University Place  Richard Quinney A Farm in Wisconsin  May 21, 2013 UP878   cc >> Today we are pleased to introduce and host author Richard Quinney as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's bimonthly History Sandwiched In lecture series as he shares his personal knowledge of life on a Wisconsin farm. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Please join me in welcoming Richard to the stage as he presents the story about a few acres of land purchased in Walworth County, Wisconsin, in 1868, which became a 160-acre farm that went on to support and provide a rich background for the lives of the generations that followed. [APPLAUSE] >> I've been writing for years about this farm. A farm that I left in 1952 to go to college, and I couldn't wait to get away and didn't think I'd ever come back. Eventually I did come back after a teaching career at various universities and have been attempting to restore the farm, to keep it in the family, and to preserve it. Each morning, it's not each morning, but the mornings that I write, I often play a country song, and it's usually a melancholy song. It may be Bob Dylan in the folk genre or a pop song. But a song that puts one in a particular place. I then have to turn the song off because I can't write to the rhythm. 

You don't want to write to the rhythm of a song, but it's a way that I find that I begin writing about something that's important to me. Now, this farm I'm going to talk about in this book, "A Farm in Wisconsin" that brings it together-- I have written all of these books, one, two, three, four, five, six. Six of these also about the farm. How can one write so much about the farm? Well, if you listen to country music, you find yourself being able to write about the farm. Next point: at the county fair, at the Walworth County Fair this year, we were presented with a centennial award for the farm. The farm actually will be 150 years old in five years, but this was the centennial award. And we were in a little grandstand and I gave a little talk and we received our plaque. And I wanted to read my little presentation because it gives a summary about what the farm is about and why it's important to me. And then I want to end with a photograph back to the fair because the cycle of the farm would end with a county fair, in this case the Walworth County Fair held in Elkhorn, a very old fair. So here, we've been presented the award. 

This is what I say. Some time ago, long after the creation of the universe and the galaxy and a planet that would be called Earth, natives roamed this continent without claim to the land. Eventually, we, as immigrants from other lands, made the land our own. We cleared and tilled and farmed the land. We built our buildings, houses, barns, granaries, and sheds for livestock machinery. Four generations lived on this farm in Wisconsin. The farm was made of many families connected by marriages and births as it slowly grew during the years. Pioneer families of the county, the families Holloway, Bray, Wishart, Taylor, O'Keefe, Reynolds, and Quinney. And more than these families, there were the families surrounding the farm, families including Kittleson, Dutcher, Johnson, Duesterbeck, Olson, Williams, Jacobson, Keltner, Larson, Nelson, Scola, and Gies. These were the families and farms within the square miles of Sugar Creek Township that you will find on the plat map of the late 1800s and into the middle 1900s. 

The many rural schools and churches dotting the map served to make a community. It takes a community to make a family farm. Our farm of 160 acres was started as a few acres purchased in 1868 by our great-grandparents shortly after emigrating from Ireland. The farm, always a subsistence farm, survives after 145 years. Our father and mother reduced the amount of farming as they aged and as their sons left the farm. My mother rented the acres for 30 years after my father died, and then my brother and I inherited the farm in 1999. The farm survives intact, but it survives without the many things that once made it a family farm in a community of farms. Survives, for the time being, as land for a sustainable agriculture. A consumer supported vegetable operation occupies a good portion of the farm. We've sought to improve the land and protect the woodlands and wetlands. 

Still, this is a transition to what we do not yet know. The land in the beginning was not for us to own. Might the land again become a common land? A common ground for our time here on Earth.  I'd like to do one little reading, a couple paragraphs. It begins the book. And my grandfather is coming across the field, and it's the first memory that I have of anything, the farm, life, myself, my family, you think what is your first memory. It must have been a morning early in spring, after the melting of winter snow and the drying of the land by the warming sun, that I formed what would become my first memory. I would have been nearly five years old. Standing beside my father east of the barn, looking to the southeast, we watched as my grandfather, nearing the end of his life, slowly made his way across the field. A dark figure coming towards us from an old place. 

