Old Soldiers...

A little ahead of Christmas this year we had a chunk fall out of the fir tree next to our back door.

Given that we live on a hill in the open prairie this sort of thing happens. A couple of years after we moved in an old Maple situated between the house and the barn fell, and I am forever cleaning up limbs from windfall.

This tree stands directly outside my home office. It's been a persistent piece of the scenery from that room since I was a child, sneaking into that room against my grandmother's wishes, playing with my uncle's train set and wondering over all of the other "ancient" toys. It's a regular friend when I gaze out the window when I'm working.

It looks to me - based entirely on my complete lack of expertise on trees - like the original hunk that came out is part of a larger splintering along the trunk, and that this is the next piece to come down. More is still hanging in the tree and will probably need to be cut out if the tree is to be kept from simply splitting in half.

Given that complete lack of expertise, my thoughts probably shouldn't be the last call on that one...

The Fog

Today has been almost entirely cloaked in fog.

Early in the day it was cloudy, but otherwise clear. As the day progressed, the fog gathered and encroached, closing us in. It was warm for early January - above freezing in to be sure. Still, lack of visibility prevented any thought of venturing out.

When I was younger I always thought of fog as a thing of stillness - low lying clouds that wrapped around, laying against the earth. No wind was welcome, as one would assume that it would move any cloud coverage away.

Either my childhood experience was lacking, or my memory was poor. The plains of Illinois beg to differ on this point, providing dense cloud cover in the face of considerable prevailing winds. It is possible to be unable to see where you are going, and yet to be struggling against a headwind or treacherous cross wind.

The Midwest is a place of weather. Other regions and latitudes offer consistency, predictability, in one direction or the other. Here, each day offers the interest and excitement of variability. Have you ever seen freezing fog? It's an amazing thing that the Midwest has to offer you.

It's possible, in this weather, to feel locked in. Certainly Stephen King has had that experience. But it also offers an opportunity to exercise flexibility - to pivot with what Mother Nature has to offer. A day like this presents a good opportunity to stay inside with family and relax. Curl up with a good book, tv show, or iPad and enjoy.

Out in the Cold

I said last time that I delight in the midwestern winter, even when I'm entering it after a week in the tropics.

Fortunately, life out at the Homestead offers plenty of opportunities to spend that time outside in the snow. On our first full day back from vacation there were a handful of activities that I tackled, all part and parcel of time on the prairie.

Since we missed the first snow of the season I hadn't thought yet about picking up salt for the sidewalk. This fact was provided as a near miss at a painful reminder as I felt my feet move out from under me when I took my first steps out the back door. It was added to the list of things to pick up as I ran my errands.

But when I returned from those my primary chore - which I'd frankly left a bit for want of time to address it - was upon me. A little longer ago than I care to admit MLW sent me a text to let me know that a rather large section of the fir tree next to the back door had broken off and fallen to the sidewalk.

One of the things I've had to teach myself about living out here is that it is often better to leave a project - at least one that isn't an emergency - to a time when one can handle it properly. As it stands, with the declining daylight hours I typically leave in darkness, and in darkness I return... The limb had fallen near the sidewalk, but it wasn't in the way of anything, and it was too large for me to simply pull over to the brush pile; it would need to be cut up. But this meant that I'd be working on it in the snow.

Given the size of the limb, and in the interest of efficiency and practicality, I made a suggestion to MLW:

E: Hey, you know, what do you think about just using that fallen limb as our Christmas tree this year?

MLW: ...

E: Hey honey - I said I thought maybe we could use that fallen limb as our Christmas tree.

MLW: Yeah - I heard you the first time.

It appears she was, shall we say, less than interested in that option.

So I gathered up some of my yard weaponry and prepared for battle.

I used my implements of destruction and was able to get it into small pieces fairly quickly. I keep thinking that I should get a chainsaw - there are enough downed limbs and weed trees to justify such a tool. But there is something especially satisfying about taking apart a limb like this with an axe. A few well-aimed swings can separate things into manageable pieces, and it's hard not to feel like you've accomplished something when you're done.

Once cut up, though, the pieces still had to be hauled off to the brush pile. Given that Freyja was hanging about and "helping", I tried to elicit her assistance:

E: Hey Freyja, you like to haul wood about. How about you carry these on over to the brush pile.

F: ...

E: Really - come on - you're big and strong. It'll be a good workout for you.

F: ...

So, yeah, disappointed for the second time of the afternoon, I hauled it all off for future burning.

Anytime I do something like this, outside, in the wintery weather, it reminds me how quickly one warms up if one is actively working in the cold. I started up bundled up against the cold, but before I got halfway through I was loosening buttons and unzipping things to get relief from the heat. It's mother nature's little gift.

