Later the rutabaga seedlings were hoed to free them of weeds. Dad sharpened the hoes so they cut easily. A horse drawn cultivator mulched the space between the rows. Mother or my sister guided the horse in front, and father guided the cultivator by two handles to keep it from going too near the precious ‘baga plants.

In the fall after school started, it was time to harvest. The horses were hitched to a wagon with a box made of planks. (This was the same wagon which hauled tons of rock that we picked off the same field in spring.)

It took a strong left hand to pull up the heavy ‘baga while the right held a homemade knife. With the right strokes it cut off the roots and soil that clung to them and the lush green tops and leaves. These were left in piles for the cows to clean up later.

When the wagon box was full, the ‘bagas were hauled to the basement window or to the barn to be stored in wooden bins. Rutabagas would freeze like any other vegetable and deteriorate. Toward spring the odor of sprouting or partially decayed ’bagas was quite unappetizing.

Cows could not eat the rutabagas whole, so the ’bagas had to be chopped up with a hatchet in a wooden wheelbarrow. Later Dad bought a “slicer” which saved time and made feed easier for cows to chew. The slicer had a hopper and a huge fly wheel with long knives or blades. As we turned the crank the bushel basket below filled with juicy cream-colored rounds. That was the job that waited for us when we came home from school. One cranked, one threw in the ‘bagas, and a third carried the basketful to the cows.

Cows loved and milked on this vegetable. We walked up and down with our broom to see that a “hoggish” animal did not steal from her neighbor. Some were smart enough to eat from another’s heap before eating her own.

Because we kids had few fresh fruits or vegetables in the winter, we liked raw rutabagas, too. What a treat when Dad cut a big one in half and scraped with his knife big heaps of tasty ‘baga for every open mouth!

Vieno Keskimaki

Box 113

Withee, Wisconsin

After having kept a diary for 45 years, it is interesting to look back and see where we have been and where we are going. These are just a few highlights from this diary of my father, Harry Kauffman, which he kept for many years.

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Harry and Emma Kauffman left Rolfe, Iowa, from (for?) a farm in Section 7, Fremont Township, Clark County. My Father rented two railroad boxcars in Rolfe, Iowa, to carry furniture and farm machinery in one car and four horses and 12 head of Holstein cows in the other. Also, he had to have enough feed and bedding to care for the animals for five days.

They arrived on March 10, 1920, at the Romadka railroad station in York Township. I came with my Mother a few days later on a train to Granton.

Neighbors helped Dad unload the cars and herd the cattle and horses through deep snow to the farm. The first summer my Father cut up 40 rods of oak rail fence with a buck saw for firewood and replaced the fence with the “Weld that Held” woven wire fence.

In 1922 Dad bought 400 pounds of dynamite that the government released for farm stumping of new land. This was quite an experience to see four pounds of dynamite under a tree stump and to view the aerial display of mud and debris after the fire-off.

In the mid-twenties there was an abundance of birds and Dad and his friends hunted many times for their limit of five prairie chickens per day.

Then there was the fall season when it rained so much. Men wore high boots to wade the mud in order to cut corn with a corn knife.

In 1927 Dad bought a new Maytag washing machine with a gas engine that made the washing of clothes easier. Later he put on an electric motor and Mother used this machine until 1976. We still have this machine and gas engine which we want to donate to the Clark County Historical Society.

In 1929 Dad bought a 4-door model-A Ford from the Braun Ford Company of Loyal, Wisconsin. I remember the thrill of riding home in our new car. I still have the car and have an antique license for it. It is in fine condition and I occasionally drive it in parades.

The roaring twenties, with the coming of moving picture shows, prohibition and “liquor stills” on farms were over and the sad thirties began with a bang,. The bank closings left many farm families without finances. The “depression” began, and farm prices for milk, pork and beef, dropped drastically. Dad sold hogs for four cents per pound and beef sold at six cents per pound.

