we got on the home farm I milked 23 cows myself, but we had a machine then . . . you didn’t have to sit on the little threelegged stool. “And I had a big chicken house full of chickens and a lot of eggs to sell. We traded eggs for groceries at the Royal Blue Store in Spring Green. Virgil worked at Oscar Mayer in Madison so he couldn’t do the milking. I didn’t ask the kids — we had 11 children — to help too much in the morning because I didn’t want them to be late for school; and besides, the cows knew me and I knew them . . . and I just milked them. “Well, I just loved that place, I just did . . . I just loved it, and I have loved my life. My dad was the best old guy, and my mother was just a sweetheart. I think about it sometimes. I think, ‘What a wonderful life.’” — Alice Crook 

Alice Crook, Coon Rock, holding a picture of her wedding in 1934 to Virgil, 2006

32

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“When we dairyed, we were patron number 64 at White’s Mill Creek Cheese Factory. We milked about 36 to 40 cows in a stall barn. We started with milk cans, then added a dumping station and a bulk tank. We got a barn cleaner and we thought we were in heaven. “I used to drive tractor to bale; and I would unload [hay off of the wagons]. Only once in a while I would be in the mow . . . but I didn’t do that often. . . . It was hard work. I never cultivated corn because Ron said I took out more corn than the weeds would have. I always helped move irrigation pipe. I enjoyed the hogs, farrowing the little pigs. . . . I just loved being out in the country.” — Elaine Drachenberg

“I came from the city. I began to be in love with just being out on the farm, it was comfortable . . . I was comfortable. I liked the smell of hay, I liked the smell of the plowed dirt . . . Paul showed me how to do things, many things. I could drive any machine that had a steering wheel, as well as milk cows, plow and disk, and plant corn.” — Judy Swenson 

CITY GIRL: A CONVERSATION Del Bryant: “I was born in 1929 and was probably the cause of the stock market crash. I’ve been here on this farm all of my life; my two sisters, brother and I were all born right in the next room.” Marie Bryant: “I wasn’t from a farm, I was raised in the city; but I enjoyed farming, particularly the cows. We milked together; I prepped the cows and carried milk pails, fed calves.” Del: “Country people said, ‘It’ll never work; you never bring a girl from the city out to a farm.’ We’ve been happily married more than 50 years.” Marie and Del Bryant, Knight Hollow, 2004

 “Dad was the last one to have draft horses in the community . . . till about 1965. I can remember him and my grandfather out cultivating or rotary-hoeing with the teams;

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

33

The Land

I was out riding along, picking up rocks and so on at five years old because I didn’t know enough to stay in! I was looking for work back then already. “In the winter, Dad cleaned barn every day with the horses hitched to the manure spreader, and if there was a deep snow he would take the milk [in cans] down to White’s Cheese Factory with the team. He was the last to shred corn in the community, and I can remember being out picking up the fallen corn after the men lifted the bundles onto the buckboard wagon. Dad stayed with the horses because he loved them.” — Carol Nelson

THE WISDOM OF PLACE “What Life’s About” “The history of every nation is eventually written in the way it cares for its soil.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Carol and Ruth Nelson, Mill Creek, 2005

“People today are so driven by money and financial success that they essentially forget who they are and part of that comes from taking away the individual’s right and ability to be his/her own boss, to operate a farm that makes sense — that makes sense not only from the human side but from the environmental side. We’ve got a hell of a lot of land to protect and we need the farm families to take care of it.” — Richard Cates Sr.  “I miss the cows. . . . I miss the good ground I had for a garden. We raised most of the food our family ate. I can remember my dad taking wheat to Sawle’s mill

34

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

and he’d always bring back a little bit of flour for the family . . . you couldn’t keep too much because it had the [wheat] germ in it and it would spoil before you used it all. “I can remember my dad going to town in the wintertime with the team . . . we had a Model T touring car but he’d put it up on blocks for the winter because the roads weren’t passable. My dad loved horses, oh my. When he finally got an automobile he’d move in the seat going up a hill, as if he was in the saddle of a horse. He had 12 horses at one time. “Back in those days they had buggy horses — fast ones to go to town [‘courting’ horses] and heavy work horses. Dad’s courting horses were named Flirt and Dexter. The buggy horses would pull the sleigh if there was snow on the ground, or a light rig like a milk rig, or a buggy. I read for the minister in catechism class in Barneveld and we drove a blind horse named Skirmish on the buggy . . . oh, he could drive like nothing; we’d just tie him up when we got to town, and at home we could put him out in the pasture and he knew where the other horses were. “We didn’t have horse doctors in those days, and things would happen. My older brother loved Dexter. . . . He always got home from school before we did because his legs were longer, and he’d ride Dexter. Well, one day when we got home he said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, but I don’t want you to cry . . . Dexter died.’ And he started bawling like a calf. I think he [Dexter] got bots [the parasitic larvae of botflies] . . . we lost a couple of horses that way. There were sad times. . . . But I think living on a farm and seeing the calves born . . . and seeing your lovely, loved animals die makes you know what life’s about.” — Vivian Dodge 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

35

The Land

“Dad was always an advocate, said that farming up here in the Arena hills should just be grass farming. Then I came along and I thought, I’ve gotta have 40 acres of corn; and Dad would just shake his head. . . . He would raise hay and buy his corn. So, this sustainable thing went back another generation, it wasn’t just our generation. We were old enough to realize after a while. That’s the wisdom of your parents becoming more prominent as time goes on; you realize Dad was right.” — Paul Swenson  “When the county sprayed along the road with chemicals [2,4-D], Dad would run the boom while another man would drive the vehicle. It looked like an old Army jeep. Of course, they didn’t know what they were really doing, the chemicals they were spraying. I remember when the vehicle would pull in here at the end of the day, I just loved the smell. Then we would go up the valley and spray our ragweed and I’d just watch that old boom go. God only knows how many people it got between what they were spraying and breathing and, of course, a combination got my dad.” — Rod Anding 

GOING ORGANIC: A CONVERSATION Dean Swenson: “The change from chemical to organic farming wasn’t that great. We had a dairy, we had alfalfa, crop rotation; we had manure from the cattle. We had everything we needed.” Carl Pulvermacher: “When Dean first ‘rediscovered’ organic farming, he told

36

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

me there’s another way of doing it . . . you can farm without chemicals. I said, ‘Dean, don’t be ridiculous, what are you talking about!’ But I tried cutting some chemicals, just because Dean was doing it. It worked all right, but I thought to myself, ‘I can do that a little better’; so I played around with some things and it just worked. A few years later I said to myself, ‘Why not do it this way; there’s got to be benefits to the soil and the water.’”

Carl Pulvermacher, ca. 1990

Jan Swenson: “Dean, ironically enough, grew up in a sustainable, organic system back in the ’40s and ’50s. Then he went to college, learned all about farm chemicals, and when he came to Arena to start teaching, he taught night classes for local farmers to teach them how to use all the latest chemicals and how to calibrate their new chemical sprayers. “Then, in 1980, he decided to go organic! Our organic milk went right on the milk truck with all the non-organic milk, and we were not paid a premium price for ours. Our reasons for producing organic milk at that time were completely altruistic. We believed it was better for the soil — for the land; better for the cows, and better for our family. It was better for the world in general not to use chemicals. “We didn’t know any other organic farmers around us at all. There just weren’t any. When Dean started organic farming he was the only one around here doing it; Dick and Ruth Zinniker from Elkhorn, Wisconsin, were his mentors. Nobody said anything negative to Dean, because everybody respected him; but so many have since told us that they all thought at that time he was crazy. They said they were just going to sit back and see what happened to us. “We did on-farm research [through the Wisconsin Rural Development Center]. Our on-farm test results were impressive, and pretty soon others in the

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

37

The Land

neighborhood moved to organic farming: Carl Pulvermacher, then Tom Forseth, and brother Paul Swenson. You have to give Dean credit. He stuck his neck out and was the first one in this area to try organic farming. Now our whole neighborhood is doing it.” Judy Swenson: “After Paul started farming organically in the ’80s, we had more wildlife out here. I never saw a red fox on our farm until the ’80s, and then sandhill cranes.” Carl: “There’s no compromise. In your heart, you have to believe that ‘This is the way I want to farm and I cannot imagine farming any other way.’ I don’t think I’ll ever do it any other way. Never is a long time, but if it’s in your heart . . .”  “I hate seeing run-down places, run-down barns . . . falling down . . . and I think of the people. . . . It bothers me to see farms that are left and gone down. I think of people that started them, who built those up in their life; and all of a sudden everything is fallen apart . . . because they had to leave the farm. As a kid I remember all of the small farms, people that made a living on the small places, and raised their families.” — John Roberts 

Charlotte and John Roberts, Arena, 2004

38

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“You spend so much time . . . I’m talking about when I was three years old I was working with it, the soil, the land. I have given my life to it. Many of the old-timers

Linda and Steve Harrington, Mounds Creek, 2004

want to die in their own home. Because they were born there, worked their whole life there . . . and want to die there. “Our father had a spell in the barn one morning; he dropped down and called for help. My brother Tim and I got him on his feet and took him back to the house. Mom said we should take him to the hospital. So we put clean clothes on him while Mother backed the car out. “Then Tim and I walked Dad around to the passenger side of the car. And as we opened the door for him to get in, he stopped, momentarily . . . and put his hands on the top of the door, he just stood still, looking around . . . at the farm land. I was watching him as he was looking. I suppose, in his own mind, he possibly thought that this might be the last time he would ever see the farm. . . . I could see in his eyes he was looking over the home he had created, the land he had worked most of his life. “We farm with care for the land; we will try to leave it better than when we started . . . and that started with our dad. . . . He started making [grassed] waterways so that the water that ran off the fields didn’t carry the soil off of the farm. I remember filling potholes — eroded areas — in the waterways when we first put them in, when the seeding wasn’t well-established yet. We used to carry pails of dirt and fill these potholes by the shovelful, then re-seed the area. We don’t ‘own’ the land . . . I think that is a bad term. You are just here, briefly, and then somebody else will, supposedly, ‘own’ it. I can’t get away from land and the people . . . it’s the same to me. The community spirit . . . I can’t get away from that.” — Steve Harrington 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

39

A Century on the Land

“The farms are here, but the farmers are going. It is a shame we could not keep them both.”

Theodore Sawle To my farm:

GRANDPARENTS ARRIVED FROM CORNWALL “My grandfather Sawle [b1830] came from Cornwall, England, in 1875. He had been a sea captain, not a farmer; one of my daughters is named after his ship, the Naiad. My grandmother told him that she didn’t want her sons all drowned at sea so she convinced him to sell his ship and move to America to farm. By golly, that ship was shipwrecked four years afterwards, so she wasn’t too far wrong. “My father, William Stephen Sawle, born in 1858, came over with his parents at 17 years old; he lived to be 97 years old. He was a very precise man. He’d expect you to learn how to box a compass on board ship, tell all the points on the compass. He used to tell us about all of the different sails on the ship, which at that time went in one ear and out the other. He was a sharp guy. He

40

only went to school through eighth grade, but he had the knowledge in his head. He purchased the home Sawle farm, ‘Rosevale,’ in 1889. “My mother was Jeanette Hodgson Sawle. Her grandfather Hodgson, Scottish guy, was born in 1797 and came to this area in 1845; he is buried in the Arena Cemetery. They say he was a powerful man, could shoulder a bag of wheat standing in a bushel basket; I was real strong, but I couldn’t do that. He had a brother who was a drummer boy in Napoleon’s army. “I was one of nine siblings: two sisters, Bessie and Winifred, and six brothers, Rowe, William, Samuel, Frank, Richard and Arthur. On April 29, 1909, just four days after my mother gave birth to Sam, I witnessed my six-year-old brother, Art, die in a mill accident. This event, the loss of my brother, has been with me every day for the rest of my life.”

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

The day will come when I must leave. Someone else will walk in my place. They will say they own you. They do not understand; how could they. I am sorry. — Steve Harrington, a poem written while sitting up in the windmill

Opposite page: Rod Anding with Suffolks Punch team, Reba and Mandy, 2005

2

ROOTS

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

41

Roots

“God created people because he loves stories.” — Jewish saying “We live in stories. We breathe stories. Most of our best conversations are about stories.” — Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searle, David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto

A

s the settlers of Arena Township indeed “settled,” they came to be increas-

ingly aware of their dependence on and deep connection to the land. As their lives developed a new cadence, they became aware of those fresh patterns and rhythms, and of the elements that played an integral part in forming those patterns. Good soil, ample physical space, and a relative absence of shackling social pressures or interference by a King — all this was essentially different from their life in the Old World. And they came to realize that what they were building — physically and socially and spiritually — was a new order unto itself. It worked encouragingly well and allowed for an abundance of progress and satisfaction and enjoyment.

42

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Part of the way we all come to understand “who we are” is by examining “where we came from.” Our book’s narrators descend from that dynamic engine of frontier living, and they cherish their “inheritance.” They have recorded their personal pasts — and shared them — in stories. The stories contain clues about how they managed to maintain and extend the important experiment they found themselves a part of. So they shared stories about their roots, and valued them, because these stories of their past were important to their future. And, of course, valuing their roots strengthened them. On my family’s farm there is a stone wall — a fence of field stone — built by the hand labor of the Stapleton family, emigrants from Ireland, the family that lived and farmed here beginning in the 1860s. Picking stones from the farm fields is an age-old necessity in this part of the world. Sometimes the stones were simply tossed in a pile. But on our farm, the stones were piled in a line that must have served the purpose of keeping livestock in, or out. This prodigious piece of handiwork runs its length up and down a steep hillside which is now quite covered in hardwood forest. The stone wall itself, long since toppled, is grown through with trees. Throughout the townships of America are relics of family work that have succumbed to time. Warren Hoyer, my neighbor and a voice in this book, tells me about my old neighborhood: “Enos Lloyd Jones’s place is gone. And over here on the corner near Taliesin [the Frank Lloyd Wright home] there was a big farm there, that’s gone. As you go up the hill where Walkers lived, that farm is gone. Back where you go into Al Bemis’s there was a farm in there. And there was a farm just past Enos Jones’s, it

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

43

was the Henry Michels place. The only way you can tell that it was there are a couple of catalpa trees there yet, just before you get to Herb Fritz’s driveway. Then of course up here the Leo Reider farm, the barn is gone, the house is gone; all of

Roots

the Schoenmann kids were raised there.” I often think about those who worked so long and hard to clear our land of stones, just as I think about the builders of the first rough-sawn farm homes and barns in our valley, and the old mills and schoolhouses in the surrounding township that are now mostly gone. The few physical remains kindle for us the imagined hopes and dreams of those who came before — their neighborhoods, communities now buried and gone. Fortunately, however, the real legacy of those who preceded us — their values, their character, the communities they built — can live on through story. Here, then, are stories of a time when there were lots of farms, country schools, and cheese factories; when there was time to visit; when “boughten” bread and “No Trespassing” signs were a rarity; and when horses were a part of the family. A time of pig drives, working the whole farm with a single-bottom, horse-drawn plow, doing “a man’s work” as a child, hoping for the gift of schooling or to go farming. There are stories of legendary strength, bare-bones living, soldiers on foot, tall tales, proud heritage, older people teaching younger people . . . and of folks listening to each others’ telephone conversations — “rubbernecking” — which was great fun and occasionally saved lives. These stories help us put flesh on the ghosts of the people who lived and died in these hollows before us, to see and feel the hidden hands and the heartbeats that shaped the land and “place.” These stories help us see how the stone walls,

44

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

the first homes and barns and schoolhouses were built, how neighborhoods looked and felt, and how and why the values that enabled people to thrive came to be, and to “stick.” Listen . . .

STORY “Great Storytellers” “My dad and his brother, Uncle Jefferson Bryant, were great storytellers. Uncle Jeff loved to rock in a rocking chair; and as he told a story the chair would keep sliding and sliding, and he’d end up across the room.” — Del Bryant 

T HE PIG DRIVE: A CONVERSATION Steve Harrington: “Winnie Sawle, born 1891, told me this story. Arena had a great stockyard, and in the autumn the farm furthest away that you can get up Mounds Creek would start the pig drive. . . . Then the next neighbor down the road, who maybe had 20 or 30 pigs to sell, would add his pigs to the bunch, and so forth and so on. They would all come down through the valleys driving their pigs; and they’d camp out at night, that was what they’d do. They’d have to cross the bridge over Mounds Creek at the Sawle farm, just next to here, driving the pig herd down to Arena to the stockyards for the sale. From there, the pigs all got on the train to the packing plants in the cities.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

45

Roots

Paul Swenson: “They used to drive the pigs down from the Mill Creek area to the railhead at Arena, as well. They’d come down from Ridgeway along where Highway H is now; and the Ruggles farm was a way station partway along the trip. They’d put their horses up for the night there and continue the drive to Arena the next day. At my place, a few miles from the old rail station in Arena, there was a little building that they called a hotel. There was about five rooms upstairs in that building; each room, as I remember, measured about six-and-ahalf-feet square. So, all the neighbors’d stay there after the pigs were loaded on the rail cars, and go back home the next morning.” 

Arena Depot, built in 1856

46

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“Uffda . . . we had a lot of hardships; we were so poor we couldn’t hardly pay attention. But we existed; we sure had a lot of family love . . . and a real good bonding. When brucellosis came through the area we lost 29 milk cows; that was our first hardship. Our landlords were always big Holstein people, and they went down to Milwaukee to buy cows at the Pabst farm [the Pabst beer family]; they bought 20 head. I remember the day. “One of my brothers, Bud, got to go along but I didn’t. I was the oldest of nine children and I had to stay home and help with the chores, to see that things got done. Well, of course I got kind of pouty; I had never been farther than ten miles from home. I said, ‘Well, yeah, if you bring me a tube of lipstick I’ll stay home and help,’ you know, never dreaming that . . . well, in those days there wasn’t a dime store so often along the way. . . . “I got home that night after the chores were all done, and here Dad come in and said, ‘Here’s your lipstick, May’ — his nickname for me — aah, it was a tube that big! I said, ‘I was looking for one of those little ones that you should get free.’ But here was

one of those big ones of Cara Nome lipstick. Oh, my eyes went so wide, and he said, ‘You know what, I had to pay a whole dollar for it.’ I cried . . . well, a dollar was a terrible amount in that day; some people worked a whole day for one dollar.” — Helen Knight 

Helen Swenson Knight, Knight Hollow, ca. 2000

“We used to pasture [some of ] the islands in the Wisconsin River, a hundred-acre island. The first thing they ask ya is, ‘How did you get the cows out to the islands?’ Well, it took time. The cows had to swim out there . . . there was a lot of water in the river; there was hardly any sandbars . . . we didn’t know what a sandbar was. I didn’t have to train them much, Dad he already had ’em trained. Oh, he had quite a time . . . I remember helping train some of them. You just gradually get started with two of them that like to do that. “There was marsh hay out there . . . there was bits here and there. We had our milk cows over there, had to go get them come time to milk. That was the part I didn’t like. Oh, I didn’t mind swimming . . . I swam over, or sometimes I took the boat so I could have fun comin’ back. I had some willow [fishing] poles; I’d stick ’em in the bank in the morning when I went to get the cows. There wasn’t a mosquito around, they was all wore out, you know, early in the morning; you go out early in the morning there isn’t any around . . . they been up all night and they’re wore out.” — Ken Wittwer 

Ken Wittwer, Helena, 2004

“My dad thought an awful lot of his horses. I’ve got the old [farm] record books, and every time we lost a horse it is recorded, ‘Dolly died last night . . .’ Not just one entry, a lot of them. He never said much about it when a horse died, but he wrote it in

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

47

the books. So, you know he felt a lot for them. . . . Well, they did . . . they depended on their horses for their livelihood. My dad had a temper, but he also had a soft side, too.” — Frank Schlough

Roots



REMEMBERING WOODY ROBERTS: A CONVERSATION Paul Swenson: “Bun Reeves and Woody Roberts used to hunt rattlesnakes for people. Woody kept them in a box in his yard, and he milked them for researchers. He claimed he could smell rattlesnakes in the wild. He finally got bit and almost died. Woody Roberts was one of the few guys that I always thought had fun doing what he wanted to do. He trapped, hunted, he hoed watermelons, and that’s exactly what he wanted to do. He’d go down there [to the field to hoe watermelons] in shorts and take his shoes off, he loved the feel of sand between his toes; he’d go down on a cool morning like this.” Judy Swenson: “He [Woody Roberts] used to raise hogs in the woods, when everybody else had them in confinement. He’d put the sows out in the woods, leave them to farrow on their own and took what he got. He never let his work interfere with going hunting.” Paul: “Woody milked [cows] briefly, but he was a vegetable farmer and a hog farmer . . . and he was successful at it. And, it looked to us like he was doin’ exactly what he wanted to do. He’d pick watermelons and put ’em on the wagon down by the highway or up by his house and he’d get paid for only a percentage

48

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

of ’em. He’d tie a milk can on the wagon with a sign that said ‘Drop your money,’ and ‘Thanks.’ But he didn’t have to sit there so he got 25 to 30 percent, maybe, of what he had on the wagon and it was okay; he was okay with that.” Dale Pope: “One night, about two in the morning, a neighbor called Woody and said there was a truck over in his sweet corn field. Woody goes down there and finds a couple of guys loading their truck with his corn. He says, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ To which they replied, ‘Well, we couldn’t sleep, and we just decided we’d pick you a load of corn . . . so you’d have it ready to sell in the morning!’ Woody thanked them with kindness, and they went sheepishly on their way, tails between their legs . . . but it didn’t bother Woody.” Elaine Drachenberg: “I’ll never forget Woody. He was a wonderful man . . . he had no pretenses.”  “Mark Binger could stand up with three 100-pound sacks of grain at once — one in each hand and one in his teeth.” — Warren Hoyer 

St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, Mill Creek, 2006

“In , one of Cornelius and Johanna Harrington’s children, Martin, my greatuncle, passed away on the kitchen table from appendicitis; it took him three days to die, and in those days there was nothing much they could do for him. Upon the death of Martin, the family donated a part of their farm, next to the barn, to build the Mill Creek

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

49

Roots

church, Saint John the Baptist Catholic Church. They also donated a stained glass window — on the left-hand side in the front on the church; on it was inscribed, ‘In memory of Martin Harrington.’ “My children, going to church there, growing up and learning to read, one by one, would stab me and say ‘Dad, there’s a stained glass window that says Martin Harrington . . . who was that?’ And I would tell them, ‘He’s one of the saints; you’ve heard of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John . . . well, Martin was their overseer,’ and they’d say, ‘Wowww . . .we’ve got a saint for a relative.’ And one by one, as they got older, it dawned on them I was lying. The story went flat.” — Steve Harrington 

Linda and Jerry White, Mill Creek, 2002

“This factory, Mill Creek Cheese, was a Swiss [cheese] factory at the turn of the last century, when my father, Joe White, was a little kid. He grew up on the White family farm a mile from the cheese factory and he remembers coming down with his dad, hauling milk down to this factory with a team when it was an old Swiss factory. Well, that factory burned down in the early teens and was rebuilt to make American [cheddar] cheese. Dad first worked here in 1919, then he and Mom [Vera] bought it in 1923. . . . They made cheddar here continuously for 59 years until Dad died in 1978; Linda and I continued without them after that. He was still living upstairs when we took him to the hospital, and he didn’t come home again. . . . Mom stayed and lived upstairs alone for five more years until she passed away.” — Jerry White 

50

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle THE HISTORY OF THE SAWLE GRIST MILLS AND LATER RESTORATION OF THE HYDE MILL BY A “19th CENTURY MAN” The Mill on Blue Mounds Creek on the Sawle home farm was constructed in 1848 by Henry Rowell and Gardener C. Meigs, and began operation as a grist mill in 1852. William Rowe bought it in 1854; the mill washed away in a flood in 1860. It was rebuilt out at Highway 14 where it was in operation until 1880. Sawles purchased the mill and farm (hence to be known as Rosevale farm) from Rowe in 1889, and relocated the mill back on the farm. The mill burned down in 1943 and was not rebuilt again. However, in 1931 Ted Sawle put his life savings into refurbishing a home at Hyde and building a new mill at Hyde [the Hyde Mill on Mill Creek]; this was the same year he married Roma Rachel Rockcastle, from Chicago. He operated

the Hyde Mill as a grist mill until WWII, when he turned it into a box factory to support his family during the war effort. Ted began restoring the Hyde Mill in the mid-1970s as a historic reminder of a past culture, but faced legal resistance from the State because the work meant reconstructing the mill dam, and Mill Creek was deemed a navigable stream. He hired Richard Cates Sr. to represent his case in court and the two fought, successfully, to allow the restoration to proceed. What follows is a moving, historic landmark opinion on behalf of Ted Sawle by Judge Maurice H. Van Susteren, who heard the case:

Opinion We are in an age of nostalgia wherein antiques are highly valued in search for “roots” and the simple values of a bygone bucolic era. The mill of the applicant is a working authentic replica of the earliest application of a power source on the Wisconsin frontier. Immortalized in song (“Down By the Old Mill Stream”), in verse (“The Old Water Mill-Vories”), and the subject of art

by Moses, Rockwell, and indeed, Fulkerson of the Wisconsin State Journal, the old grist mill ranks with the corner church and the little red schoolhouse as one of the principal institutions of the Wisconsin frontier. The church was a source of spiritual strength in meeting the privations and hardships of pioneer life; the schoolhouse was the center of learning; the grist mill, beyond the grinding of grain, was the center for talk on the political issues of the day. There also was information exchanged on agricultural practices and prices; arrangements made for mutual help in harvesting, threshing and barn raising, agreement reached on the sale of horses, farms, and timber. The mill was the cultural nucleus around which early Wisconsin communities were formed. The mill pond provided values other than hydraulic power. It was the only sizable body of water in the neighborhood and served as a park and recreation center. Going to the mill was a day long outing for the farmer and his family. While the men engaged in “men talk” in the mill and had a nip of the miller’s cider, the women engaged in “women talk” on the banks of the mill pond. It was picnic time and an opportunity for Þshing for the youngsters. For the teenagers it was a place for

Hyde Mill, Mill Creek “sparking” and “wooing.” In the “dog days” of August there was “skinny dipping” in the swimming hole in the secluded upper reaches of the pond; when January’s chill winds blew, crude home made skates and sleds glided over the ice. Mr. Sawle was described in the hearing as a “19th Century man” with a dream of restoring an era that lives only in the dim memories of a few survivors of a time long past. A crass materialist may consider Sawle a “Man from La Mancha” with an impossible dream, tilting at water mills rather than windmills. We do not so view him. Yes, Mr. Sawle, contrary to the cynical opinion and view held by some, the Department of Natural Resources does have a soul. — Dated September 16, 1977; Maurice H. Van Susteren

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

51

Roots

“I have been a cheese maker here at Mill Creek essentially since birth. But I remember my dad saying, ‘You’re not going to stay around and work like this and you’re not going to make cheese!’ But here is a picture of the cheese factory on the 1933 calendar that my mom and dad gave out to all of the farmer patrons. I was less than a year old, the sign out front of the factory reads, ‘Joe White and Son’! I don’t know if I loved it, but it was bred into me.” — Jerry White  “I am going to a funeral today for Leslie ‘Legs’ Sutcliffe. He had a portable sawmill, sawed a lot of firewood for people, and I worked with him some. He had a gunny sack for an apron. I was young and he’d watch out for me. He was one of the old timers . . . he was one of the strongest men I ever seen . . . oh man, he was strong. A lot of guys would haul logs to him, twelve-, fourteen-foot long. . . . That’s mighty heavy stuff to lift up onto the saw skid, but he could do it. The logs would be tiered about six feet tall. Five or six guys would saw about four of those piles in an afternoon with a gasolinepowered buzz saw. Leslie always fed the saw; it was dangerous work, no doubt about it. Leslie means a lot to me . . . I knew him real well.” — Dean Lucey 

T HE PINE BOYS: A CONVERSATION Harold Pulvermacher: “The bachelor farmers, Charlie and Mark Pine [b1890s], they were real characters. In our neighborhood, there were seven families [farms] that used to saw wood together. We’d start at one place, and

52

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Joe White and Son, 1933 patron’s calendar

wherever we were at noon, that’s where we’d eat dinner. We’d be at another place for supper. It was hard work lifting the logs up onto the saw deck, and ‘throwing away’ [from the saw] the big cut pieces. “This one time, oh, Charlie must have been 70 at the time, Ken Swenson come over to me and said, ‘Harry, why don’t you trade off with Charlie; just tell him that whenever he gets tired and wants to smoke his pipe you’ll throw away in his place.’ Okay, I went over and I told Charlie, I said, ‘That’s too hard on you; why don’t you let me throw away. Whenever you want to throw away again, you holler.’ So, he’d go and smoke his pipe and he’d come back, ‘By god, kid, I’ll take over now!’ “If you went in the tavern in Spring Green, Mark Pine had the money, but Charlie had so many friends. They could be in there for hours and there’d usually be somebody to buy Charlie one. But if not, he’d work his way over to Mark and say, ‘By god, give me a fifty-cent piece.’ “One time Mark was driving up to here in the wintertime, and around the curve — I think he had maybe a few too many, but anyway — he shot off into the ditch. Charlie gets out on the pasture and says, ‘By god, you got her in there, see if you can get her out!’ Mark come over to me and asks if I got something to pull them out. I said I’ll get the horse, hitch the horse up and pull you out. After I had them out I said to Mark, ‘Now, you don’t pick Charlie up on the way home for hollerin’ at you like that.’” Ruth Pulvermacher: “Yes, the Pine boys were something that nobody today can realize; you had to see them. They were so good, so honest, so polite . . . never caused any problem. Everybody liked them . . . but they were, oh, so dirty [unkempt].”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

53

Heritage: a Conversation

Roots

Steve Harrington (Irish): “The Swensons are Norwegian.” Dean Lucey (English): “Oh, yahh . . .” Steve: “Well, the Bergs are professional Norwegians . . .” Dean: “No, they’re ‘Schweitzers’ [Swiss], they’re not Norwegian.” Steve: “Ahhh, Hank’s Norwegian and Ruth’s Swiss.” Dean: “I don’t think Hank is all Norwegian . . .” Steve: “I don’t know . . . I don’t know.” Dean: “No, no . . . I think he’s English as well.” Steve: “Well, I’ll be darned . . .” Dean: “Oh, yahh.” Steve: “Hmmm . . .” [Author’s note: Hank, commenting on this conversation, reminded me that he is all Norwegian, and noted, “Uffda, English and Irish still can’t agree.”]  “The neighbors and I purchased a used thrashing machine and corn shredder from old Sam Hamilton. And we bought his Rumley Oil Pull tractor to run them [a Rumley tractor had a kerosene two-cycle engine that sounded a continuous ‘pop, pop, pop’]. Sam was supposed to be retired but he would come up every season and run the rigs even after we bought them from him; he just wanted to be there to run them.