Home and Away

This was my view yesterday morning:

...And this was the view out my window today:

Thanks to a delightful invitation by MLW's Aunt and Uncle we spent the last week at the Paradise Village resort in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. A delightful time was had by all. Over the course of our week in the tropics we went scuba diving (LB) and snorkeling (MLW and myself), swimming and boogie-boarding on the beach, kayaking, swimming, hottubbing, receiving massages, and partaking of many drinks and lovely dinners with family - including one such dinner on a pirate ship. It was a wonderful opportunity for a truly unforgettable experience.

We left temperatures in the 70's and 80's to return to an Illinois draped in snow. For some this might be a let-down. Our midwestern state had temps in the 40's, with nary a snowflake to be seen when we left, and we were entering it from a tropical paradise.

For me, though, as truly delightful as Mexico was (and it was), I also delight in the midwestern winter. The first snows of winter always make me smile and, while I'll admit to being a little frustrated with the way the weather slowed our trip home - the bus struggled with snow and traffic on the way back from O'Hare to Rockford - once I was on my own, navigating along country roads, each progressively more snow covered than the next - I was in a little bit of heaven.

It's wonderful to get away, and this vacation was particularly special. And it's wonderful to come home again as well.

Where Have All the Railroads Gone?

Several enduring recollections of my childhood involve railroads. Mendota has always been a crossroads, some of those roads paved, others laid with track. In that fashion, many of those memories simply involve having to sit and wait as the train goes by - the quiet groan as the lights come on at the crossing and the gate comes down, the brief hope that it's an Amtrak train which will quickly pass, its dozen or fewer cars flying by at high speed; this followed by the darkening realization that no, it's a freight train, with too many cars to count, and that this will be a long wait.

But other memories involve playing along those railroad lines. Yes, I realize that statement sounds like something a frustrated parent might off-handedly say to a troublesome child, but it's true. In my childhood the countryside here was cross-crossed with rail lines, many defunct or at least in such low use that one virtually never saw a train. These lines offered walkways through the countryside that were often very different from traveling on the roadways. While the roads were open, with long sight lines offering view of fields, fields, and more fields, the rail lines were typically lined with trees. Those trees were scrub growth - no one had planted them - but they offered a break from the former prairie, and opportunity to feel that one was out in the woods. A similar opportunity was offered by stream beds, but that held the problem of dealing with water and water-loving insects, while the railways were relatively bug free. Indeed, where there was water there was also a bridge to walk across, high above, butterflies in the stomach as one focused on making sure each footfall landed on a railroad tie rather than on the open space in-between. (As I've said before, it's a wonder we didn't die...)

Many of these are gone. If they seemed defunct in the 1970's they have simply vanished now. If you know where they were you can still see evidence of them - sometimes seeing the raised bed on either side of a roadway or the remainders of the trestle supports in a stream bed, cut down when the bridge was removed, but too much trouble to pull up.

It's an old joke that country folks provide directions with references to things that are gone - "you turn left where the old oak tree used to be, go down about a half mile, and take a right where they pulled up the railroad tracks..." Like many such things, it has its origins in a grain of truth. I think about these old rail lines often, typically as I drive past the places they used to be. There's enough evidence in the lay of the landscape to see what was there if one knows what one is looking for, and that is enough to trigger those memories.

I realize, as I think about such things that my memory of them is really quite limited. I have vivid memories of a few miles of these rail lines at best, and that in non-continuous sections. I know very little about where they went and what they were for. Fortunately, the internet has some things to offer in that regard: The Illinois State Library has scanned in a series of Illinois railroad maps going back to the late 1800's. These can be viewed on the site, which offers a viewer that allows you to zoom in, or downloaded in a size that allows you to zoom in on your own device (a better option for mobile devices).

What I see here is that the lines that I'm most familiar with - both of which are now gone - are designated as BN-L and MILW-G on the map from 1970. The BN-L line ran between Sterling and Paw Paw, right through West Brooklyn and Compton. My recollection of it was primarily of the tracks crossing 251 just at the south end of Compton. You can still see the remnants of it going east into Compton, including the grain elevator that was undoubtedly a cargo stop. The route is circled here:

This article from the American History and Geneology Project suggests that line was once called the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy line, and offers a little invective as to railroad decisions as well:

The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy is the only road running through Compton. For a time it was expected the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul would extend its north and south branch through Compton, but for reasons best known to railroads, it ran a mile to the east and established the Roxbury station and built an elevator.