This I would remember for the rest of my life. My father would say, "Here comes the old man." To me that was a shocking phrase. It startled me into consciousness. I have no recollection of my grandfather's arrival at the farm after his perilous journey across the hilly field. He would die within the year, just before the war began. In one of the tattered family albums, my grandfather, John Quinney, appears as a tall, mustached man in overalls standing behind the team of horses and the grain drill in the same field where I would see him later at the end of his life. From my earliest memory to the present moment, my world begins at the old place which was across the field from this farm. My father had been born on the old place as the new century began. He would be the last generation to live in the old house. A year after the last aging member of the household, my great aunt Kate, died in 1942, the house would be torn down. 

As a boy, I would walk across the field and look into the cavity that once was the basement. The ruins of the foundation outlined the house that once rose above and served as home for three generations of the family. I don't know when the house was built. It was some years after my great-grandfather, also named John Quinney, and my great-grandmother, Bridget O'Keefe, purchased a few acres in 1868. They'd come to the United States on immigration ships from Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s. They settled in Yonkers, New York, and in 1850, they were married. Whether John and Bridget knew each other before emigrating from Ireland is not known in our family history. We know that in 1859 they moved to Walworth County. After renting an acre or two of land in Sugar Creek, they bought the land four miles south that would be the beginning of the farm.  Thus, the book begins. 

And the story is told, in a way this is a genealogy or the way I do genealogy. There are charts but I'm telling that history that's been passed to me and that I'm preserving and attaching to that genealogy. The first section is on my father's family. The second is my mother's family. The third section is my grandfather then. The first section on my father's family. And it's being continued and I can say things as we move along. Just giving you captions. Then I'll get to our farming during the '40s and '50s. Can you move? That's the old house that they built shortly after coming from Ireland. 

My grandmother taken, she died in 1920, and I think she's probably holding her rosary here. That's Bridget. These are scanned from old family albums. This is my great aunt Kate. I told many stories about her. She didn't marry. She became a seamstress, worked for the wealthy families in Chicago, and came back to farm. I remember meeting her once. She's looking towards the farm. I'm fascinated with these photographs. 

This is Margie, my father's sister. She did not marry, and she and a friend bought the -- Inn right after Prohibition. And then she passed away in 1935. And she's returning to the old place. My father feeding the cattle. This is visiting Kate, my brother, and myself. And there is Kate and my father and other relatives. I'm fortunate that that photograph was taken. I don't know who took it. Perhaps my mother. 

She became the family photographer. Kate and her scrapbook, much I know about the family history is a scrapbook she kept with obituaries particularly. And this is a derogatory cartoon of the Irish. She identified with Irish all her life, and certainly would take offense with the way the Irish were portrayed. Here's Kate standing in front of Lake Michigan with a schooner. Look how she would dress. Born on the farm, became a seamstress and hat maker for Marshall Field's. What a photograph, standing on a culvert. This is the woman she worked for, Mrs. Woodward, in her, it looks like, electric car on what's now Martin Luther King Drive. It's the opposite picture of Kate back at the farm crocheting with her Model T. 

It looks like an American flag hanging in the window, doesn't it? My father's grandfather's brothers homesteaded, went to South Dakota, walked much of the way in 1880 and homesteaded. And this is Tom Quinney and his wife Florence Loomer in a house that they built in South Dakota. Kate went back to visit Tom and her brother Bill who was a sheriff in Deadwood. So there must be history there, but I don't know that history. Postcards sent back. Bill's wife saying you've been back in Wisconsin long enough, come home. We miss you. Come home soon, Agnes. These are my grandmothers, my father's, Hattie Reynolds, her mother and father. Hattie was my grandmother, my father's mother. 