The summers brought very hot and dry weather. I recall many forest fires in the southern part of the country and smoke covering the sky for many days. Pastures dried up and some farmers shipped their cattle to northern counties to rented pastures. One time we cut down 30 basswood trees, one a day, to feed our flock of sheep. In 1936 we had the coldest winter ever recorded in my diary. The coldest spring was 1976.

Mother made soap in a large iron kettle outdoors. Dad and I cut pine stumps to keep the fire going. I stirred the soap until it was ready to set. It was left in the kettle, and the next morning it was cut up into pieces and laid on boards to dry. This same iron kettle was used to boil water when we butchered hogs. We still have the kettle.

We also had a cream separator which we used to separate cream from milk. I remember helping to turn the separator at the rate of 60 revolutions per minute. Mother made our own butter and some of which she sold.

We used the walking plow to break new land and later the sulky plow with three horses. Both of these plowed a left furrow, a rare type of plow.

In 1938 electricity was brought to our farm and we put away the kerosene lamps and the task of cleaning lamp chimneys. The gas engine also became obsolete.

My sister Leone and I walked almost a mile to attend Heathville School. Our children, Michael, Jean and Kathleen, also attended here. Heathville was the first school in the town of Fremont. It was built in 1873. In the early 1960’s many of the rural schools closed and were consolidated into city school systems.

The 1940’s brought World War II and many changes in the life style on the farm. This was the period of ration stamps for meats and canned foods, and of gas rationing which slowed down many cars and cut out unnecessary trips. We learned to walk and ride bicycles and horses to town.

More modern and practical farm machinery came into being in the late 1940’s and the use of the threshing machine and hay loaders were drawing to an end in favor of grain combines and hay balers, also silo unloaders and barn cleaners.

The black topping of county roads took place in the 1950’s. Many farmers changed from shipping milk in milk cans, to holding milk in bulk tanks. Now in the 1970’s, many small farms are again being absorbed by larger farm operators; consequently, the family type of farm is fast disappearing.

In 1959 we built our home. My son Michael and I cut and sawed 12,000 feet of pine logs from our woods for the structure. Walter Moldenhauer sawed the logs into lumber and Freeman McHone planed the lumber.

During my 56 years on this farm, I have found 24 arrowheads and 10 oxen shoes.

We are proud to be farmers who live close to the soil. Farming hasn’t been easy, but we shared the good times and the “depression” and the droughts and the hard rains with our families and neighbors.

God has been good to us in this land and in this, our bicentennial year, we give thanks for the freedoms that we have enjoyed and pray God will continue to bless America.

Everett A. Kauffman

Route 1 Box 188

Chili, Wisconsin 54420

(Everett A. Kauffman is Chairman of the Town of Fremont and a member of the Board of Supervisors of Clark County.)

One fine autumn day twp little girls were walking home from their first grade classes at Longwood State Graded School when they saw a huge orange monster coming toward them. They were terrified, ran across the road, crawled under a fence and waited until “it” passed.

They escaped the monster, but one little girls caught her coat on the fence. (My friend doesn’t remember this encounter with a road grader. That is understandable. It occurred nearly fifty years ago, and she wasn’t wearing a new brown plaid coat that had been lovingly made by her mother.)

Several years later I had another rather frightening experience with a road-making machine. The road was being prepared for pavement, and some of the machines were parked in our yard. One evening a tractor caught on fire, after it had been parked. The men quickly scooped dust from the garden and put out the fire.

Other memories of the machines that maintained the road are more pleasant--watching the plows that cleared the snow drifts in winter and the graders that smoothed the surface in summer.

It was a footpath--then a trail through the forest wilderness--north from Neillsville, eventually to Withee. My grandfather, John McCarty, walked on it when he came to Clark County in 1867. He spent his first night in the County under an elm tree on the west side of the trail, about one mile north of Greenwood. The tree still stood in 1927, when he traveled the road from his farm home to Greenwood for the last time. My grandfather, Ira Barr, followed the trail from Neillsville to Greenwood in 1878, to Longwood in 1886, where he was the village blacksmith. He made his final journey to Greenwood in 1892.