It appears likely that the invective is actually directed at the other line I'm referring to, designated as MILW-G on the map, and circled here:

I've circled Compton and "Roxburg" in dark green. The "burg" in this instead of "bury", as in the article, appears to be an error on the map. Modern maps - inlcuding Apple and Google Maps - refer to this area as Roxbury. And, indeed, there is an old grain elevator at this spot as well (see the arrrow):

All of this a reminder that there was once a vibrant railroad network through this area, with old grain elevators and empty, flat grassways serving as the palimpsest of a former time. At times it feels like a loss, things gone to the vagaries of time. In many ways, though, I feel fortunate. I was born in an era of transition, giving me the opportunity to have seen, and still recall what was, and to see what it will all become. While not precisely the same window of opportunity as my grandparents - born in the nineteen-teens they would have viewed the rise of the automobile, the airplane, and the telephone - I've had the opportunity to walk the tracks laid in their childhood, to play in the barns they used and their parents and grandparents built, and yet to see what comes next.

New Approach

As mentioned briefly a day or two ago, it's time for wrapping the front door again. This because the wisdom of siting your house at the top of a hill and pointing your front doors in the direction of the prevailing wind on the open prairie is something perhaps better understood from the perspective of a settler making a statement in 1861 than from that of a homeowner in 2016 who must face an LP gas bill... but I digress.

In previous years I've put rigid foam insulation across the entirely of the inside of the front doors. Our approach this year is different. This year the plan is to sandwich the foam insulation in-between the storm doors and the front doors. This will, hopefully, give us something approaching the the insulating capacity of covering the entire doorway without the ugliness of it all.

We have been re-using the same foam panels over the past few years. I was able to modify one of the panels to fit in the door opening. This was a bit more challenging than one might think. While it was easy enough to cut a single panel to fit in the space - ideal because it decreases the number of seams or weak points for air to leak thru - getting it into the opening between the double-doors was another thing. The space they offer when open isn't quite as big as the space I needed to fill. This left me with three potential options:

1. Cut the panel and make it from two separate pieces.
2. Take one or both of the doors off the hinges; or
3. Try to gently bend the panel and hope that it doesn't break.

I went with option #3. Two separate pieces offers an entire additional cut through which wind can blow, so that was a no go. As for the hinges, well... when anything 155 years old is continuing to operate as designed, trying to take it apart and put it back together seems... inadvisable.

Long story short, I was able to gently coax it into place. A little bit of trimming was needed to get it all to drop where it needed to be, but it's in there as a single panel. Add in a bit of Frog Tape (which is gentle on the ancient paint), and we were ready to go:

I put the silver side to the inside, and the white, painted side to the outside. This should look more like a regular door from the outside, and perhaps the silver will reflect some light back into the hall. The windows are frosted, so you can't see much of the lettering through them.

Now it's just a waiting game. As the weather gets colder and the winds pick up we'll see how this measures up to the more complete wrapping of the past. I don't expect it to be quite as good, but if it's close I'll be content with the trade off of having the doors visible and the whole thing less claustrophobic than in the past.

November Wind

The curtains are drawn tonight against an angry western November wind. It's the first time this season, which has been oddly, pleasantly warm and calm.

The first time, but not the last, to be certain.

It also starts this season's test of the slow, but semi-steady improvements we've made. Last season these were windows, this season insulated curtains are in place. And we'll be trying out a hopefully more visually appealing approach to our front door insulation approach this year. After all, things didn't always work so well last year.

Solar Roof?

This week Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, announced a new product developed in conjunction with SolarCity - a new type of solar shingles designed to visually replicate the appearance of traditional roofing materials.

At first blush it might seem odd to bring this up here, on this site dedicated to living in and (very slowly) restoring a family home built in 1861. Indeed, I went back and forth between whether to put this here, or on my more science and technology oriented site. But this seemed the right place.

While our goal is to maintain and restore this old family home, it has never been with the intention of living a 19th-century lifestyle. We've been working our way through the replacement of the original windows, and with the help of the fine folks at Triple Service, have installed air conditioning and, more recently, a modern iron filtering system for the water supply. And, given that the house was originally built without either electricity or indoor plumbing, I hold that these modifications are consistent with the approach prior generations have taken to the Homestead.

All of which makes this new product very interesting to me. The prospect of using alternative energy sources - either solar or wind - has been something I've wanted to incorporate in the long-term picture for our home from the beginning. This is true both from the standpoint of being a person who is interested in these technological solutions for their own sake, and for the benefit they stand to offer to the environment. It's also true from the perspective of a person who owns a large, 155-year old home who must contend with the utility bills that home generates.