Thrashing with an Advance Rumley Oil Pull tractor

54

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“He’d come up with a Model T open-top truck with a little pick-up box on the back, and he’d park it right here next to our garage. He had a great sense of humor, and so we played a lot of tricks on him. One time we greased his windshield, put axle grease on it [right where he looked through the glass]. . . . “One time Sam was running the thrashing machine and he asked me to clean out the tool box on the machine, it was all full of chaff. It was a big old wooden tool box. I wasn’t real thrilled about cleaning it, but I did. . . . Well, Sam had taken ten cents and he’d hidden it in the corner of the box, so I found it when I got to the bottom of the job. Turns out this was a favorite trick of his; a little incentive to make it worth our while to do it the next time.” — Frank Schlough 

W HEN THE DEER CAME: A CONVERSATION

Merven and Mary Nelson, Amacher Hollow, on their wedding day, 1947

Jerry Nelson: “When I was a youngster, if somebody was hunting, or picking up walnuts, or picking grapes . . . you didn’t even think anything about crossing a fence line. Hogans would call and say their hunters were going to be driving [moving the deer through] the valley; and that was okay. There would be this whole group of men and deer comin’ through. “I remember you told me, Dad, the first time you saw a doe with a fawn . . . in the ’20s . . .” Merven Nelson: “They thought I was crazy; my dad thought I was a liar! They thought somebody’s pigs had got out, made them tracks. But the numbers kept increasing. And in the Depression, people were just hungry for something

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

55

to eat, so they’d poach the deer. If you saw a deer track in the woods you could just sit down and wait, and sure enough, somebody would come along following the trail, trying to find the deer.”

Roots

 “We have taken our milk to the Mill Creek Cheese Factory for five generations. Even though the ownership has changed [from the White family to the Pittman family in the mid-1980s], we are still Patron Number 30.” — Carol Nelson

THE NEIGHBORHOOD “Everybody Neighbored” “Everybody knew everybody else, knew where they came from, knew who every child belonged to. Everybody neighbored . . . that’s the way it was. . . . “A new person moves in to the area now, and they’ll say they live in ‘Arena.’ When I was a kid, there was Mounds Creek, Coon Rock, Blue Ridge, Dover, Bawden, Ray Hollow, Hogan, Pleasant Point, McCutchin, Blue Ridge, Meadow Vale, Helena, and Arena, each centered around a schoolhouse or cheese factory. It is the community that I love. The people that taught me when I was a kid, most of them are gone now. “When I was a little boy, waking up at the crack of dawn in the summer, everything was quiet and still. I could lie in my bed and hear Howard Linley north of us on his little Ford tractor down in the pasture to bring the cows home; you could hear him as clear as a bell. You could hear the Orcutt brothers’ chickens cackling, three-quarters

56

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

of a mile away, roosters crowing; and Frank Sheehan calling his pigs to feed them, clear as a bell. I remember the Bryants had two farms along the town road. The dad [ Jeff ] would bring a team of horses down to his son’s [Donald] farm and take the tractor home to do field work; once he got caught up, he’d bring the tractor back and take the team of horses home.” — Steve Harrington  “All those farms around . . . now we’re the only ones left. We run bits and pieces off of what were at one time 13 operational farms . . . all families that made up a community.” — Tim Harrington Joannie and Tim Harrington, Mounds Creek, 2004

 “There were seven cheese factories at one time in Arena Township: Ours here at Mill Creek, one at Blue Ridge, at Coon Rock, Mounds Creek, Hyde, Arena, and Highway K at Roelke Road. And there was others on the town lines of Ridgeway and Wyoming no more then 10 miles from here. I mean the factories weren’t big . . . but there were a lot of farms. “The years when I was a kid, everybody had all kinds of livestock. But then they cut out chickens, and they cut out pigs, and they cut out beef and sheep . . . and every farmer milked. Up until a few years ago, if a farmer was farming, he was milking. . . . When I was growing up, all the factories around here — north of Military Ridge [present-day Highway 18] — were

Mill Creek cheese making room — cheese makers Garfield Thomas and Joe White, ca. 1938 RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

57

American [cheddar] factories; all the factories south of there were Swiss factories. All we ever made in our factory [Mill Creek] was American.” — Jerry White

Roots

 “We were raised up Amacher Hollow and went to school at Mill Creek. At that time, in the early ’50s, all the kids were from dairy farms; all except one family [Dickinson], and their parents worked in the cheese factory. There were seven farms on that several-mile stretch along Amacher Hollow Road; now there is only one — our brother Jerry.” — Ruth Nelson  “We used to go to the [cheese] factory every day with horses here; did for years. The social life . . . the cheese factory was a meeting place every morning. Oh, man, if there wasn’t a lot of work at home or if it was rainy, you might see five or so farmers at the cheese factory with their teams. You knew everybody’s business, pretty near, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Then they start haulin’ the milk with a trailer and a car, but it used to be the teams. That was a big gossip time, found out all the news. There used to be a lot of cheese factories in the townships. But all of the farmers made livings on 40, 80, 160 acres; and all the cheese makers made a livin’.” — Warren Hoyer

Laurel and Warren Hoyer, Hillside, 50th wedding anniversary, 1995

 “Every farm had from 15 to 30 milk cows. Every farm had hustle-bustle going on because they had cows out in the pasture. George Hodgson had the farm two farms

58

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Carol and Ruth Nelson, Mill Creek, 2005

down, then Alan and Gertrude Hodgson lived right next door, the Petersons up here, and then old Ivan and Vic Pfanku. Vic, boy, he was a hard-working old farmer. He bought the farm from his dad, Ivan Pfanku, that goes right back to the start of Arena. “And then the Cowleys, where the Forseths live now, they lived there until ’53, I guess it was. Then of course the Hogans up on top there, big-time farmers; and the Swensons and the Pine brothers. Everybody had activity going on at the farm because they all had their little nucleus of what made their money . . . that little herd of cattle. “I remember neighbors helping neighbors. Burdette Loy would always keep an eye on stuff if he knew you were going to be gone, and he’d chase the cows in if needed. If someone got hurt, you would always go over to Gertrude and Alan Hodgsons’ place. If someone had a hardship or something, you would always take a dish to their house so they didn’t have to cook any meals while they were going through hard times. I remember when our renter’s house burned down in 1953. I can just remember my dad talking about how many people came to clean up the mess and get the cement work ready for the new house. “I think back to when three of my best friends drowned and I saw them pulled from the river . . . I got through it somehow. We didn’t know about crisis intervention stuff then. That’s where the strength of the neighborhood helped you get through it.” — Rod Anding  “Everyone was just farm folks that would help anyone do whatever needed to be done. We had a 4-H, and we helped the kids with that; I was a 4-H leader for many years; I enjoyed the kids, and they seemed to enjoy me. And I was in the school’s ‘Mothers Club’ for years. There were more farms and more kids then. There was Bryants up above us, the two Knights, and Coldwells, Luceys and Harringtons and Sheehans and RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

59

Roots

Schoenemanns; about 20 families on farms in the Mounds Creek area. Most of these farms aren’t there anymore, not hardly a trace of them sometimes. “Everybody had families. When I moved here [from the Barneveld area in the early ’40s], the Mounds Creek School had 45 children in it, a one-room school. There were 11 or 12 couples that were married in the Mounds Creek area in 1946, the year I was married. “People just don’t have the time to visit anymore. They have their day job, and when they get home they have a schedule. I remember when everyone had chores to do on their farm, and then afterwards everyone was there and could be neighbors and friends, and visit.” — Helen Knight  “We had a general store, a little bit of hardware, we had nails and shovels. I remember as a kid, the groceries only took up a little space in the store, everything came in bulk. And fruit and vegetables, the only fresh fruit was bananas in a big stalk that you pulled up and hung, and then you broke off the bananas as you sold them. All of the sugar, and the beans and the prunes, and dried fruits, apricots, came in a box; most were under the counter in a drawer. . . . The box would fit right in the drawer; the beans were in a big bin behind the counter. “There was only a small space for groceries, no meat counter. The store was mostly clothing, shoes, and you could order a suit, they had to measure you for the suit, and order it. Over time, I’d say the store became two-thirds groceries. The cookies used to come in boxes with glass lids on them, bulk cookies — chocolate ones with little nuts on the top, windmill cookies, sugar cookies, molasses cookies — everything was sold by the pound.

60

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“And I remember the tobacco cutter in the ’30s, a lot of people chewed [plug] tobacco at that time, we’d get Horseshoe and Sparkplug in boxes and foil. The tobacco cutter was marked, one plug was about two inches square, and you’d cut it off, never wash that old cutter at all. . . . Then in the ’40s, Red Man, Summer Time, and Plowboy came in packages . . . and a lot of Copenhagen. “Dad had a place in the back end of the store — a water trough/tank to put the milk cans in to keep them cool. And we had a kerosene pump in the back of the store. People would bring in a kerosene can to be filled; they had these Perfection kerosene stoves that were used in the summer to cook with.” — John Roberts  “Bill Michels, Herb Fritz, John Pronold, Owen Richardson, Dick Lockman, and I are all from the same neighborhood, all married a local girl, farmed on the home farms, and stayed married more than 50 years. “We used to be able to walk anywhere to hunt and fish. My brother and I growing up would go hunting and cross the neighbors’ farms; one might say, ‘Come in, we just made some doughnuts,’ and we’d have coffee and doughnuts. But one day, recently, I was out behind my barn and some guy hollered from over by the chapel, ‘Do you know where you are at?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m right here on my farm.’” — Warren Hoyer 

Ruth and Hank Berg, Blue Ridge, 2004

“Neighbors were people we knew for years. Some were farmers, schoolmates, or teachers . . . others were talented musicians. A community is what the neighbors make it and this is no exception.” — Hank Berg

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

61

A Century on the Land 

Theodore Sawle HALF A HOG ON THE KITCHEN TABLE “I married a girl from Chicago, Roma Rachel Rockcastle [deceased 1990], in ’31; I’ll tell you how I met her. Highway 14 down here, before it was cemented, was a quagmire. Every spring, cars’d get stuck and they’d have to be pulled through the mud hole. We’d have to put on four horses because the mud would be pushed right ahead of the axles. Once we pulled a guy through there and, gee, I believe they charged him pretty darn good money, around 20 bucks or something, but a man named Jones said to my brother, ‘Well, Sam, I think we ought to go up and turn off some of the water,’ as if they were doing it on purpose! Wouldn’t make you too happy to hear something like that, would it? “Well, anyway, this one man was coming through from Chicago to go to Rochester [Minnesota] for a goiter operation, and he had to come up to the house here to get

62

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

our help to pull him out of the mud. It so happened he got talkin’ and he said he came from Hobart, New York, and that’s where my grandmother’s grandparents came from! “So when the man went back to Chicago he told his friends, the Rockcastle family, what a wonderful farm we had here. Well, they had three or four daughters, and they came out visiting. Two of us brothers married two of the sisters just because of that mud road! “Roma wouldn’t come out until I had electricity and plumbing in the house. You know, for out in the country that was pretty darn early to have electricity and plumbing. And would you believe, we were married in May 1931, and by October I had the house at Hyde wired, a well dug 20 foot deep with the pump rigged up, plumbing in, and had two wires from the grist mill — the water wheel for the grist mill served as our generator — number 4 copper wire, that’s darn near as big as a lead pencil; 1,000 feet, $46. I had 18 automobile batteries in the cellar of the house for reserve. Of course, she brought an electric

stove and that would pull the batteries down pretty quick. Her friends told her, ‘Oh, you’ll be out there two weeks.’ We were married for pret’near 59 years, which wasn’t too bad. “Before we were married, Roma used to shop at Marshall Field’s on Michigan Avenue; she had lots of pairs of shoes. Shortly after we were married she gave the neighbor a pair of her nice shoes . . . and what do you suppose they brought back? They gave her half a hog with the head on it. Brought it in and laid it on the kitchen table. I bet it was a 200-pound hog, but it was half a hog with the head on it. Imagine a girl from the city. . . . But she took care of it, she cut it up. Hogs at that time were only about 2 or 3 cents per pound; things were terrible then. “We had nine wonderful children together: Jannette, Abigail, Theodore, Reginald, Thomas, Judith [deceased in infancy], Charlotte, Naiad, and Scott. And to date, 24 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren [two are deceased], and 5 great-greatgrandchildren.”

“In the early ’60s or so, Sam Sawle [b1909] and I were driving along in my truck through the hills, worming our way to Dodgeville. About halfway along the trip Sam yells at me, ‘Stop!’ I stop; he says, ‘Back up!’ I back up. Sam looks over . . . there was a ‘Keep Out’ sign nailed to a tree. Sam thought that was the darnedest thing he ever saw, the words ‘Keep Out’ . . . on your land? “Rowe Sawle, the oldest of the Sawle boys, he was born in ’01, was a great man to trap, fish, and hunt. Rowe told me when he was a young man, every autumn he would leave the Sawle homestead and walk south till it was suppertime, and wherever he ended up that night, he would give some of his squirrels and rabbits . . . or whatever he shot . . . to the lady of the house. He would be invited in for supper, or whatever they had, and be invited to spend the night in the farm house. Then, the next morning, he would help the farmer do his chores . . . go in and eat pancakes and whatever, bid the family goodbye, and then walk west all day . . . wherever you ended up you stayed overnight . . . then he’d walk north . . . then he’d walk home, east, the next day. It was just a hunting trip within the township, and he told me that, no matter where you went, they just took you in. . . . He said that the last time he did this, when he left a farm in the morning, there was a horse hanging in a shed, butchered. He said, ‘By golly, that’s what we ate for breakfast.’” — Steve Harrington  “We had a good neighborhood; they all helped one another . . . a lot of that’s been lost . . . some don’t want to be neighbors now. We got together and had card parties. I was 4-H leader for many years for sewing and for wildflowers. Our kids were in 4-H, as well. We used to have the meetings at the homes.” — Vivian Dodge  RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

63

Roots

“So many things you used to be quite proud of . . . to keep a good fence between neighbors to keep the livestock in . . . if you’ve got good fences you’ve got good neighbors. But there were no ‘Keep Out’ signs, however . . . no, no, never. I wonder who they think gave them the authority, the power to say ‘no’ to anybody. God gave the land to us all.” — Helen Knight  “There used to be a lot of county farms [owned and operated by the county government, to provide food for county institutions] with dairy herds. But now, they don’t hardly exist anymore. It was good, productive work. The food they raised there supported the entire institution. There used to be one in our county [Iowa County] at Bloomfield Manor, just west of Dodgeville. It was all self-supporting; it kept that place a-going, the farm did.” — Bob Demby 

Lois and Bob Demby, Arena, on their wedding day, 1944

“We milked cows; and we would raise a spring and fall crop of pigs. We wouldn’t raise as many in the fall as in the spring. While I was farmin’ I was town chairman, and on the county board, a county supervisor. We ended up, when we finally quit, we were milkin’ 26 or 27 cows. That was the average size herd. A big herd was 40, but there were a lot of farms that milked 15 cows and lived on it. Fact is, there were those who rented farms and milked 20 to 25 cows on shares, the owner got half, and the farmer nearly starved to death.” — Warren Hoyer 

64

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“How about the information center? You talk about the cell phone today, but people years ago had the party line. Forseth’s phone number was ‘two shorts and a long.’ Ours was ‘a long and three shorts.’ There was a lot of rubbernecking. You’d pick the phone up and listen to the conversation. When it was over, if you’d hang on a few seconds, you could hear all the phones click on the line! Then you had the central telephone office in Arena for any calls not on your party line. You would call the operator by ringing it lo-o-ong; when she’d pick up you’d tell her who you wanted to call.” — Rod Anding 

Tom Forseth and ‘Pauli’ Shapiro Swenson posing under a 1,000-pound hay bale being lifted on a tractor forklift to the left just out of view, ca. 1980

“Besides the cheese factory you had another place for the news, the women usually would . . . we were on party lines — four, five, six, eight people on a line. When the phone would ring — you knew everybody’s ring — so you’d let it ring a couple times, pick up, and then everybody’d listen. And if you had an emergency, you just rang the phone and you knew everybody’d pick up. Sometimes there’d be so many listening the voices’d go pretty weak. Our ring was ‘two longs and a short’; over here was ‘four shorts.’” — Warren Hoyer 

“RUBBERING”: A CONVERSATION Alice Crook: “Two rings — a long and a short — that was our telephone; Pines was ‘three shorts’ and Hogans was ‘three longs.’ Of course some people rubbered . . . I didn’t have time to rubber.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

65

Paul Swenson: “I can tell you some names yet of people we knew who rubbered every time the phone rang.”

Roots

Steve Harrington: “Mounds Creek used to have a ladies’ — mothers’ — club. One year during Lent they were sitting at one of their meetings in the Mounds Creek schoolhouse. And it was told to me that one of the ladies announced to the crowd that she had given up rubbering for Lent; she thought that was a true sacrifice.” Alice: “It was worse than TV, the amount of time some folks spent rubbering.” Carol Nelson: “A farmer might have a difficult calving and call the vet for emergency assistance; neighbors, rubbernecking on the party line, would show up to help before the vet could arrive.” Warren Hoyer: “One morning the phone was jinglin’ and Laurel grabbed it; a bull had a man down on the Hickcox farm. It wasn’t only a few minutes there were about ten farmers there with pitchforks and everything. He was hurt pretty bad, but they got the bull away from him. They didn’t need to tell anybody to come. . . . You know how today if you call 911 they need to ask a bunch of questions, ‘Where you at?’ and ‘How do you think he is?’ In those days, they’d just ring and everybody’d head out.” 

66

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

LEARNING AND WORKING “Growing Up in Arena Township” “When I was started to grade school down here at Mounds Creek we drove a pony and a buggy. In wintertime we had a cutter [sleigh]. There was a little pony barn at school. We’d go the same road every day, but about two or three times a month that pony would shy and veer to the left, and the wheel would lock under the buggy. So we’d have to get one of the neighbors to come out and get it ‘unlocked’ [get the wheel out from under the buggy]. With the cutter, she’d shy and take us up on the left snow bank and tip us over. Then when my sisters got to high school, I had to go alone, so I just rode that darn, stupid pony. She wouldn’t take a saddle, always bareback. It was twoand-a-half miles each way.” — Del Bryant 

QUITTING SCHOOL: A CONVERSATION Sonny Porter: “I went through Arena High School. I went in the front door and out the back . . . that was my education. Well, education is a great thing; everybody should have an education. It’s a necessity. And it was then; I just didn’t realize it.”

Sonny and Marion Porter, Arena, ca. 2000

Marion Porter: “No; his dad got in a car wreck when Sonny was in seventh grade and he had to stay home to run the farm. He was the only child. He never went back to school.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

67

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle OLD SAM HAMILTON, THE THRASHER MAN “I’d hurry home from school just to sit on the steam engine that ran the thrashing machine, the old 18-horse [power] Advance. Boy, to get home and sit on that, I thought that was really something. But the guy that used to fire that steam engine, Charlie Pine, he could take the coals out of the firebox and shake ’em around in his hand and light his pipe with them. He was a wonderful man with the engine. He could run on two tanks of water one day and three the next; other guys might use five tanks of water each day to do the same work. “But do you know what they liked the very best for fuel . . . these old fence posts. They were nice and dry, and they made beautiful fires. They liked coal pretty good, but they liked them old

68

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

fence posts. Of course, there was a time when they fired those engines on straw; that kept a guy pretty busy feeding those straw burners. “This old guy from Arena that used to thrash for us, his name was Sam Hamilton. He had two or three gold teeth and he’d be so greasy, and black, just like a colored man. Sam liked to play tricks on the crew, he was the darnedest guy for that. He’d get the men’s hats and throw ’em in the thrashing machine. Well this one time, he threw his whole crew’s hats through the thrashing machine, then went down to his brother’s store in Arena and charged them all $25 [presuming that they would all have to get a new hat there]. If he’d catch a guy under the blower [resting and cooling off ], he’d throw a shovel full of sand in [the blower]; boy, that’d be an unwanted shower! “But then his machine always ran

perfect. He knew just how many rows of concave to put in. You see, some types of grain took more rows of concave; the concaves were big teeth about two-and-a-half inches long, and the cylinder teeth were the same way, they were in there tight; but these concaves were in there in banks, about four or five sets, and they’d have to change them for certain types of grain. “And then there was quite a trick to running your machine at the right speed to keep plenty of wind on the sieve on those shakers, otherwise you’d be blowin’ grain over into the straw stack. If you saw a guy that wasn’t a very good thrasher man, you’d see a straw stack turn green with grain blowin’ on it. No, no, I’ll tell you, that wasn’t all something a guy just did without thinking a little bit. And old Sam Hamilton, he was one of the best.”

Sonny: “Well, Dad couldn’t do it alone and he couldn’t afford to hire anybody to do it; and he couldn’t afford to quit, and he had to eat. I’m like my dad: I couldn’t spell and the teacher wouldn’t let me talk, so I quit school and went farmin’. I was 13, goin’ on 14 years old when I started farmin’ full-time. “I could have gone back to school, but I’d sooner work. We had 80 acres of corn and it took just about eight weeks to husk it. We’d husked it by hand. I can look back and see some of the things that we done, that we weren’t maybe very happy doing, but it was educational. And you worked from daylight to dark, often seven days a week, and you didn’t have many nickels to rub together . . . but you really didn’t need ’em. Everybody was in the, kind of, same boat.”  “Education started at Meadow Vale country school, a one-room school building that is still there. We had one of the first hot lunch programs: Cans of soup for each student were placed on top of the huge wood stove. Not thinking that liquid gets ‘bigger’ as it gets hotter, sometimes we had soup on the ceiling and not in a bowl. “Education continued at the one-room Blue Ridge School, with a big wood stove that smoked a lot and caused a lot of red-eyed kids. In two years, the school’s well went dry, so we were transported to Pleasant Point School. This was a state-of-the art schoolhouse with a wood furnace in the basement. Each of the boys still got a chance to split wood and fire the furnace, of course.” — Hank Berg Coon Rock Elementary School, 2005



RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

69

“BOUGHTEN” BREAD: A CONVERSATION

Roots

Paul Swenson: “Alice and Virgil Crook had 11 kids, a bunch of them around my age. Eleven kids require a lot of room and a level of efficiency to feed them all. Virgil was pretty handy, and he made a bench seat along one of the walls in the kitchen and all the kids sat next to each other and ate from one long table. Everything was always clean and neat and nice, but by the time you set up to feed all of the kids and parents . . . they just had it figured out the best way to do it was to make it efficient. I remember when the Crook kids came to the Hogan School . . . there was up to five of them there at one time — JoAnn, Eddie, Donna, Marie, and Albert. “Well, anyway, Alice Crook had a lot of kids to feed; and she’d send her kids to school with ‘boughten’ [store-bought] bread once in a while. Our ma always made our bread and every time we had our sandwiches, why, they’d fall apart. But the Crook kids, with their ‘boughten’ bread from time to time, it all stayed together. . . . We thought we were being cheated.” Alice Crook: “Even so, I baked a lot of bread over the years, about three times a week. . . . It’s pretty hard to tell what’s gonna happen with a bunch of kids.”

Paul Swenson, Mill Creek, ca. 1995

70

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Paul: “Well, I’m sure you did, but, from time to time there would be some ‘boughten’ bread that came to school and we thought, ‘Geez, they are way ahead of us!’”