The trail became a “tote” road--it was muddy in wet weather and dusty in dry weather--hub deep on the wagon or buggy wheels. As the years passed it was improved and became part of the state highway system about 1918. In the late 1930’s it was paved with a wide ribbon of concrete and had a smooth surface applied in 1969-70. It still follows, essentially, the original trail.

The part of the road that I knew the best is the mile from Longwood, south to “McCarty’s Corners.” I have traveled it on foot, with horse and buggy or cutter, and by automobile. I looked for wild flowers and strawberries on the roadside and for pretty stones in the ditch. Then I would have to run to catch up with my sister Violet, the school teacher. I had to stay close to her in the morning on the way to school because one farm had some geese that hissed at me.

The years flew by and became memories. I haven’t traveled the road regularly since 1940 but it is still the road that “takes me home” --State Highway 73.

Elizabeth G. McCarty

4164 Richard Avenue

Saginaw, Michigan 48603

Raising geese can be humorous as well as profitable. I was about thirteen when we got our first pair of geese. It was a warm day in March and the geese were just starting to lay their eggs. We took the geese home and they adapted to our farm very well.

Two days after we bought then, my father found an egg. For the next two weeks the goose laid an egg faithfully every day. It started to rain one day, so we built a shelter around the hen. She promptly broke up setting.

A neighbor told us that you never bother a setting goose. We were lucky to get another and left her alone. Then we got a hatch of six goslings.

As we found out geese are very protective. We had to walk at least six feet away from the nest or get attacked. One day I decided to be brave and face the goose. I wanted to see the new goslings. The gander was very cunning. So I didn’t know he was near. He came from behind and bit me in the back of the knees. As I fell, the gander started in for the kill!

A goose attacks with wings, beak and feet. I think this one had five of each! It took my father and brother to get him off from me.

We had another one that would ride our dog from the house to the barn.

You have to see and be around geese to know how much fun they are. What is more exciting than watching a gander protecting his goose and young at sunset!

Joanne Rose

Owen, Wisconsin

Many times I ran to the barn barefooted in the frost and snow. The men wore heavy boots and used a boot jack to pull them off.

Most farmers had oxen, men worked from six to six or daylight to dark on the farm. They made maple syrup and sugarpeeled hemlock bark to ship to the tannery.

There was a coal kiln where they burned wood to make charcoal. Folks took their wheat to the grist mill and brought home cornmeal and feed. They had horse powered threshing machines and a fan mill where they cleaned grain before planting or grinding.

Wild animals were thick around and fish in the rivers those days. Folks had logging bees and raising bees to help one another put up log houses and barns. The woods was full of wild flowers and berries, grapes, plums, cherries, hazel, beech and hickory nuts. We used to gather wild hops to make yeast and to make lye we had a barrel filled with ashes for homemade soap making. Milk was kept in stoneware crocks in the spring house.

But now we hid our axe in a hollow log and traded off our saw.

Jim Clark

Maple Plain, Minnesota

One effect of our country’s bicentennial year is to make us all a bit nostalgic about our own beginnings. My young daughter used to say, “Tell me about the olden times,” which would make me fell instantly ancient, but I would launch into one of many “I remember when ----.” It’s been some time now since she has asked, so for old times sake, let me reminisce with you.

I remember when in the spring of early 1900, my sister and I, with our parents, left the small summer resort town of Silver Lake in Southern Wisconsin. We left my father’s thriving carpenter business and all the comforts of a lovely home to go, in those days of the new century, to a new country and new beginnings. Just HOW new all of this was to be was a surprise, ending almost in shock.

How the real estate company of Blackburn and Bast ever contacted Dad, I never knew, but presumably money changed hands, and we were the proud owners of a 160 acre tract of wild land--and I mean WILD LAND--to which a so-called road had been carved, just four miles north of Withee.