In addition, owing to our rural location, we are low on the list for restoration during power outages. In the seven years that we've been living at the homestead we've encountered at least one outage each year, and several of those have been for multiple days at a time. Because we have forced air heat and get our water from a well with an electric pump, a power outage also means a heat and water outage. This is a reality of where we live, of course - on the open prairie, in an area with high enough winds to justify a wind farm - but that makes it a reality it's which one must contend. Being in the position of generating some or all of one's own power becomes a very attractive option under these circumstances. If one can do that in a fashion that also complements the appearance of our vintage home, as opposed to looking like a modern-era tack-on, so much the better.

Another, very relevant detail is the quality and durability of the roofing material itself. Because of our location in the wind farm the traditional asphalt shingles that are used here struggle to maintain their protective position in the face of the gust. The descriptions of this material suggests that it is considerably more durable than traditional roofing.

This is all early days, of course. The product is not yet available, and there's been no announcement of pricing, though the stated goal is to make the cost competitive to the cost of traditional roofing plus utilities. Still, I think our Homestead would look quite nice with the Slate Tile panels on it. If the folks at Tesla and SolarCity are looking for a location which would provide a real-world, four-season, high-wind test site for their product I'm certain arrangements could be made...

Burdock

If you have spent any time exploring unmanicured areas in northern Illinois you have undoubtedly encountered Burdock.

The Wikipedia entry for Burdock describes its role as a food item in Asian countries and as the inspiration for Velcro, which is all well and good. What Wikipedia fails to do is to accurately describe this plant as a hateful, invasive weed that is designed to wreak havoc on the coat of medium to long-furred canines passing by.

It's slightly possible that I have not been as diligent as I could have been at trimming around the old barn. One consequence of this oversight seems to be that of allowing a burgeoning colony of Burdock to grow in and around that area. What's more, if I wasn't aware of my lawn care failings of my own accord, Rosie, our border collie/Australian shepherd mix has been helpfully making me aware.

I need to do some further research here, but based upon our recent experiences, it seems quite possible that border collies and Australian shepherds were selectively bred as Burdock seed distribution devices.

Sometimes you can catch the seed pods shortly after they have attached, at which point they can be removed fairly easily. However, miss a day or two of grooming, or fail to detect the presence of one of these things during a grooming session, and it can work it's way into a mat of fur that seems to require divine intervention (or scissors) to remove.

It appears that it could certainly be worse than we have it here, as a quick google image search confirms. Still, this fact does not prevent this plant's placement on my "I wonder if extinction is always a bad thing" list.

Fourmile Grove Cemetery

Tucked off a little side road east of Welland is the Fourmile Grove Cemetery. This one is a little different than some of the others I have featured here in that it is a little harder to turn up online. I come across this particular location not by online research, but by riding past it on a bike outing a while back.

The reason for the name is somewhat hard to sort out. My best guess - and it is a guess - is that the name reflects the distance of the cemetery from the tiny town of Meriden Illinois. There is a creek in the distance, and the remnants of a grove, though it's difficult to see at the site itself. While there are large old trees there, the immediately surrounding territory is farmland.

This site is being maintained - it's mowed regularly, and apparently has a section of the property maintained as a bit of prairie.

But several of the graves are slowly being consumed by the earth, and others appear to already be subsumed.

Review of the site from findagrave.com lists several graves that I did not - could not - see while I was there. This makes me wonder further how many additional graves there may be, covered, at the other Melugin Grove Cemetery.

This is a lovely site, and it was a lovely ride to get there. Aside from that, for me this was a bit of a bust. With my current information at least, no one at Fourmile Grove appears to be a relative.

Rotties and Woodpiles

In the back yard we have an old concrete slab that used to serve as a floor for a garage no longer present. On that slab we keep a Coleman fireplace for the occasional fire and, not coincidentally, a pile of firewood.

Over the years I have periodically walked past the wood pile to find it in disarray, pieces knocked to the side, bits fallen down. My typical strategy has been to look at this and (at best) sigh, and reassemble the pile. I've always assumed that this was the result of a dog jumping on, or perhaps into, the pile in pursuit of a mouse or similar prey, my wood-stacking abilities not sufficient to construct a pile with the integrity to withstand the errant canine snout poking it in just the right spot.

I had no idea.

This afternoon I discovered mice in my tool bucket (f&@king things). I wanted to dump out the bucket to separate the vermin from my wrenches and other sundry implements of destruction, but I was at a loss as to where to dump it. The driveway and garage floor weren't options, as I had no specific idea as to what was in the bottom of the bucket beneath the mice, but I knew there was a good likelihood that at least some of it was sharp. And I certainly didn't want to dump the mice anywhere near the house.