Alice [laughing]: “Ah, yeah, they had ‘boughten’ bread from time to time . . . but I always tried to have a pan full of biscuits when the kids got home from school . . . they just loved them hot biscuits. One time one of my neighbors said, ‘Well, how in the world’s a-matter with you . . . cookin’ biscuits in the middle of the afternoon,’ and I said, ‘I’ve got a reason for that.’ She was scoldin’ me because I was so late getting my bread done!’”  “There were over 100 kids in that one-room [Mounds Creek] schoolhouse at one time; when I was in school there was pretty near 50.” — Del Bryant 

Mounds Creek School, 1959

“I went to Helena School till the eighth grade, hardly that. I liked it when I could flirt. I was doin’ a man’s work [on the farm] when I shouldn’t have been, I guess. I had pretty good strength — buzzin’ wood, farming. And I was wilder than billy heck.” — Ken Wittwer  “Several of my brothers . . . what do you suppose they did on Halloween? When they headed home from school that afternoon they went out through the wood box and left it open so they could get back in. They went to the neighbor, Eddie Winch, and got his calf, brought it up and put it in the schoolhouse; they left some corn fodder there for it to eat. Teacher come in the next morning and took one look, let out a yell and away

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

71

she went. I don’t blame her too darn much, either. My dad was on the school board and he said, ‘Boy, we catch those guys we’re going to give it to them.’ They always called it ‘the educated calf ’ after that.” — Ted Sawle

Roots

 “The Arena School had a bell up in a steeple, with a long rope. They used to call us back in to school from recess with that bell. The rope hung down in the girls’ cloak room and we’d drag a table underneath and put chairs on the table; then the big kids would make the little kids climb up and put a knot in the rope so the teachers couldn’t ring the bell. We got bawled out for that every so often. “And I got my hands slapped with a ruler in school one time when I was in fourth or fifth grade; I had to stay in that recess. They should go back to some of those methods; the kids would settle down a little bit.” — Bob Demby 

Rod Anding (left center), Coon Rock, and Tony Brickl (right center), Helena, with friends, 2005

72

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“Our big field trip when I was in grade school was when we climbed Coon Rock, had a picnic on top of Coon Rock, the bluff just a quarter-mile north of here along the Mill Creek. “There’s really supposed to be gold bullion stashed up there on Coon Rock and there was a company that was up there and they dug a hole trying to hit the cave back from the old entrance. The guy went bankrupt. Of course, that was big news when I was a kid — a company up there drilling a hole, trying to hit the shaft and trying to find the gold. Kenny Peterson had a couple of cows that fell into it after it was abandoned, so it’s filled in now.

Ken Wittwer with Dolly, George, Queeny, and Fanny, ca. 1940

“And we’d go down to the cave [at the bottom of the bluff ] and explore. The cave is on the east side of the bluff and as you walk in it’s probably 25 to 30 feet wide and 10 to 12 feet high . . . but then it drops right down to where you’ve got to crawl. Coon Rock Cave is supposed to go just about to Tower Hill State Park, to the Sugar Loaf Bluff on the Wisconsin River. But my grandma told me that old man Lockman filled it in on that end because he had cattle that fell in. “So, Coon Rock and the cave have a lot of history . . . and I’m going to tell you something right now that I could validate. When we were on one of the field trips on top of Coon Rock we found a ‘rectangled’ rock that had the girl’s name that was supposed to have jumped off the bluff. There was a hole drilled through it and the teacher made us throw it in the creek. We’ll never know why she asked us to throw that rock away, just for the big splash I guess. But the students — my sister Karen was there, Dick Forseth, Bill Forseth, the Peterson boys — I mean they’d all remember; it’s just not a bunch of hot air coming out of me. “Alan Hodgson would tell me a lot about Coon Rock because the Hodgsons go back to day one in this area. His grandfather would tell him about the teepees at the base of Coon Rock, when the Indians would camp at the base of Coon Rock.” — Rod Anding  “When I was growing up in Arena it was just a bunch of horses tied up on a railing. I started out with horses, but we couldn’t afford to buy very many of them, they were expensive. Horses that you could do anything with went for a bigger price than machinery. Our farm was on the sand prairie, and it wasn’t worth very much, a buck or two an acre in the ’20s.” — Ken Wittwer

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

73

Roots

“One time, before the war, troops in the U.S. Army were walking from Camp Douglas [central Wisconsin] to Fort Sheridan, Illinois; this was before the First World War, in 1914. They marched by our place for several days, and camped out at [our neighbor] Linley’s pasture. Some of the soldiers went swimming one day and the Jersey bulls showed up about then and chased them out of the pasture. They never did have the guts to get back for all of their gear, so the Sawle kids became outfitted in U.S. Army clothing for many years to come. I always say that was the day ‘a Jersey bull put the run on the U.S. Army.’” — Ted Sawle  “Most of my siblings tried to get to high school; we didn’t all get there. I went for a bit, but my mother was sick a lot, pneumonia. Hazel had gone to Madison to work as a housekeeper by then — she made $40 a month and the boys only got $25 a month working on the farms and things around . . . as much of the earnings as possible came home. So my parents decided that I had to come home and help; I liked school, and I would have liked to graduate from high school. We’d go to the barn night and morning . . . we milked eight cows by hand. We’d sit on a little three-legged stool about so big . . . each of us always milked the same cows so the cows knew us pretty well. We were a pretty happy family; I always thought we were doing pretty good.” — Alice Crook

The “new” barn at Sawle Rosevale farm, Mounds Creek, 2004

 “We took baths on Saturday nights, all of the seven kids one after the other, right here in the kitchen; Mom would set the tub right here and the big old wood cook stove to boil the hot water sat right there. The wood box was next to the stove; I had to fill that every night.” — Frank Schlough

74

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“My grandfather, when he was alive, got to take his bath first, and everyone else followed, in the same water. After his bath he would put on clean overalls, then a suit coat over top of the overalls, and go to town; it was his social time away from the farm. “I remember he contracted appendicitis; he was operated on on the kitchen table and he lived.” — Richard Hottmann  “When I was growing up, my dad would have me walk the cows down the hill to the Lockman home farm on the weekends in autumn to let them graze there all day between milkings. It’s a mile walk one way. I’d make the trip four times in a day, because I’d come back home in the morning then return again in the evening to bring the cows home again. It’s a real big hill. I always loved to walk, and continue to this day. Bringing those cows home, Dad would always say, ‘Now, Chubby — that was his nickname for me — don’t ride those cows.’ But we had a pet cow; her name was Sunshine. I think he knew all along that I was riding Sunshine. I’d get up at the top of the hill, and you can bet I wasn’t on that cow! No, I was walking.” — Ruth Pulvermacher  “When I was just seven or eight years old, Alan Hodgson — he was older than my dad — let me drive his old Case tractor on their baler while the two men would tie bales on the back; that was the biggest thrill for me. I really thought that was something when ‘they thought’ I was a big-enough guy that I could drive the tractor. . . . Little did I know that they were so thrilled that someone could drive the tractor ‘for them.’” — Rod Anding

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

75

Roots

“When I was growing up we had mostly Guernsey cattle, we milked 12 or 14 cows, all by hand. My mother was a heck of a milker, and she could out-milk me. She was just a hard-workin’ woman, she could do anything. She cut corn with a team of horses and a corn binder. My grandmother Thudium lived here with us for a good many years; she had lost her husband quite young. She was a hard-working woman as well. My mother would be out in the barn milkin’ and her mom would make breakfast for everyone, so when we’d all come in from the barn, things would be ready before we had to leave for school. We kids used to get a little mad, however, because she’d toast the bread way before we’d come in and we didn’t like cold toast.” — Frank Schlough  “We used to sled down Thudium’s hill, and if he’d open the gate we’d come down through the barnyard. I thought it was a pretty good-size hill and now it doesn’t look like only a little mound. And we used to tip over outhouses. . . . I think of that as an awful thing that we did to older people. I think of the kids here nowadays, they don’t do things nearly as bad as we used to do.” — John Roberts  “When I was eight years old, we moved to Blue Ridge from the log house my father and older brother, Einar, had built near Arena. Winter had been hard, with a lot of snow; then rain, then mud. There was not much gravel on the main roads — often none on the other roads — so it was possible to get stuck a lot. We were able to chase the cows across the country on foot to their new barn. However, hogs and chickens had to wait for the ground to dry up. We went from kerosene lanterns and Aladdin lamps to

76

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Wisconsin Power and Light with switches and pull strings on every bulb to save electricity; the light bill after that was about four dollars a month.” — Hank Berg  “Our first tractor was a Farmall H. We felt bad about it, because the horses were so faithful; they were a part of the family. We continued to use horses . . . on weekends, we gave them their time off, put them in the pasture. . . . They liked that, they didn’t have to work. There was Mac — a big gray; Zulu — a black Percheron; Sam — a western mustang, he was a little touchy; and Jenny. If you had a good team they were so faithful.” — Grant Jones  Grant Jones, Arena, 2005

“I was eight or nine years old, and I remember the first car my parents bought, an Oldsmobile. One night I heard them talking . . . they were going to buy a car . . . they were going to trade May, one of our horses, in for the car. So, I thought to myself, ‘Well, I have to do something about this!’ and tell old May that she was going to be leaving us. “I went out to see her; I put her bridle on and moved around up in front of her and said, ‘May, do you know what they are going to do with you?’ I told her the whole story . . . that she was going to be sold . . . I told her how sad I was . . . I just couldn’t stand the idea of trading May. My parents to this day — may they rest in peace — don’t know that I did that. When my little sister first saw the car she went into total hysterics. She had never seen a car.” — Alice Crook

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

77

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle TIE-BUCKING COULD DO IN A MAN’S SOUL “I’d say cross-cut sawing was about the hardest job I did; cutting ice was hard as well. But then the toughest job . . . see, we used to have these guys called tie-buckers that carried and stacked the ties into the railroad cars. Those beggars got five cents a tie when wages were about a dollar a day. And those guys could carry a thousand of those ties and make $50 a day doin’ that. “Imagine, they carried the ties — even the big ones, 7 x 9 — on their shoulders. This one old guy that I kind of learned some sawing from, he said, ‘Don’t ever try to steal the wood off the tie,’ he said, ‘always saw your tie oversized.’ Well, a 7 x 9 tie would probably be seven and a quarter, seven and a half, by nine and a quarter to nine and a half. I wouldn’t even dare tell ya what they called those big 7 x 9 ties. They weighed, green, about 250 pounds.

78

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“So you had a stick of wood that was darn heavy, and those beggars could carry a thousand of them in a day. They’d have a pad, a leather pad full of spikes, and under it they’d have foam rubber that they’d put next to their shoulder. They carried ’em on the quarter, which gave them a little more room for their neck. “And to make matters worse, there was a time when they sawed switch ties running up to 16 foot. Those guys would carry them! Just imagine, I don’t know, got ten cents or something for carrying them. But imagine carrying one of them. Oh, they were powerful men, I’ll tell ya. “I knew one little guy from Lone Rock that bucked ties; the work was actually too much for that guy, but he did it. He had a bruised swelling on his arm as big as . . . it was just terrible, just like you can see on a work horse . . . but that little bugger carried ties. And he was one that saved his money.

“Those other guys drank, never saved any money . . . was all big wages! You’d get them to come to work for ya in the morning and they’d work maybe half an hour, have to go to the tavern get a drink, come back, work an hour, go back again; next time two or three hours. But when they got warmed up they didn’t stop for dinner or nothin’. They’d carry them darn ties . . . why, when they’d throw one of those big ties down in an empty boxcar you’d think a stick of dynamite went off. “They were men, I tell ya. Sometimes these wrestlers would come by — they went ’round the country offering so much money [for an entry fee] if you could throw ’em out of the ring. Boy, them tie buckers could do it. Oh, they were powerful men. Many of them were Norwegians. If you ever seen one of them guys work . . . but as I say, in the morning they were just like an old stiff horse, took them that long to get livened up. If you carry a thousand ties, your soul’s done for the day.”

“When I was a boy, seven years old, I was plowing . . . walking behind the single-bottom walking plow tending the team. The plow musta hit a stone; it jumped sideways and the plow handle hit me in the head and knocked me down. I sat there and cried for a while cuz it hurt pretty bad. The horses just stood there. After a while I got over it, and just started plowing again. I went to Mill Creek School; it was a mile-and-a-half walk. There really wasn’t an awful lot of fun . . . oh, we used to play baseball.” — Merven Nelson  “I can just remember our teams and spreading manure with them, the harness and the smell of leather and I think that kind of triggered . . . there’s been a horse on this farm since day one. My dad had Belgians and crosses. He didn’t get rid of his horses, Dolly and Bert, for a long time. They were nothing fancy, but he did a lot of pulling down at the school fair in Arena; he was really good with horses. “I remember when I was trying to learn how to harness my team down here, Charlie Robb would come over to help me. I said to myself, ‘Geez, how the heck am I going to figure out how to do this?’ Heck, you know what’s embarrassing, my dad’s probably up in heaven just shaking his head because my dad would win a contest for harnessing and unharnessing the horse the fastest. And then his son is sittin’ here trying to figure out how in the world to just put the harness on. I get a chuckle to myself. But now, I kind of got it down pretty good.” — Rod Anding 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

79

Roots

“When I was a kid and we milked we didn’t have a pipeline, just cans; we had the Hinman milker. My dad didn’t like Surge milker because the Surge always had that belt you had to throw over the back of the cow; he said he harnessed a horse all of his life and he wasn’t going to harness cows. And so we had the old Hinman that sat on the ground. We had two [milking] units and we milked 27 cows in this barn and 15 cows down on the other farm. “When the milkman would come [to pick up the milk] he would bring whey from the cheese factory in a couple of 50-gallon steel barrels, filled with whey. He’d pick up the milk and dump the whey to slop the hogs. There was always something going on.” — Rod Anding  “One time when I was five or six years old I was helping my dad unroll the corn ‘check’ wire. The wire would catch all of the time when you unrolled it or rolled it back up. Well, the wire caught and snapped and the darn team of horses ran away . . . they come all the way home, right down the highway . . . smashed the planter to pieces. What a mess; we didn’t plant corn for a couple of days until the repairs were done.” — Frank Schlough 

Opposite page: Neighbors gathered at a soil conservation field demonstration, early 1990s

80

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

3

COMMUNITY

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

81

Community

“Multiply picnics.” — Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer

A

s the settlers succeeded — at first in surviving, and then thriving in so many

ways — and as they began to recognize their success and look for patterns they could replicate in their interaction with the land, they also became more aware of the importance of their interactions with each other — and the realization that their human community also played a large role in the success of this experiment — in their success at surviving, and also in their appreciation and enjoyment of life. So we must look at the values our narrators express in regard to how they treat each other — and, as it turns out, how mutual respect and interdependence have served as the bedrocks of their lives and of their community. Robert Putman, in his national bestseller Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000), thoughtfully showed us what perhaps we had already sensed: for the first two-thirds of

82

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

the twentieth century, Americans were actively and intricately involved in the life of their community; then, due to a number of influences — including (in his words) “television, two-career families, suburban sprawl [and] generational changes in values” — the tide reversed, pulling us apart from one another and from our communities. Putnam’s idea was that individuals’ many close connections and involvements with each other in the day-to-day occurrences of social life added up to what he called “social capital” — the “money in the bank” that kept communities (and society) functioning smoothly and effectively, to everyone’s mutual benefit. As people became more isolated, our “social capital” diminished and our communities became less functional, less effective, less nurturing. These days, when we are fortunate enough to be able to join and build communities, we form them just as we did then but with a significant difference: now we each belong to multiple communities — a work community, a “neighborhood” community on our block or in the building where we live, a community of our children’s school friends, and others — each distinct and clearly delineated. In contrast, the community experienced by our narrators was a single, all-encompassing network enfolding land and work, learning and social services, mutual support and fun, and social rituals and matters spiritual. From our vantage point today, this is a powerful social construct. It was probably a powerful experience for our narrators’ ancestors, too. Though they certainly came from “communities” in the Old World, it is easy to speculate that those communities were different in nature. A cornerstone of American culture is the tenet that an individual has a right to choose his or her destiny. Our European settlers emigrated from aristocracies, where human

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

83

beings were defined and destined by birthrights. A nobleman was entitled to rights and wealth, a serf to a life of labor on behalf of others. Our rural settlers recognized a freedom to work for their own benefit, and they sought it with gusto. And so a “work culture”

Community

emerged and was passed down. On the American frontier, everyone was more or less equal. Most people were involved in the same types of work, with the same resources, advantages, and challenges. Their individual performance and progress could be compared to that of their neighbors. Education in life skills was shared between neighbors. In fact, nearly everything they confronted in life — from challenges in animal husbandry to land cultivation practices to courtship behavior to their spiritual relationship with their environment — was mirrored in the experiences of their neighbors and shared between them. What an intense experiment, what a potent way of life! The voices speaking throughout this book understand what is of value about the land and community in ways that speak to the heart and soul of humanity. Their stories are those of shared responsibility, shared work on each others’ farms, friendship, camaraderie, forgiveness, laughter, compassion, and empathy. Listen, in this chapter, to what they say about how they valued each other, how important they were to each other. They courted, cooked, nursed, and nurtured . . . they made up each others’ world: heard each other calling their cows, married each other, took care of each other, laughed at each others’ idiosyncrasies and their own frailties, marveled at others’ skills, and wept for each others’ losses. The community — the land and the people — was inseparable.

84

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

IT TAKES A COMMUNITY: SHARED RESPONSIBILITY, EMPATHY, COMPASSION “We’ve Helped Each Other Through”

NEIGHBORHOOD VALUES: A CONVERSATION Jan Swenson: “This neighborhood has always been close. We’ve helped each other through many rough times. Kindness goes back and forth, too. We go back with our neighbors for generations. I’m talking about the Pulvermachers, the Hogans, the Forseths, the Andings, the Swensons, and the Nelsons. They work together, babysit for each other, play cards together, buy farm equipment together, share irrigation, share tractors and share hired help. When there is work to be done Dean will send his hired man over to work for Paul, or Paul will come up and help us out, or Tom and his kids will help out. Whoever needs help just gets on the phone and the neighbors will be there.” Judy Swenson: “Someone gets injured and the others are right there; they milk cows, do the chores, and put up the hay . . . even to the exclusion of their own work.” Jan: “When we put up a shed a few years back, the whole neighborhood showed up. It’s like the old barn raisings. We put up a shed and have pictures of the place just crawling with people; it’s all neighbors. I mean, that’s the way it should be. Those are the neighborhood values that we have.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

85

Community

“But this neighborhood of Mounds Creek, I’ve heard a lot of people say that it is one of the best neighborhoods in the area; wonderful neighbors . . . people got along good, helped one another out . . . if anybody got in trouble [sickness, tragedy], others were right there to help them out. When Russ Peterson’s wife died, she died of cancer, Helen Knight took that family under her wing, just like it was her own. Helen’s a lovely lady . . . she’s just got a heart of gold . . . and she always took care of children that needed it.” — Dean Lucey  “Donald Bryant was severely ill; he had a wife and three small children. And the neighborhood together — no questions asked — they did his chores for a year and a half, two years, put his crops in. Right towards the end of that first year picking his corn, everybody went into the house to eat. Don came out of the bedroom, and whereas he used to be a big man, he was a frail man now. He knew he was in poor health, and he wanted to say thank you, personally. And I remember him setting in a chair, a mere shadow of what he used to be.” — Steve Harrington 

ICE STORM: A CONVERSATION Hank Berg: “In the winter of ’76, Ruth and I had been on our 25th anniversary trip to California to see the Rose Bowl, a lifelong dream. We saw the parade and game, and had a swell time. “Well, as we drove home and neared Wisconsin we were just ahead of the ice storm. We made it home safely, but when we awoke the next morning there was

86

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

two inches of ice outside. It kept on for several days, and you could hear the trees breaking in the woods. The wires [power lines] were breaking, as well . . . everything electric was down. “So we got on the telephone, called all around to find a generatoralternator to buy. We finally found a supply at the Farm and Fleet in Janesville — three were to go to the Dodgeville Farm and Fleet, and the last one was for us. The company trucked ours to Barneveld, just a few miles away; we got one of the four, and took it home. As it turned out, all the rest of them were no good . . . they didn’t work. By chance, we got the only one that worked out of the whole bunch. “For the next nine days we very seldom saw a bed, ’cause we went from one farm to the other in the neighborhood to get the cows milked. It took a couple of hours at each farm . . . twice a day.” Ruth Berg: “We used the generator to milk, to feed silage, run the barn cleaner, and pump water. We went to Paul Jones’s farm up here, Jerome Buol, Francis Pailing, Ray Pailing’s farm that’s in the valley, others in the neighborhood, and of course our own herd.” Hank: “The generator was tractor PTO [power takeoff ] powered, we ran it with our old ‘4020’ [ John Deere tractor]; oftentimes there was nowhere to plug in to deliver the electricity, so we’d pull the meter out . . . stick the wire from the alternator in there . . . make-shift way. Every time something turned on, the poor old tractor smoked just a little bit heavier. And there were other places that we went there weren’t farmers; we just hooked ’em up long enough to charge their freezers, and run their furnaces long enough to get their houses warm . . . then you go to the next place.” RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

87

Ruth: “Even then, when the milking was done, and the milk was in the bulk tank, there was no way to load the milk into the trucks.”

Community

Hank: “So when the milk truck come around we had to go back to each farm, hook ’em up and run the alternator long enough to load the milk, and then go to the next place and do the same thing. We did this for nine days and nine nights. We went through some over 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel in the tractor in those nine days. After that, a lot of the other neighbors bought their own alternator . . . but they weren’t very available at that time, they were kind of new then.”  “In , my husband Ron contracted Hodgkin’s disease. He was hospitalized, and I went into Madison nearly every day. I was pregnant at the time with Thad. Talk about neighborhoods. . . . Eric and Dale were young boys. Ron’s parents and neighbors would take care of those kids. Men would come over here and help with the chores, clean the barns for us, help put up the hay . . . it was so meaningful, so humbling. It still makes me cry.” — Elaine Drachenberg 

Jack Harrington and son Tim, Mounds Creek, ca. 1959

88

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“One spring, I had been in the hospital. And when I got home, the first guy wanting to help us was Jack Harrington. I can remember him coming to the front door wanting to know where he could start to plow. That’s just the way he was, though. He had a heart of gold; he would do that for anybody. At his funeral, the priest called him ‘a character.’

“Eddie Winch was a bachelor farmer here at Dover, and for many years he ran the farm alone before his nephew came out to help him. He was older than the rest of us. He played softball with us till he was well in his 50s, he was just one of the boys. He never drank, smoked, married, or swore in his life. ‘Gosh darn’ was the hardest words that ever come out of his mouth. “He was hospitalized . . . he and his nephew were both in the hospital at the same time, around haying time. I don’t know who the ringleader was, probably all of us, but we decided we better have a bee . . . Eddie and his nephew didn’t have any hay up. We got a huge crew together; we put up all of their hay, 70 acres, in one day. We had five or six cutters, rakers, and maybe four balers. The two Winches would have worked a month at that. Gary Harrop, our banker, brought all the food for the crew.” — Frank Schlough 

SHARING EQUIPMENT: A CONVERSATION Rod Anding: “We share a lot of equipment with the neighbors. Paul and Dean Swenson have shared a center pivot irrigation system with us since 1976, and by garsh I don’t know when was the last time I paid Paul for electricity . . . but he’d have a hard time figuring out when was the last time he paid for repairs. Our family keeps it going mechanically, Paul keeps it going with the electricity, and Dean keeps the insurance going. That irrigation system cost us a bunch apiece, and we went together on that and it’s been swinging around down there since 1976. Between the Forseths, Swensons, and Andings, we own a grain truck, a cut conditioner, cultivators, bale wrappers, and probably some things I forgot. It’s kind of nice. We all get to use the equipment and none of us uses any of it that much.” RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

89

Community

Paul Swenson: “We all went together [Forseth, Anding, Swenson, and Swenson] and got a two-ton truck and put all our names on it, the F.A.S.S. truck. It’s gotta be the longest title [at the vehicle registration office] in Madison. And there was a discussion one day, we were going to get rid of Forseth . . . then sell his share to Mark Olson, and it would have been the A.S.S.O. truck. . . . That’s one of Tom’s wisecracks.” 

Tom Forseth with daughter Leah, Coon Rock, mid-1980s

90

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“When Nancy was a year old she could hardly breathe, she had such a cold on her chest. I had no mother or grandmother to ask, ‘What do I do?’ I brought my kids home from the hospital without directions — I never knew my mother; she passed away within a month of my birth; only one of my grandmothers lived until I was seven years old. So I asked my neighbor, Inez Swenson [Paul, Dean, and Lois’s mother] what to do. “Well, you can bet in a flash Inez was down here with this mustard plaster; I was scared to death to put a mustard plaster on a little kid! Inez went ahead and put it on Nancy’s chest, and she was well the next day. Inez passed away at a young age from an aneurysm. “If she and her husband Ken were going to town, they used to stop here and she’d say, ‘Oh, Ruthie, can I have the kids this afternoon?’ And I thought, ‘Anybody has got to be nuts to want someone else’s kids to bother you all afternoon!’ But that’s what she would do. If she was working at home, painting a wall, say, she’d let the kids help! And she passed away so sudden [ January 1957]. To tell my kids that . . . that was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do; they always thought Inez would be there.” — Ruth Pulvermacher

HELPING OUT: A CONVERSATION Tim Harrington: “You can ask anyone in Arena about Dad and all of the stories of his practical jokes and having fun . . . if he couldn’t do that then there was no purpose in even getting up in the morning. Oh, he was a piss cutter, I tell you . . . a hard worker as well. You know, he believed in working just as hard as he could and playing just as hard as he could, and there was no sense in doing anything in the middle.”

Tim and Steve Harrington at work, 1999

Steve Harrington: “If somebody got hurt or had trouble around here — Orcutt, Sawle, Linley, Harrop, Winch — Dad was the first guy that would go to help. He’d say, ‘Now, we’re going to come over and bale your hay,’ or, ‘We’re going to come over and pick all your corn.’ The Orcutt brothers, Harold and Elmer, one was sick and one got hurt . . . tipped the tractor I believe . . . anyway, the whole community came together on a Saturday to pick their corn . . . everybody around here was there to help out. I drove a picker, Bob Gutwiler and Dean Lucey drove pickers; Richard Hottmann and others packed corn in the cribs.”  “Our neighbors were getting out of farming, and they were selling off portions of their land. They had a 30-acre piece of good black dirt that adjoined our farm. The real estate person that was handling the sales came to our family and asked if we’d be interested in making an offer on the piece. We said yes, and we made the offer. The agent then went down to another neighbor and said that land was for sale, and she had

Steve and Tim Harrington going to church, 2005

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

91

Community

received a bid. Our neighbor said he would offer more. Then she came back to us and said she had a higher offer, and would we be interested in bidding more? We thought that we would, but asked who the other bidder was. She told us it was our own neighbor. Well, we rescinded our bid — we weren’t going to bid against a neighbor. “The agent went back to our neighbor and said, ‘I guess that you have the highest bid.’ Finally, our neighbor asked who else had been interested in the land, and she said the Harrington family. Why, he rescinded his offer as well. “Our dad went down and talked to him and told him that he felt it would be better for his farm to have that land. . . . They ended up purchasing the land. But neither of the families was going to bid against each other because their relationship meant more than that parcel of land did.” — Tim Harrington 

ABOVE AND BEYOND: A CONVERSATION Marion Porter: “When our third child, Tom, was born, I can remember the day the tests come back; he had a closed stomach. They had to operate on him and open it up. But I was hemorrhaging badly. I’d been in the hospital about a month at Sauk City and wasn’t getting better. Dr. Rosemeyer in Spring Green [prior to Dr. Kempthorne] and Dr. Galarnyk from Plain come in my room to tell me that they’d found cancer cells. There I was with a sick baby that had surgery and I didn’t think I was goin’ to make it. They said they were transferring me to Madison, and I said, ‘I want to go home before I go.’ Still makes me cry. They said, ‘All right, we’ll take you home.’ So one carried the baby and the other one hung onto me and my suitcases, and they took me home. . . . You just couldn’t have . . .”

92

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Sonny Porter: “Several weeks later, I was up with Marion at the hospital in Madison, and we were snowed in . . . couldn’t drive in or out.” Marion: “But anyhow, neighbors. Roger Reeves’s wife Delphine tied her boy Gregory — four or five years old, a real husky boy — on her back and walked from their home through the snowstorm so she’d be there with Sonny’s mother and the new baby.” Sonny: “She put a blanket over her boy’s head and walked just about a mile to our home through the blinding snowstorm; that’s the kind of neighbors you had.” 

