2020 Wisconsin to Texas

It is 6 am, January 24, 2020 and I have already been up half hour here at Garner State Park in SW Texas.   We got into the park about 7 pm, setup the camper and unloaded after dark – although with the car lights and then the camper lights once we got it rolled up, it wasn’t working in the dark.  However, the first setup after a year of it being parked is always complicated as we notice some mustiness and mildew.  This year when I put it away, it will be in the garage, well aired out and a couple of pillowcases with the silica gel dessicant kitty litter to keep it dry.

We were behind nearly 2 hours from our planned arrival at 5 pm.  Two things got in the way – a stop for grocery shopping to get the first week’s food before we arrived rather than the next day – as the local town of Leakey (pronounced Lakey) hasn’t much selection, and a tire blew on the camper about 4 pm, and that took time to change.

We left Wisconsin, Monday January 20^th, and drove 120 miles south to our MN home in Pine Island where we got the snow-blower out and cleared the driveway, did a little maintenance and then Tuesday left just at light and drove 500 miles before finding a $64 overnight Motel in Kansas SE of Kansas City an hour or so.  We had driven out of the snow as we entered KS, but Wednesday morning it has slushed about an inch and at 32 could have been slippery, but the warmer pavement melted it and we cruised all day long putting in just under 400 miles to stay at a $44 motel in Oklahoma (just north of the TX border). 

Getting  up early on Thursday, with the intent of making 420 miles to the park – driving SW across much of Texas, we cruised along nicely and were on schedule to arrive at 5 pm when we heard some rumbling behind, the car started sort of surging and looking back through the mirror I saw a chunk of rubber fly up.  Now we were doing 70mph on a Farm to Market Road (like a county road) where the speed limit was 75 and folks were driving 80.  We pulled over to see the rear trailer tire shredded completely.  

I had a brand new spare on the back of the camper.  The tire that blew was the last of the 30 year old originals, and I figured just a short stop to swap tires.  Well, when I got out my wrenches, I found, like Goldilocks, one was too big and one was too small and none were just right.  And where was my 4 ended fast tire wrench? – at home on the truck seat where I left it to remind me to put it in the camper.  And where was my 13/16 socket?  Not along—I think Margo had borrowed it to repair the kitchen Mix Master and not put it back! 

So, after a thorough search, some self-condemnations, I unhooked the trailer and was about to drive 5 miles ahead to the next town and get a socket – buy, borrow, beg or steal. Just then an older pickup and a gentleman inside pulled across the lane and parked behind me and asked if I needed help.   “A 13/16 wrench is what I need!”

He had one of those 4 ended tire wrenches and helped us change the tire while visiting.  He said I could get a spare in town at the first gas station/tire shop.  I tried to give him $20 for his help, but although he wouldn’t take that, he did take a pint of maple syrup.  We have noticed in our years of traveling and tire troubles, that the folks who stop to help are those who undoubtedly have had the experience of driving on tires that are not as good as they should be; not those with nice cars or trucks and not those who can afford to call the road-side service to bail them out. 

I have had tire troubles on every trip taken for years, sometimes of my own making as in this old tire and letting Google maps gps take me through the shortest driving routes that put us on too many back roads – scenic, traffic free, fast, but probably more tire-flattening debris.   No tire in town, so drove the last hour into the park at 60 mph and got here after hours.  That way you just set up someplace empty (the park is mostly empty this time of year) and then register in the morning and hope the site is not reserved sometime in the future so you have to move everything.

Absolutely no cell phone signal and no wifi at the campsite –A36--we picked.  However, we will likely drive the 7 miles to the local town and either hit the laundromat, restaurant or library to post that we made it to our destination for the next few weeks.

