In 1924, Albert Zahn retired from farming, moved to Bailey's Harbor, and began building
a house from scratch in a very unusual style.
Why the house wasn't that style nobody really knows, but it's all poured concrete him and
his wife and when the kids would have had time, came and helped him pour the walls.
He made all the windows himself, cleaned down the wood, made the windows.
Since earlier, Zahn had built his own farmhouse, also with an unusual design.
He built stone fence pillars and placed a carved eagle above the front door and a deer
on top of the roof.
It was decorative.
Nobody else did that.
I remember hearing a story from somebody, even though this was a dirt road coming up
here, that people would come up the dirt road to see this house and the stone pillars
and things out front because it was so much different than anybody else would have had.
It was a dairy farm, he raised crops, he had cows and pigs and chickens.
All the things that a family needed to survive, he did not like killing things.
Even though that time in history you needed to butcher, he didn't butcher, either his
father-in-law came and butchered, and when his sons were old enough, they did the butchering
and he would go in the house, he didn't want to watch.
After he retired to Bailey's Harbor, he didn't have all the farm chores to do so.
He would sit alongside the wood stove and sometimes just pick something out of the wood
pile or the kindling alongside the stove and start whittling.
A gifted and very prolific woodcarver, Zahn began to populate his house with carved birds
and other creations.
So a lot of it was things that he enjoyed.
He really enjoyed birds, there was one story where after he was retired in Bailey's Harbor
he still had 20 acres where he could cut firewood and one of his son-in-laws would take
him there and bring him home and they walked, they went to pick him up one day and he was
sitting on the stump, coaxing the chickadee to sit on his finger.
He knew where there was an eagles nest, so the eagles were a big deal for him and the
rabbits and the fish and the deer.
And same thing with the soldiers and things from when he was in Germany.
This sort of started before he ever came to America when he was a child.
In Germany I guess one of his jobs were to tend the animals and I don't know if the animals
were necessarily always fenced in so somebody had to tend them and that's when he would
have started carving.
He was a very religious man so a lot of the things that he did would have been characters
out of the Bible and the angels.
After he retired things just as he would do it the house got fallen and started going
on the outside of the house and the local people in Bailey's Harbor considered him very eccentric.
But he didn't care that this was Albert.
Albert was never interested in painting so his wife did all the painting and I guess
at one point they even bought some small bird book or something so she'd have some
idea how to paint them but I think it wasn't so much what the bird needed to look like.
It was what they wanted it to look like.
The paint was just house paint.
The metal for the wings it wasn't like he went to the store and bought anything.
Some of the big pieces with bigger wings if you look real close you can see the labels
from the coffee cans.
He didn't have any fancy carving tools so he just used an axe a hatchet in his pocket
knife.
Well after he moved to Bailey's Harbor he still made a lot of his own furniture.
There were chairs with birds for backs and it's a very religious man so he had made what
was called a Bible box it was actually a small table with a door, a little door that would
open up where he stored his Bible and he could take the Bible out of the drawer and place
it on the table and he could read his Bible.
Door County always was a tourist area and people would be coming through and they would be
stopping in front of that house and looking at that house and finally they wanted to purchase
items from the house and first of all he really didn't want to sell it and his daughters
had all moved to Chicago and they came back and they said why don't you sell it you can
make some extra money or you're just doing more and more and that's how he started selling.
Without intending to Albert Zahn and his wife Louise opened one of the first art galleries
in Door County.
Small birds might have been ten cents, bird stands might have been five bucks.
As the gracefulness and simple beauty of his carvings became known galleries in Chicago
began to sell them.
And he was so prolific that there was enough of it that it has survived and thus it's made
us so collectible now I think that people can find it yet.
Considered one of the best examples of folk art or outsider art Albert Zahn's work can
now sell for thousands of dollars and is found in art museums across the country.
Some of them have ended up in the Guggenheim and Kohler out of Sheboygan in the Milwaukee
Art Museum.
Just recently somebody had donated some of them to the Smithsonian so they'll be in
Washington DC.
Albert Zahn's hand-billed home called Birds Park has also achieved national recognition.
Now restored the house has been added to the national register of historic places.