Schlough farm, Dover, 2005

“Frank Schlough called us, he had sweet corn he couldn’t sell, and he said, ‘Help yourself to it, take all you want.’ We had potatoes, and we told Frank, ‘Help yourself,’ so he took a pail of potatoes home with him. There isn’t a dollar figure on it . . . if you have some extra, a neighbor can take it; everybody’s happy. “We border the Burdette and Helen Knight farm, and one time our cattle pushed through that fence line. Burdette come down and he said, ‘I got bad news, good news, and bad news.’ He was a rough old cob; talked rough, heart of gold, one of those types of fellas. ‘The bad news is your cattle are out, the good news is I found ’em, and the bad news is they’re in someone else’s corn field.’ “We all worked together to get the cattle back in, fixed the fence, and ended up back down at the Knight farm. Burdette asked Helen to get us some ice cream bars; she came back with one extra for the dog, Sherman.” — Steve Harrington RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

93

Community

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle

gust, and you could break off pieces as you needed them. “In the old barn raisings they’d have “We used to cut ice off the ponds to maybe 40 or 50 men, neighbors. Some use all spring and summer in the ice box at guys were good at climbin’; some guys were home. First, you had a heavy ice plow that scared or no good at it so they stayed down was pulled with a team of sharp-shod horses on the ground. The biggest timber would [horse shoes with spikes so that the horses be the ridge beam that ran the length of could get traction on the ice]. The plow had the barn at the peak of the roof; if you had teeth in a row, and it would scribe straight a 40-foot barn, you had a 40-foot, ten-bylines on the surface of the ice and cut up to ten timber. That was a big timber, I tell eight inches deep. ya. Then there were the posts, purlins, and “The rest of the cutting was by hand, batter posts [diagonal braces]. Everything with a great long two-man vertical hand was pegged together, wooden pegs. The guy saw. We’d cut the ice into blocks about that cut all the pieces of the frame, he had to two foot square and maybe 18 to 20 inches be good, because everything had to be made thick; and then haul ’em on a bobsled to the just perfect, you know. Any mistake, things ice house — a hole in the ground about 20 didn’t go together; but those old boys they foot square. Here, the blocks of ice were knew what they were doin’. stored — packed with sawdust or marsh hay “You’d have guys with the long pike — for about four foot on all sides. The ice poles; they’d push the bents [pre-assembled would stay frozen like this till July or Au- sections of the timber frame] up in place

CUTTING ICE AND RAISING BARNS

94

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Dean and Jan Swenson with Ted Sawle at 98 years old, 2003

and others would be pulling them up with ropes. Oh, it was quite a job. And then as soon as they got her up, they’d hurry up and get the sheathing on, another crew’d be up there shinglin’. And sometimes they’d darn near get that barn shingled the same day; and stock boards on, everything. The farmer might have $1,000 in it.”

NEW TRACTORS: A CONVERSATION Paul Swenson: “Ruth Pulvermacher keeps a diary. I bought my Allis Chalmers tractor new, but I didn’t remember when. Well, it’s been several years back now, but I thought, ‘I’ll find that out, so I’ll just ask Ruth.’ I asked her, ‘When did I buy that tractor?’ Oh, she went back and looked in her book, and she told me 1967, she had the date and everything. She had written it down when I drove the tractor by their farm for the first time.” Richard Hottmann: “A new tractor in a community was quite the thing.”

Paul: “That’s the only new tractor I’ve ever bought in my life . . . I still have it.” Richard: “I’ve never had a new one.” 

Hugh Hogan and son ‘Little Hughie,’ Coon Rock, 2005; a log cabin dating to the initial settlement by the Hogan family in 1856 remains as a part of the present home

“All our neighbors, six or seven families — Hogans, Eleanor Forseth, Ed Campbell, Swensons, the Pine boys — you go to them for anything, or they come to you for anything. If you’ve got it you’re going to give it to them.” — Harold Pulvermacher  “This neighborhood was always quite close; you didn’t have any neighbors fighting with each other. And that’s the way it was. You worked together on the crews. If somebody was in trouble, you’d go and help them. I remember our neighbor had a cow

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

95

Community

in a mud hole and they couldn’t get it out. They called up and said they needed help. Everybody heard about this on the party line, and everybody went to help! No, you went and helped them. A few went in the mud hole with a big ol’ hay fork rope; pulled her out with a team. “I can remember when my grandma died here [in this house], the house was full. People would come — not for the funeral — but just to come be with each other. My father died in this house, as well. Usually the wake was held at home. The funerals were at the church, but they’d all come back to the home [of the deceased] for a meal afterwards; the neighbors’d put that on.” — Frank Schlough  “The Lutherans married Lutherans, and the Catholics stayed together, but when it was time to thrash oats everyone came together . . . they did what they had to do to get it done. . . . If there was a fire, a sickness, a death, they’d drop any differences . . . accepted each for what they were . . . and they helped each other out. When somebody was in need, neighbors would dive in and help.” — Jerry Nelson

The home of Frank and Donna Schlough, Dover, 2005



SHARING THE KIDS: A CONVERSATION Paul Swenson: “Over the years I had all the Tom and Diane Forseth kids work for me, all except the youngest one. Paulie, our son, and I would have our differences and so Paulie went to work for Tom. That worked out fine because he and Tom got along well. And then Paulie ended up working at Tom’s father-

96

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

in-law’s, Bud Rickey. He’d leave home at four-thirty in the morning and ride his bike up in the morning, about seven or eight miles; at night he’d run home. Then the next morning he’d run up there, and ride his bike home that night. Paulie turned out to be a runner. But he worked for Rickeys and Tom for about three or four years.” Judy Swenson: “We had two generations of Forseths working with us — we had Tom, Bill, and Dick; and after our kids left we had Tom’s kids, and we’ve gone through three of the four of those. So we’ve had two generations raising each other’s kids.” Forseth and Anding kids, ca. 2003

THE BEES: CAMARADERIE, SHARED WORK “A Pie Apiece and a Goose for Dinner” “Gib and Ada Roelke had just gotten married. My dad and Dale Pope’s dad, Vince, were going to go up there with the crew to shred their corn for them. Vince and Dad said to Ada, just pullin’ her leg, ‘If you don’t have a pie apiece and a goose for dinner, we’re gonna pull out and won’t finish shreddin.’ But the crew of ladies got us back! “Ada was just a young lady, and she got worried to death. Well, the other mothers got together and made everyone all a pie . . . little tiny pies. But they did cook a big goose. Vince ate so much he got sick and couldn’t work with the crew to finish up there anyhow!” — Del Bryant  RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

97

Community

“Corn was cut and shocked [bundled], and then the shredder’d come in; and the neighbors would come with their teams and flatbed wagons. There’d be two men out in the field with a long hickory pole, 12 foot or so; they’d call ’em ‘polers.’ You’d drive the wagon up next to a shock and these two polers on the ground would lean the shock against your wagon and then they’d put the long pole under the base of the shock and, with one man on each end of the pole, the two would lift the butts [bases of the stalks] up; the ones on the wagon would grab the tassels [tops of the corn plants] and carry or drag the shock and lay it across the flatbed. Then, of course, you’d get into November sometimes and the butts would be froze in the ground. You might get four or five on a wagon, or sometimes, the big shocks, just three. Then the crew’d go in and throw ’em in the shredder. It was a lot of fun.” — Warren Hoyer 

Warren Hoyer, Hillside, 2003

98

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“The day that you know you’re not a kid anymore . . . I was the tail end of those [the generations] that thrashed, and the community shredding bees. The men that had the thrashers and the shredders, they moved from farm to farm, they never made a penny going around . . . but at noon you were fed just as good as royalty because the ladies of the house had such a glamorous array of hams and chickens and roast beef and potatoes and pies. It’s unimaginable . . . and those fellas looked forward to that and that’s why they did the business. They ate like kings all summer. “When you are a kid, you are given the odd jobs — ‘Run around with the grease gun . . . go up in the barn and throw some fodder around.’ There comes a time when the men go to eat. The head man, the engineer, so to speak, he was considered the king of

the table. And then when you’re invited to set at the main table and you’re taken into the group . . . you feel like a man. I was 12 or 13 years old.” — Steve Harrington

GOOD COOKING: A CONVERSATION Alice Crook: “When you had the thrashing, silo-filling, corn-shredding bunch, why, you fed the whole crew, and that’s for sure. I usually had either a big pork roast or beef roast, a lot of vegetables, and fresh bread; and I made pie . . . because they thought I could make pie pretty good . . . always made pie . . . raisin and apple, mostly, raisin and apple. . . . I never changed that very much; once in a while a peach pie if there was peach in season. But I had pie because they expected some pretty good meals. Guys got pretty fussy about that; they’d talk about the women that couldn’t cook good, and . . .” Paul Swenson: “Boy, everybody knew where the good cooks were!” Alice: “I did the big roasts in the blue roaster in the oven. In them days you had a wood stove; it was a good old thing to cook on . . . after some time, though, I got a gas stove.” Paul: “If you were cooking for a thrashing crew it was something special, a lot of the women wanted to be the best cook on the route.” Alice: “Yeah . . .”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

99

Paul: “You needed to show off a little bit.”

Community

Alice: “I know! And Paul, your mother, Inez, was known to be one of the good cooks, I know that.” Paul: “Oh yeah, she was a good cook.”  “Up the road at the Litchauer farm they owned a steam engine thrashing machine. When they shut the engine down for the evening, their two daughters could play tunes on the whistles till they run it out of steam. That went on every night during thrashing. I still like steam engines, there’s something fascinating about them. “I never thrashed with that crew, though. We thrashed with a crew on this end of Mounds Creek. The Orcutt brothers, Harold and Elmer, owned our community thrasher. Kirch and Linleys at Dover thrashed with us, and Harold Roberts here, and the Schoenmanns, Gib Roelke till he got a combine, the Cowleys, the Harrops; and then we went up as far as Knights’. We used to have a great time thrashin’. These Orcutt boys, very easygoing guys, good guys, it was always an hour, hour-and-a-half noon. After everybody’d eat a big dinner we’d go out and lay under a tree and shoot the breeze; some would fall asleep.” — Dean Lucey

Dean Lucey, Knight Hollow, 2005

 “My brothers Burdette and Leonard and I owned a silo filler and a shredder. We worked together. My cousin, Roy Nelson, had a thrashing machine.

100

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

We used to exchange work up to Hogans’, and down the other way to Murphys’. The Swensons were a part of the crew at Hogans’.” — Merven Nelson  “I cooked for the crews, of course, for many years. Meat, potatoes, a vegetable of some kind, a salad, something to drink . . . and a dessert of course . . . and that would be pie!” — Emma Abplanalp  “People would go silo fillin’, thrashin’, shreddin’, and you would help neighbors out. We got along pretty good. There was a lot of good eatin’, except one to two places where the cooks weren’t up to par. One place, a bachelor’s place; they couldn’t make gravy, I am not kidding; so the women drove there to cook for us. “But then we had people, oh man, Mrs. Lucy Schoenmann and her sister — the neighbor women all helped whoever was having the thrashing crew — and, oh man, we used to have some feeds. Mrs. John Michels here, she was a good cook; Mrs. Rueben Kraemer. Labor Day didn’t mean anything; that meant you were laborin’ out in the field, fillin’ silo. Sometimes at Thanksgiving we’d be shreddin’ corn. But we had other days off, of course, so it didn’t make any difference.” — Warren Hoyer  “Thrashing, shredding, filling silo, we all worked together. We got to know the neighbor girls that way, and we found out if their mothers were good cooks or not. If

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

101

they weren’t good cooks, we’d look at another neighbor girl. Every once in a while, you know, you’d find a beer in the water tank . . . stuff like that.” — Sonny Porter

Community

 “My uncle Art Roberts, on my mother’s side, was a very smart man, he could fix anything. But when we had [family] reunions and the neighbors’d be together for a bee we never wanted him to say grace . . . because everything would get cold. Whenever he’d start crossing like this and start looking to the sky, that was the time to look out because he never quit talking.” — Del Bryant 

HARVEST TALES: A CONVERSATION

Paul Swenson with Percheron team, Dan and Dolly, ca. 1995

102

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Ruth Berg: “My mom would do most of the cooking; my older sister, Zona, and I would help, and neighbors Mrs. Baker and Ruth Whit would come to help. But there were some that didn’t cook as well; I remember one man complaining that the ‘cakes were too little’ at one farm. At our farm we’d cut nice big ones, and say ‘Help yourself!’ We generally had the crew here for about three days at a time. The meals were done early each morning because you didn’t have any way to keep all of the food. Mother used to can meat, so that didn’t take a lot of preparation. Dad would go over to town and buy beef roasts. We went up in the hills and picked berries; Mother was thinking ahead for pies for the thrashing crew, then it was silo filling, and then the shredding crew that usually went clean till Thanksgiving time before that was all done.”

Hank Berg: “A lot of times till Christmas.” Ruth: “My brother, Ken, built a home-made tractor and a loader with forks that ran with cables, not hydraulics. He’d go out and get the corn shocks and lift them up and set them on the wagon . . . instead of men having to wrestle those bundles. With his invention he was able to put six, seven shocks at a time on a flat-racked wagon. And the neighbors said, ‘No, don’t come yourself, you bring that tractor of Ken’s!’” Hank: “Later in the fall, sometimes those shocks were froze down, and you had to drop a chain around them, back up to them with the team, stand on the chain, then the horses would pull and break them loose. Then you’d slide a pole down through them, it was long enough to stick out on both sides . . . a man on each end would lift and turn the shock up, the guys on the wagon would grab a hold of the top . . . and on it went . . . you generally put on three from one side of the wagon and two from the other side, and that would be a load. “I started with this work when I was 14 years old because there weren’t men around more able than I was. Shoveling corn . . . they’d back a ‘double-box’ underneath the shredder spout and the corn would drop out and fill the box. When that was full I took it to the corn crib and unloaded it with the shovel. Well, some of these corn cribs had a shovel-hole way up there in the air, maybe two foot above my head. This was really kind of upsetting, because why couldn’t we have a shovel-hole down a little lower? Well, the old guys would say, ‘Gee, that’ll ruin the crib.’ Well, this way was ruining the man, you just wore out. . . . I just plain wasn’t man enough yet.”  RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

103

Community

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle

THE STRONGEST GUY WAS KINGPIN, BUT THE WOMEN FED EVERYONE “There was quite a trick to setting up the thrashing machines. We’d throw some chaff in the air to see which way the wind was from. Of course, you always had to set so as not to carry the hot wind and sparks from the engine toward the stacks. And if they didn’t carry a side wind it’d be a dirty job. . . . You had to keep the dust running off sideways. “Then you had to think about the drive belt, too. If there were strong side winds, then you had to set and put the loose belt on the windward side of the pulleys and the tight belt on the leeward side to keep the loose belt in place. There was quite a trick to all of that. “Those old corn shredders were beggars for guys getting their arms pulled off, you know. A good many guys . . . they used to

104

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

have the habit of jerking these big 150-foot drive belts off by hand while the belts were still running; it was a darn foolish thing to do. And to show you how people didn’t adhere to things like nowadays — I can remember seeing them setting the corn shredder down here with a big 150-foot drive belt, the engine would be right across the highway so as people came along in their cars they’d have to slow down and drive out off the road into the field to get around the engine. And they’d leave it like that for several days, even. “When they had those old corn shredders — the old 10-row McCormick — those guys, they meant business. I tell you, them guys just tried to see how much they could get out in a day. My dad said he shovelunloaded 38 loads of corn one day — those 26-inch high boxes, ten and a half feet long; now that’s moving a lot of corn with a scoop shovel up over your head into a corncrib.

And then sacking grain, I tell you, one sack would be about 150 or 160 pounds. “Some men could shoulder a sack of grain standing in a bushel basket. Now I tell you, it took a darn good man to do that. If you ever have any doubts, why you try it. But in those days, why, there were men that just kind of enjoyed showing their strength; you know, the strongest guy was kingpin. “And boy, I’ll tell ya, the women worked hard to prepare the meals for the crews. When we were stack-thrashing it wasn’t quite as big a crew, but when we were shockthrashing we had up to eight bundle wagons and two sets of grain wagons, three or four men on each, couple guys in the straw pile, a sacker for the grain, and two or three men with the engine crew. You can see it got to be about 25 or 30 men. Oh, when they come in for a meal, the women would have the meals ready!”

“We had sawing bees where all the neighbors came and helped. A man would come out with a saw rig with a Model A engine on it. The rig would go from farm to farm, and you went and helped your neighbors; most people did this. Then we had a pretty good sized woodshed. In the spring you’d stack all the wood cut that winter in the shed for the next fall and winter.” — Frank Schlough 

Grant and Sarah Jones Farm, Arena, 2005

“People did things together; it was really fun, because in those days it was all with horses yet. One job I always liked was thrashing . . . putting the bundles in the thrasher and getting the grain out. Silo filling was the hardest, because it was big bundles of green corn . . . liftin’ that was a son-of-a-gun at times. And of course we shredded [corn] in the fall. Down here on the Arena prairie, you had to use a fork to handle the bundles because there were so many sand burrs. “One time at a thrashing dinner . . . oh, this woman was a poor cook . . . and she had served us all raisin pie. When she went back into the kitchen, one guy took his piece of pie and stuck it in his pocket. When the cook returned, she wanted to know if he wanted another piece. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘that’s plenty.’ But most places were great to go eat at.” — Grant Jones  “I enjoyed the camaraderie of the big thrashing events; it was a big job preparing the meals. When you had enough food to prepare, it was fun.” — Helen Knight 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

105

Community

“My dad always had good wood . . . no green wood. He’d split the new wood, and then it was our job, the girls, to take the dry wood in the shed — that was split last year — and put it over on the other end of the pile close to the [house] door. Then we’d stack the freshly split green wood on the far end of the woodshed. “I can remember the sawing crews in the winter; this was one of the crews that women used to look forward to. We cooked the meals and enjoyed the company. You had to be a good cook . . . at a moment’s notice. The crews ate at the farm at dinner, and sometimes supper. We usually made a huge beef roast . . . oh, they are so good if they are big. “One of my neighbors, Doris Miller, we always helped each other. We’d make pies, potatoes and gravy, and a vegetable . . . and the men were happy . . . just fill ’em up! We’d put out a big pail of water and a dishpan outside on a bench so they could wash up a little bit . . . not too much, but they would wash . . . and come in and eat. It was fun; we looked forward to it.” — Vivian Dodge

LEISURE AND SOCIABILITY: JOY, SIMPLICITY “Didn’t Cost a Nickel” “We had fun without spending a fortune; the most enjoyable things in life I’ve done didn’t cost a nickel. “The 4-H club was a big deal. Emma Abplanalp, Esther Bawden, or Elnora Forseth would take us on farm visits to see each family’s 4-H projects and then we’d have a picnic somewhere. Gertrude Hodgson was the first 4-H leader for the Coon Rock 4-H Club. Gertrude also drove the school bus for the Coon Rock School. The 4-H, church, and the church picnic were all big-time activities.

106

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“On the 4th of July, we’d all go down to Arena and our uncle, Al Anding, would have a little fireworks display in the parking lot for his semis. There were probably a couple of M-80s and a couple of rockets, but by garsh, that was big-time just to see that stuff.” — Rod Anding  “People came to events for the ‘sociability.’ The women had what they called the Bazaar once a year in the church. They’d cook all the food at home — didn’t have any room in the church, just a small church — and they’d set up tables . . . people would come and eat. “They had an ice cream social once a summer and people would come from all over to attend. We had a Community Club at the school; that’s where all the neighbors would get together and play cards and have sandwiches, cakes, and snacks. Box Social, that was another big thing over in the schoolhouse; everybody made a box of food, then they’d bid them off. The girls would eat with whoever bid their box . . . sometimes they didn’t like who they got . . . but that was tough. “At Christmas, we’d string a wire up across the room in the schoolhouse, pin sheets up for a curtain, and we’d put on a program. Santa Claus would come, of course. A gal by the name of Della Harrop would be our Santa Claus, most of the time; she was really a good one, too. She’d go and sit on the men’s laps. That’s the way it was. But people were different back then; they didn’t have TVs and all the things to run to.” — Dean Lucey  The Coon Rock Rock decorated for the holidays by Mary Liegel, Spring Green, 1993 (see page 138 for explanation!) RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

107

ROBERTS AND SON GENERAL STORE: A CONVERSATION

Community

John Roberts: “The store was a place to visit. People would come in, the same customers, and you got to know them, and you knew their family.” Paul Swenson: “You could go get five pounds of chicken, a bag of flour, a pair of Wolverine boots, bib overalls, or some thread, or yarn . . . it was all there.” Elaine Drachenberg: “I remember as a kid going down to John Roberts’s store. . . . They always had ice cream, and John’s dad, Lee Roberts . . . oh, he would give you the biggest ice cream cones you ever have seen . . . they never could have made any money on ice cream . . . and we always wanted Lee to dish ’em up because he’d pile ’em as high as can be.” 

Lee Roberts, Nett Demby, and John Roberts in front of Lee Roberts and Son General Store, Arena, 1952

108

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“Wednesday night and Saturday night were nights you went to town. The grocery stores were open on those two nights, and town would be full! They would have what they call ‘bank night.’ They’d draw a name for, I forget how many dollars, and you had to be in town to get it. All the stores were in on giving so much money towards this prize. In Spring Green the theater would be full on Saturday nights, and Buck’s tavern — his dad ran it then and it was called Ollie’s Sweet Shop — would be full as well; you could get ice cream and that in there. When the people at the seven o’clock theater show would come out at eight-thirty, nine o’clock, they’d usually come over to the tavern and the tavern people would go to the later movie . . . and it would be filled again, twice a night on Saturdays.” — Warren Hoyer

“I always had close to 250 acres of crops to put in, in addition to my job teaching at River Valley [High School, in Spring Green]. My friends would give me a rough time sometimes for not going and doing things with them. They were right, you know. The work always gets done somehow. I remember the first Hand Clutch Tractor Day. I unhooked a corn planter on the ‘eighty’ on Hayward Crossing and drove the tractor to the big event. Just left the corn planter sit . . . sunny day and everything, and just took off. It was the best old time. Charlie Robb, Senior, was still alive, and he was there coming up with some of his contests, like the competition for the slowest idle.” — Rod Anding 

T HRASHING REFRESHMENTS: A CONVERSATION Paul Swenson: “In our neighborhood, the only time anybody drank a beer thrashing or shredding was when the Mickelson brothers brought it with the thrashing machine. In the Dover neighborhood, they’d party for two weeks at thrashing time and two weeks at shredding time. They did some dandy things in the Dover neighborhood.” Richard Hottmann: “I didn’t have anything to do with it; it was the kids! When you had the crews at your place, you were expected to have refreshments. Once in a while, a few individuals had too much, maybe . . . and to think that Dover was settled by the British Temperance Society.” 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

109

Community

“Elnora Forseth and I were leaders of the Coon Rock 4-H Club for 20 years. Elnora was the cooking leader — she was famous for her pasties [meat-and-vegetable pies] — and I was the general leader. I had Rod Anding and his sister, Tom Forseth, the Hillman and Bawden kids, Ziebarth kids later. But there were children in town that belonged, as well. I have since retired. But those kids, well, they’re all grown up now, they’re all 50- and 60-year-olds now! We met in the homes, changed it off. But we got so big once, a lot of the town kids joined, we’d meet at the school down in Arena, in the gym.” — Emma Abplanalp  “Every time somebody had a birthday or was gonna get married or something, we’d have a house party. My mother was big on that. My wife, Marion, was big on that. We’d have a lunch and we’d play cards and we’d visit; the young kids’d play outside. If it was someone’s birthday in the summertime, they supplied the wieners and the marshmallows and the bonfire and then all the neighbors’d come. It was an awful lot of neighbors takin’ care of neighbors. The Pine boys, Mark and Charlie Pine, one of them called squares; then there was the Dembys, one played the fiddle and neighbors and friends square-danced.” — Sonny Porter



SHIVAREES: A CONVERSATION Merven Nelson: “Shivarees usually happened soon after the wedding, when you thought they were home from the honeymoon. You’d make a heck of a noise,

110

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

anything that’d make a noise . . . a shotgun, cow bells, or hit a buzz saw blade with a hammer. My favorite was the first thing I could find that would make noise. The best time was after you were sure that the bride and groom had gone to bed! I was ‘shivareed’ by all the old neighbors. Everyone expected to get a treat from the bride and groom.” Paul Swenson: “Some places it’d be ice cream and cake; some places it’d be a beer, or something like that. Einar Berg told the story about what they did to Paul Jones when he got married; he lived up on Blue Ridge there. They hung dynamite up in the tree next to the house, and when they set it off it blew all of the windows out on that side of the house. “Dick Keene married a girl that none of us knew . . . she was from Arizona, and she lived there before they got married. We knew that if the phone rang late at night it was Dick calling his girlfriend in Arizona . . . so everybody’d listen in. But when they got married, we knew that they’d go to Dodgeville for fish on Friday night. We were all sittin’ up to Cride McCutchin’s near the Keenes’ trailer house, and the women were over at Doris Crook’s . . . so when the Keenes passed the Crooks’ on the way home we got a call, and one of our group crawled under the trailer house with an M-80 firecracker. When the newlyweds returned home and settled in, the M-80 was set off . . . got them up with a start! “When Judy and I got married we never got shivareed. But we had a wonderful wedding party down at White’s tavern. Sometime after that party one of the fellas that had been there said to me, ‘You know, that was the best band I ever heard, at your wedding party!’ But we never had a band.” Richard Hottmann: “I remembered we shivareed a neighbor in the ’40s. He did come out; he gave us money rather than treats. When we divided it up RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

111

Community

it was 21 cents apiece. So we took the money and went to Chuck Roberts’s filling station. “When you get shivareed, you don’t get to invite your friends; it’s just whoever comes! We came out after our shivaree; we all went to Lilac Gardens [now Chandlers Roadhouse], a tavern nearby; I had to buy until they wanted to go home! “At Bobby Linley’s shivaree, somebody put dynamite on a fence post.” Paul: “When Harold Ziebarth got married — he lived in the Anding place, below where Dean Swenson lives — we shivareed him and they wouldn’t come out. We made all the noise and everything. Finally someone went and knocked on the door to tell them the terms of the deal . . . and they wouldn’t come out. This was in the late autumn and they had a wood fire going. So, somebody climbed up and put a board over the chimney . . . and smoked ’em out.”  “I was on the Arena Town Board for 13 years, town clerk for ten years and treasurer for three years. We had meetings in our home, in the dining room. I wish I had a nickel for every dollar that passed over that table. When I first came on, the board was Francis Pailing, Lester Hodgson, Woody Roberts, Harold Harrington, and myself. We’d meet once a month . . . probably took us an hour at max . . . but the meetings would drag on for four or five hours. We would visit, and discuss the world’s situation, and solve all the problems in the area.” — Elaine Drachenberg  “We don’t even have time to get to know our own relatives anymore . . . honest to gosh.” — Bob Demby

112

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Opposite page: Rod Anding and Dick Cates, 2005

4

CHARACTER AND CHARACTERS

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

113

Character and Characters

“It used to be that people talked about individuals, their character, what you could expect out of this person, what you could expect out of that person. Integrity was vital, honesty was vital; the commitment to man’s freedom was vital.” — Richard Cates Sr. “We had so many characters years ago that were real people, and we don’t have so many anymore. It was the environment that made these characters.” — Edward Klessig

W

hat kind of individuals settled the townships of America? Were they dif-

Margret and Edward Klessig under the walnut tree, Saxon Homestead Farm, Cleveland, WI, 2003

ferent from many of us today? Did they have different desires, abilities, weaknesses, or immunities? What part did character play in making the frontier experiment a success? And how did the experiment shape their characters? This final chapter tells stories of integrity, commitment, humility, and hope — the values our narrators prized, struggled to uphold, and left as a legacy for succeeding generations.