Soon moving day came, with all the hustle and bustle of getting all of our wordly goods plus two horses, Bill and Nell by name, into the old Soo Line box car. The time of leaving I do not remember, but I do have a very vivid picture of our arrival in Withee. We had been directed to the Douphner Hotel across the Soo Line tracks, the first street north from the depot. Perhaps very few residents of Withee now living even recall the name of the hotel. We had no other home for many days, not counting this tract of wild brush land to which we would travel every day by lumber wagon as my father proceeded to build our house but only after he cleared the land sufficiently to make a space for the posts on which the house was to stand. Both of our parents worked very hard those days while my sister, Ella and I played with whatever we could find to amuse ourselves under the lumber wagon, so as to be in the shade. We would bring our dinner from the hotel each day and eat it picnic style under the lumber wagon. In this way we traveled back and forth from the Douphner Hotel and worked and played for many days until our new house was made ready to be lived in. I remember moving day and our furniture being hauled out to the house which consisted of one room. Curtains partitioned the bedrooms from the kitchen, and the windows also were covered with sheets to keep mosquitoes out until Dad could get the windows in.

I remember one night we heard an uproar in the chicken house. Dad grabbed his gun as he hurried out to see what was going on out there. A skunk had gotten into the chicken house and with Dad’s ignorance of the best way to go about killing a skunk, the skunk nearly killed us all with his smell. Dad finally got him, but I remember that he had to take off all his clothes and leave them outside. He had to stay out quite a while himself! For days we were almost unable to live in the house.

Then Dad had to start work on the out-buildings we needed. I remember the chicken house which he built right next to our house so that we could hear any disturbance if any animals should disturb the chickens. The chickens were for the purpose of providing us with eggs, but we realized that they could also offer fresh meat for any number of other creatures.

Bill and Nell were now living in a low shed, and this primitive barn was the scene of many of our adventures as children. Ella and I could always make our own fun. One thing we liked to do was to gather hazel nuts, which were plentiful in those days. We would spread them out on the roof of our “barn” which was low enough so that we could climb it easily. But then we realized that we were feeding the chipmunks too. How could we trap them?

We thought we had the problem solved. We would use an old birdcage, tie a string to the door, and put some feed in the cage. It worked! The first chipmunk we caught we were so delighted with that, we took it into the house to show mother. Of course, it got away from us and went tearing around frantically until it could locate the door. Mother put a stop to that sort of fun immediately.

I remember the many changes in our lifestyle as the days went on. Each season brought its special activity, from the constant berry picking in the woods to the strawberry picking along the roadside to the making of maple syrup. We tried everything!

I remember the holidays and most especially the 4^th of July, though not for any patriotic reason. Mr. Blackburn, the real estate man, had done his work well and talked old friends from near our hometown in southern Wisconsin into buying land about five miles from us. On each long-waited Fourth of July, we would hitch old Nell to the “Surry with the fringe on top” and off through the woods we would plunge on an old logging road to gather friends for the day….and what a day!!

Each of us kids had our separate little package of firecrackers, and we just wished that the day would never end.

Just how long we lived in our little house I do not recall, but it must have been a few years until Dad got started on the “big house” which was to be our permanent home. I do remember that was the year of the big cyclone which took the beginnings of the new house and also took our little house off its posts and set it onto the ground. Fortunately not one of us was hurt.

Yes, by this time we did have neighbors. Some stayed longer than others. Some expected an easier time and simply did not have the stamina to stay and live such a rugged life. One of those who left gave us an old horse. Not that we needed another animal, but they wanted to get rid of it before they left and they knew it would be fun for us kids to have our own horse. Dad dubbed him Old Columbus…..for what reason I never discovered. One day tragedy struck. Columbus turned up missing. We looked in vain for him and were about ready to give up when a neighbor from a short distance away came and told us that Columbus was caught in the mud near his place and could not get bout without help. When we got to him, only his head and back were still visible. Dad was tempted to leave him there, but Ella and I started to cry and he relented and went to get trusty Bill and Nell and a rope to get old Columbus on solid ground again---dirty but still alive.

Besides our “pets“---Columbus, Bill and Nell, there were the wild things all around us. We had skunks, porcupines, and the ever-present lowly wood ticks in abundance around our beloved Withee territory in those years. More mysterious and terrifying were the wolves that could be heard howling to

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