The mileage counter says 1442 miles since the Farm.  The first day was 120 to Pine Island.  Then roughly 500, 400, 420.  The car mileage was about 17 mpg bucking a south wind of 10-15 the whole way—which means about 85 gallons of gas.  Gas ranged from 239 in WI and MN to 1.99 in one gas station in OK, but mostly 2.20 south of Iowa.  So with that estimate of about $190 for gas to drive here.  The motels add up to $108.  Meals on the road about $75.  We will have to buy a new tire for the camper – maybe $50.  So to get here totals about $425. We can guess that the return trip will be around $400.  So the travel cost is not too far under $1000. 

The next cost is two weeks of camping here at the Park.  Can’t remember the fee, but probably $20 per night – will find out later this morning. That would mean a 30-day stay in TX would cost about $600. And while here we will do some driving around, some shopping, etc., but that will be likely not a whole lot different than if we were back home—so won’t count that against the vacation.  My current estimate is that the whole month away will be about $2000.  There are a lot of things that the $2000 could have bought to make winter in WI and MN easy, but I just wouldn’t have spent it.  Now that we are here, I don’t have much choice!   For me, money was hard to come by the first 1/2 of my life, and so after I finally got a decent paying job, I never really felt like I should spend it on frivolities like travel.

 We also bought $75 of food for the week ahead, but that we would buy whether we were at home or not, so won’t count that against the vacation. 

Driving yesterday we had about 55F temperatures, sunny and pleasant.  Here in the Park we are supposed to see 60s to 70 with 40s overnight.  Last night and this morning the sky was absolutely clear and even with a few nearby lights from the bathroom and a handful of fellow campers, we could see the stars and constellations wonderfully. 

Today we look for a camper tire, look for a 13/16 deep socket, air out the camper, clean out the car and organize it and the camper as compactly and neatly as we can, and settle in for some day strolls, and begin vacation intently while spending frugally. 

Breakfast today is toasted bagels, coffee, and a banana, that is if I can find where the coffee maker is, where the coffee is, where the toaster is etc.  I have them packed in camper cubbyholes and the coffee in one of my clothes duffle bags.   

2009 Tobacco growing in Wisconsin -- an interview

Did you know that Wisconsin was an important grower of tobacco for over 100 years?  WI workers stringing tobacco for drying.  Photos courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

 Some farmers used small tractors to cultivate their tobacco.  Here a 1949 Farmall Cub is used in Wisconsin.  In the 1800s you might have seen small tobacco patches in Laketown township. 

Growing Tobacco in Wisconsin  by Cliff Christianson 

January 2009

(From an interview with Cliff in Natchez State Park in Mississippi where he and his wife and Margp and I were escaping the cold weather in Wisconsin.  Around his campfire he told me about tobacco raising.   A hundred and fifty years ago you probably would have seen small patches of tobacco around Cushing and Alabama raised by the families from the state of Alabama who came north to settle in Laketown--Russ).  

Back in the 1940's when I was at home on our farm north of Colfax, WI, we raised tobacco as a cash crop.  It took a lot of time and labor, but I think it paid for Dad's farm over five to ten years.   Dad raised no more than 5 acres and at last probably only an acre and a half. 

In the late spring, we planted the tobacco seeds in a special bed.  We made several rectangle beds out of 1x6 inch boards about 2 feet by 15 feet filled with good dirt well worked up.  We carefully planted the tiny seeds in the bed, trying to space them out evenly.  Then we stretched old flour sacks, as a cover across the whole bed.  They were attached by nails driven through the boards sticking out along the outside. I suppose it helped keep the plants warm and protected them from the wind and bugs.  On nice days we opened the plants to the sunlight. 

As the seeds sprouted and started to grow, they had to be weeded, watered  and thinned to give each plant room to grow.  When they were about six inches tall or so, they were ready to transplant into the tobacco field—that had been plowed and kept weed free ahead of time.  Each plant was gently pulled up from the bed and put into pails with water in the bottom.  There were thousands of seedlings to transplant.