114

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Forging a life of relative self-sufficiency on the fringes of wilderness was no easy task. As we explored in the previous chapter, one of the most important tools for survival was found in the strength of community. “You can’t go it alone” was an early and frequent lesson. Community supplied the extra muscle when needed and made quick work of long, arduous tasks. The “critical mass” of community allowed for the support and proliferation of specialized skills, such as milling and cheese making. And beyond the obvious, physical advantages of many hands laid on, community offered safety, security, and the social and psychological benefits of companionship and emotional sustenance. But in order to function, a community must ask that its members meet certain requirements. They must recognize and adhere to rules, sometimes codified, most often unspoken yet assumed. These rules speak to expectations about the behavior of the community’s members. Are they honest? Reliable? Is their word trustworthy? Do they work hard and see a job through? Are they determined to “stay the course” in times of adversity? All these were important individual characteristics that the community needed to count on, because there was lots of work to do and many challenges to meet; there wasn’t much slack for accommodating those who couldn’t be trusted. When present, trust is often invisible — an assumed honorable quid pro quo. But when trust is lacking, the fabric of society is tenuous. And indeed, as our “voices” remind us, there is nothing which defined character in the township more fully than integrity and the bond of one’s word. In the townships, where “if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done,” character also came to be defined in part by the “weight” a person could pull; that is, the commitment he or she was prepared to lend to the necessary task at hand. Over-accomplishment, honest shortcomings, and most certainly arrogance and a shirking of responsibility did not go unnoticed. The virtue of work was passed along in habit, practice, and story. RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

115

To some degree, even personality traits became a part of this social trust. For folks whose work was often on public display along the town road — the look of the land and the health of the cattle — and who depended on each other through thick and thin,

Character and Characters

humor and humility didn’t often get too far separated. A sense of humor helped others get through vexing situations with equanimity and made social gatherings more enjoyable. Humility and modesty helped keep things in proportion and sustain social harmony. Individuals needed resiliency, a “thick hide” to roll with the punches. And an abiding faith and hope helped see them through even the worst of adversities. All of these personal characteristics contributed to the survival and success of the community, and where they were not absolutely required, they were encouraged and held in high esteem. Here, then, are examples of how our narrators regarded the many manifestations of “character” that helped sustain them as a society. Love of family and friends, a tenacity for living (hope) and reflections on how a good life is truly defined are the pillars of these stories.

INTEGRITY — TRUST “A Shake of the Hand Was Your Contract” “We never had a written contract with any of our patrons; they could switch factories any day, and we could stop picking up their milk any day. This was back in the days when your word was worth something. In 65 years, we had only one we had to stop picking up his milk and only one who decided to ship somewhere else.

116

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Jerry White hauling milk cans at Mill Creek Cheese, 1948

“At our biggest we had 59 patrons, and we did not go further than a 10-mile radius with the milk truck; we didn’t even go 10 miles to the north because the Arena factory had all of them. I can remember convincing my dad to go 12 miles to pick up milk for Tom Hodgson, a high school friend of mine; that’s the farthest we ever got away from the factory. I always wanted to hit 60 patrons, go look for another patron. But Dad wouldn’t go one mile out of the way. He’d say, ‘If we get one in between, that’s okay, but we’re not going any further, we’re too far now.’ “Dad wouldn’t go by another factory to pick up a patron because he didn’t want to hurt them. He wouldn’t pick up a farm that was closer to another factory, even if they wanted us to come. He’d say, ‘You work it out with them [the other factory]; I might be paying five cents more today, but they’ll probably be paying five cents more another month, so why don’t you just go work it out with them.’ So you stop and think how many farms there were around here back then . . . it was family cheese-making . . . it wasn’t big. The cheese factories were like a big family in those days; your patrons were like family. We had big picnics here each year.” — Jerry White  “There used to be a lot of farms between Dover and Arena: the Sawles, the three Jones farms, the Pfankus, the Clark Hottmann farm, Gene Hottmann, and Lester Hodgson. We used to all thrash together, and now it’s all houses. Once we lose the country we lose everything. . . . A shake of the hand was your contract.” — Grant Jones  RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

117

“Another thing about people, some people influential, some real common people; you’re kind of all the same if your word is good. Most people’s word was like a contract.” — Sonny Porter

Character and Characters

Sonny and Marion Porter, Arena, 2003

 “Marion and I offered to buy Herman Knight’s farm on High Point Road for $3,500, and Herman had agreed to that price. In the meantime, Mr. Wright [Frank Lloyd Wright] wanted to buy it, and he offered Herman $7,000. We’d done Herman’s farm work the year before because he was in poor shape and couldn’t do it; so Marion and I did it for him along with our own farm work. “Herman wanted to know what he should do because he had given us his word that he would sell the farm to us. And I said, ‘Well, there’s just no question about it, you sell it to Wright.’ But he was willing to stick to his word, see, and he sold the farm to Marion and me. Nowadays, that amount of money isn’t any more than a rusted-out car, but it was quite a thing in them days. Herman had given his word; that more or less kind of sums it all up.” — Sonny Porter  “I’ll never forget when my dad told me, ‘Look, Carl, there are some times you talk to your neighbor on the phone and there’s some times you drive up and you sit down at the kitchen table.’ I’ll never forget that. How true it is. I don’t know exactly how to say it, but it’s kind of like a family farm: You know one when you see one.” — Carl Pulvermacher 

118

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle GRIST MILLING AND THE TITAN TRACTOR

and holler, ‘How the hell much stayed in the run, Sawle?’ I’d tell my dad and my dad said, ‘Don’t you pay any attention to “My dad used to run with a four-foot that old guy.’ stone buhr [a mill stone] — they’d weigh “I can remember grinding feed for 2,500 pounds or so — and he had to al- over 300 customers at this mill. I can ways leave a little grain in the hopper so name every one of them and I can even when you started, your stones didn’t rub relate something funny about every one together. They called that ‘leaving it in of them. The only problem I ever had the run.’ Of course, I thought that was with my dad was I used to like to carry foolish, but me, running the mill, I didn’t the water pretty high, about an eight-foot have the job of sharpening — dressing — head. He’d get up in morning and he’d those stones; and that would take a man see that water flooding the pasture. He’d pret’near a day with a mill pick to put new get a little grumpy, but not too bad befurrows in there. . . . cause he liked to see me run a good mill. “There would maybe be a half a bushel Well, sometimes I’d still run a little short in the run . . . you take it from one guy and of water about three o’clock in the middle put it in the next. If you made a mistake, of the afternoon. you might give one guy a little more, the “So then I got the idea . . . how about other guy a little less. One guy’d get angry using the old Titan tractor for some aux-

iliary power. I took it off the wheels and mounted it on the cement floor and it really worked beautiful. Same speed as my line shaft — 550 RPM — and all you had to do was put the belt on, turn the waterwheel on, turn on the fuel, prime ’er, a little gas . . . get her going . . . and turn her over to kerosene. “By golly, we had power. Boy, we could really grind fast. I’ve even seen it one day, we had over 400 sacks; they were lined up clear down to the barn, yet I ground every darned one of them out that same day. I did the grinding and my brother Dick took care of the door, loading and unloading the grist. He loved to talk to the farmers, and he’d pump them all and get all these stories.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

119

“Ken Swenson, Dean and Paul’s dad, had been to a sale and had gotten a pair of bowling shoes; and you know how bowling shoes are, about three colors of leather. In school at the time, this was the hippie look where you could wear about anything and be cool. I was probably a sophomore or junior in high school, and he says, ‘You want to buy these shoes?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll buy them.’ I gave him 50 cents for them, took them home, and discovered they were different sizes, and they wouldn’t both fit. “So I took them back to Ken, and he says in his typical, slow speech, ‘Carl, a deal’s a deal.’ And this time he just wouldn’t budge, he wouldn’t let me off the hook. As I was leaving the house I noticed his plow shoes sitting by the door, so I took them and went home. A few hours later, Ken came to the door and Mom lets him in. I’m in the other room and he says, ‘Ruth, did that kid of yours take my shoes?’ Mom yelled in for me and asked if I took his shoes, and I said, ‘Yep.’ And Ken said, ‘What did you do that for?’ I thought a while and said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t give me my 50 cents back.’ And he said, ‘Well, a deal’s a deal, wouldn’t you agree Ruth . . . a deal’s a deal?’ Mom says, ‘You’re right.’ Ken took his shoes and went home. “Shortly after that, Paul Swenson was going to pay me a dollar if I loaded his manure spreader with a pitchfork. Dad had about a 40-bushel manure spreader; it was small, but in those years I didn’t know that they made them a lot bigger. So I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll load that for a dollar.’ I didn’t know that he had bought a new manure spreader, about 220 bushels, and of course, a deal was a deal. They had had cattle in the shed all winter — manure just packed tighter than hell. It’d have been one thing if it was just loose sawdust, but to get all of it out of there you had to just about break the fork to get a forkful. Paul backs that new spreader up there — the first time I had seen such a monster — and I about gagged. I don’t remember if I ever filled it or not, but I know I never got my dollar.” — Carl Pulvermacher .

Character and Characters

Carl Pulvermacher, High Point, with sons Cody and Beau, and Eric Cates (L), ca. 1990



120

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Larry Anding, Billy Roberts, Kathy Powers, and Mary Roberts on the steps of Lee Roberts and Son General Store, Arena, 1953

“Our general store [Roberts and Son] was a place to visit; we ran the store from 1914 to 1981. People would come in, the same customers, and you got to know them, and you knew their family. Every order and invoice through all of the years was written out by hand. My dad didn’t like to ask patrons to pay, period; and he never would go out and collect from anybody. At the store we had charge accounts, we charged by the month. We trusted people. “The kids would come up to the store at noon and they’d get their drink and treat to eat with their sack lunch from home and then they’d come and pay me; they’d tell me what they had. I don’t think I ever lost a nickel. “I couldn’t believe how good the kids were when they came to the store; they really didn’t get into mischief. I can’t remember any incidents where they got into any argument or trouble. I only had a few incidents in the store where a kid got mouthy or something, and I’d tell them, ‘You don’t need to come in unless you can behave; and if you can behave, you are welcome to come in here again.’ It’s like my father told me, when you go to school, if you get in trouble at school, you’ll be in trouble at home. And that would be the same way if you would say something to the parents about the way their kids acted in the store. . . . They were the greatest bunch of kids.” — John Roberts  “Someone told me this story from the ’30s, about a time when my dad, Merven, was shredding corn at Shelby Baker’s farm. It was a dreary, drizzly late fall day, a Friday.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

121

Character and Characters

Towards the end of the afternoon or so, it was getting dark, bundles of corn were still coming in, and somebody hollers, ‘Is this the last?’ Well, it turns out there was one more shock, way out in the field, more than a half a mile away. “There was one of the men that was done with his work, and he could have started out to the field to get the shock, but instead he decided to start to clean up and get a jump on supper. When Dad and a couple of the others finished their tasks, the bundle was still in the field. So they headed out with the horses to bring the shock in and put it through the shredder. That night at supper when the ham was passed around, the man who had slacked on the job passed it up, being Catholic. Another, older, man piped in, ‘Go ahead, you SOB, you might as well have some, because after what you just did you ain’t goin’ to heaven anyways.’” — Jerry Nelson  “I was one of nine siblings; in 1940 my dad was still disabled from the bull attack and they were having a difficult time finding a farm to rent. That was the year that my Grandmother Olson passed away. So Grandfather Olson invited Mom and Dad and all of the nine kids — 18 years old down to newborn — to come down there and live. Can you imagine, a 77-year-old man bringing a family that big down into his home? Grandpa had one room, and the rest of us just layered in, wherever we could find a place. “But we made a home for him, and he was glad of that. I would have thought it would have driven Grandpa crazy. One day he walked out with his cane toward the car, and one of my younger sisters, Sally, ran after him yelling, ‘Grandpa, where you going, where you going?’ And Grandpa said, ‘Oh, I’m going crazy.’ And Sally said, ‘Oh, I want to go with you!’” — Helen Knight 

122

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle THE DIFFERENCE IN PEOPLE

“And then I’ve had guys fill their ordinary grain sack and then they’d use a baseball bat or something to tap the grain in “Cow feed didn’t need to be ground there, then they’d tie them so tight close real fine; we charged eight cents a sack around the top. I’ve had other farmers that for grinding cow feed. For hog feed, we would come, and there would be that much ground that real fine and got nine cents loose in the top of that sack; I dare say those for that. I’m looking to this day to find a guys made as much money as those other sack of this dried beet pulp — it used to guys, the tight ones . . . that shows you the come in big sacks, about three foot across. difference in people. Why, they held about three times the or“I turned the Hyde mill into a box dinary guy’s, and would you believe I had factory during World War Two. Gosh, I several farmers that had enough nerve to got to hiring over 20 men there, day and bring them to me when grinding by the night. We packaged enough for about sack. Here, I was so dumb, I should have 60,000 pounds of meat every day. This said, ‘Burn the darn things up,’ or some- one particular box I got 65.5 cents for at thing, cuz they were getting their darn stuff first; pretty darn good-size box, 30 by 16 ground for pret’near nothing. I’d give any by 10 inches, and that had to be nailed up money if I could find one of those old big and delivered. And then, by golly, after dried beet pulp sacks. six months or so, I found another buyer

and I got a dollar and a quarter for the same darn box. Well, gosh, I could haul 800 of those boxes on a truckload. Then I started making a little money, but I didn’t make any big wad of money. There’s no disgrace in being poor, but it’s damn inconvenient. . . . “In later years I built several water wheels, all by hand. One, in particular, was just so beautiful, why the wind will turn it, or just a little bit of a trickle of water like the weight of your finger will turn it. I had big ball bearings in there, four inches in diameter. But when I put it in, the man decided he wanted to have it turn the other way around. Well now, you know, when a man puts in a water wheel he ought to know which way that wheel is going to turn. But we parted good company. It’s a darn beautiful running wheel.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

123

Character and Characters

“When I go to a banker, I want to be able to tell them that my great-grandpa cleared 20 acres with an axe, I want him to know what my mother and father did, and what I have done . . . and I’ll continue to do this because ‘I am who I am.’ I want to make sure that he understands this. “I just know the difference between right and wrong, and my parents and the Swensons and the fabric of the town of Arena taught me that. If you do wrong, you’re gonna pay for it. It’s about that simple. “There are so many people that believe they just can’t do anything to change things — ‘My hands are tied, someone else has to do this for me.’ But ordinary people have the opportunity to have power to do extraordinary things. It doesn’t even enter my mind anymore that someone else has to represent me.” — Carl Pulvermacher

COMMITMENT — PERSEVERANCE “Never Went on a Vacation”

Carl Pulvermacher, High Point, speaking at his farm field day, early 1990s

“I never went on a vacation . . . I didn’t know what one was. I was grown up before I ever saw Madison [now less than an hour by car]. I never missed a milking, except when I was 16 years old, I had the measles; and when we went to Minnesota for our honeymoon, a special place that we wanted to see . . . some attractions . . . we were gone two days. I milked about 25 to 30 cows when I was a young man. . . . That was quite a bunch to milk by hand.” — Merven Nelson 

124

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“Jeff Bryant farmed near here. Somebody asked him if he’d ever taken a vacation and he said, ‘I take a vacation every day.’ Well, they asked how he could do that, and he replied, ‘I go out and set on the porch for an hour after dinner.’ That was his vacation.” — Paul Swenson  “People don’t do the things we did years ago. I made my own washing soap until I left the farm [1990]. Never did I ever buy laundry soap . . . all those years. And my kids, they said nothing got their clothes as clean as my homemade soap.” — Vivian Dodge  “My grandfather told me this story. It was a common practice for the cousins from the city to come out to the farm in the summer to work, to help out. It was healthy, they got good food, and they were supposed to work hard. Well, there was a young man from town who thought he was a little ‘too good’ for his summer occupation, a little bit arrogant . . . these old fellas, they could sense that right away. “At noon they shut the thrasher down and went in to eat. One old guy winked at all the other fellas and said, ‘Gosh darn, for a city kid you sure got big arms . . . are ya tough?’ And the boy said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m tough.’ The old guy asked, ‘Are ya strong?’ And the kid said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m strong.’ The old guy then asked, ‘Well, can you “hold a tree”?’ And the kid, not knowing what he was in for but figuring he could do anything the old guys could do, replied, ‘Well, sure!’ So after dinner they went out to the elm in the yard, and the men threw a rope up around the top branches and pulled them down. Elm will bend, it won’t break. RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

125

Character and Characters

“The story goes they pulled the branches down with the rope and, before handing the rope over to the city kid, one of the guys said, ‘Wait a minute, if you’re really tough you gotta put in a chew of tobacco first!’ Well, the kid had come this far so he had to put in the chew that was offered. The men handed him the rope and . . . whoosh . . . he was lifted off the ground up through the lower branches . . . and about halfway up — of course, he probably swallowed the tobacco before he thumped down to the ground. As the kid was turning green he said, ‘We don’t have time for this foolishness, we gotta go to work.’ And as he was walking back over to the thrashing machine he was throwing up; but they never had any attitude problem with that city cousin for the rest of the summer.” — Steve Harrington 

LEARNING TO WORK: A CONVERSATION Jerry White: “After the war, we hired a cheese maker, Willard Loy; he had received a Purple Heart in World War Two. He ended up being with us for 39 years, until we sold the factory. He was like a second dad to me. He really taught me how to work. . . . He told me, ‘You know, you don’t amount to anything unless you really work.’ So I’d work right along with Willard and I’d try to keep up and beat him . . . so that’s how I learned how to work.” Linda White: “When Willard died, his wife, Edna, asked if he could be buried next to Jerry’s dad. She said he wanted to be buried next to Joe White.” 

126

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“I want to emphasize, the older generation, they were tough; they were hardy souls. The things they did and lived through . . . they were unbelievable. Sam Sawle, born in ’09 and died in ’99 . . . he had a terrible fear of going to a nursing home, so he died in his house. I was the one who found him . . . that was the way that he wanted to go.” — Steve Harrington 

Wittwer family farm, Helena, ca. 1964

“I had a big shop. I had the first irrigation system in the area in the early ’50s; I could irrigate three acres with an inch of water an hour; we pumped the water out of the [Wisconsin] river. I had an airplane boat on the river, the first one again; a four-cylinder airplane engine, 60-horse [power] out of one of them little Cubs. “When we got the cows from the pasture before supper I let the flies come in with ’em; I’d get ’em to the barnyard, then we’d run the little Cub [airplane] engine and propeller to blow the flies off . . . I’d let her idle. Then when we put the cows in the barn I’d open her up and that’d keep the flies off when we were milking! The cows got to like that, they’d come in for that; their tails would start hangin’ straight down in the barn [there were so few flies to swat]. That was nice when we were milking . . . not get swatted with a dirty tail. We’d run a fan with the tractor when we weeded the big garden, as well; it’d sure blow the mosquitoes away.” — Ken Wittwer  “I never learned to run and repair equipment; the men just did it. And so now we, my sister Ruth and I, are here alone and — for example, I just purchased a piece of equipment, and it has a different style of PTO [power takeoff connection], and I just

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

127

Character and Characters

don’t know how to hook it up . . . whereas men just look at it and they know how to do it . . . they can just jump from one piece to another, and I cannot. I never had any agricultural education in high school; girls did not take agriculture or FFA, whereas the boys weren’t in home economics, either.” — Carol Nelson 

VACATIONS AND HONEYMOONS: A CONVERSATION Richard Hottmann: “We never had a vacation the first 25 years we were married.”

Gerald, Amacher Hollow, and Ruth and Carol Nelson, Mill Creek, 2005

Claire Hottmann: “Richard was an AMPI [Associated Milk Producers, Inc., a milk processing company] delegate and we went to the annual convention in San Antonio, Texas.” Richard: “I think that was after the first 25 years. We milked together; we never had a hired man in the wintertime.” Claire: “Oh, we had a night off every now and then; we’d get someone in to milk.”

Hottmann family farm, Dover, 2005

128

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Richard: “We started here together when we got married in 1960. But my parents were helping at that time. My dad didn’t think anybody should ever have a milkin’ off. My father passed away in 1967 and I told Claire that ‘the honeymoon is over.’”

“There were two grades of gas used in tractors like the old 1020 McCormick and Fordson: ‘straw gas’ cost about five cents per gallon and regular gas was about seven cents per gallon. The idea was to start the tractor with the expensive gas so you didn’t have to crank so long, then switch to the cheap stuff to go all day. We had a Fordson tractor that needed more fixin’ than usual, therefore we used horses a lot. “One of my earliest farming tasks was to walk behind the field drag being pulled by the horses — first lengthways, then crossways to level the field — and then, behind the [six-foot] drill, sowing oats and seeding alfalfa . . . it was tiring. The old drill had a wooden seed box, cracked or rotted from the weather; so you kept some Plaster of Paris along to fix the holes. You could ride along on the two-row corn planter, however, so corn planting was left to my brother Einar, who was born with a club foot. “Haying was hard, hot, and heavy work: loading the wagon, then the team pulling it up into the barn — a stout rope with a set of hay tongs full of loose hay — and you’d ‘mow’ it [distribute it in the haymow] by pitchfork, out to the sides of the barn. Cutting grain with horses was slow, as well. The binder was small and always seemed to be wore out . . . and so were the horses. Thrashing was hard work, but also a lot of fun — a community effort with plenty of good food. “Our first fall on Blue Ridge [1939], the corn was cut by hand because we didn’t have a corn binder; it was shocked and later hauled into the shredder, all by hand as well. There again, a community effort — hard, cold, and heavy work. “We had open-pollinated corn, so you could save seed and plant it the next year. You saved the seed by ‘spiking’ the whole cobs [pushing the unshelled ears onto large nails] to dry over the winter. The next spring the small end of each cob was hacked off, and the rest was tossed into a hand-operated corn sheller, then screened for adequate size.” — Hank Berg

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

129

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle HEWING 3,000 TIES WITH AN AXE

Now, he was always sharpening his ax with a file; he wasn’t very particular. But my Uncle George, a big man about 240 pounds, always used a razor stone, “I worked with my uncles in the he always had the razor stone in his woods on their place up by Coon Rock, a pocket. He was a perfectionist, but a 500-acre farm, and they had a lot of tim- slower chopper. His work would be just ber. Back then timber was so cheap. In perfect, smooth and just neat. the ’20s you could buy a whole 40 acres, “My uncles used to cut about 2,500 heavy timber, for $400. to 3,000 ties every winter. Boy they had “My uncles George, Frank, and good red oak timber. I pulled crosscut Charlie, all three of those guys were [hand saw]. We cut the trees down and bachelors; they’d have to hire a girl cut ’em into logs with the crosscut. We to do the cooking. Uncle Charlie was cut 746 tie cuts [logs] in 10 days one time, the best chopper, he was a wonder- which was pretty darn good for a young ful chopper. Boy, I tell ya, he was an guy. Then we’d take the horses and skid expert in the woods. When he chopped the logs into a pile. Charlie would hew you could hear the old chips fly, I tell ya. ’em with an ax and make railroad ties;

130

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

he could make 30 of those ties in a day. Hew ’em by hand, then haul ’em to Arena on a Model T truck. How many do you suppose he’d haul to a truck? Well, he said he could haul 15, but 12 made a better load. “In the ’20s, all the railroads wanted was 6 by 8 ties [six inches by eight inches by eight feet long]. Then, when it come to about 1940 or so, these bigger lines, like Burlington, went into a much heavier tie, a 7 by 9; that was a big tie. Then they went to a tie six inches longer — eight foot, six inches. Up until then they were always just eight foot. I remember one sawmill man got ten cents for that extra six inches; he said, ‘Boy, that’s just like money in the old sack.’”

“We didn’t work hard, just steady.” — Tony Brickl  “My dad farmed, and he also worked for the town when he was a young man. In fact, he drove the first grader that the Town of Arena ever bought; he drove it from Madison. I remember Dad talking about it. It didn’t have power steering. One time he drove the grader 38 hours straight in the snowstorm. I have bills that he turned into the town back then when he would work 15 hours a day for I don’t know how many days in a row and got 50 cents an hour for doing it. But he took so much pride in stuff like that. He just loved doing that. “Years ago, I remember in the summer my dad always wore a white shirt and rolled his sleeves up; he wore white so it would be cooler. How they would sit in them old graders and them old dump trucks and just roast, and work their tail off.” — Rod Anding 

SHARING THE WORK: A CONVERSATION Jerry White: “We generally started about five a.m. each day. You’d get up and get the boilers going, and soon the farmers would begin bringing in their milk; some would want to stay around and visit for several hours. We tried to have the milk all in by nine o’clock. We worked seven days a week making cheese, spring through the fall, because we had no way to keep the milk. When I was in grade school we had a little Model A truck, and we started to pick up some of the milk

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

131

at that time. But most of the farmers brought their milk to the factory by team and then by truck. Linda worked right along with me; my mother was the same when Dad ran the plant.”

Character and Characters

Linda White: “I drove milk truck, cheese truck, whey truck; I washed the separator. I started packaging and delivering curds around town; it seemed like a good idea to me. Pretty soon I had a regular route.”  “Grandpa Lockman died before I was born, of a heart condition. He was a World War One veteran. I guess he was built a lot like me, about 6'2" and gangly. George Lockman was known for his ability to take a crosscut saw and a double-bladed axe and supply Spring Green with wood. Grandpa cleared most of the tillable land on our farm that way. He was just a tough son-of-a-gun. So both sides of me were kind of bred into ‘work isn’t a bad word.’” — Carl Pulvermacher  “One year, thrashing oats up here on this field behind the chapel on the Lloyd Jones farm — John Michels was farmin’ it then and Ike Evans owned it at that time — Art Robson had his machine in there, and we thrashed. Art thrashed by the sack; a lot of them had a weigher on ’em and thrashed by the bushel. But Art thrashed by the sack, and every time they’d flip to a new sack, it would count. “We thrashed 1,008 sacks of grain that day. It was probably 3,000 bushels of grain. The oats came out of that spout so fast it took two men to keep bags on the bagger.

132

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

It just poured. I’d never seen a crop of oats like that, before or since. It was just unreal. Had oats on the ground, and two guys trying to keep sacks on the bagger. It was wild. But that stuck in my mind, 1,008 sacks. It was heavy; probably three bushel to the sack.” — Warren Hoyer

HUMOR – HUMILITY “The Lady That Disks the Air” “One time I was disking [pulling a field disk with a tractor through the plowed field to level the soil before planting] sometime in the ’70s . . . over 30 years ago. I pushed the hydraulic lever to lift the disk out of the ground at the end of the field, but as I made the turn and started back, the hydraulics failed and the disk wouldn’t drop down into the soil. A neighbor saw this, and to this day when he sees me he says, ‘There’s the lady that disks the air!’” — Claire Hottmann 

FATEFUL MEETING: A CONVERSATION Marion Porter: “I’ll have to tell you how I met Sonny Porter. I had been workin’ under a war [WW II] program; if you were a good student and had your grades up they hauled you in a bus to Mazomanie and you broke eggs. We broke eggs, thousands of eggs. It was a job, I earned 37 cents an hour then, and I saved money. . . . My mother raised nine of us children plus she raised six more that

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

133

Character and Characters

Arena High School football team, 1946 conference champs

wasn’t hers whose mother had disappeared. So if one of us needed a bigger coat or something, by morning Mother had somebody’s coat ripped up and made another coat. “I’d never had a boughten coat; we never had boughten clothes. Our clothes were probably better than any you could have bought because my mother did a lot of sewing. Nevertheless, I bought a brand new red coat with the money that I earned breaking eggs. I was so proud of it. “One day, several years later, I was waitin’ for the bus to take me home from school at the intersection of [Highway 14 and] H ’cause we lived over on Demby Road then. This old Model A truck come along, Sonny, and he was with another guy. They hit the mud puddle. I was standing closest to the road but I guess I was the only one with a fancy new red coat on . . . and the mud covered my red coat. “Of course, I was screaming and mad. Boleys ran the service station there at the intersection and Mrs. Boley run and grabbed my coat and tried to clean it . . . but it stained. And so I said, ‘I’ll get even with him if it takes till the day I die.’ And so, anyhow, to make a long story short, after Sonny and I started to go together — the women in the community always had showers for everybody. Mrs. Boley had a shower for me. They gave me a flat iron, a warshing board, and I don’t remember all of the things that they gave us except a note, I still have it . . . it says, ‘You sure got even with him.’” Sonny Porter: “But really, see, somebody else was drivin’ that truck, I wasn’t.” Marion: “Yeah, I don’t believe it. In two or three months’ time we got married, after he made my coat all muddy. I don’t have the coat anymore.”