LB suggested I dump it on the slab, out back. I pronounced this a brilliant idea, and we set off towards making it so.

As soon as the bucket was upended the mice skittered. We'd counted at least three babies and one mother when we viewed it from the top. Once dumped there were at least five juveniles that scurried out along with mom, and most headed straight for - you've likely guessed it already: the woodpile.

All of this happened under the watchful eye of Freyja, our Rottweiler mix. She immediately began sniffing about at, and sticking her nose into, the woodpile.

I have personally long had a bias towards breeds that fall into what one traditionally thinks of as part of the herding group - border collies, cattle dogs, shepherds, and the like. I like those breeds because they are bright, capable animals who work with you rather than just obediently follow. Lots of owners want a lovable dufus, but I am not one of them. Casting them in with that lot, my attitude towards Rottweilers was the same as I held towards most other breeds: disinterest.

Again: no idea.

While Freyja is smaller than a full-bred Rottie, her head is much too big to poke in between the logs, which one would expect to ultimately stymie her attempts at mouse hunting.

One, perhaps, did not expect the problem-solving that followed:

Apparently, when you are a Rottweiler and you cannot get your (huge) head in-between the logs you just remove the logs in a canine game of Jenga until you can.

And she did - she steps away at the end with a mouse in her mouth.

...and left me, once again, to re-stack the woodpile.

Fisk Cemetary

One of the more delightful parts of doing geneology research is that it takes me to wonderfully peaceful locations like the other Melugin Grove cemetery and, today, Fisk cemetery.

The countryside here is peppered with these little cemetaries, some of them tiny, some of them large. Typically there are gravestones at an array of ages, some legible and, for the older graveyards, many not. Some time spent online will find that some of these sites (though not all) have at least partial rosters to give you an idea of who is interned there. I recently re-discovered findagrave.com, which is a low cost way to find a considerable amount of information both about where to find ancestors, as well as adding to what you know about them - I've found, for example, a few additional family members a couple of generation back, within the information available on the site.

It also meant that I knew - or at least had a pretty good idea - what I would find by traveling to and exploring Fisk cemetery. Central to that trip today was the grave for my Great-great-great grandfather and grandmother: Smith H. ”Prairie" Johnson and Ziba (Tompkins) Johnson.

These two people fall in the same generation as John Foulk, the builder of our house. And as with that generation on the other side of my mother's side of the family (if you can parse that sentence) things start to get sketchy when one tries to go further back. Written records get harder to find, making a record of these grave sites much more important. Thanks to my uncle's family tree research the Johnson side of the family can be tracked further back, but the same is not true for the Foulks and the Comptons, among others. There the work is more involved.

I do know from this that I want to know more about these folks - what occurs that causes a man to get the nickname "Prairie" in the first place? And what is the derivation of the name "Ziba"? Is it short for Elizabeth? Because Ziba is the only version of that name I come across. And she was born in 1809 and died in 1873. It doesn't seem like folks from back then were terribly interested in keeping enduring written records as a part of their priorities while coping with life on the prairie. Wolves, coyotes, panthers, growing enough food to survive - they may have had other things on their minds.

Also present at the Fisk Cemetary is Calvin Johnson and his family.

Calvin and Mary (Williams) Johnson would be, by my estimation, my Great-great Uncle and Aunt, respectively. As is true of many living in the turn of the century they experienced tragedy with respect to building their family. They lost all of their children early - one at 3 months (Jennie), another at three years (Lafayette). The third and first-born, Eugene, lived to 23 years of age. He did better than his siblings, but all three were outlived by their parents.

This is not, of course, an uncommon story for the times. Still, it illustrates the reality - and the pain - of the era.

The folks three generations back - John and Martha Foulk, Smith and Ziba Johnson, John and Nancy Compton - come to Illinois from the East. The Foulks came by way of Pennsylvania, with a stopover in Ohio; the Johnsons came out from Vermont and New York. We can see from the gravestones they were here, but finding more on them has been challenging.

The Other Melugin Grove Cemetary

This has been a bit of a quest.

Back when I wrote about the Melugin Grove Cemetary I noted that i had become aware of it because my uncle had told of it. As I mentioned then, it was a bit of a goldmine of former ancestors, and provided helpful technical information - birth and death dates and, in at least one case, allowed me to identify a marital partner for a cousin of a couple of generations back.