Nathan Church Reynolds with a beard which was biblical, I assume. His ancestor was in Salem, Massachusetts, and tried. So that comes from a tradition of witches, dissenters.  Hattie is in that picture, top on the right in the back, and these are her five sisters. And in the book I tell the story, really frontier stories, of the five sisters, six women. Bridget then, in 1895 in the center, went out to visit Tom and Bill and their families in South Dakota. A picture taken in a studio in Alexandria, South Dakota. This must have been a traveling photographer. My father was born in 1900. This must be about 1903 or 1904 with his sister Margie in front of the old house, being posed by the traveling photographer who would probably then develop the film in his wagon. 

 Relatives that lived in Como.  I have photographs like this in the book. Not portraits, but giving-- portraying the visual world of that time. I've been fascinated with this snapshot going down a country lane with the medallion of the car, the radiator in front. I've not identified the car. Easy to identify but I don't know it. But it's a haunting picture, is it not? And the photographer, in the passenger side I guess, would bring up a camera, a box camera, and take this picture.  And that's kind of an informal photograph in Delavan Lake. My father on the left, Margie second, in the middle, third from the left, and their friends on an outing. I like this. 

Margie coming back to farm, looking in the distance. She's been the mystery woman of my life. My father and his friend, Mervin Kittleson, on the next farm over, finished the harvest, and on September 15th set out for a trip of their lifetime to California. Lincoln Highway had not been built yet. This is the morning of their departure. By the time they reached Clinton, Iowa, and they reached it that night, they'd had 16 flat tires and changed. In the '70s, out in the front porch of the house in the music cabinet, I found my father's diary and the negatives for these photographs. And I then told his story in some of my writing. My father's holding a cap. So he spent six months in California working on the power lines, seeing the sights. 

Seal Beach. He took a trip to Catalina Island on a Sunday afternoon. They came back, and the next year, my father is using, I think it's Margie's camera because I have his camera and it's not this one. It's a folding camera. And Margie, then, is taking his picture. This is Margie's photograph of my father, and I have never found the photograph that he took of her. But that Model T in the background going over the hill, up Main Street in Delavan. Yes. What people did with cameras. Now we're to my mother's side, and I won't try to identify these relatives. 

These have been found in the family albums and has their names. This is the Bray side of the family.  You all have photographs like this probably. It's my grandfather as a young man and his mother and father.  This is on the Taylor side. My mother's grandparents, my great-parents, the Wisharts, and only recently did I find that they came from Scotland. I didn't know I was part Scottish. And he was a blacksmith there and a blacksmith all his life in La Grange, Walworth County. And his wife Mary.  Lorena, my grandmother, who I never met, is here and her parents, the Taylors. 

The house is still there. My grandfather and Lorena, their wedding picture. Will Holloway and Lorena. She must have been named after the Civil War song. It was so popular after the Civil War, "Lorena." I listen to John Hartford's version of it, not daily, but often. That's my mother. My mother, and I have her diary from the time she was nine years old until age 16. And she received her first camera, sent for it from a box of cereal, and she marks in the diary, "Received my camera today. Took a picture of father and mother in their Buick." So this is the picture. I like the chickens. 

But Lorena's sitting in the back. This is Lorena. It looks like a frontier picture, doesn't it? She would pass away, would die young in 1921 from Bright's disease, which now can be cured with antibiotics. My grandfather was township clerk in Sugar Creek for 52 years. And this is his retirement picture in a house that we would visit every Friday night. My father and mother met in 1929. This was taken by a lake on one of their first outings in July.  And then the next Sunday they went to Milwaukee, and here's a picture of Lake Michigan. They met at a dance hall in Delavan. This is their wedding on September 15, 1930, at my grandfather's house. 

They took a trip to Detroit and to Canada to visit relatives. There they are later in life. Will Holloway and Mabel. Recently I found her diary of 1939. A full diary for the year, and I've been reading it and writing about it. This is from their honeymoon trip. An old postcard back to his father.  Well, I come into the picture in 1934. And my mother has a brownie box camera, and she's taking most of these pictures you'll see now that we'll show in succession.  I'm fascinated with this. 

