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Emily Demuth and her daughter, Louisa, at the Mather Inn well excavation.
The archaeologist, Norm Meinholz, was digging at the site of Mather Inn again this month. This time, I managed to get back to Wisconsin while the dig was still open. Meinholz had uncovered part of the old foundation and established the exact location of the Inn, when it stood facing the Plank Road. The Mather Inn itself still stands a stone’s throw away–it was moved many years ago, and now faces what would have been the Section Line Road between the Mather and McEachron properties.
Just a few paces west of the foundation, the archaeologist had found the well. Stones formed a perfect semi-circle (only half had been uncovered). It was easy to imagine Katie pulling a bucket of water from the well, setting the bucket on the stone rim, and peering at her reflection–even though that scene was edited out of our book during an early revision.
Many scenes never made it into the final version of Plank Road Summer, including one which our mother particularly liked. This lost scene was the first introduction to the Mather Inn from Katie’s point of view:
“Katie walked past the grand front door that led to the parlor and the ballroom upstairs–that was for guests. She hurried round past the porch on the west side, which led to the dining room–that was for teamsters. At the back of the house she rapped at the kitchen door–that was for neighbor children. Mrs. Mather was very particular about the proper use of doors.”
As I walked around the original site of the Inn and stood where the front door had once been, I slipped back in time–back to when traffic sounds were the creak of a harness or clopping of hooves, and when water came not from the faucet but from a bucket drawn daily from the well. Had Hilda and I seen this circle of stones a couple of years ago, I’m sure we’d have kept the well scene in our book.
Click here to read a newspaper article about the first dig.
The students at Yorkville Elementary School in Racine County, Wisconsin, have a distinct advantage over students elsewhere when it comes to imagining the scenes of Plank Road Summer. Their school buses travel down the plank road past the old McEachron and Mather homesteads, climb up over the Rise, and pass the pioneer cemetery on Old Yorkville Road.
The Modine-Benstead Observatory now stands on the Rise.
When I visited the school recently, the students enjoyed trying to figure out which local landmarks now stand at the places mentioned in the book. For example, the high point of land known as the Rise is now the site of the Modine-Benstead Observatory. The Waites’ Corners schoolhouse once stood among the oaks just south of today’s popular Country Rose Bakery and Cafe.
This week I received a packet from Mrs. Mary Jo North, the Yorkville teacher who coordinated my visit. In the envelope were thank-you notes from representatives of the student body. Here is a portion of one:
You taught us about the writing process and all the research you had to do to write your novels. A lot of us love to read, including myself, and some of us dream about writing our own novels. You helped us see what we’re up against, but that it’s also possible for dreams to come true. . .
. . . You taught us to never give up and keep going when things get rough. Even though you submitted your story for publishing and got refused over 20 times, you and your sister never gave up. Whether we ever attempt to write a novel or not, it will help us in whatever else we do.
Thank you, Kristina, for those beautiful words. Your teachers at Yorkville School should be proud indeed.
When Emily and I appeared at the Racine Lutheran High School Ladies’ Guild Harvest Fair, our Plank Road Summer book display was set up in an impressively renovated lobby which looked nothing like the entrance we remembered from our high school days. The RLHS Harvest Fair itself, on the other hand, seemed exactly the same–a gymnasium full of tables heaped with linens, books, craft items, baked goods, and the ever-popular “trash and treasure” selection in the corner.
During a break from book-signing, I wandered down a corridor in search of familiar flooring and fixtures. At the top of a stairwell I peered into the darkened classroom which had belonged to Mr. Adel. White-haired Mr. Adel, my ninth grade English teacher, was also the school librarian, and the little library adjoining his classroom became my favorite haven.
Mr. Adel recommended books and discussed them with me afterward. I set myself the ambitious goal of reading the entire fiction collection, beginning with Alcott and Austen and working my way through Zola.
Sophomore year I began writing a novel, an undertaking that cut into my reading time considerably. Faithful Mr. Adel read every word of the chapters I hammered out on my mother’s old manual typewriter. I knew exactly where my novel would be located on the Lutheran High library shelves; I could already picture the label FIC DEM on the spine.
While that unfinished novel is now in a box in my attic with other abandoned projects, the fact that a teacher took me seriously as a writer is a significant factor in my success today. Having Plank Road Summer on a shelf in a school library is sweeter than any display at Barnes & Noble. I think Mr. Adel would understand.
The Racine County Fair, that is. This weekend, Hilda and Emily Demuth, co-authors of Plank Road Summer, will be at the Racine County Fair in Union Grove, Wisconsin, on Saturday, August 1 (12-5 pm), to sign books and host some fun family activities.
Be sure to stop by their program tent on Saturday afternoon (it’s on the NE corner of Polley Drive and Creuziger Lane, near the Case exhibit, by Gate 5). For other events and directions, see the Racine County Fair website.
Why we’re excited: a major event in Plank Road Summer is . . . (drum roll, please) the first Racine County Fair! It was held in the early 1850s just west of the Mather Inn (one of the key places in the book).
Like the county fair itself, Plank Road Summer celebrates the community spirit and the rich heritage of the pioneer Midwest.
Hilda, Emily, and friends will be there Saturday from 12 to 5 pm. Besides signing books, they’re hosting wool-carding on an antique drum carder, a bit of live old-time fiddle music, and a display on Racine County history.
So come on down to the fair! Enjoy the rides, the 4-H exhibits . . . and meet the authors of this exciting novel for kids about county fairs, pioneer life, plank roads, fugitive slaves . . . and more!
