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.