We used a tobacco planter.  It was pulled by horses.   On it were three seats; one in the front to drive the horses and two sticking out behind for the planters.  A barrel of water gave each plant a shot of water when it was planted.   There were two pails of seedlings, one on each side.  As the planter was pulled across the field, it marked the next row as well as dug a narrow trench.  One person picked a plant from his pail and carefully dropped it in the trench while another part of the planter in the back pushed the dirt back in around the seedling.  The plants were dropped about 18 inches apart.  One person dropped his plant and reached for another alternating with the other person trying to keep a smooth rhythm.

After the tobacco was all planted, we started the hoeing.  We didn't use a mechanical cultivator so we wouldn't break any of the leaves.  It was all hand hoeing.  As we hoed, we carefully looked at the plants to see if there were any tobacco worms. They were big caterpillars with a horn on their head.  You grabbed them by the horn and picked them off and stepped on them.  Once you found any, then you had to spend a lot of time lifting the individual leaves looking for hidden ones.

Later in the summer, a seed stalk would grow up through the middle of the plant.  We didn't want any of the plant's energy going into seed making, so we went through the field and broke off each seed stalk and dropped it to the ground between the rows.

At the base of each leaf, there would be a new shoot start, what we called a sucker.  They had to be broken off too.  All of this time we were still hoeing the rows to keep the weeds out. 

The full-grown leaves on the plant were about 6 inches wide and 12 to 18 inches long.  Well before frost, when the leaves were still green, we harvested the tobacco.  We had a sharp metal knife cutter that we went through the field and cut each plant with its many leaves and dropped it to the ground.  We only cut some of the plants each day—the amount that we could get into the barn that day.  The plants were cut, dropped to the ground and allowed to wilt, and then gathered and brought to the drying barn. 

Dad had a special sort of spear made to pick up the plants.  It was sort of a wide flat metal arrowhead shape that fit over a four-foot wooden lathe (like the kind you find in old lathe and plaster house walls).  You went to each plant and poked the spearhead through the main plant stem, back far enough so it would split to the end.  You slid the split plant stem down onto the lathe until you had maybe six or seven on a lathe.  The spearhead was removed and put on a new lathe and another bunch of plants speared. 

Then you loaded the plants and lathes onto a wagon and hauled them to a special tobacco drying barn.  We didn't have one of our own, but our neighbor up the road had a large one that we used (he didn't raise tobacco then).  It wasn't painted—maybe to keep any paint flavor entering the leaves.  The boards on the sides of the barn were vertical, with every other one hinged so it could be opened for ventilation.  Inside the drive-in barn, the whole barn was lined with a framework of poles—up into the top part.  We unloaded the lathes of tobacco and then hung them up between poles in the barn.  The tobacco leaves were wilted, but still very wet and needed to dry for a month or more.  It was a little dangerous hanging leaves up in the higher areas where the poles could roll away and let you fall down. 

On good drying days we might open the side boards wide to let the breeze through. Other days we had to close them.  We watched the leaves so they were drying evenly, spreading and turning  them as needed. 

When they were dry enough, as I remember maybe in late September or early October, they were quite brittle.  We waited until we had one of those fall days with damp fog that made the leaves pliable and then started baling them.

We had a wooden box, about two feet square, three feet long.  We put two ropes down in the box and out over the sides and over the ropes a layer of heavy brown paper in the bottom and up the two insides.  Then we took each plant and stripped each leaf off and graded it into three qualities:  was it free of any breaks or holes from handling or worms; had only a few holes or breaks; or had lots of holes and breaks.  Leaves of the same grade were packed together by laying them in one direction, then the opposite, trying to get a level square stack.  When our bale was the right size, we pulled the two ropes to tightly wrap the brown paper around the tobacco leaves and tied them and set the bale aside.

