The strands of history about this little Kickapoo River town
reach out to other places. The history
of a place like La Farge is really a compilation of many stories about people
and families – people and families who came to this place, lived in this place
and moved from this place. Those family
stories may be entrenched in the lore of the Kickapoo Valley or they may
stretch out to places far away.
There is a
condo unit on Curtis Lane in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Inside the condo, a thirteen-year old boy
slouches in a lounge chair in the downstairs den. He is killing time until he has to go off to
hockey practice, trading Tweets with his friends on his phone and casually watching
TV.
In a corner
of the room, off to the boy’s left, is a cabinet. It is a corner cabinet constructed a half
century ago. It is a cabinet of that
time; its purpose to show off prized dishes, photographs or other keepsakes of
the family. Some would call it a fancy
knick-knack shelf, but its purpose was nobler, so perhaps corner china cabinet
could be used when identifying it.
The cabinet
stands forty-two inches high and is nineteen inches wide. It has four triangular shelves including its
base piece. The front of the cabinet is
mainly a wooden door with a frame around it.
The door is affixed to the frame with brass hinges and a clasp to secure
it for opening and closing. The door
itself is a large pane of glass supported by another wooden frame. The other two sides of the cabinet, hidden
from view when it is placed in a corner, are pieces of tin tacked onto the
front frame. The two tin back pieces are
wrapped around a wooden support piece that forms the ninety-degree angle that
allows the cabinet to fit into a corner.
Each of the shelves is also anchored to the support piece. One end piece on the cabinet is also made of
tin. The other end piece, either the
bottom of the cabinet if it is hung from the ceiling in a corner or the top of
the cabinet if it is placed on the floor, is made of the same pinewood as the
front. All of the wood is stained a dark
brown. The interior wooden shelves and
tin backing has been painted a pale yellow-green to show off the contents
displayed in the cabinet.
The cabinet
was made over fifty years ago in the workshop of a house on Maple Street in La
Farge. The corner cabinet was one of
several made by the retired farmer for family and friends. The man who
constructed the cabinets in the spare time of his old age was named Emery. The boy who sits next to the corner cabinet
in Eden Prairie is also named Emery. He
is the great-great grandson of the Emery who made the cabinet. The cabinet is a strand that connects the
two, as is the name. (Another
great-grandson of the cabinetmaker also carries the name.)
The man who
made the cabinet was the first son born in Wisconsin to a family who moved from
Ohio. He grew up on a farm on Morning
Star Ridge and as a young man, he and his brother, carrying axes on their
shoulders, walked down to the Kickapoo Valley to do winter work at the lumber
mill there. As they trimmed the fallen
trees, they earned fifty cents a day.
When they brought a horse from their farm along to help skid the trimmed
logs to the river, their pay increased to a dollar and a half a day. It was hard work, not in this century, nor
the last, but in the century before that.
The man who made the corner cabinet spent most of his life working with
wood in one form or another. His skills
with wood became a strand that still reaches us today – whether in the barns
that he helped build or the corner cabinets he made.
The boy
named Emery jumps up when he hears the sound of a car horn and an SUV stopping
on the street out in front of the condo.
He picks up his duffle bag and dashes out the door into the garage to
catch his ride to practice. As the door
slams, the vibrations reach to another corner of the downstairs den, where the
branches of a Christmas cactus shudder.
The plant is flowering for the season and is another strand that is
connecting families, places and time.
The Christmas
cactus is a cutting from a plant, over a century old, that is in a house on
Highland Street in La Farge. That host
plant is also blooming with flowers to mark the season. A mother passed a cutting from the cactus on
to her daughter. It is a strand
connecting two members of a family and two places far apart. The Christmas cactus in La Farge now has main
branches larger than a man’s thumb and covered with bark like on a tree. The
cactus has served for the host of many other cuttings for family and friends
and reaches back to another time in the past.
It is a strand of history reaching back to a house on the hill
overlooking the Kickapoo River at a place called Seelyburg.
At one time or another most of the
men who lived in the house on the hill worked for the vast operations producing
lumber at the mill located there on the river.
One of the sons, Jesse, married and his wife Millie brought the
Christmas cactus to their new household.
Jesse lived for a century and most of the one hundred years of his life
was spent near the Kickapoo and La Farge.
His family formed a fife and drum corps to help celebrate those who had
fought in the Civil War. Jesse was born
in 1865, the year that the war ended.
The family fife and drum corps played for GAR Reunions and 4th
of July Celebrations in Seelyburg, La Farge and in many other places around the
area. Jesse’s drum that he played in the
fife and drum corps at those celebrations remains as a strand to that time.
The cactus had been in Jesse’s family for generations, perhaps brought
to the Kickapoo Valley from a former home in the East. It always seems to have been in the Kickapoo
Valley as part of the family. Jesse and
Millie’s granddaughter now has the Christmas cactus (with its red flowers
starting to bloom) in the house on Highland Street, passed on to her by her
Aunt Esther. Now a great granddaughter of Jesse’s has another part of it in
Eden Prairie. So the cactus in its
various forms connects the members of the family, moving back in time to the time
of first settlement of the Kickapoo Valley from other places and forward to the
thriving suburb of the Twin Cities.
History is the telling and sharing
of the stories of people and places. The
corner cabinet and the Christmas cactus have stories to tell – strands to the
past that continue to connect us to a former time and another place.
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