This is my first birthday and there's no flash in a box camera, so they place me in the window. They had to be on a stepladder outside using available light and taking this picture.  My brother comes on the scene. Ralph.  Born in 1936. So they take some turns photographing. This... I have in a little frame on desk of this picture. I was three years old, and I also complained I was put to work too early on the farm while other kids were in town playing. And here I am, three years old, cutting grain. 

Not really, but my mother took the picture and said that I liked to ride. Yes.  This was on the cover. I wrote the first story about the farm in the '70s and was published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, and this photograph was used on the cover of the Wisconsin Magazine of History. My brother watering. An old tub that was used, a cast iron, I think for scalding hogs and butchering. I think that was its purpose. That was the schoolhouse a mile away. One-room schoolhouse that finally closed at the end of the '40s when there were three or four students left. This was our class. 

I'm over in the overalls on the far left. You might know some of the names if I name them.  My mother would take a picture of us all through high school of our first day of school. School was important. She had been a school teacher. She went to Whitewater Normal and got a rural teaching degree, taught for four years, five years in Williams Bay school, and when she married in 1930, the law was that she could not be a teacher. Education was important and going to school was important and we'd have our picture taken.  That's my brother. After the war, the tractor came and the tongue would be cut off, but still at this stage we were using both horses and tractors.  Again, the chicken. 

They liked to get in the picture. They just liked to be photographed. Yep.  This is the Walworth County Fair, and all summer we would prepare and take our livestock of all kinds to the fair.  And this is the, I think maybe my junior year in high school, we would drive the pickup truck. I would park it on a back street so people wouldn't know I was driving a pickup to school. It was that sense that you were from the country, and you didn't want people to see that. Strange, isn't it? I've talked to classmates now and they said they were the ones who felt, shall I say, inferior. I didn't know why. I guess we all feel that way no matter where we are as we're teenagers trying to make it in high school. 

Let's see then. How much further do we want to go? I wanted to do a little more reading. The later years. What's the next photograph? Okay, we'll hold that. Maybe go back to the other one if you can. Ken Crocker is helping me show the photographs, and Ken has designed all of these books and many more for others. So pleased to know Ken and thank him for helping us. The later years, then, let me read a little bit here.  In a sense, one never leaves home. Home is where you start from, as TS Eliot noted in his poem "East Coker," and home stays with you for the rest of your life. 

I'd like to read what Eliot said. Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. I spent my teens and early adult years trying to extricate myself from the farm. I'm surprised to find then that many years later I'm writing about it.  The farmhouse, this is how I end the book, the farmhouse is empty now. The accumulated material possessions of four generations of the farm have been taken away. The attic has been cleared of the spinning wheel, the high chairs, the baby beds, the quilts, the cradle, boxes of books, framed paintings and photographs, sets of dishes and silverware, and the rosary bead that served my great-grandmother Bridget for a lifetime. Taken from the basement are the tools, the sleds, the milk cans, barn jackets and caps, and the canning jars. 

No longer on the front porch are the immigration trunks that held the photographs, scrapbooks, farm ledgers, diaries, and souvenirs from trips to the west. The cupboards, dressers, and closets have been emptied. Every object removed from the century and a half of living on this Midwest farm held a story and a memory. Some of the treasures from the farmhouse will be restored by the state and local historical societies. The old furniture and family heirlooms have been dispersed to the homes of children and grandchildren. The kitchen table that our family sat around is now in my dining room and serves as my writing table each morning. Some material objects of daily living are gone forever. Still, my desktop is covered with enough objects to last the rest of my life.  Exploration of the past informs us of the reality of impermanence. We begin to understand how our particular lives fit into the larger scheme of things, including our connection to all others in the world. 

