Farm updates

Today's Facebook post

58F, calm. damp after an afternoon thunderstorm dumped another half inch of rain on the Farm yesterday.


Before the rain, got a little outdoor work done-- couple more concreted corners at Wolf Creek cemetery and a little sorting of the pipe fence out at the Cemetery west of us on Evergreen Av, and some of the orchard mowed getting ready for apple season.


The apple orchards around are opening -- Holmes Lake announced Honeycrisp and McIntosh apples for sale. Ours has Wolf River (baking apples) and probably others too, some trees loaded with apples this year.

Scott was busy during the rain boiling down a few bushels of tomatoes into tomato paste for winter cooking. He has some Amish Paste tomatoes for that. Although the tomato plants look terrible as the windstorms broke off or bent over the 5-foot tall plants, they are still bearing fine.
When it dries out this week, maybe will dig some of the potatoes -- looks like a good crop too. Potatoes are best when dug late and "hardened" a little by cold weather. Adds a little sugar and makes them store better. So other than some for sale and some to eat, will leave most until October.

Eating the last watermelon -- very poor yield this year. Only planted 4 vines and two died on the way due to injudicious hoeing by the farmer.

Monday is Genealogy drop in day followed by the Sterling Town Board meeting in the evening. I go to the board meeting to bring back 20 old record books already copied and pick up 20 more for the month ahead. When Sterling is done, have Luck, and Laketown to do next. Goes pretty smoothly as I have a old computer connected to the foot pedal copy camera ready to go when I have some time. Takes about 10 minutes per book. I suppose I should just take the setup to the source and do it there, but I rather enjoy doing it gradually.

 Lots of irons in the fire make each day a choice of many interesting jobs. I expect that all will get done, but in sort of a shotgun approach with sort of the Jack of all trades, master of none approach.

The tomato vines were 5-foot, held up by wire cages and electric fence posts, but two storms broke them off and although they are bearing yet, they lost their wonderful lush look.  

 Lately the swans and geese have been flying around in their vees. It must be the youngsters have gained flight.

The tools to make a concrete marker -- pre-mix concrete, post hole digger, shovels and a tub for mixing it and some water.

 The surveyor left a lathe marking the south boundary of the church yard with a metal spike driven in the ground. Here, as it was in the ditch, I moved 1 foot to the west, dug a foot deep hole (hit a major tree root at that level) and poured concrete and two metal spikes to make a more permanent ground level marker. I still have the west two corners to put a pipe in concrete 1 foot east of the corners. I did all of the markers I put in 1 foot east of the surveyor's pin except this one.

The south boundary of the church yard is about where the big oak tree stands. The old south driveway is just off of the property. Back in the woods, behind the church is the old school yard netting fence, almost all disappeared, but in a few places grown in to trees. The surveyor marked the written boundary about 10 feet east of the old fence. Now, if one wanted to, the old fence could be considered the actually boundary as line fences in for over 20 years are sacrosanct in law -- meant so farmers didn't have to continually move their fences as surveyors changed their measuring techniques and found fences were not quite on lines. Now that would have been important in the cemetery as some graves would have been off the newly surveyed line, but as we bought an extension to the west, we are OK, just our new cemetery boundary is about 10 feet shorter than originally thought. Modern surveyors used gps and satellites and claim to be more accurate than the originals who went with chains and compasses through the area in 1848.

  The finished marker is a deep tube of concrete with 2 spikes embedded that will soon disappear under the sod, but will beep on the metal detector.  

The surveyor marked the south boundary of the cemetery property -- a 100 foot buffer zone south of the old cemetery fence. I dug a post hole 1 foot east of the marker and poured it full of concrete with two giant spikes embedded in it -- all below mowing level. This marks the south boundary -- the east is the road and back in the woods is the west. It will likely grass over, but be locatable with a metal detector. .When you pay a surveyor $2000 to mark boundaries, you want to make them permanent.

In the church yard, a few feet north of the south boundary, east edge just back from the ditch is an old concrete 1922 benchmark survey marker.  It used to have a bronze top marking the height above sea level back in the 1950s when I went to school at the Wolf Creek.  The bronze was knocked off, but the concrete remains, just high enough to dent the mower blades it looks like. 