134

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

A Century on the Land Theodore Sawle stack would take water; it ruined the whole darn thing. Oh, there was quite a trick in that. “But no, that stack thrashing, that made beautiful grain. The first two or three “We stacked grain up until the ’20s. weeks that grain sweat in the stack. Then The farmers nowadays wouldn’t know after it got dried out, oh man, it was fun what the heck that was. My brother Billy to grind . . . it would just shatter so easy. was a wonderful stacker. He could start When the shock thrashing come in, some a stack on a wagon wheel and come out of these guys’d get in too big of a hurry just like an ice cream cone and then start after a rain and start thrashing a little bit coming back in. That stack would be 15 when the grain wasn’t dry. Why, that flour feet wide and 15 to 20 foot high; beauti- or feed could get so hot you couldn’t stick ful, just ideal. But, I tell you, that guy on your hand in it. But the stack thrashing, the stack, he worked on his knees and he that grain would rattle down the chute. had to be careful. You didn’t dare bump That was dry. There was a big difference the stack or anything. in grain. “You had to be so careful to always “If you were grinding rye [rather than keep the middle full because if you didn’t, corn, oats, wheat, or barley], you couldn’t your middle would settle and then that see from here to the wall because of the

“STACK” THRASHING RYE COULD MAKE FRIENDS OUT OF ENEMIES

dust, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. My dad breathed flour like that and when he’d sneeze the neighbors clear up here a mile away claimed they could hear him. “My brother pulled a prank on a guy, they were fishin’ and he stranded this guy on a dead tree out in the middle of the lake. It was in about March or April and the water was cold. The guy was swearing, he was so mad; he was mad at my brother for pret’near two years, until they ended up on the same thrashin’ crew. This old guy knew these boys weren’t gettin’ along . . . so he put them in the rye-straw pile together. That’s about as dirty a job as you can get; it’s dusty, and that rye straw has sharp beards [long ‘awns’ on the seed]. They had to build the stack together, see. By golly, they came out of there good friends . . . a pretty good psychology there.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

135

Character and Characters

“When I was younger, I often thought about going somewhere else to work. I mean, farming was hard work. I drove horses when I was eight and nine years old. I remember I was at our land down the road [a mile away] dragging corn [to kill emerging weeds in newly planted corn] with a team. When you were dragging, you walked behind the drag being pulled by the team, you walked right in the cloud of dust. I always walked barefoot; we never wore a pair of shoes all summer. “One afternoon a storm was coming up — it was thundering and lightning — the sky was black. I thought maybe I better unhook ’em, maybe head for home. Then a big crack of lightning come and away they went. I couldn’t hold them . . . they drug me right down the highway in the gravel. I hung on for a while, but I got tired of that. Well they didn’t go home, they went to a neighbor’s and stopped to eat grass. The neighbor lady caught them, picked up their reins and walked them partway back, and we met on the road. “It never did rain . . . never did rain. So, I went back to the field and continued dragging corn. Geez, my older brother Roland was mad; he said, ‘What did you unhook them for?’” — Frank Schlough 

CHURCH PROCEEDINGS: A CONVERSATION

Cows at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church yard, Mill Creek, ca. 1990

136

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Steve Harrington: “There was one thing in that little Catholic church that was very awkward, the confessional was only three feet behind the last pew. So before church on Sunday mornings, if anybody had a real hot sin, you could confess before church started. You tried to whisper, but the priest would go, ‘What?’ And so you had to speak louder . . . the people in the back rows would try to listen!

Our dad, Jack, was in the confessional, and they had one of those trainee priests. Harold Harrington, Dad’s cousin, heard the priest say, incredulously, ‘Noooo . . . ,’ to which our dad’s reply was, ‘If you think that’s bad, wait till you hear this one . . .’ “Every family sat in the same place, week after week, you could count on it. The Hogans would come in, go to the front on the right-hand side. Harold and Kathleen Harrington would set in the same place. The Crooks on the left-hand side. The John Roberts family were on the right, Petersons were behind us, Loys were on the left, Pailings right in front of us. Everybody had their place.” Tim Harrington: “Dad tied Francis Pailing’s shoes together. When Francis was kneeling down, Dad tied his shoelaces together and he couldn’t get up.” Steve: “Larry Anding took my shoe off once in church over there. . . . Ever go to a communion where you don’t have one shoe on? ‘Ba, bump . . . ba, bump . . . ba, bump.’” 

COON ROCK ROCK: A CONVERSATION

Rod Anding and his team of Suffolks Punch horses with the Coon Rock School and Bluff in the background, 2004

Rod Anding: “My neighbors would always give me a rough time because I had a whole field that wouldn’t have any rocks in it while they were out there plowing up rocks in their fields. Tom Forseth said it just wasn’t fair that I could go down to a field as flat as a pancake and have no rocks! So he brought this humongous rock down and set it in my field.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

137

Character and Characters

Tom and Diane Forseth, Coon Rock, 2004

Tom Forseth: “I hauled the rock off my ridge and dragged it across Rod’s field; I tried to miss some of the corn. It sure took out the weeds. It’s a stoneage cultivator and a good tool for sustainable agriculture. Jack Demby says that the rock gives Rod something to aim at when he’s making windrows; maybe now they won’t overlap. Rod has no hills, no rocks, no gullies, I thought it must be boring to farm over there . . . Rod needs a rock. So we called it Coon Rock Rock and it’s an historical hysterical monument. . . . It was actually pushed to the surface by the high nitrate level in Rod’s groundwater.” Rod: “I don’t know if we put a flag on it but more and more people found out about the rock. Steve Foye even heard about it on his CB radio when he was going around the Loop down in Chicago when some truckers were talking about ‘What was that stupid rock in a field out on Highway 14 about 30 miles out of Madison?’ and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Well, then, Mary Liegel from Spring Green came here and wanted to buy the rock because she collected rocks. I said, ‘I’ll give it to you so I can really get Tom Forseth back.’ “Mary had the rock hauled away. She decorated that rock, a different costume for every month to fit the seasons, and she took a picture each month and made a calendar featuring the Coon Rock Rock.” 

PORTER’S RESTAURANT: A CONVERSATION

The Coon Rock Rock decorated for Valentine’s Day

138

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Sonny Porter: “I always tell people, before I was married, I made all of the decisions: where we were goin’, what movie we were goin’ to see, and if we were

goin’ to stop and have a sandwich or not. And after that minister made me say ‘I do,’ I haven’t made one [decision] since. Marion said I was spending too much time on the couch, and so she started a restaurant — it became known as Porter’s Restaurant — right here in the living room, in order to move me; hired a modern dishwasher — me. See, where the davenport sat, that’s where she put the door going into the kitchen part of the restaurant; the people got tired of jumping over the davenport, so she just threw it outside. “We didn’t have ‘customers.’ Friends we knew or didn’t know just dropped in. We were going to put up a sign. We filled out the forms from the state, got the okay to put up a sign when we first started the restaurant, but we didn’t need it; we had enough to do.

Tom Forseth, community appointed Admiral of the Coon Rock Yacht Club, where none of the members own boats

Marion Porter: “We had a lot of wonderful people. Dean Swenson washed a good many sinks of dishes for us when we were runnin’ out of dishes. Craig Beighley, that worked for Paul Swenson, he’d clean off tables, set up the tables. “We’ve had a lot of odd customers. We had Tom Forseth’s donkey in our restaurant once. Tom thought he was really going to get me riled up, so I went and opened up the doughnut jar and started feeding the donkey doughnuts; did he ever like the doughnuts! They had a hard time getting him back to the trailer. He wanted to stay.” 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

139

FAITH — TENACITY — HOPE “ You Can Only Peel One Potato at a Time”

Character and Characters

140

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“My family, the Carpenters, built silos and barns. They built several round barns. They built the ones up by Plain [Wisconsin] that they researched and put on the historical register. They built the Mazo [Mazomanie] pickle plant that was made out of a big enormous barn, rock foundations, and cement. That’s all they ever did. “My dad was a builder until he got disabled. The bank took a lot of these farms back because people couldn’t pay for them. A bank would have these farms with nobody on ’em, and they’d get my dad to move the family on these places, because he was a carpenter and handy, and he’d run the farm and fix up the buildings and fix up the house and everything. The bank didn’t pay nothing, you see, but we didn’t have any rent. When the times got better, then the banks could sell those farms. But they always had two more for us to move onto. “My mother was a remarkable lady; she was a Hankel and she lived to be over 100 years old. I remember the summer of 1936; lately on the TV they said that the temperature got to 114 degrees that summer. “We had terrible dry weather; there was no hay crop. Farmers chopped down trees so the cattle could eat leaves, and people from the hills had to haul water for livestock from the creeks in the lowlands. We lived near the Mazo marsh, and farmers came to the marshes to make hay; they stabled their horses and slept in our sheep barn. My mother fed the men. She made baskets of food and us kids carried them — and water — to the men at noon. The temperatures were burning hot. On August 21 my brother Louis was born. “I know later, one time I stayed home from school for three weeks to cut the short,

drought-burned corn by hand. You hate to miss school, but we cut a lot of the corn in the neighborhood by hand together. What they couldn’t cut with the ‘go devils’ [a horse-drawn sled pulled between the corn rows with a set of knives sticking out from either side] and the small binders, we cut by hand and put it in piles. Then the piles were hauled and put in the shed to have enough feed for winter. . . . You can only peel one potato at a time. . . . I guess it didn’t hurt me too much, missing a little school; I graduated valedictorian of my class [Arena High School Class of 1945].” — Marion Porter 

Ken Wittwer and his brother Earl, Helena, 1999

“People now, they don’t know what it was like, that rationing during the war. You had to have a stamp to get tires or shoes, you had to have a stamp to get red meat, butter, sugar, coffee. “I had a furlough and I come home and they told me to ‘Go to the ration board now ’cuz you can get a certain amount of stuff so you won’t be eatin’ your folks’ butter and sugar.’ So, you’d go to Dodgeville and they ask, ‘How many days are you home?’ and that’d be maybe a half a pound of coffee and a pound of sugar and one or two pounds of meat. “People went through their ditches and yards and they hauled junk to town for scrap iron for the war effort. It all got piled at the depot, right where the senior center is now. Toothpaste and tin cans were saved. In the fall the kids would go out and pick milkweed pods; the silk on the seed was used for flotation in life vests. “We did a good job raisin’ these kids today. They got good taste: T-bone steaks and lobster and all kinds. We had pickled pig’s feet and sowbelly. Folks used to fry down pork; you would fry it, put it in a crock and then keep it covered with lard. Then

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

141

Character and Characters

during the summer you’d dig the lard off and get a pork chop out, scrape some more lard off, and fry it, warm it up. And canned beef . . . Mother used to make the hamburger into meatballs like this, and would fry ’em and then put them in a two-quart jar and put the grease on ’em like that.” — Warren Hoyer  “You know during ’, that was really tough times. There was a man up here, shipped a [railroad box-] car-load of sheep to Chicago, didn’t bring enough to pay the freight. That’s how tough times were. “My mother would say, ‘Get a quarter’s worth of beefsteak.’ Now you may think that’s pretty insignificant, but that would feed a big family. That was about three pounds of beefsteak, eight cents a pound. “We always thought everything in terms of a quarter. I’d charge batteries for people, a quarter; I’d grind these silo-filler knives, some of them even an S-shaped knife — I could grind them buggers with a hollow grind for the big sum of a quarter. I imagine sometimes I put in an hour or an hour and a half for each knife. “But a quarter meant a lot of money. You’ve probably been through times like that. I was in Rochester [at the Mayo Clinic] just a few years ago, and the doctor saw a scar on my knee. He asked, ‘When did you have that happen?’ and I said, ‘When it cost $15.’ “Oh, man, I think I hired one guy for as low as $15 a month. To show you how times were, I had one man that worked for me, I think I was paying 67 cents an hour at that time; he’d lost his farm. But you see, when a man lost his farm he was pretty darn desperate. I bet you I probably hired 500 different people over the years and that guy turned out to be the best man I ever had. While I was giving him that 67 cents an hour,

142

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Ted Sawle, November 2000

he bought two houses in the city of Dodgeville on those wages. If you tell that to anybody today they’d call you a liar. The houses weren’t fancy, but they were the kind you could live in. . . . “In 1930 it was so dry we made hay on the marshes. Marsh hay was just about the worst thing you could imagine, had kind of a sickle grass, you know. We have a forty over by the Wisconsin River, and we put that whole forty acres of hay in one stack. . . . That was one heck of a stack of marsh hay. “That was an experience in itself, because that marsh has got bogs, and the old hay loader . . . you had all you could do to stand up, let alone pull hay out . . . that was a job. Well, about the only thing that would normally eat it was horses, but only if they were awful hungry. Then it come to the even drier years in the mid-’30s, and by gosh, men came all the way from Mount Horeb for that darn hay to feed to their cows. It was dry; no feed in the country. . . . They come after that darn old hay. . . .” — Ted Sawle  “On April , , the original farm house burned. My husband, Adolf, had gone down to Joe White’s cheese factory. I was in the kitchen with the two boys, who were up eating breakfast, when I heard this unusual roar — I thought it was a bunch of airplanes overhead. I went out the back door to look and I saw the mostly empty woodshed was a ball of fire . . . so that’s where the fire started — sawdust, spontaneous combustion — it was a very hot day. “So I had a moment to call the fire department right away. There were about 13 families on our party line, and of course everybody rubbered you know, back then; so a lot of the neighbors were up here even before the fire department got here.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

143

Character and Characters

“The fire department was able to save part of the house. They got their water from the creek down here. But evidently they had the pump hooked up the wrong way, because the water would pump halfway up the hose and then come back down. So that took a little more time to correct that. They carried out all of our furniture from the first floor and the basement; we didn’t have a very big basement. They couldn’t get to the second floor, so we lost all of our belongings on the second floor: a lot of keepsakes that belonged to the Abplanalp family, our baby furnishings, our bed and all of that. “We stayed at Adolph’s folks for about a month. We got tired of running back and forth, I guess, so we decided that we’d live in the garage. It was summer by then, and we stayed there into the fall. Well, then it was getting kind of cold so we partitioned a small section off and insulated it — it was an area big enough to hold a stove, refrigerator, freezer, two-three chairs, and two beds. So we stayed in the garage that winter. “The next spring, Adolph ran a crew on the farm to saw all of the lumber for the new house; Paul Swenson was on that crew. We worked on building the house through most of that year, but we were still in the garage the next winter. One morning in February we woke up and there was water under our bed; must have been an early, temporary thaw. Well, the house was far enough along that we decided to move in; we’d been in the garage for more than 20 months.” — Emma Abplanalp 

144

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

BARN F IRE: A CONVERSATION

Jean and Ron Berg at Berg farm auction, autumn 2005

Ruth Berg: “Hank had gone up to the Hennessey auction in Dodgeville that morning. He helped our son, Ron, with the milking that morning. Ron had to go to town as well. A neighbor lady driving past our farm saw fire through the cracks in the barn walls. She called me as soon as she arrived home and let me know that she had just called the fire department . . . that there was fire showing between every board in our barn. So I took the phone and walked over to look out the window at the barn. “And about that time, the top of the barn blew off . . . it would have been like if you dropped a watermelon and the stuff inside blew all over . . . it come out the roof just like that . . . it exploded! “After the fire, pieces of the barn were found 200 feet away. It was so overwhelming. . . . I saw the granary between the barn and the house, and then the LP gas tank, and the pine trees up here near the house . . . I feared the fire could reach here. It seemed like it took the fire department two hours to get here . . . but I don’t think it was five-six minutes till they were here. . . . I said, every time something awful happens, I’m by myself. . . . “It was so awful to know that some of the cattle were in there . . . the cattle that had been in the barn earlier ran back in! Some died in the barn and several others had to be shot because they were severely burned; others — including many of the calves — died later from smoke inhalation damage . . . it took about ten days for them to die. A few years before I was born, in 1928, my parents lost our barn to fire . . . it is always a tragedy.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

145

Character and Characters

Hank Berg: “Cows are strange this way; if their barn is on fire they’ll go back in there . . . they are used to being in there . . . that’s what happened. The fire marshal said that we should be thankful that none of us were there in the mow, because it went up in an instant. “We had to salvage what we could of the cattle, to try to sell the injured cattle [as kill cattle at a salvage price] before they died on the farm. We called the stockyard in Dodgeville . . . it was stockyard day, a Thursday. I’ll never forget all of the trucks that came . . . they didn’t even know us. They hauled all of those cattle out that were still alive. There was people here from as far way as Fennimore, Lancaster [several hours’ drive away] with stock trailers. Farmers helping farmers . . . they did what had to be done.”  “Then I remember when things got so tough . . . people would come out from town to get milk, but they couldn’t pay for it. You could get someone to work for you, for milk or other food. My dad hired a family for $15 a month, a room upstairs, meat and potatoes.” — Grant Jones  “ was the year of the worst drought after the ’30s . . . the only year I didn’t get a corn crop off of this farm; there wasn’t any ears on the corn, just wasn’t enough moisture to make an ear. We chopped all the corn stalks, put it in a pile and fed it out of the pile. The cows ate every handful of it.” — Frank Schlough

146

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“Through all of my earlier days, money was very scarce. I can remember we lived primarily on chickens, squirrels, and rabbits. And Mom baked bread every other day. I still have a little record book that my grandpa used to keep . . . they’d sell a cow for a cent a pound. My dad bought this farm from his parents on a land contract; the payment was only $40 per month . . . a lot of times the milk check wasn’t $40.” — Del Bryant  “I wouldn’t change much, if I could, on what we’ve done. We went through a hell of a lot, hard times, but we enjoyed a lot of things too. Growing up, I always thought money was the answer to everything . . . and it’s not.” — Sonny Porter  “In our neighborhood, there wasn’t a single family that didn’t have some kind of a tragedy at some time in their lives. Three teenaged boys drowned [Dick Forseth, Douglas Harrington, and Ronald Meise], Thomas McCutchin got lockjaw, and Frank Schlough was lost on the highway; all in their teens. It was the saddest community. . . . “Most of my bosom friends are gone now. Elnora Forseth was one of my best friends. She went through a lot of heartache, but took it like a trouper. . . . She said, ‘Life goes on, Vivian.’ I said, ‘Yes it does.’ I guess it’s all in attitude.” — Vivian Dodge 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

147

Character and Characters

“In , on September the 13th, my father was gored by a bull. Two of my brothers, John and Jim, two and four years old at the time, come running in to the kitchen shouting, ‘The bull’s got Dad!’ They had been watching through one of the barn windows. So, Mother and I [16 years old] and Bud [13 years old] rushed out. There was Dad, the bull had gored him and broke his leg so bad that the bones come right out through his pair of new blue denim overalls. “Bud ran right in the barn beside the bull to get a hold of Dad; Mother and I helped pull him up over the mangers . . . the bull took another wham at Dad, but we had him just out of reach by that time. But just think, what if he’d taken at Bud . . . but he wasn’t obsessed with Bud, he wasn’t after Bud, he was after Dad. Well, that ended my dad’s farming days for many years, he was in and out of the hospital. “We moved to town. My dad got seasonal work [summers] in the Barneveld Swiss cheese factory. I can remember the day Dad come home and threw the checkbook on the table, and he said, ‘Here, you kids can play with this now, there’s nothing in it.’ “Well, those were experiences, but we really didn’t realize we were poor. Everybody was the same. We might have been a bit poorer, because we didn’t have mattresses; the only thing we ever had was straw ticks. I think you could have found mattresses in most every home. But we didn’t care; we had a nice big, high tick when we had fresh straw after thrashing each summer! “We never made a lot of money, we made an existence, could pay the taxes, support the [Mounds Creek Methodist] church once in a while, and be a part of the community life. What more do we need? We come in with nothing and we’ll go out with nothing.” — Helen Knight 

148

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

149

AFTERWORD

T

hrough the voices in this book we have gained a glimpse at understanding

the values, the social relationships, and the character traits that allowed a rural American community not only to survive but to thrive. And if what we have glimpsed is relevant today — and I believe that it is in the deepest sense — may we muster the foresight to foster these lessons and the willpower to honor this wisdom. This book holds dear the notion that celebration of community, a community of people and the land that sustains us, is vital — essential! — to the survival of our culture. As I think about the span of time and the lives represented by the voices in this book, multiplied by everyone like them in rural communities across America, I can’t help but be overwhelmed by the profound manner in which they did their best to safeguard our local world and way of life for succeeding generations to cherish and enjoy. In peace. As a free people. The choice is now ours: whether we choose to cherish and uphold their tradition along with the new . . . whether we choose to listen to and continue to learn from their voices . . . and whether we recommit to finding and fostering the values and the behavior that sustained and nurtured us in the past.

150

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

NARRATOR BIOGRAPHIES Emma Abplanalp Abplanalp farm, Amacher Hollow May 27, 1918–April 26, 2007

“In the middle of the ridge field there used to be the best sweet apple tree; and those apples’d be about that big! The field was cropped, but we’d go around that tree; it was a good-sized tree. I don’t know the name of the apple [variety], we just called it a sweet apple.” — Emma

Emma is the only “voice” in this book who moved to Arena from farther away than a couple of hours (by car, not horse team). She grew up on her family’s farm in Lake Benton, Minnesota, but met Adolph Abplanalp in 1936, shortly after she graduated from high school, when his family — Swiss immigrants to Amacher Hollow — was visiting friends near Emma’s childhood home. Emma graduated from normal school (a one-year course) and took a job teaching all eight grades in a country school near her family’s home. After Emma and Adolph married in 1939, Emma moved to the Abplanalp farm and never left. The couple raised two children there, Leroy and James. For years, they farmed with horses until they eventually bought a tractor — first a Ford, then an Allis. They milked up to 36 Holsteins and pastured pigs and sheep on the woodland pasture portion of their 420 acres. Emma is known and loved for her many years of community leadership with the Coon Rock 4-H Club. Adolph died in 1976, too soon in a long life, but Emma continued to live in her home on the farm. The world lost a compassionate, gracious, and truly civic-minded soul when she passed. She is loved and will be missed by all.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

151

Rodney and Christine Anding Anding farm, Coon Rock b1946 and 1950

Narrator Biographies

“I have pictures of my grandfather up the valley with a team of horses and I’m wondering what he must have been thinking when he was tilling the ground. . . . Oh, if the land could talk, tell us what those before us thought, what they were doing when they were here. . . . The land has a calling for me.” — Rod

152

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

In 1995 the Anding farm received the Century Farm Award, marking 100 years of continuous family ownership of the farm. Both the Salzman (Rod’s grandmother) and Anding families emigrated from Germany and settled in the area. Rod was born the last of five children to Roy and Lorraine Williams Anding. The family farmed and milked 27 dairy cows. Roy served on the Iowa County Soil Conservation and local school boards most of his adult life. Lorraine was from Ridgeway, just down the road from Arena, and was a teacher at the Coon Rock School, a one-room schoolhouse located at the end of the Anding farm driveway. Naturally, Lorraine met Roy, and within a couple of years the two were married. Rod was trained in industrial education at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville and taught school from 1969 to 2000 — he says he taught through five decades — most of those years in the River Valley school district. In addition to running the family farm and teaching, Rod raises draft horses for parade and to show in the Arena Draft Horse Plowing-Planting Days, an event he initiated. Rod is also a founding member of the Coon Rock Yacht Club, possibly the only dry-land yacht club in the world. Christine is from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and earned her degree as a registered nurse at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She and Rod met while she was in school, and they were married in 1971. Chris has helped on the farm and worked as an RN in the area ever since. The couple raised four children on the Anding farm, Roy, Gwen, Wade, and Becky. Roy, named after Rod’s father, is taking over the farm and represents the fourth generation to do so. Rod says that the trick to good teaching, like good farming, is to tie the old to the new.

He says, “The students humbled me with their appreciation, but when you have students as I did, who have roots and family, it sure makes it a lot easier.”



Henry and Ruth Berg Berg farm, Blue Ridge b1930 and 1932

“For the next nine days we very seldom saw a bed, ’cause we went from one farm to the other in the neighborhood to get the cows milked. It took a couple of hours at each farm . . . twice a day.” — Hank, about helping neighbors during the ice storm of 1976

Albert and Johanna Berg, Hank’s dad and mother, emigrated from Norway in 1904 with his oldest sister and settled in Hollandale, Wisconsin. His father was an experienced railroad worker, and at that time new railroad tracks were being built across Iowa County. His mother was very knowledgeable in the use of herbs and helped many families as a midwife and caregiver for infants. When the railroad work was completed, his parents began farming in the Meadow Vale community of Arena. His father built a log house with a tin roof and a basement made of quarried stone. This is where Hank was born and raised, and he recalls it was “quite a place to sleep when it rained!” He remembers that the horse barn, cow barn, chicken house, and hog house were all made of logs, with sod roofs that never leaked. Hank was the youngest of seven, with three sisters and three brothers, but only two stayed on the farm ahead of him: Einer, who was born with a crippled foot, and Milo. Hank’s father — heartbroken when Milo was recruited into the Army — died when Hank was 12, and his mother died of poor health when he was 23.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

153

Narrator Biographies

154

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Hank had been a successful baseball pitcher in high school and was invited to attend a New York Yankees tryout. He says of the experience, “Well, it would have been fun to do this, see where you went, but I was needed at home on the farm . . . so, you gotta make the decision. A couple of years went by, Ruth and I got married, and she took care of Mom. So at that time, baseball kind of got lost.” Ruth, one of the four Wittwer siblings, was born to Alfred and Sarah Aebly Wittwer, both of Swiss descent; Ruth’s oldest brother, Kenneth, is also a “voice” in this book. Alfred Wittwer came to America in 1906, at the age of 16, to the Monroe, Wisconsin area and worked for farmers before joining two of his brothers in the woods in northern Wisconsin. He came to Arena in 1914 and bought a rough sand farm along the Wisconsin River, where only a granary stood (previous owners had lost the farm to the bank and burned all of the buildings, a common occurrence). Alfred moved into the granary, where he lived alone for a number of years while he farmed and, during the winter, cut the timber for the barn and home off the long island in the river. Ruth recalls that her dad always said, “Every young fellow should batch! That way he will appreciate his wife.” Sarah Aebly was a farm girl from the Monroe area as well. One of seven siblings, she attended school through the ninth grade. She was also a very good seamstress. Ruth recalls that her mom was an important part of the farm. In addition to helping with the milking twice a day, she “canned vegetables, took care of the chickens, traded eggs for groceries, made ‘new’ clothes out of old clothes — kids’ clothes from adult sizes — and kept an immaculate home.” Hank and Ruth were married in 1951. Hank says, “Ruth married me for my money, and I married Ruth for her money; and we’ve been lookin’ for it ever since — for more than 50 years.” They raised two children, Jean and Ron — Ron returned to the farm. The couple has lived through — thrived throughout — the good and the tough

times: the 1988 drought, loss of family, a 1994 barn fire, and recently, Hank’s heart attacks. He tells us, “At the hospital a nurse asked why am I here . . . and I said, ‘It was either heaven, hell, or Meriter [Hospital in Madison] . . . so here I am!’ They treated me just great. Now I’m here with moss on four sides, two stents in my heart, and a pacemaker . . . not much good for anything anymore, except memories . . . ‘Old Hank.’” 