From Plank Road Summer:
Even though she had watched the preparations day by day, Florence was still astonished at her first sight of the Racine County Fair. The north end of the Doanes’ front forty was lined with nearly a hundred wagons and buggies. The clamor of livestock provided a constant accompaniment to all the other goings-on.
Among the dozen enormous tents, Florence could pick out the dinner tent in which ladies of the Scotch Settlement church and the Methodist chapel were working together to feed hungry fairgoers. Next to the dinner tent stood a dance platform where a fiddler sawed a merry tune. Florence remembered someone’s claim that there would be enough players that the music at the fair would never end.
Mrs. Mather led the way to the domestic skills exhibits, which were flanked by a brilliant wall of quilts swaying on a line strung between two tents.
(As you may know, quilts and quilting also play a big role in the book!)
Hope to see you this weekend!
During my Valparaiso University semester abroad, in Cornwall I enjoyed reading by the hearth in the youth hostel, hiking along the cliffs, and watching the sea. I remember standing at Land’s End looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, thinking about the many emigrants who had watched their homeland fade into a gray haze of sea and sky.
I did not know then that my sister Emily and I would write about the Cornish settlers of our own Wisconsin community. In the tree-shaded Yorkville Methodist cemetery, the pale weathered stones of the pioneers are scattered among the sharp granite markers of their descendants.
In the Plank Road days, Cornish settlers must have sought ways to connect the old ways with the new. Along with telling stories of the old country, they shared the tastes of home–pasties every day and saffron cake on special occasions–and worshiped together at the Methodist “mud chapel,” singing hymns and carols known for generations.
Other traditions must have persisted as well. There are no cliffs in Yorkville, so on Midsummer Eve the Cornish pioneers were never to see “a chain of fires on the clifftops stretching all along the seacoast,” as Gran Mather described the custom to Florence. Yet lighting a bonfire on June 23 and sharing a ritual for prosperity in the coming year would be one way of honoring the old ways and helping the young people to appreciate the place they knew “only through stories and songs, the land where others shared in the keeping of the fires.”
By the end of the nineteenth century, such Midsummer traditions had died out even in Cornwall, but in the 1920s various organizations were formed to preserve the Cornish heritage. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies is “Cuntelleugh an brewyon us gesys na vo kellys travyth” (Gather up the fragments that are left that nothing be lost). You can learn more about Midsummer Eve fires and other Cornish customs at the Federation website: <http://www.oldcornwall.org/>
The Plank Road Summer Resources for Teachers include materials related to immigration and Cornish traditions provided by the Wisconsin historic site of Pendarvis.
This morning Patricia Lynch, Civil War dance instructor in Milwaukee and president of the West Side Soldiers Aid Society, emailed me a wonderful treasure–a PDF of a page from a dance tunebook used by Yorkville settlers in the plank road days.
According to the file description listed for this example of “Pioneer Dance Music” in the Racine Heritage Museum, the handwritten notebook of tunes and dance notations was “brought from the east by Rubin Waite in 1837 and used by three generations of the Waite family: Rubin Sr., his son Lorenzo, and his grandson Menzo, who donated the book to the Racine Co. Historical Room.”
The page is marked “3d Sett” and contains a reel and two jigs. Neatly-inked quarter- and eighth-notes caper above a swirling script:
First 4 R & L/ Bal – 4 Swing/ Ladies chain/ All promenade //
These figures are familiar to square dancers and contra dancers today. Old-time dance communities still flourish in the Midwest, following in the footsteps of the Yorkville settlers who promenaded in the Waite’s Corners schoolhouse or the ballroom of the Mather Inn.
Click here to see the 3rd Sett
If you attend the Plank Road Summer book launch at Yorkville Elementary School (see the Events page), you can join in old-time dancing with caller Dot Kent and the Hoosier Recruits, a contra dance band. The Recruits may well be playing a dance or two out of the Waite family tunebook.
One hundred fifty-five years ago this week, fugitive slave Joshua Glover was captured in Racine, Wisconsin, where he had been living for some time, working at a sawmill. On the night of March 11, 1854, Glover’s former master and two United States marshals surprised Glover at his home. Fearful of the strong anti-slavery sentiment in Racine, the captors rushed their prisoner to Milwaukee to await transportation to Missouri.
As news of the capture spread, angry Racinians boarded ship for Milwaukee, and Sherman M. Booth, editor of the Milwaukee Free Democrat, called for a mass meeting at the courthouse square, where St. John’s cathedral was under construction.
A crowd of 5,000 gathered around the Milwaukee courthouse, and the leaders demanded that the jailer hand over the keys. When the jailer refused, James Angove, a Cornish bricklayer, picked up a six-inch beam from a pile of lumber and said, “Here’s a good enough key.” Other men seized the beam and battered in the door. According to Angove’s account, Glover was spirited away in the buggy of John A. Messenger, whose horse was the fastest in the Second Ward.
The Cornishman’s interview appears in a June 10, 1900, Milwaukee Sentinel article describing the Glover rescue as a “spectacular incident of anti-slavery education . . .which brought prominently to the notice of the liberty-loving people of Wisconsin the iniquity of the Fugitive Slave law.”
The Joshua Glover case is featured in the Underground Railroad exhibit at the Racine Heritage Museum. The tale of Glover’s rescue is also told in Julia Pferdehirt’s Freedom Train North: Stories of the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin. In Finding Freedom: the Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Runaway Slave, authors Ruby West Jackson and William T. McDonald provide a detailed account of Glover’s life. Wisconsin’s most famous fugitive slave spent the last thirty years of his life as a free man in Canada.