Facebook Posts

I do a daily post on Facebook--sort of a memory diary so I will know what it is that is happening and what I am thinking.  Have been doing it for many years.  Here is the example for September 12, 2019.  It usually has photos from the Farm, but this time of year I am up ahead of the sun and so have to use photos from the previous day.  

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East wind, drizzle, about 1/2 inch yesterday pushing us to about 8/10 over the two days here on the Farm. Still a stiff east wind and general rain predicted all day through midnight in Cushing.

Trying to catch up with paper work -- 3 more Sterling record books to scan before the Monday night town meeting where I bring in the finished ones and pick up 20 more. I am doing 1930s and 40s this month. It goes fast when I get at it-- rainy days. Wet days, for me, are inside projects, and lately those have been on the computer.

Typed up 2 sets of meeting minutes -- the Northwest Wisconsin Museum Consortium meeting on the 10th and last month's Northwest Wisconsin Regional Writer's group.  One was fresh in my mind and the other from notes written a month earlier.  I learned that I had better do the typed up notes sooner rather than later.  I have tried to do the notes on my laptop as the meeting progresses, but that seems to take me out of the conversation rather than being a participant, and also is a little distracting to the others as my keying is a little noisy.  I need to cultivate a softer touch.  Those of us who began our typing career on old manual typewriters have developed firm keystroking fingers.

Margo's 2011 laptop quit working last month, and she uses it as her window on the world, so she got a new one, much lighter to handle. It seemed as the old one no longer would charge the battery nor run even when plugged in. . So I bought a junk laptop of the same brand off of Ebay for $12 that seems to at least charge the battery, charged Margo's and put it in and sure enough it works. The connector was OK, so it appears the charging circuitry on the motherboard is shot. I told her to return her new computer and just carry around her old computer and the other old computer for battery charging, but she seemed reluctant (to say the least), so I have another somewhat usable old machine to hookup to a scanner unless I take the two apart and swap parts to make one good one.

The curse of being somewhat handy on fixing things is you really can't ever throw away anything as you might be able to fix it, given a few more parts and a little time. With ebay, the parts are probably available as other people who can't throw away things sell them.

A new project -- A slice of the old cemetery white pine blown over in the storm made into a stool (for display only) with the top smoothed and the growth rings showing a timeline from birth to death (75 years) and an event line. Have to figure out how to drill angled leg holes -- or .

maybe some kind of bracket. Then put one in the Cushing museum and one in the chapel in the cemetery.

The other project is removing the old storm damaged pipe fence from 100 years ago and replacing it with new pipes.  I have several hundred feet of water well pipe at the MN place from twice pulling a 200 foot well and replacing the pipes.  So the materials are available.  The old fence has smaller rail pipes and larger upright post pipes with holes in them to feed the rails.  Far too much work and I don't have smaller pipe, so will bolt the rails to the posts.  I offered to do it for free, so after some cleanup of the fenceline  will try to get the upright posts in before frost.  

The 75 year old white pine has been removed but lots of small branches to clean up and some trimming along the fence before the new fence goes in.  

14th Annual River Road Ramble

September 28th, 9-5 pm, 2019 is the 14th Annual River Road Ramble - the loop tour of Hwy 87 and the old River Road between Grantsburg and St Croix Falls.  Web page River Road Ramble
  Map 2019 Ramble Stops

It looks like we will have about 25 official stops for sales, events, museums, farmer's markets, lunch, bake sales etc.  There are always others too along the way, so get out and enjoy what is likely to be very good fall color in the shortest state Hwy in Wisconsin (Hwy 87 Grantsburg to St Croix Falls), and its predecessor state hwy, the Old St Croix River Road.
   This is a slow scenery drive to spend the day at rather than a rush from sale to sale on the less traveled roads of NW Wisconsin. 
   

Local History Through Township Records

Back in 1970, I had a summer job at the Sterling Fire tower.  I sat 100 feet above the surrounding forest using my eyes to look for smoke.  