When I told my uncle about it he laughed a bit and said "that's not it", and noted that the one he meant was down a hidden path, lost behind the trees. I've been looking for it since, all along Shaw Road - lots of miles logged on the bike in that search, and many hours in the satellite view of Apple and Google Maps. I'd begun to think he must be mistaken about the road it was on, and that he was perhaps remembering a different place - something like Inlet Cemetary, which is a registered Cemetary not that far away that also happens to be in the middle of a field, behind some trees.

I should not have doubted him.

To say that this cemetary, which contains the final resting place of Zachariah Melugin, the man after whom the grove was named, is "down a hidden path" strains the definition of the word "path". But it is here, and it has the appearance of being maintained still, thanks to Boy Scout Troop 85.

The graves are old, with some dating back to at least the 1850's. At least, because the majority of them are at least partially illegible, and many completely so.

There are perhaps two dozen graves visible. One of the sources I used to locate the site indicates that several of the graves had to be uncovered. What is visible makes one wonder if there might be still more here - the clearing it occupies is much larger than the space in which the stones appear.

And those sources? How did I find it? I think this one I'll keep close to the vest. It seems like a thing this hard to find wants you to work to find it - nothing this special should be casually obtained, or revealed such that it would seem easy prey to vandals.

Melugin Grove is a Place

Finding and exploring the back roads in the region seems to have stimulated my appetite for information about the geography of the area, and led to some wondering as to what it must have been like to live here during that time.

I realized - not for the first time, but this time it must have sunk in - while looking at a map of the area this morning that, as far as that map is concerned, Melugin Grove is still a place. This may be an odd thing to say, I suppose, but I believe I come by it honestly. There are dozens of place names on the area map that no longer correspond to anything that people traveling today, at 60 miles an hour in a car, would consider a separate place. The towns of Compton and West Brooklyn, for example, tiny as they are still contain a small arrangement of streets and houses that make it clear that they are places - self-standing entities, of a sort, a thing, a village or town.

But as you look on the map there are other "places" that appear in the area, with names - The Burg, for example, at or near the intersection of Shaw Road and Rt 251, or Shaws, at the intersection of Shaw and Inlet roads - where it is difficult to understand, even when one goes there, how these were considered a place worthy of a name. Sometimes, with practice, you can begin to see what might have led to it. Shaws, for example, has a a few houses in closer proximity than typically seen along a country road, a former church, a decaying gas station at the intersection, and the tumbledown remnants of what appears to have been a one-room school house (there are more of these out here than you'd think). The Burg, alternately, provides nothing to suggest anything was there, no visual hint to why it would have a name.

There are similar peculiarities - running through the area is Beemerville Road, which one might expect would be part of the straightforward naming strategy seen in the area of naming the roads after the places they go. West Brooklyn Road goes to West Brooklyn, Compton Road leads to Compton, Paw Paw Road... You get the idea. But Beemerville road? No sign of a "Beemerville" on the map anywhere along its approximately five miles of length, not even as a forgotten place name, an atavistic map icon. Was it a place once? The Melugin Grove Cemetery has has its fair share of Beemers laid to rest, so one suspects it may have been. But apparently no longer.

But Melugin Grove is still a place, at least according to Apple Maps, falling in an oddly-shaped territory framed by Carnahan Road to the west, Richards and Melugin Grove (natch) Roads to the east, Shaw Road to the south, and Butler Hill Road to the north.

In the grand scheme of things it's a small place - a little over 650 acres - but at the slower, smaller scale of moving through it on the ground, in my case on a bicycle, it feels substantial. Like so much of this little area, it's heavily wooded to a degree that can make one feel pleasantly separated and, when looking in toward the area identified on the map one sees a far higher proportion of trees and grassy clearings to crops than in most parts of the region. It has the feeling of a different place - more central Wisconsin than Northern Illinois. It becomes easy to imagine why an early settler, particularly if he or she did not fancy themselves future farmers, would choose to stop here.

Melugin Grove - beyond the bean field - from the North.

Back Roads

I complained a few months ago about the lack of wooded areas to hike in and explore on the prairie, grousing over the rarity of stands of trees. While this is technically true, it is, perhaps, an unfair characterization.

In our immediate area the land is relatively flat and open, to be sure. Still, one doesn't have to travel far to get some geographic variation. A few miles away is an area historically referred to collectively as "the groves" and, as the name implies, these areas are considerably more woodsy today, as they were back when they'd first attained that name.

To be clear, there were several groves, one of which was Melugin Grove, where I found the cemetery containing Joel Compton's grave. This article discusses, among other things, how the groves were an attractive site for early settlers, offering wood for building and fuel, and what was undoubtedly an abundance of wildlife for hunting.

While the land is almost certainly different than it was back then - a fair amount of it is cultivated for agriculture - the features of the area still leave it feeling more wild than the flatter land a few miles away. In parts this is almost certainly because the area is marshy and challenging to work with.