I think we had as many as 40 bales when we were done.  They weighed about 50 lbs each  They were marked as to their quality.  I can't remember if we waited for a buyer to come or if we sent them to an auction house or just took them to town to sell.  The highest quality leaves were for cigar wrappers, the lowest quality for filler.  I am not sure what the medium quality were used for—maybe cheap cigars?  I don't know how much money Dad got for a crop, probably $500 or so.  In those days a farm only cost a few thousand dollars. 

We never used our own tobacco for our own use.  Dad always had a can of Copenhagen with him from the store.  I think ours all went for cigar wrappers.  The acres of tobacco you could raise were strictly controlled by a tobacco board.  Although we raised only a few acres, it took a great deal of time and work. 

The tobacco that was raised in Wisconsin was quite different from the that raised in the south.  Ours had larger leaves and was harvested green.  In the south, they let the leaves yellow before it was harvested.  I think theirs was for cigarettes. 

Sometime in the late 1960s, I think, a US law was changed to allow cigars to be wrapped with reconstituted tobacco instead of a high quality Wisconsin whole leaf.  That meant the scraps could be ground up and made into cigar paper, and the price of WI tobacco dropped tremendously.  The crop had almost disappeared in the state a few years ago.  Lately there has been a WI resurgence when tobacco companies found that raising Burley tobacco in a northern climate changed the composition to have a lower level of carcinogens.

I mostly remember all the work it took to raise just a small field of tobacco.  You had to be very fussy with tobacco to get a good quality crop so the buyers would pay a good price.  I still have my Dad's two tobacco spear heads.  That is about all I have left from my tobacco growing days except my memories and a sore back!

Merry Christmas!   We are almost finished with our Christmas newsletter mailings.  The 2019 year was memorable mostly for the ability to have another enjoyable year here on the Farm and to continue with the usual trip south, maple syrup, gardening, clubs etc.  Here is the 2019 Christmas newsletter.

   2019 Christmas Newsletter

For those of you who want to keep up with the Farm, we do a daily post on Facebook Facebook .   I have it set to public, so if you are on Facebook, you should be able to see it without being a friend. 

I occasionally put a video on my youtube channel
   Youtube River Road Rambler

Happy New Year too. 

The River Road Rambler. 

Frost on the windows this morning but not the ground here on the farm as October 2019 still hasn't had a killing frost on the Farm. 
  An update on projects:   The cemetery pipe fence west of us 5 miles on Evergreen had a tree down on 100 feet of it.  I volunteered to replace it freewith used well pipe I had in the MN place.  Two rails replaced of three, and coming along slowly but surely.  
  The new addition to the Wolf Creek Cemetery, where I volunteered this spring to be sexton, is surveyed and we pay the bill and have it registered in the next few weeks.  I am digitizing the old cemetery records to make it easier to figure out ownership and occupancy.  
  The latest project is an upgrade in fluorescent lights to LED lights in the hallways at the Cushing Community Center -- around the museum upstairs. 
  The 14th annual River Road Ramble had a sunny day and a great turnout, and so likely we will do a 15th one.  
  Here on the Farm, our pumpkins and squash crops failed, the melons almost failed, the apples are good. Too much rain seemed to be a problem
   The other project underway is scanning the old Sterling, Eureka and Laketown township records.  We started with Sterling and have done about 100 record books so far, with probably 50 -75 left.  I try to do 20 per month.  
   This is the setup -- a special foot pedal copy camera and a computer and someone to turn the pages and push the pedal.  You can read about the project on the latest Sterling Eureka and Laketown Historical Society newsletter. 
 Newsletter Oct 2019

  Working on a video for the End-Of-Season SELHS lunch, Oct 24, 2019 noon potluck at the Wolf Creek Church.  The program is about local Country Western singing stars from the 1940s-60s, Hank and Thelma Holland.  Thelma Bergstrom grew up along the River Road.  
You can test the video underway at this link   
Hank and Thelma

   I do a daily post of what is happening on Facebook with photos from the Farm. You can look at it without being a facebook friend (I think).  
  https://www.facebook.com/russell.b.hanson

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.  

***

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.