I had trouble concentrating on it, and talked to others who had towered.  One said "I read a book," and at the end of each set of pages, stopped and looked around carefully.  That made me a better watchman than just sitting there and forgetting to look around at all."

  "Dad," I asked Sterling Town Board chairman V. R. Hanson, "would it be all right if I took along one of the old Sterling record books to the tower?"  The records from the 1850 and newer were stored in the always unlocked 1888 town hall in the chimney closet, somewhat mouse chewed and moldering away.  

   "If you think you might learn something," he replied, knowing he didn't have to tell me to be very careful carrying them 100 feet up the ladder on the side of the tower, and putting them back when finished. 

   I did a project -- took the 1865 tax roll and made a plat map of land owners in Sterling at the time.  The yearly tax roll books told who owned each piece of land and at the end of the book the personal property of each person living in Sterling (at that time all of northern Polk Co and Burnett and Washburn counties were administered by the Town of Sterling as no one lived there).  

   Most of the land owned in 1865 was along the rivers and streams in the Sterling barrens, much of it still federal land open for homesteading.  The land in east Sterling was already owned, but often by absentee speculators. 

   Over the summer I read the tax rolls, the town meeting minutes, the budgets etc., and got a fine appreciation for the days when the township was almost all of the government folks saw.  The taxes were for roads, for bridges, for the poor, for the cemetery, and for town surveying, town lawsuits, etc.  

   I got to know the names of old roads as they were called by the folks working on them -- Evergreen was Darey road after a local resident.  Hwy 87 was Broadway. 

  I learned that half a dozen families from Dunkerton, Iowa began arriving in 1903 including Great Grandpa Carnes. I learned that the Hanson's migrated in form Barron, WI in the 1930s.  I saw how many horses the Harris family had, how many cows, and how Ida Harris and her sons Floyd and Vedon stayed on the barrens after most of the folks had left by the 19 teens. I saw the depression area influx that included Grandpa Eugene Hanson and mom, folks who had lost their good farms and were hunkering down on the abandoned farms on the sand barrens with subsistence living to ride it out. 

   So this summer, I started a project -- copying all of the Sterling, Laketown, Luck and other local township record books, making digital copies of them and sharing them with others through the magic of cloud drives and the internet. 

   As I enthusiastically told the Sterling town board members, "The yearly Sterling tax rolls are the only yearly record we have of who lived where.  Census records are 10 years apart, church records are on birth, confirmation, marriage and death.  But town records show every year how many cows, horses, buggies, watches, organs, pianos, land and so on that all of the households here have.  A treasure that is far to valuable not to be copied and preserved forever."   

   And so I committed to photographing hundreds of old books in as careful a manner possible--just turning the pages and photographing each page.  

   To do that with a camera seemed possible, but not easy.  So, I spent $300 and bought a book copying camera on a stand that, I have found, to make the process easy.  

   You can see a video of me in action doing this.  CZUR Copy Camera in Action

   Do you want to see some of the results?  I am trying to organize them in easily readable book format, that you turn the double pages and zoom in to read the beautifully handwritten records of our past.  

  Check out the 1943 tax rolls

 
  The rest will be in a cloud drive on Google where you can go to see any of them.  To move these files to the cloud, requires decent speed internet, something that has been sorely missing here out at the very end of a stub line of the Grantsburg phone line.  Rural phone service always lags 20 years behind the rest of the world-- mostly because phone companies are monopolies here and they see much more money going to serve the lake areas to compete with other phone companies there than serving their own monopoly area.  

  But, after a great deal of whining, complaining, and excuses, two weeks ago the fiber was actually put in along Evergreen avenue.  We already have it from house to road as that replaced the phone line strung over the trees we had 2 years ago (yes it was from tree-top to tree-top).  So all that is needed is a few hours to connect our end and the River Road end for it to work.  

  "When?" I asked eagerly as I saw the cable laid.  "Probably yet this year," said the monopoly spokes man.  I already agreed to pay the $100 + service rate per month, but phone companies have a policy of serving the complainers worst, as the spokesman plainly told me. One of these days the overhead satelite or tower service will catch up and we can dump the monopoly service, a dinosaur from the past that has evolved to a turtle on its way to the future.