Tony Brickl Wittwer farm, Helena b1917

“We didn’t work hard, just steady. . . . We didn’t have any rocks in the fields in the creek bottom, we had too much sand . . . the sand ate up the rocks. Now, where the farms are gone, the brush is so thick you can’t even chase a dog through it.” — Tony

Tony was born and raised dairy farming along Honey Creek in the Town of Franklin, a few miles north of Arena, on the farm that his grandfather purchased in 1904 upon emigrating from Germany. While serving in Europe in World War Two, Tony married an English woman. When the war ended, she decided not to follow him back to the farm and remains in England to this day. Now more than 90 years old, Tony does chores for Gary Heck out on the Wittwer homestead (see Kenneth Wittwer, Helena, below). He feeds the beef, the rabbits, the chickens, and hogs. He says it takes an hour in the morning and an hour at night. He also helps with butchering the animals for meat. He says, “We do everything but the smoking; we don’t have that rigged up yet.”

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

155

Delbert and Marie Bryant Bryant farm, Knight Hollow b1929 and 1936

Narrator Biographies “I wasn’t from a farm, I was raised in the city; but I enjoyed farming, particularly the cows. We milked together; I prepped the cows and carried milk pails, fed calves.” — Marie “Country people said, ‘It’ll never work; you never bring a girl from the city out to a farm.’ We’ve been happily married more than 50 years.” — Del

The Bryants’ maternal family roots trace back to the Roberts family, who emigrated from Wales and settled at Mounds Creek; paternal forebears came from Germany. Del’s grandparents, originally from Germany, moved from Sauk County and bought the farm in Knight Hollow in 1908. Del says, “Well, actually, Grandpa bought the farm and Grandma wouldn’t talk to him for months because all there was down here was rocks. . . . She didn’t want to live on a rocky farm. When Grandma got here she continued her baking, she liked to make mincemeat pies. She put them in the cupboard and the rats ate all the mincemeat out; so that didn’t help her get settled here either.” Marie’s family, Baumann, is from Madison and Richland Center. The couple met at a dance in Madison and were married in 1955. Marie laughs that she “couldn’t boil water” when she first came out to the farm and that she still has her original Betty Crocker cookbook with pictures. Marie and Del raised the fourth generation of Bryants on the farm — Janis, Bill, Dell, and Lori — all instrumental in the farm work growing up. Del’s humorous stories and Marie’s exceptional cooking are enjoyed by all. 

156

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Alice Crook Meyer farm, Coon Rock b1914

“I had a reputation for being a pretty good farmer myself. . . . I just loved that place, I just did . . . and I have loved my life. My dad was the best old guy, and my mother was just a sweetheart. I think about it sometimes. I think ‘What a wonderful life.’” — Alice

Alice’s father, Nick Meyer, a full-blooded German, purchased the farm at the top of Coon Rock Road in 1909. He married Mabel Boylen, full-blooded Irish, from down in the valley in Mill Creek. They raised eight kids on the farm; Alice was third in line. She says, “I had 75 cousins; I knew them all by name and really visited and knew them.” Alice married Virgil Crook (d1986) in 1934 and together they raised 11 children on the Meyer farm — JoAnn, Edward, Donna, Marie, Albert, LeRoy, Duwayne, Marilyn, James, Howard, and Melvin. Alice and Virgil built and ran a grocery store at Clyde for a few years before moving to, and eventually purchasing, the Meyer family farm. The 11 Crook kids went to the same school their mother did, the Hogan country school just down the road. Alice said she liked school but didn’t get to graduate because her mother was sick with pneumonia and she was needed at home; she made certain that all of her children had an opportunity to go on to college. 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

157

Robert Demby Railroad worker, Arena b1918

Narrator Biographies

“The Arena School had a bell up in a steeple, with a long rope. . . . The rope hung down in the girls’ cloak room and we’d drag a table underneath and put chairs on the table; then the big kids would make the little kids climb up and put a knot in the rope so the teachers couldn’t ring the bell.” — Bob

Bob’s grandfather Demby — then Dinby — emigrated from Ireland during the 1850s potato famine and married Ida Gernhardt, from Germany. They settled just southwest of Arena in the Knobs area, where the towns of Arena, Ridgeway, Dodgeville, and Wyoming all come together. According to Bob, Grandpa Demby used to say that he had land in four different townships and had to pay taxes in all of them. Bob’s father, John, was born on that farm, and he and his siblings lived and worked with other families in the area for room and board. John eventually met and married a Welsh girl, Jeanette Lloyd (no relation to Frank Lloyd Wright’s family) from Arena. In 1918 they had twins; one died in infancy from the flu epidemic, and the other, Bob, survived. Bob worked for a time in the Dane County Health Care facility, where he met his wife, Lois Knight (no relation to Helen Knight, also a “voice” in this book), from Birchwood, in northern Wisconsin. She was a medical technician there at the time, so Bob likes to joke that he met his wife in an asylum. Shortly after that he started working in the freight and ticket house for the Chicago and North Western Railroad. Lois and Bob were wed in 1944 and were married for 54 years before she passed away in 1998. They raised two children, Janet and John. 

158

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Vivian Dodge Dodge Valley farm, Mill Creek b1918

“We didn’t have horse doctors in those days, and things would happen. My older brother loved Dexter. . . . He always got home from school before we did because his legs were longer, and he’d ride Dexter. Well, one day when we got home he said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, but I don’t want you to cry . . . Dexter died.’ And he started bawling like a calf. . . . There were sad times. . . . But I think living on a farm and seeing the calves born . . . and seeing your lovely, loved animals die makes you know what life’s about.” — Vivian

Vivian’s parents met in Mount Horeb. Her mother’s family (Anderson) came from Norway and settled in the area. Her father’s father (Smith) came west from Pennsylvania and got as far as Mount Horeb when he broke a wagon wheel, looked around, and bought a farm. The Smiths were married in 1911 and moved a couple of years afterward to a farm on Blue Ridge, in Arena Township, where Vivian was born. Theirs was considered a large farm, with 36 cows, a gas-powered milking machine that worked some of the time, and a brick silo. In her early years, Vivian taught school for more than a decade at the one-room Mounds Creek School, with 36 students in eight grades. In 1940 she married Gaylord Dodge, and they bought the old Eddie Smith farm at Mill Creek, where they lived for 50 years until Gaylord passed away in 1988. In that half-century, they raised two children, Gayle and Joan, and grew most of the family’s food in a garden Vivian loved. 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

159

Elaine Drachenberg Drachenberg farm, Mill Creek b1945

Narrator Biographies “In 1972, my husband Ron contracted Hodgkin’s disease. He was hospitalized, and I went into Madison nearly every day. I was pregnant at the time with Thad. Talk about neighborhoods . . . Eric and Dale were young boys. Ron’s parents and neighbors would take care of those kids. Men would come over here and help with the chores, clean the barns for us, help put up the hay . . . it was so meaningful, so humbling. It still makes me cry.” — Elaine

160

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Elaine’s father, Arthur Anding, was born on the first day of the twentieth century on a farm in Arena Township. Her mother, Lorraine Guell, came to Arena from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to teach school. The two were married in 1939. Her husband Ron’s grandmother emigrated from Germany in about 1911 with her children when her husband died after an exploratory visit to America. The children, including Ron’s father, were “farmed out” to families in the Arena area to labor in return for room and board. In 1963, Elaine graduated from River Valley High School and Ron graduated from the University of Wisconsin, and the two got married. They started running the dairy on Ron’s parents’ farm in Hyde, immediately south of Arena, as well as the original family farm in Arena. They eventually consolidated the operation, moving to the Ted and Hazel Bawden farm adjacent to the home farm, and also buying the adjoining Demby farm. Elaine and Ron raised three sons: Eric, Dale, and Thad. Their first son, Eric, and his wife, Jan, now represent the fifth generation on the original farm. Before the children came, Elaine worked in Madison, at American Family Insurance and the Wisconsin Department of Public Welfare, then helped on the farm. Later, she worked for the Arena School District and then River Valley High School, for more than 26 years. The family lost Ron to pancreatic cancer in April 2004. These days, Elaine enjoys seeing her grandchildren arrive by bicycle to help her in her garden; and she holds dear the words of Proverbs 28:19: “He who works his land will have abundant food.”

Thomas and Diane Forseth Locust Valley farm, Coon Rock b1949 and 1949

“I hauled the rock off my ridge and dragged it across Rod’s field; I tried to miss some of the corn. It sure took out the weeds. It’s a stone-age cultivator and a good tool for sustainable agriculture. . . . So we called it Coon Rock Rock and it’s an historical hysterical monument. . . . It was actually pushed to the surface by the high nitrate level in Rod’s groundwater.” — Tom

Tom swears that both he and Diane (Rickey) were born on their birthdays . . . and when he married (1976), it was to an older girl . . . Diane was born in February and Tom was born in October. The Forseth and Rickey families were from the Dodgeville-Ridgeway area, a little to the south of Arena. In 1951, Tom’s parents bought the 400-plus-acre farm at Coon Rock “on the county courthouse steps for $17,000.” Tom’s great-uncle Potterton had homesteaded near there in the 1850s. Tom is one of six siblings. They lost their father, Leslie, in a tragic death in 1960. Brother Dick drowned the next year (at 17), along with two friends. Dick had planted locust saplings in the wet bottomland that spring before the accident (locust make extraordinary fence posts that last forever). Years later, those locusts were thriving in the valley and Tom and Diane’s first-born, Matt, as a memorial to an uncle he never met, came up with the name for the farm: Locust Valley. In the same year they were married, Tom and Diane started managing the family dairy farm, and had their first of four children. The siblings, in addition to Matthew, who is taking over the farm, are Leah, Lauren, and Leslie. The farm has been run organically since the mid-1980s. Tom said he had to learn a sense of humor to survive: “I realized that most of what people worry about and fight over doesn’t amount to anything.” Tom’s mother, Elnora, a longtime “famous” pasty maker and 4-H leader loved by all, passed away in 2003. At her funeral there was music and storytelling. Tom says, “The humor almost got out of hand . . . it truly was a celebration of life. Many people came up afterwards and said, ‘That was the best funeral I was ever at . . . don’t take it the wrong way!’” RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

161

Steve and Linda, Tim and Joannie Harrington Roberts and Harrington farms, Mounds Creek b1949, 1949, 1956, and 1957

Narrator Biographies “When I was a little boy, waking up at the crack of dawn in the summer, everything was quiet and still. I could lie in my bed and hear Howard Linley north of us on his little Ford tractor down in the pasture to bring the cows home; you could hear him as clear as a bell. You could hear the Orcutt brothers’ chickens cackling, three-quarters of a mile away, roosters crowing; and Frank Sheehan calling his pigs to feed them, clear as a bell.” — Steve “All those farms around . . . now we’re the only ones left. We run bits and pieces off of what were at one time 13 operational farms . . . all families that made up a community.” — Tim

162

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Steve and Tim are two of six siblings; the balance are sisters. Steve is married to Linda Moe from Mazomanie, and they have three children: Kelly, Meegan, and Colin. Tim is married to Joannie Sprecher, from a farm family near Spring Green, and they have two children: Amery and Alex. James Harrington, Steve and Tim’s great-great-grandfather, a miner, left Queenstown, County Cork, Ireland, with his wife and four children in 1844 at the onset of the potato famine. The family came to the southern part of Wisconsin to the lead mines. Soon thereafter, James went back to Ireland to settle the estate but passed away before his return. His wife and children stayed and worked in and around the mines. In 1863 the youngest of the four children, Cornelius (b1836), moved to Mill Creek and worked for a McCutchin. He married Edmund Lawton’s daughter, Johanna, from Pinnacle Road in Arena Township. They saved up enough money to buy a farm in 1870; a few years later they sold the first farm and bought another farm, in Mill Creek, which is now the Paul and Judy Swenson farm. In 1923, Cornelius’s son, John V. Harrington (Steve and Tim’s grandfather), bought a farm in Mounds Creek, the farm the brothers were raised on. John married a Sweeney girl, Margaret, who grew up in the southern part of Arena Township on Sweeney Road. Grandpa and Grandma Harrington had six children. The only son, Jack, father of Steve and Tim, married Eileen Zwettler, from just down the road at Pine Bluff. Steve says, “None of the Harringtons went too far to find a bride.” Tim adds, “They only went till the tongue hung out on the horse; that was far enough.”

In 1966, the Harringtons also acquired the nearby A.O. Roberts farm, where Steve lives now. Their father, Jack Harrington, whom the priest called “a character” at his funeral, passed away in 1992; their mother is well and lives next to the farms. Steve and Tim are of a long line of practical jokesters and storytellers, and they are the originators of the (locally) famous Mounds Creek Social Club, which meets once a year in their freshly swept machine shop and is comprised of any neighbor who wants to play cards, jawbone, and receive a grilling every now and then. Steve says no one has ever been turned down for membership, of course.

“I got started in the purebred business when I was in 4-H when I was ten years old. We were the Dover Dashers. I have loved working with the cattle. My wife, Claribel, is an animal lover. She didn’t want to part with any of the dairy cows; she’d have a terrible time when we had to sell a cull cow.” — Richard “I loved the cows, I didn’t love milking. I still cry about them once in a while. Don’t ask me about the land. People ask, ‘How many acres do you have?’ I know how many cows we milked.” — Claire



Richard and Claribel Hottmann Hottmann farm, Dover b1935 and 1938 Richard’s great-grandfather, John Hottmann, brought his family to Arena from Germany in the 1850s, and he became a blacksmith. They were the only family in Dover who spoke German, as it was a community settled by the British Temperance Society. It was his son — Richard’s grandfather — who purchased the current Hottmann farm in 1903. Richard’s father, another John, married Janette Harrop, whose British family was one of those that homesteaded in Dover in the 1840s. Richard, an only child, was raised on the family farm as well. He says, “I’ve been farming since I was born.” He graduated with 17 classmates from Arena High School, and took the University of Wisconsin’s Farm and Industry Short Course in 1953–54.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

163

Narrator Biographies

Richard recalls his high school ag teacher predicting a food shortage and telling his students, “Some day you guys will be the boss; they’ll have to have food.” Richard observes, “We’re still waitin’.” And he recalls all too clearly the day in 1947 when a crew arrived on the farm to spray DDT to kill flies in the barn; the activity startled a work horse. Richard, 12 years old, attempted to control the horse and was kicked and dragged and nearly killed. Claire (Knutson) was from Clinton, Wisconsin, and met Richard on visits to Arena to see her older sister. Claire and Richard were married in 1960 and have raised three girls: Patti and Laurie, and Suzi, who lives on the farm. 

Warren and Laurel Hoyer “ You knew everybody’s business, pretty near, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. . . . One morning the phone was jinglin’ and Laurel grabbed it; a bull had a man down on the Hickcox farm. It wasn’t only a few minutes there were about ten farmers there with pitchforks and everything.” — Warren

164

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Hoyer farm, Hillside, Wyoming Township b1921 and 1925 In 1867, John Hoyer, Warren’s paternal grandfather, journeyed from Pilsen, Germany, to New Orleans, then traveled north, working on railroads, until he bought farmland near Libertyville, Illinois. Warren was born there in 1921, in the same back bedroom where his father, William, had greeted the world in 1880. This blessed event inspired a proud William, who was thrashing at the time, to blow the whistle on the steam engine until the steam ran out. Warren’s maternal great-grandfather, Alexander Philip, came from Scotland by way of Canada to Wyoming Valley, where a son was working for the Lloyd Jones family (ascendants of Frank Lloyd Wright). He is buried at the Wright Hillside Chapel, just

to the east of the present Hoyer farm. His great-grandfather’s two uncles owned farms just to the west of the present Hoyer farm. Warren’s grandfather moved the family to Mineral Point and he worked in the mining industry. But his son — Warren’s father, William — wanted to farm. So in 1938, when Warren was in high school, his father and mother, Florence (Philip), moved the family of three boys to the Hillside area of Wyoming Township, a stone’s throw from the Arena town line, and purchased the present Hoyer farm. Laurel’s family, the McClays, lived just up the road to the west side of Wyoming Township. She and Warren met on a blind date. Warren was a B-29 bomber mechanic during the war, while Laurel worked at the munitions plant in Baraboo, Wisconsin. They married in 1945, while Warren was on furlough. After the war, Warren and Laurel resumed farming, milking cows and raising pigs. In 1960, Warren also became Spring Green’s postmaster. Laurel and Warren had three children: Larry and Robert, and their first-born, a daughter who lived for but a few precious days. 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

165

Grant and Sarah Jones Jones ‘Tuscarora’ farm, Arena January 25, 1924–September 29, 2006 and b1927

Narrator Biographies “The best smell in the world is in spring, when you go out and get that fresh dirt turned up. . . . It has a smell all of its own. . . . There used to be a lot of farms between Dover and Arena: the Sawles, the three Jones farms, the Pfankus, the Clark Hottmann farm, Gene Hottmann, and Lester Hodgson. We used to all thrash together, and now it’s all houses. Once we lose the country we lose everything.” — Grant

166

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

In 1954 Grant was driving a tractor on the highway between the three Jones farms when he was hit from the rear by an automobile; he was thrown from the tractor and run over by an oncoming car. He was on life support for five days and survived, but with lifelong disabilities. But the injuries did not stop him from continuing to do what he loved doing . . . farming. Grant’s great-great-grandfather, John T. Jones, came from Wales in 1841 at 75 years old; he brought the entire family with him, including Thomas Jones, who was to become Grant’s great-grandfather. The family was among the original European settlers in the region. Thomas married three times; his third wife was Frank Lloyd Wright’s aunt. Two rows in the Town of Barneveld cemetary (previously a part of the Town of Ridgeway) are descendants of these Joneses. Thomas moved to Arena in the late nineteenth century and in time purchased three contiguous farms. Grant says, “I was born in the house on the Jones farm across the road; my father was born in the house on the Jones farm next door. I’ve been in this house on the third Jones farm — the Tuscarora Farm, which means ‘Rushing Waters’ in Welsh — for the past 80 years.” The barn, built in 1916 by Ed Lloyd, a preacher from Arena, remains a work of art. Sarah’s family name is Frame; she says it’s Scotch-Irish, but crossed with Swiss and Norwegian as well. Her family farmed at the very foot of Blue Mounds, at the head of Blue Mounds Creek. Grant attended college at UW-Platteville, and then returned to the farm. He and Sarah met at a wedding dance in Black Earth, married in 1950, and then took over the

farm they are on, where they live to this day. They have raised three children: Mike, Connie, and Penny. Grant also worked for Northrup King Seed Company and L.L. Olds Seed Company, and served as director of the State Bank of Black Earth. Grant is loved and will be missed by all. 

Helen Knight Knight farm, Knight Hollow b1922 “Uffda . . . we had a lot of hardships; we were so poor we couldn’t hardly pay attention. But we existed; we sure had a lot of family love . . . and a real good bonding. . . . But we really didn’t realize we were poor. Everybody was the same. We might have been a bit poorer, because we didn’t have mattresses. . . . I think you could have found mattresses in most every home. But we didn’t care; we had a nice big, high tick when we had fresh straw after thrashing each summer!” — Helen

Helen was born in 1922, the oldest of nine children. Her parents, Ted and Ida (Olson) Swenson, were from Norwegian and Swedish families that had settled in the Barneveld area, south of Arena. She grew up on a 40-cow dairy farm and started helping in the barn when she turned seven, hand-milking the cows along with her five-year-old brother, Bud. “That took all of our life,” she recalls. Helen graduated from Barneveld High School in 1941, and began doing housework at the Knight Farm in Knight Hollow. The Knight family had originally come to the area with the British Temperance Society in the mid-nineteenth century. One of the sons, George Knight, bought the present Knight home farm in 1900, and his son, Burdette, was born there. Helen and Burdette were married in 1946. Helen and Burdette milked Guernseys, instead of the more common Holsteins, for the higher butterfat content and hoped-for larger milk check. They exchanged help with Burdette’s brother Harland and neighbor Dale Pope, but hired no help until Burdette’s emphysema slowed him down. Burdette passed away in 1993. RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

167

Dean and Betty Lucey Lucey farm, Knight Hollow b1927 and 1932

Narrator Biographies

“I loved the farm as a whole. When I was in high school I made up my mind I was going to farm . . . you’re your own boss . . . if somebody stops by and you’re on an eight-to-five shift, you can’t stop and visit with them . . . but when you’re farmin’ you can take time to visit.” — Dean

Dean’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Sharratt, came from England with his father (his mother had passed away) in the 1860s as a young boy. They joined extended family on the Sharratt farm in Dover. Joseph worked herding neighbors’ cattle in the surrounding bluffs, and by age 14 he was working on farms in the Mineral Point area. Just a few years later, at age 18, he met and married Ida Cocking from that area, and the couple moved back to Arena Township and bought a farm at Knight Hollow; Dean’s mother, Jenny Sharratt, was born on that farm. Dean’s paternal grandfather, Daniel Lucey, was an orphan who served in the Civil War. The family thinks he was on an “orphan train” to Milwaukee, but can’t be certain. Around the turn of the century he purchased what is now the family farm, also on Knight Hollow Road. Dean’s father, Ernest, was born there. Dean’s parents met and married in Mazomanie, and Ernest gained a reputation as “the world’s worst farmer,” although he excelled at truck gardening. Betty’s grandparents (Steensrud) came from Norway, but she was a “town girl,” born and raised in Mazomanie. Betty and Dean married in 1949. She wasn’t keen on farming, but Dean coaxed her to move to the country, to the same farm his grandfather had worked and where his father was born. Betty and Dean raised five children there: David, Tom, Beth, Bruce, and Jodi. The oldest, David, farms part-time on Mill Creek. 

168

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

“I never went on a vacation . . . I didn’t know what one was. I was grown up before I ever saw Madison [now less than an hour by car].” — Merven

“Dad and Mom have always helped us. Dad, he was cleaning barn yet at 89; he raked hay, about six acres, at 90. Mom, she was doing the milk dishes for the milker buckets until she was 85.” — Carol “We were raised up Amacher Hollow and went to school at Mill Creek. At that time, in the early ’50s, all the kids were from dairy farms; all except one family [Dickinson], and their parents worked in the cheese factory. . . . I guess it’s a love of the land; it’s something we’ve always done . . . so we keep on doing it.” — Ruth “I never left the farm. It is something I always wanted to do. I was fascinated from the start. It was born or bred in me. I can remember, like from three years old, out watching the sows . . . the baby pigs.” — Jerry

Merven, Carol, Ruth Gerald ( Jerry) and Deborah Nelson Pfanku farm, Mill Creek and Nelson farm, Amacher Hollow March 2, 1914–December 29, 2007, and b1949, 1950, 1955, and 1957 Between them, the Nelson family owns and operates three farms in the township — the Pfanku home farm along Mill Creek, the Nelson home farm on Amacher Hollow Road, and part of the Abplanalp farm. Conrad Pfanku, great-great-grandfather of siblings Carol, Ruth, and Jerry, came from Germany to buy the Pfanku farm in 1864. Their father, Merven, was born there in 1914. Carol owns it now and lives there with her sister, Ruth. They represent the fifth generation of the family on the farm, which has always been offered for sale to the oldest child of each generation. In addition to working full-time at the Dane County office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency, the two women keep an 80-head herd and milk 36 without hired help. The farm’s original 120-acre configuration remains essentially unchanged, Carol points out, except for a power-and-telephone right-of-way. The Nelsons came from Norway in 1869. Merven’s father, Henry, purchased what is now the Nelson farm in 1915. Merven grew up there, along with two brothers, Burdette and Leonard, and a sister, Grace. He married Mary Pronold (1914–2001) from Wyoming Township in 1947. Jerry bought the Nelson farm from his parents in 1979 and farms there now with his wife Deborah (Scanlon), originally from Plainfield, Wisconsin. They have raised five children on the farm: Karl, Karyn, Kirsten, Kaitlyn, and Kristopher. Karl has plans to take over the Nelson farm business. Merven, one of the last of the true “self-sufficient” individuals, devoted his entire life to his family and the farm. He was patron number 30 at the Mill Creek Cheese Factory for 75 years. Merven is loved and will be missed by all.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

169

Dale and Lillian Pope Pope farm, Ray Hollow b1924 and 1927

Narrator Biographies

“I loved the land; I still do. I didn’t run tractors, though. I was asked to be Dale’s wife, not his hired man. Dale milked; I fed calves and washed the milkers.” — Lillian

170

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Dale’s ancestors were all Welsh, related to the Reeves and Gorst families who first came to Dover in the 1860s with the British Temperance Society — Dale says he thinks they got involved with “smashing up bars and things like that” — and moved to Mazomanie when the train station was built there instead of at Dover. The Popes arrived later, from Nova Scotia. Dale notes that, “My great-grandfather was 99 when he died. He outlived three wives and then chased the housekeeper away . . . I bet she didn’t have to run too fast.” Dale’s maternal grandfather was a Smith from London; his wife, a Dodge, was a distant relation to Governor Henry Dodge. Both sides of Lillian’s family — the paternal Bragers and the maternal Thorsruds — came to the Town of Vermont, immediately southeast of Arena, around 1860. A self-described “purebred Norwegian,” she was raised on a farm with “seven-and-a-half ” siblings (one a half-brother). Dale was born next door to the farm where the couple lives now, the farm he has lived on since he was four. Their paths first crossed in a Cross Plains bowling alley in 1945, Dale in his sailor’s uniform and both with other dates. Lillian got Dale to ask for a date by hitting him over the head with her purse; the couple was married soon after that. Dale remembers, “When we used to go down to vote . . . might just as well have stayed home; she’d vote one way and I’d vote the other.” “Well, I made a voter out of him,” Lillian counters, “because he didn’t dare let me go alone . . . he had to go and cancel me out. He’d tell me how to vote on the way down, but it didn’t work.”

The Popes celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in 2006. They raised four children on the farm: Scott, Charlie, Vince, and Sondy. Sondy, the Wisconsin State Assembly representative from the 79th District, kindly wrote a foreword for this book. 

Clarence and Marion Porter “ You can only peel one potato at a time.” — Marion

“Another thing about people, some people influential, some real common people; you’re kind of all the same if your word is good.” — Sonny

Porter farm and Porter’s Restaurant, Arena b1930 and 1928 Sonny says, “I’m quite a rounder . . . I’ve always lived around Arena.” His parents, Ray and Geneva Porter, bought their 200-acre farm on the sand prairie near Mill Creek in the early ’40s for $3,000, the price of “a rusted-out car” today. Sonny was raised on this farm; the family milked cows and raised crops for the truck garden market. Marion’s father’s family, the Carpenters, built barns and silos in the area for generations. They specialized in round barns, several of which are now on the Historic Register. Marion’s mother, originally a Hankel, lived to be more than 100 years old and raised nine of her own children plus six more who were orphaned. Her father, John, had an arrangement with area banks whereby the family would occupy repossessed farms, live on them rent-free while fixing them up, and then move on to the next farm. Marion remembers the fall of 1945, her senior year in high school, when lack of rain caused the corn to be so short that machinery couldn’t cut it. Everyone took off school for three weeks and helped pick all the corn in the neighborhood by hand. Despite missing school, she graduated as valedictorian of her class.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

171

Narrator Biographies

In 1962, Sonny and Marion stopped farming and got into the restaurant business for the next 37 years. When they both were nearing 60 years old, they established the soonto-be-famous Porter’s Restaurant at their home in the Village of Arena. The restaurant became a favorite gathering place for the folks from town and the township — and far beyond — through the next decade. The couple took care of Sonny’s parents as they became ill — his mother contracted cancer at 52 years of age and died shortly thereafter. His father, Ray, lived with them for an additional 31 years and enjoyed visiting with restaurant patrons up until his death at age 82. The couple raised three children: Gary, Ray, and Tom. 