I keep reminding myself to stay focused in the present moment. Not to dwell in the past, not to remain in sorrow and regret, but to be in touch with what is happening now. To dwell in the present, even as I explore how the past is shaping this life. I know that to remember the past is not to live in the past. Remembering is a vital part of the living and the present. Time present is only time we really have. When all is said and done, after all the gaining and the spending, after trying to make sense of this life, I know that I must ultimately surrender. Everything that I cherish today, I will some day be separated from. Only what I've given to others will last and not be lost. On the cover of the scrapbook, and I want to show you that, my mother gave me, shortly after I was born, is a moon looking down at five owls perched on a branch of a tree. 

Bats are flying in the night. There's a four-line verse on the lower part of the scrapbook. Five little owls, sitting on a tree Up rose the fair moon, wonderful to see Fly away, dear owls, fly away to me. Thank you very kindly, we'll stick where we be. So, we belong here on Earth, here with this farm. Cleaning the farmhouse five years ago, I found my mother's scrapbook that I had forgotten about that she had given me when I was one year old. And it contained cards and images from her childhood and also from the childhood of her mother. So it's going back into the 1890s. And, with Ken's help, we scanned and used these images in this book. That's about cleaning up a farmhouse and remembering the past in little stories that tell along the way. 

And this is the cover from the scrapbook with the owls and the moon. And I title the book "A Lifetime Burning," and the epigraph is from the TS Eliot that I read: But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered I'd like to show you the pictures now that I took. I went back to the farm before we cleaned it out and documented the artifacts that were important to the farming during my lifetime and going before that. The old silo filler that remained in the barn. And even these are artifacts. The photographs are now artifacts because this is no longer that. This has been cleaned out. This has passed. The hay mill that is vacant and of no use, but we're using the barn and I'll say something about that. My father's workbench in the shed where he spent the last minutes of his life. 

 So I'm just going through the various sheds and photographing things as they are using a large format camera.  A feed bag from the Calvary, World War I, that we used on the farm.  I like the cobwebs up there showing in the photograph. This is in the basement. The fruit cellar. This is the attic. The wheat scythe. The picture that used in the book of my great-great-grandfather Reynolds. The attic was the storage bin for the farm, you know. Attics are so important. 

I remember my father in the early '40s in the sleigh driving the horse taking us to school, and he had a milk route where he carried neighbor's milk up to the frontage road and used this sheepskin coat. That then hung for decades in the attic. Corner of the living room with a lamp, I think from the Wisharts. The grandfather clock. I wrote a book with a friend, Ron Berger, called "Storytelling Sociology," and we used this as the cover of the book. A rocking chair and the immigration trunk. I don't know if this is the Irish immigration trunk or the English immigration trunk. It's now at the Walworth County Historical.  The old place would be right here, and it's looking across the field to the farm.  I think I'm going to stop right about here, unless there's one other. 

 I'd like to show the last one of the fair. This was found in the attic just a few pages from the story of The Three Little Pigs. And this is the pig, remember the first pig, this is a moral story, builds his house of straw, and the wolf comes and huffs and puffs and blows it down. The second little pig builds his house of wood, and the house is blown down. He huffed, he puffed, blow your house down. The third pig, the one that survives, the smart pig, builds his house out of brick. The wolf comes. He's not able to blow it down. While the wolf is puffing, the pig gets to go to the fair and enjoy himself. The fair would come at the end of the season. 

And, after working in the field harder than I thought we should be working, we'd be able to go to the fair for three or four days and roam the fair by ourselves. The Ferris wheel, the arcades. When I found this in the attic, immediately I wanted to save it. This is one of the items saved from cleaning out the farmhouse. That's about what I want to say. I think I've made some points I want to make. Every farm must have its story which are family stories, and we remember these stories and, I think when we can, we write them down or tell them to other people, and if we have photographs and albums, we put together to tell our story of our particular place. This is what I've done. So I'll stop there. Remember George Jones' song, "A Picture of Me," always a picture. 

Might there be questions, comments? [APPLAUSE]