Most of the property is private, which in and of itself continues the complaint that I made back in late winter. However, public roads run through them, which makes them accessible by foot, by car, or by bike, which is my preference. Head out on these lightly traveled back roads, and within a fairly short distance things start to seem very remote indeed:

For better or worse these areas didn't become the long-term thriving communities that the early pioneers perhaps pictured. As such, many of the roads are still gravel, and several are single-track passageways that are barely wide enough for a single car to travel. It offers a very nice opportunity to get back to nature, and a bonus, lets one feel a little of what it must have been like to travel through this land back in those pioneer days.

Family Trees

The long weekend offered by the Fourth of July has provided an opportunity to address a number of little projects that have been sitting, waiting. Among these is making a digital copy of the family tree that my uncle had put together.

Constructing a physical family tree is a bit of a logistical nightmare because of the way the tree fans out away from whomever your starting person is. My uncle is decidedly, and unashamedly, a man of physical media, which is why his solution involves paper and tape:

I am, of course, taking the opportunity to photograph and take scans of this document so I can have a digital version both for my reference, and for preservation. My uncle's work on his tree has been entirely non-digital, and so it provides a valuable verification source against which to compare my online research.

Much of my homework on the family tree has been done through Ancestry.Com. Anyone who has used this source is almost certainly aware of the amount of metaphorical heavy lifting it completes for you in terms of research. Being plugged into a huge library of census and other records is a huge boon, and the fact that others are also often researching parts of your family tree means that there is an uncoordinated group effort which can be very helpful.

So why the paper version? While I'm a fan of technology in general, I am well aware that the accuracy of the information gathered online is only as good as the expertise of the people putting it together. The reality is that neither I, nor many of the other people putting their trees together, am really expert in constructing a tree. For many people, myself included, it's an activity undertaken in fits and starts, when a large enough bit of free time presents itself to allow for the extended time sink that is family research.

The digital versions offer ways to manage large volumes of information relatively easily, and to provide reports on that information in attractive and interesting ways. Ancestry.com has an app for the iPad, for example, that lays out your entire tree in multiple views, and provides background information that you've assembled for each person on the tree. This is great, and again makes it easier to put this information together. But because of the time and effort this all takes, I periodically worry about the information I've gathered in that spot because it is essentially held by that company.

While the company is functional and healthy, it's in its financial best interests to ensure that one has easy access to one's records. This isn't the part that concerns me. But what happens if and when the company is no longer functional and healthy? What happens when Ancestry.com goes out of business?

For this reason I actually maintain two family trees, one through Ancestry and one on private geneology software. And even that is vulnerable to the perils of obsolescence.

All of which makes it clear that the paper and tape solution also has its advantages.

Recycling

My grandparents were the last inhabitants of our old house. They were not especially well-to-do, but my grandfather was handy. The combination of these two facts can be seen around the home. Probably my favorite example, which I touched on briefly in another recent post, was the repurposing of materials from the old bay window that was on the south side of the house:

At some point in my grandparent's occupancy that window began to leak, and my Grandpa Ray made the call to remove it and replace it. In its place he installed a large multiple pane picture window, which still occupies that space today:

This decision seems to have been a practical one - either the bay window was worn beyond repair, or perhaps to a degree that was beyond Ray's capabilities to rectify. In either case, however, removal of that item did not signify the end of its useful life.

Two of the windows, and their shutters, were repurposed. If you look closely at the first, older picture you can see that the house originally had an open porch entry into the back door:

It's since been enclosed, and a close look at the second picture shows that Ray repurposed two of those windows for service on that enclosed porch:

And, not only did he repurpose the Windows, but the shutters continue to grace them on the inside:

This seems again, eminently practical, as the porch windows face south, and the temperature in the space can otherwise heat up considerably.

This is all pretty straightforward, of course, but there is also at least one example of some real imagination and out-of-the box thinking:

These shutters - which appear to be the same shutters as those on the porch - are serving as a closet door for the room that was once my grandparent's bedroom. Two of the shutters are fastened together on one side, and the other is free, to make a sort of double door.

I saw this closet door many, many times across the course of my childhood. It was so familiar to me from such an early age that I don't believe it had ever occurred to me to ask, or even wonder, why the door was made from shutters. Having been away for a while, and coming back, combined with having the old pictures of the house to compare against has given the the opportunity to begin asking, and understanding, about these things. In a lot of ways it helps me to better get to know my grandfather, who died when I was only six.

It also means that, with the closet door and the porch windows, seven of the eight shutters from the original bay window - shutters first built in 1861 - have survived to current day. This might seem a small thing to others, but to me this is a pretty cool thing.

What's He Growing Out There?

Something... different is happening around us this year.

We are surrounded on all sides by farmland, and three of those four sides are owned by my cousin. Most years he plants corn, but sometimes soybeans or a mixture of the two. We never know which until we see things start to sprout, and that's a bit of the adventure of living out here.

Yes, we could probably ask, but one of the joys of country living for this introvert is that I'm not routinely interacting with my neighbors. I suspect most of the people living around me have a similar perspective - it's part of why one chooses to live out here.

At any rate, this year is different.

What's coming up around us looks like clover (and I've learned something new today: apparently there is a dating app called Clover, and it occupies the first four hits on Google). It looks like this up close:

And looking across the field:

A Google image search doesn't help much, since much of it seems to focus on either idealized images or a couple of specific types of clover.

The Wikipedia page on clover suggests good reasons why it might be planted around us - apparently the plant is related to peas, and fixes nitrogen in a similar fashion, refreshing the soil. Its also an important component of hay, which is my cousin's primary crop.

Eventually I'll probably get around to asking him. But for the moment I'm rather enjoying the mystery. What's he growing out there? What the hell is he growing out there...

Warm Weather Approaches

We've had a very cool spring - I could hear the furnace kick on periodically well into April. As we got through May, however, things finally warmed up. Temperatures around these parts have stopped shy of the 90's so far, but we've had some solid mid-80° days.

Temperature control year round is an issue for our old house. We've talked quite a bit here about taking measures - some more successful than others - to manage the cold. Hot weather is also a challenge, though less-so than winter.

We do have central air conditioning. This was something that we had installed by the second year or so that we lived here. My grandparents did not have it, and my uncle will tell sad stories of summer nights in his bedroom just wishing that his sister - my mother - would open up her bedroom door so that the southern breeze entering her room could be shared across the hallway into his.

As I understand the story, she never gave in, selfishly hoarding the refreshing summer breeze to herself; The story, at least, as my uncle tells it.

While we have the central air available, however, we use it sparingly. It gets hot here now, and it also got hot back in the 1860's, when the house was built. With the absence of technological interventions like air conditioning, they employed other strategies to keep the building relatively cool. Those strategies, and the support systems for them, still work today.

Most of this involves keeping the house closed up. Part of this is focused on making sure all windows and doors are sealed during the part of the day in which the outside air is warmer than the inside air. Having it sealed prevents temperature exchange, and the inside will stay much cooler than one would expect without the help of AC.

Another part of being closed up refers to covering windows - particularly those facing south and west. This decreases heat gain from sunlight, keeping rooms that would otherwise be scorching hot from reaching those temperatures and sharing them with the rest of the building. You can see this strategy employed in one of the few very old pictures of the house that we have:

If you look closely you will see that this picture - clearly taken in the daylight in summer - shows that every window has shutters on it, and every shutter is closed. They were external shutters, in this case, which also had the benefit of protecting the glass in high winds. A few of those shutters are still around, incidentally. My grandfather repurposed some of them into use on the enclosed porch windows (the windows were also repurposed from the old bay window that was taken out - the shutters covered the bay windows as well), and into a closet door. Others are out in the shed, far the worse for wear. I'd love someday to be able to use them as a template for new versions, though that's far down the list.

The final part of the strategy for staying cool is something I am thankful my ancestors took care of for me: shade.

We have very large trees to the south and west of the house, planted by enterprising relatives likely both to cool the building and protect it from the wind. It's a gift that just keeps on giving.

To be clear, we still give in and kick the AC on when the weather gets too hot, and particularly when it gets too humid. While I love the care and attention that my ancestors paid to keeping the house cool, that love only goes so far on a 98° day with 95% humidity.

Barn Swallows

If the Red-wing Blackbirds are a sign of early spring, the arrival of the Barn Swallows indicates that Mother Nature is finally confident the season will persist.

These birds are truly amazing - arial gymnasts that pluck insects out of the sky in mid-flight. They are a country phenomenon, needing open space to fly and structures in which to nest. This time of year you may encounter them when driving down a country road; or, if you live out here, mowing the grass will bring them out in droves, which is why you see them flying about in this video:

(Because they are relatively small and move so much, they can be difficult to pick up on a mobile phone camera)

I, personally, embrace any critters that decrease the resident population of insects and vermin, though opinions vary within the Homestead household (LB will not now, nor has she ever seen fit to suffer a spider to live). More than most animals that provide this contribution, though, these birds put on a show that is delightful to see throughout the spring and summer.