Harold and Ruth Pulvermacher “I was born on this farm; I continue to sleep every night in the room where I was born.” — Ruth “All our neighbors, six or seven families — Hogans, Eleanor Forseth, Ed Campbell, Swensons, the Pine boys — you go to them for anything, or they come to you for anything. If you’ve got it you’re going to give it to them.” — Harold

172

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Campbell farm, High Point b1925 and 1928 Ruth’s great-great-grandfather, Tracy Lockman (b1822), came from Cazenovia, New York, in the mid-nineteenth century and purchased a farm near the north end of the hill known as High Point (on High Point Road). Her great-grandfather, William, and father, George, were born on that farm. Just before George went off to World War One, he bought the 80 acres where the Pulvermachers live now, still known as the Campbell farm. Ruth’s mother, Evelena Poquette, and her family were from Mineral Point, some of them lead miners. The Poquettes later moved to Arena, where Evelena taught at the Helena School and met George; they were married in 1922. Ruth was the youngest of three siblings and never knew her mother, who died weeks after her birth.

Harold’s forebears came from Germany to settle in Roxbury, near Sauk City, Wisconsin, where his parents, Conrad and Mary, and uncles had farms and lived into their late 80s. He met Ruth at a dance in Black Earth in 1947, and they married two years later. They’ve been on their farm for nearly 56 years and have four children: Carl, Nancy, Sue, and Julie. Nancy and husband Keith Maxwell’s youngest son, Kallan — along with his wife Kaydee Schmitt and young son Andrew — is operating an organic grass-based dairy farm on the Paul and Judy Swenson farm on Mill Creek. Kallan’s heart is in farming, not born into it but “grown” into it through love of the land and with the guidance of the Swenson brothers, Dean and Paul. 

Carl Pulvermacher Clark, South Dakota b1951 “There’s no compromise. In your heart, you have to believe that ‘This is the way I want to farm and I cannot imagine farming any other way.’ I don’t think I’ll ever do it any other way.” — Carl, on farming organically

Carl was raised farming in Arena Township with his parents Harold and Ruth Pulvermacher; he also worked for the Swenson brothers, Paul and Dean. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Platteville and sold feed for a few years, but says he got “stuck on farming” and soon set out to build an organic grass-based dairy in Bear Valley, about 15 miles away. He has since moved to South Dakota where he continues to farm organically. The only “voice” in this book who was raised in the township and has since moved away, Carl is a very good friend of mine and a great storyteller. His character and values

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

173

were shaped to a great extent by the other narrators in this book, and so I have included some of his story here as well.

Narrator Biographies



John and Charlotte Roberts Roberts and Son General Store, Arena August 26, 1913–January 22, 2008 and b1921

“The kids would come up to the store at noon and they’d get their drink and treat to eat with their sack lunch from home and then they’d come and pay me; they’d tell me what they had. I don’t think I ever lost a nickel. . . . They were the greatest bunch of kids.” — John

174

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

I spoke with John in 2004, the day after his 91st birthday. He said he “officially” quit playing golf on his 90th birthday, but had played about four or five times this year. He said he had lost a dental filling on his birthday, but didn’t think the dentist would cut him any slack on the price. And he also said when his wife, Charlotte, wished him happy birthday he replied, “Well, the best part of it is having you with me.” John and Charlotte have been married 60 years. The Roberts clan came from Wales with nine children in 1846 as part of the British Temperance Society. John’s mother’s side, the Sharratts, also came from England. In 1914, John’s father, Robert Lee Roberts, purchased a half-interest in Reimann and Hamilton, the general store in Arena, going into partnership with George Hamilton. His father also drove the local ambulance — his station wagon — and served as area funeral director; John says that his family would have starved in those businesses because there just weren’t a lot of people around yet. So the store was open six nights a week, and the entire family, including John’s mother, brother, and sister, would help out. John graduated from high school in 1931 and scrambled for work during the Depression. He did road work and sawed lumber before landing a job with Kroger’s

on the Square in Madison. He worked full-time for two years while he attended Madison Business College, and then took a job with Oscar Mayer. He enlisted in the Army in 1942, and after the war the Oscar Mayer office job no longer appealed. In 1947, John met Charlotte in Madison, where she worked for an investment firm, and they married that same year. In 1948, they bought George Hamilton’s half of the store, which then became Roberts and Son. The couple had six children: Bill, Mary, and Susan — and then seven years later ( John blames a trip to Niagara Falls) three more — Gene, Rich, and Jim. John’s outlook on life: “Enjoy everybody you meet; be as happy as you can be; be satisfied with what you have. I never made a lot of money, but I’ve been able to enjoy things. People used to have more time. Now everybody is in a hurry, it seems like; they’ve got a lot to do and no place to go . . . end up the same way.” John is loved and will be missed by all. 

Theodore Sawle Sawle Rosevale farm, Mounds Creek b1905 “I figure I put in about 30 years of farming, about 30 years logging and saw milling, and 30 at the grist mill. . . . I just kind of enjoyed things.” — Ted

No one embodies the spirit of the voices in this book like Ted Sawle, centenarian from Mounds Creek. Ted is a living legend and legacy, a gift to our culture. His stories, including his family background, are presented at intervals throughout the book.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

175

Frank and Donna Schlough Schlough farm, Dover b1933 and 1935

Narrator Biographies

“I can remember when my grandma died here [in this house], the house was full. People would come — not for the funeral — but just to come be with each other. My father died in this house, as well. Usually the wake was held at home. The funerals were at the church, but they’d all come back to the home [of the deceased] for a meal afterwards; the neighbors’d put that on.”— Frank

176

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Frank’s great-great-grandfather came to the area from Prague, Czechoslovakia, to escape the kaiser’s draft. The family farm was located right where the settlement of Dover had been situated, before the residents all moved to Mazomanie when the train track and station was sited there. His first purchase, in 1876, was the old Dover Hotel, which he divided in two — one half became the farmhouse and the other half was moved and converted into a barn for milking. Then he expanded the farm to 250 acres by buying lots from residents as they moved to Mazomanie, as well as larger land purchases in the area. In addition to farming, he started a local brewery and a furniture factory, and traveled to sell the furniture. In 1898 he sold the farm to Frank’s grandfather. That same year, Frank’s father, Roy, was born, in the old farmhouse (as was Frank). A newer barn (1905) and farmhouse (1936–37) were built using stone from a quarry on the farm. Designed by an architect from the University of Wisconsin, the house was built by a mason who had learned his trade in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Frank’s mother, Mildred Thudium, was German, her ancestors “old Yankees” from upstate New York. Some had been participants in the Revolutionary War. The family moved to Wisconsin in the late nineteenth century and settled on “a son-of-a-gun of a rough farm” south of the Village of Arena, which became known as Thudium’s Hill, where Mildred was born. Frank had six siblings, all born on the farm. Frank met his wife, Donna Peterson Swenson (the Petersons were an Arena family; the Swensons a Madison family with no relation to other Swensons named in this book), while they were both attending Arena High School. Frank went on to complete

the University of Wisconsin–Madison Farm and Industry Short Course, married Donna, and was immediately drafted. He was sent to New York City and stationed on the old 1930s World Fair grounds, where the Mets ball park is today. Returning home in 1956, he doubled the size of the barn and increased the milking herd. Donna and Frank are now farming with their daughter, Jean, and son-in-law Kallen Schwartz. In a tribute to his wife, Donna, Frank says, “She was able to do a man’s work, and always did; everything I’ve been able to accomplish in this world I owe to her.” Frank and Donna have two children: Jean is half-owner of the farm; Frank Jr. was lost in a tragic automobile accident in 1976. May he rest in peace and know that his life is honored and cherished. 

Dean and Jan Swenson “I was so excited one time that I got up at one o’clock at night and headed for the barn; I thought it was five in the morning.” — Dean “I love seeing cattle walking in the pasture . . . getting exercise . . . they are healthy. I love the land, the beauty of the place.” — Jan

Upsome farm, High Point b1938 and 1938 Dean graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Platteville with a degree in Agriculture Education, trained to teach high school agriculture and biology. During college, he worked summers and weekends on the family farm; in return, his parents paid for his education — $48 a semester for tuition, with books furnished. Although he contemplated other agricultural careers, he decided to give teaching a try and taught at Arena High School for two years, Autumn 1960 through Spring 1962. Jan was born and raised in Madison. After earning an undergraduate degree in music from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she relocated to California and

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

177

Narrator Biographies

played the French horn professionally for two years, but was unable to teach music in that state without a master’s degree. She returned to Wisconsin and took a teaching job in Arena, where she met her future husband. Dean and Jan were married in 1961, and moved to Athena, Oregon, in the summer of 1962 because Dean had heard there was a shortage of agriculture teachers in that part of the country. He taught there for three years before deciding that he really wanted to farm, not teach about it. The couple moved to the family’s Upsome Farm in 1965. Jan recalls that “Dean was like a changed person! He was so-o-o much happier, much more enthusiastic and much more energetic. His latent desire to be on the farm had been so deep and so strong it must have been overpowering. But, of course, I didn’t know all of this when I married him.” Although Jan was skeptical at first about country living, she came to love the life. And she was able to continue teaching (she earned a master’s degree in Music Education in 1978), performing as a professional musician in the Madison Symphony Orchestra (French horn; 1956–80), and leading community musical and theatrical productions in Spring Green and Arena. Together, they raised three children — Dee, Pam, and Doug. Dee lives on the farm and helps out, and also raises calves for Kallan and Kaydee Maxwell; Doug raises much of his household food at the farm. Dean and Jan had one of the first organic dairies and, later, one of the first grass-based dairy farms in the state, and they have served as mentors to countless young people over the years who have had a desire to get started farming. See additional Swenson family history in Paul and Judy Swenson, below. 

178

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Paul and Judy Swenson Cornelius Harrington farm, Mill Creek b1934 and 1941

“Dad was always an advocate, said that farming up here in the Arena hills should just be grass farming. Then I came along and I thought, I’ve gotta have 40 acres of corn; and Dad would just shake his head. . . . He would raise hay and buy his corn. So, this sustainable thing went back another generation, it wasn’t just our generation. . . . That’s the wisdom of your parents becoming more prominent as time goes on; you realize Dad was right.” — Paul “I came from the city. I began to be in love with just being out on the farm, it was comfortable . . . I was comfortable. I liked the smell of hay, I liked the smell of the plowed dirt . . . Paul showed me how to do things, many things. I could drive any machine that had a steering wheel, as well as milk cows, plow and disk, and plant corn.” — Judy

Paul told me, “I never ever really wanted to do anything else . . . I had a passion for farming.” He earned a certificate through the University of Wisconsin–Madison Farm and Industry Short Course and served in the Army. Then in 1956, after he started courses at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, the family purchased more land and he came home to farm for good. He is one of three siblings, along with Lois and Dean. Their father, Kenneth Swenson, grew up in Hollandale in the southern part of Iowa County, and met and married Inez Heggestad from Blanchardville, the town nearby. Both families were of Norwegian descent, but Inez had some German heritage and Paul says that his dad never let her forget it. Ken and Inez moved to Arena Township, to the farm on the top of the hill at Coon Rock. Their three kids were raised there, and Dean and Jan live on that farm to this day. Brothers Dean and Paul married two sisters, Jan and Judy Webber, city girls from Madison. Paul and Judy met each other at Jan and Dean’s wedding in 1961; both in the wedding party, they were assigned to walk together arm-in-arm down the aisle. About a decade later the two started to go together, and were married in 1971. Jan and Judy’s parents’ families, Earl and Dorothy Statz Webber, were both from Madison. Judy says that at one time she and her sister “might have had part of a silver spoon in their mouth,” as their grandparents owned an entire city block in downtown Madison and some additional land near the Cherokee Marsh . . . but they lost it all in the Depression. So (without inherited wealth) she and her siblings were always working; she had a work permit at 14 years old.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

179

Narrator Biographies

“We never had a written contract with any of our patrons; they could switch factories any day, and we could stop picking up their milk any day. This was back in the days when your word was worth something. In 65 years, we had only one we had to stop picking up his milk and only one who decided to ship somewhere else.” — Jerry

180

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Judy started college, but didn’t finish because of a job opportunity. She also loved to ride horses (which she had to rent at urban stables) and was comfortable with large animals and barns. These things, and always being considered a “tomboy,” she says, made it easy to adjust from the city to the farm. In addition to her work on the farm, Judy was employed for many years by the State of Wisconsin and University of Wisconsin–Madison in administrative work. Shortly after Paul and Judy wed, they purchased the original Harrington farm in Mill Creek, raised three children there — Jeff, Paul, and Ken — and live there today. They have managed the farm as a grass-based (grazing) organic dairy since the 1980s. The farm is now operated (with an option to purchase) by Kallan and Kaydee Schmitt Maxwell; Kallan is the grandson of Harold and Ruth Pulvermacher, son of Keith and Nancy Pulvermacher Maxwell. The young couple praise Dean and Paul for their role in allowing them to get started farming. The Swensons were all born and raised with a sense of decency and community spirit that is legion. 

Gerald and Linda White Cheese makers, Joe White and Son Cheese Factory, Mill Creek b1932 and 1937 Joe White, Jerry’s father, grew up on the White family farm a mile from the cheese factory at Mill Creek. He and his father (of English and German descent) hauled milk down to the factory with the team just after the turn of the century when it was an old

Swiss cheese factory. That factory burned down in the 1910s. It was rebuilt and began to produce American (cheddar) cheese. In 1917 Joe White married Vera Lampman, also from Mill Creek, and went to work at the factory in 1919. The couple bought the factory in 1923. In the following years there were as many as seven cheese factories in the Township. Joe and Vera made cheddar cheese continuously for 59 years until Joe died, in 1978. Jerry could almost be considered a “born cheese maker.” Despite his father’s avowed wish for him to follow a different career path, there is a picture of the cheese factory on the company’s 1933 patron’s calendar with a sign that reads, “Joe White and Son”; Jerry was less than a year old. Linda (Van Coulter; her family of Belgian descent from Plain, Wisconsin) joined the business when she and Jerry were married in 1954. She worked right along with Jerry, and says she drove (milk) truck, hauled cheese, and washed the separator. Linda and Jerry raised four children together, all daughters: Patricia, Jean, Peggy, and Vera Lee. The number of Mill Creek Cheese farm patrons maxed out at 59 farms in the 1970s, all within a 10-mile radius; Jerry remembers his dad wouldn’t go by another factory to pick up a patron because he didn’t want to hurt the other factory. Jerry and Linda made cheese until 1984 when they sold their factory to John (Randall) and Mary Pittman, who continue to run the business today. 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

181

Kenneth Wittwer Wittwer farm, Helena July 4, 1919–January 19, 2006

Narrator Biographies

“I went to Helena School till the eighth grade, hardly that. I liked it when I could flirt. I was doin’ a man’s work [on the farm] when I shouldn’t have been, I guess. I had pretty good strength — buzzin’ wood, farming. And I was wilder than billy heck.” — Ken

182

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

The world recently lost a true character in Ken Wittwer. He was one of the last survivors of the final “self-sufficient” generations. See additional family history under Henry and Ruth Berg, his brother-in-law and sister. The Wittwer farm is on the sand prairie along the Wisconsin River; combined with the “old Howery place,” this made a big farm operation for the days when Ken was growing up and farming 640 acres and milking 60 cows. Ken never married. Ken remembers growing up when Arena was “just a bunch of horses tied up on a railing,” and a good horse brought more money than machinery. But his sand-prairie farm wasn’t worth much: “A buck or two an acre in the ’20s; sold some in the ’70s for $150 an acre; we had to do a lot of talkin’ to get that much.” He was born to parents Alfred Wittwer, of Swiss descent, and Sarah Aebly, and farmed with them and his brother, Earl. The Wittwers improved their sand farm along the river through soil conservation, planting trees as windbreaks, and irrigation. He took pride in being the first in the area to build an airboat — the first on the Wisconsin River. He was a welder, mechanic, woodsman, and all-around inventor. In the 1950s, he developed the first irrigation system in the area, a tractor-run fan to blow mosquitoes out of his garden, and an airplane engine with a propeller to blow flies off of the cows and cool down the barn. When rows of windbreak trees along the highway were threatened by a highway expansion project, Ken invented the first tractor-powered “tree spade” and carefully moved the trees to a place where they could continue to serve their important function of soil conservation.

Ken was a very kind and pleasant man whose way of life was to take his time and enjoy the atmosphere surrounding the river with friends and family. Ken is loved and will be missed by all. 

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

183

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

o all of you who gave of your time — to help edit my often cryptic first-draft

transcriptions — and of your privacy — to tell me your stories to share with a greater world — I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart. I always knew I would care very much for all of you, but I wasn’t prepared for the inspiration of your character — the absolutely noncoveting way in which you live and the satisfaction that you derive from the engagement of family, community, good work, and the adventure of living. You have demonstrated your dedication to nurturing these relationships, and you have recognized that we are lucky if we are blessed with the opportunity to create such richness in our lives. And you all encouraged me — as I pulled out my tape recorder and plunked it down on the kitchen table — whenever you said, “This should have been done years ago!” A triad of influences in my life gently and subtly encouraged me to put this book together: my parents, Richard (Dick) and Margaret (Marnie) Cates; Charles Bradley and Kim and Dick Cates, 2003

184

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

Nina Leopold Bradley (Aldo Leopold’s daughter); and Edward and Margret Klessig.

My parents’ teachings have roots in the Jeffersonian ideal that prizes the role of the small landowner in the workings of a democracy and the safeguarding of our freedom. My father, descended from a farm family in Maine, taught us — and lived the belief — that the highest office in a free land is a free human being. By their own example, my parents also taught us the importance of listening. In 1967, my parents purchased a humble farm in Wyoming Township. This is the farm that my wife, Kim, and I continue to live on and run today, the home where we raised our three children: Shannon, Eric, and Peter (deceased). For Christmas in 1967 my father gave me a copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, shortly after the author perished helping a neighbor control a brush fire. Leopold penned, “That land is a community is the basic concept of Cates family farm, 2006

ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.” That statement has become an inspiration for much of my life and for the manner in which my family operates our farm. I met Charlie and Nina Leopold Bradley in 1980, at the beginning of my Ph.D. work in soil science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and a sharing in the love of land and the natural world. A portion of my three years of field research was conducted at “The Shack” on the Leopold family land. Charlie served as a member of my dissertation committee, and I embraced him as a mentor and dear friend until his passing on May 18, 2002. I met Ed and Margret Klessig when I first visited their family farm in Manitowoc County in the early 1990s to learn about the rotational grazing system they had recently set up for their 400-cow dairy. They talked to me about their love for the family’s land,

Peter, Shannon, and Eric Cates, 1988

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

185

which was settled in 1850 by Ed’s great-grandfather from Saxon, Germany. Ed remembered Aldo Leopold with fondness as one of his instructors during the winters he attended the University of Wisconsin in 1938 and 1939 and recounted how deeply influ-

Acknowledgments

enced he was by Leopold’s teachings. The extended Klessig family embodies Leopold’s land ethic and everything that is precious about a family farm; together they have all inspired me. In 2004 Ed and Margret received the Wisconsin Farm Family Stewardship and Citizenship Award, a special tribute for their lifetime of love and care for the land and their community. The world lost an indomitable spirit with Ed’s passing on December 13, 2006. I want to thank so many who gave of their time and talent to assist me in so many ways. I extend my gratitude to the heroic readers of my drafts — Jerry Apps, writer and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Dave Cates, writer, Missoula, Montana; Dave Rozelle, writer and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Richland Center; Randy Jackson, assistant professor of grassland ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Joan Sanstadt, editor of AgriView newspaper in Madison. I am greatly indebted to Nany Ravanelli of The Guest Cottage, who believed in me from the start of this project and helped shape the book through its many drafts. Thanks to Michelle Nommensen, legal secretary with Gingrass, Cates, and Leubke in Madison, for her diligent and patient transcription assistance in the early phases of this

Margret and Ed Klessig with Kim and Dick Cates, 2004

project, and to Robert Murphy, chairman of the Town of Arena, for making available historical documents on the history of the village and township of Arena. To my editor, John Ingham of Dodgeville, Wisconsin, longtime writer and editor for Lands’ End and other enterprises: I am so lucky to have met you. Your deep professional

186

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

wisdom and genuine respect for the voices of our book elevated the work into a coherent piece that gives dignity to our narrators and which I hope and believe will speak to generations that we will never meet. And most important, thanks to my dear wife and best friend, Kim, who gives the life of each member of our family meaning, excitement, and steadfast love.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

187

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I

chose to gather the voices of Arena Township for several reasons. First, the

township continues to be predominantly rural and significantly less affected than many areas in Wisconsin by the encroachments of urban sprawl, the second-home market, and the tourist industry. In the southern two-thirds of Wisconsin, “rural” has traditionally meant “farming,” and so the great majority of my voices are from farm families. I often had the opportunity to visit with descendants of the families that had taken part in the European settlement period in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Second, my family and I live and farm in Wyoming Township, immediately west of Arena Township. As such, I had developed long friendships and working relationships with several of the elders and was familiar with the wonderful reputations of some of the other residents. In short, the people of Arena Township and their sense of community inspired me, and I believed their collective story was important to share with the world. These good neighbors were patient enough to sit down with me and record their narratives long before I had anything solid to offer in return.

188

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

It was my hope from the outset of the project that if I could interview the Arena folks who knew me well, and if I could make the interview experience enjoyable and meaningful, then they might assist me to meet their friends and neighbors. It was my hope that they would bestow a confidence that my work was sincere and would be used toward an honest and meaningful purpose. As it turned out, this is indeed the way things turned out, and I found myself welcomed into the homes of otherwise complete strangers who openly and honestly were willing and grateful to share their stories. Sometimes my Arena friends would accompany me to interview someone I was meeting for the first time, and for this gracious assistance and belief in me I am most grateful. I started each interview by letting the narrator know my purpose: I wanted to write a book about community, the land, character, and the values that they hold dear. I asked each to simply tell their stories of growing up, working, raising a family, and being a part of their community. Most first interviews lasted about an hour and-a-half, with a range of recorded material of about 45 minutes to nearly two hours. I let each narrator know that I would take the material home, listen to it, transcribe it on paper, and send it back to them to read. I told them I would set up a second interview once they had a chance to review their narration, and we could go over the document together to add any additional material and make any corrections or deletions they requested. Once this process was complete, I asked each narrator to sign a release form that acknowledged they were giving me permission to use the material they had offered in my book; I provided each with a copy of the release form and their edited narrative. It should be noted that I could not type when I started this project. It was my plan to hire professional transcription assistance for the entire project, but I soon realized that RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

189

this would be an expensive proposition. So I began to learn to type and ended up doing almost all of the transcription and editing of the 34 cassette tapes myself, working the play-forward-rewind-pause buttons on the cassette tape with my left hand and typing a sentence at a time. About a year after I had completed the transcription work and the first draft of the book manuscript, I heard someone talking about a “transcription machine.” I inquired as to what it is and only then realized that I could have done the transcription work in a fraction of the time — if only I had known that there was a machine already invented that would have allowed me to manipulate the cassette player with my knees so that my fingers didn’t ever have to leave the keyboard! Once the transcriptions were completed, I began the long, slow task of choosing and grouping the material around topics and themes I thought were important. I selected the material I thought would add to the collective story. Throughout the process, I would continue to discover the appropriate context for yet another “stray” narrator statement. Eventually I sent a sorted draft to four readers with a request for suggestions about improving the organization. Their important observations were incorporated over a period of months and helped to make the book you hold in your hands today.

190

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

GLOSSARY

brucellosis. A bacterial infection, also called Bang’s Disease and undulant fever, found in various livestock, causing fever, arthritis, and spontaneous abortion in cows, and easily transmissible to humans. U.S. dairy herds are now tested yearly and infected animals are killed. chaff. The husks of grains and grasses that are separated from the seed during thrashing. check wire. At that time, corn was planted with a wire that fed through the planter with evenly spaced “knots” laid taut the entire length of the field; the planter was designed to drop a seed every time a knot fed through the seed mechanism. concave. A curved metal plate with teeth on its inner (concave) surface positioned adjacent to a rotating cylinder or drum on a threshing machine. When crop material passed between the cylinder and the concave, grain was separated from the stalk and seedhead. The replaceable concaves came with teeth in a range of sizes to accommodate a variety of grains. coulter. A sharp blade or wheel positioned ahead of a plowshare to cut the sod. dead furrow. Wide, ditchlike furrows resulting from two adjacent plowed furrows being thrown away from each other.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

191

farrow. To give birth to a litter of pigs. gangplow. Individual plow implements, each with one or two curved blades called “shares” or “bottoms,” were sometimes connected together side by side (ganged) in a frame to form a larger unit; in this instance, large enough to require the pulling strength of four horses. M-80. Made illegal in 1966, the M-80 was a popular explosive firecracker known as a “report,” equivalent to a little less than 1/8 stick of dynamite and originally manufactured to simulate gunfire in military training exercises. mustard plaster. Once a popular home remedy, a mustard plaster was a piece of cloth coated with a mixture of mustard and rubber and applied to the skin as a counter-irritant. piss cutter. Something remarkable. (The term may be used sarcastically.) sickle grass. Local name for a short, wiry grass or sedge found in sandy and marshy soils. silage. Plants for livestock food preserved through fermentation in a silo. waterway. A grassed waterway is a conservation practice that can reduce the soil loss that might occur down the valleys during heavy rains or snowmelt. windrow. Long row of trees or bushes planted at the edge of a field to serve as a windbreak.

192

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Richard Cates: pages iii, xiv, 4, 16, 17, 20, 23, 26, 27 (top), 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 44, 49, 53, 59, 63, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91 (bottom), 92, 93, 94, 96, 97 (bottom), 98, 100, 105, 111, 115, 118, 120, 128, 129, 136, 143, 148, 185 Wisconsin Historical Society: 7, 8, 54 Eric Cates: 13 University of Wisconsin Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems: 56 American Farmland Trust: 114 All other photos are offered for use by the “voices” in the book or their families. Some of the photos by the author, taken while serving the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection (DATCP) Sustainable Agriculture Program, are offered for use by courtesy of the DATCP.

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY

193

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Richard (Dick) L. Cates Jr., Ph.D., and his wife, Kim, co-own and operate the Cates family farm near Spring Green, Wisconsin, a managed grazing farm that has been in the family since 1967. The Cates family raises grass-fed beef and sells directly to restaurants, stores, and households. Dick is a senior lecturer in the Department of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches courses in grassland and agroecology. He directs the Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, a program for training and mentoring start-up farmers within the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems and Wisconsin Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. Dick serves appointments by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle to the Board of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection and by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Shafer to his Advisory Council for Beginning Farmers and Ranchers. He also serves as a member of the River Valley School Board and the Spring Green Lions Club. In addition, Dick works Dick Cates

internationally as a volunteer consultant with farmer-to-farmer assistance projects, most recently in Azerbaijan, China, Honduras, and Moldova. Dick counts his good fortune in the abundance of the farm, the love of his family and friends, and in the opportunity to determine one’s own destiny in a free and democratic country — an opportunity for which he thanks the people across America whose voices are represented in this book.

194

VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND