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Gus and Agnes

Last week’s blog was Leaving the Homestead, in which I wrote about our decision to sell the century-old Waschke homestead and how my great grandfather arrived in Whatcom County and my grandparents purchased the farm that I lived on until recently. This week, I will continue my grandparent’s story. To see current pictures of the homestead on the real estate market, look here.

The family historian’s dilemma

As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was trained as a historian. I took classes on history and historiography taught by professors who were distinguished historians themselves and working daily with my fellows who were on the way to becoming professional historians. I learned about objectivity and the rules of historical evidence and integrity. Searching for, finding, and compensating for personal bias was part of this training. Now, I find myself acting as a historian of my family. I know much more of the details of my family than I ever hoped to know of the Yangtze valley in the eighth through the third century BCE, the area and time that I studied for my never completed PhD thesis.

Yet, I am much less sure of myself in writing about my family. When I was studying the state of Chu in southern China, facts were hard to find and harder to separate from the romantic stories that were told by later generations. But after the records were rigorously examined, you might find you didn’t know much, but at least you knew what you knew.

Writing about family is different. I have many facts. I remember things I was told and I have read letters and looked at records. Much of what I know comes from a little boy listening to his dad, grandpa, other relatives, and their friends, talking while they worked and rested. But it is hard to distinguish fact from mis-remembered fantasy. What can I do with clearly remembered stories told by people long dead? As a trained historian, I am loath to trust my feeble brain, but if I don’t, I leave the story untold.

I have a solution: I am telling it as I remember it. I could be wrong. Don’t let my credentials fool you. The stories I tell here would not hold up as journalism or history, but I am sincere in telling them. You must trust me that I am doing my best. But I am not even trying to be a good historian or journalist, not even a good memoirist. I’m telling a story here, trying to be true to the spirit of my memory. I try to fact-check and cross-check, but when the cows are all back in the barn, I am just spinning a yarn.

Brush, stumps, and shade

Starting a family on forty acres of brush, stumps, and semi-forest was a struggle. In Sometimes A Great Notion, Ken Kesey wrote about loggers cutting trees to fight the shade. For homesteaders in Whatcom County, shade was deadly. Cattle couldn’t eat trees and brush. Crops to put by for winter would not grow in shade. The old settlers’ brutal tactics in the life and death battle against the shade would horrify many people today. My father told me that in the early days the loggers left behind fir logs so large, farmers dynamited the logs to break them up into chunks small enough to burn and make space for crops.

The forest fire that went through the homestead when my grandparents were young was likely to have been intentionally set. Both the early settlers and the Lummi and Nooksack tribes occasionally set fires in August and September to clear the underbrush and open the forest floor to sunlight. The Indians used fires to encourage Camas lilies and other plants which they cultivated and harvested. A forest fire made land clearing easier, eliminating underbrush and shade which were barriers to cultivation. Hard to imagine a beneficial forest fire in these smoky days of August 2018. The fires threatened their homes and livestock, they also made life easier for the old settlers.

Dynamite

My grandfather, Gus, became a dynamite expert. He stored his dynamite in powder boxes suspended five or six feet up the trunk of a tree fifty yards behind the barn. If the dynamite exploded, the damage was minimized by suspending the explosives above the ground where the blast would dissipate in the air. Dynamite itself was fairly stable and difficult to set off, although it had to be kept dry and thawed carefully if it froze.

Blasting caps are small volatile charges that fire easily. The small explosion from a blasting cap would trigger a much larger dynamite explosion. The problem with blasting caps was that they set off easily and were enough to blow off a hand or blow open a chest. I heard a story about a guy who lost his hand when he attempted to scrape what he thought was mud out of a blasting cap with a nail. Gus stored his blasting caps in a smaller powder box on a tree twenty feet from his dynamite safe. I was always warned that caps were more dangerous than dynamite.

Childbirth

Living in their cedar shack, my grandparents struggled to clear land, grow crops, and raise cows, pigs, and chickens. On Sundays, they walked to rest the horses. During this time, two daughters were born, my aunts, but both died before they lived a year. My grandmother, Agnes, grieved over these deaths, still occasionally shedding tears many years later when she spoke about them to her grandchildren. I am sure my grandfather, Gus, grieved also, but he did not articulate his grief. Childbirth and infant care must have been difficult. No running water or refrigeration and long days working in the fields and with animals must have been obstacles.

Doctors were scarce and expensive. When birth came, my grandmother preferred a mid-wife from the Lummi tribe over a doctor from Bellingham or Ferndale. She was hesitant about physicians for her entire life, preferring herbal remedies and patience. I have the name of the mid-wife, a Mrs. Wells, but I have not been able to discover anything about her. At birthing time, she came to stay a few days, presiding over the birth and my grandmother’s recovery.

Shocking grain

My great-grandmother was known for her physical vigor. I heard that one of my great-uncles was born during fall thrashing. My great-grandmother tied up her skirts and went out to shock wheat in the morning, came to the house to give birth, and returned to shocking before the end of the day, leaving the infant to her older daughters to take care of.

I helped a little with shocking before my dad got a baler and hired a combine to harvest the wheat and oats. The standing grain was cut with a horse or tractor drawn implement called a binder. The binder produced bundles of grain stalks bound with twine. These bundles were gathered in to shocks of four or five bundles stood upright to dry. Usually, the grain was cut while the kernels were still soft. In cool and damp Whatcom County, cutting grain while the kernels were still soft was prudent because the fall rains could easily flatten a field of grain and make harvest nearly impossible. Shocked grain would still dry and the kernels harden for thrashing.

Born in a real house

My grandmother was not a field worker like my great grandmother. My father was born in the cedar shack, but when my uncle, my father’s younger brother Arnold, was born, they had a new house with plumbing and wired for electricity, which would not be available for a few years. The house was built in 1916. I once saw old invoices from Diamond B, which still exists as Diamond B Constructors, that I think were for plumbing and wiring the house for electricity. Whatcom County Railway and Light Company was active already in 1902, but electricity did not reach the house until the Gus Waschke family had occupied the house for a few years.

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Leaving the Homestead

You may know that I live on a road named for my family and in a house that was built by my grandfather and that both I and my father grew up in. Every so often, I meet someone who is like me: stubborn, lacking in creativity, or otherwise inclined to remain sessile in a country where no one lives in the same place for long. All has changed. This spring, I left that motley clutch.

My wife Rebecca and I decided early this year that it was time for us to leave the Waschke homestead. The property has been in my family for well over a century, passed on from my grandfather, to my father, and finally to me. We have a deed tucked in a safe that has Ulysses S. Grant’s signature at the bottom, although I understand those deed signatures were all copies.

The decision was difficult and part of me still disagrees vehemently. Sadly, I am no farmer. I was raised on the farm, but my interests have ranged from mathematics, to classical Chinese history, developing and writing about computer systems, libraries, and writing mystery novels. Although I stayed on Waschke Road and the homestead my entire life, I never wanted to farm. Too much experience has dulled my appreciation for the work on the farm that many find renewing and fulfilling. In recent years, a congenital heart condition and diabetes have made maintaining the farm more difficult and my wife Rebecca had her third back surgery last summer. My city wife is the gardener on our team, but what she enjoyed and I dreaded as stoop labor, is now impossible for her. Our children are not interested in the farm. The inescapable conclusion was that we would live longer and happier if we relinquished the homestead.

We decided to sell the old place. Our first step was to buy a house in town, Ferndale where I went to high school. I move, but not far. Although we remodeled the old farmhouse ten years ago, we both much prefer this smaller and more easily maintained new house. I am happy to spend my days researching and writing instead of fretting over the aches and fatigue that almost put me to bed after a few hours on the tractor or maintaining the farm. We still live from packing boxes—the effort of moving from a house and grounds in which three generations lived without ever moving out was tremendous. We are sorting three generations of accumulation. We found a pair of trunks, which we think traveled to America from Germany when my great grandparents emigrated. One of the trunks contained the chrome plated name plaques from the coffins of my two aunts who died shortly after birth on the homestead before my father was born. The trunks now sit in our new foyer. We’ve cleaned them up and are thinking about whether to let the years show or to restore them.

The homestead is now on the market, waiting for the right buyer. I don’t expect the place to sell quickly. It is not for everyone. Only a certain person in the right circumstances will appreciate it. You can see pictures here.

From Prussia to Minnesota

My great grandfather, Gottlieb Waschke, was an orphan. His parents died when he was twelve, leaving him and his younger brother to fend for themselves. As orphans, Gottlieb and his brother John trained as a builders and craftsmen in the public vocational school system established by Otto Von Bismarck in 19th century in Prussia. He built sugar mills, which boomed in northern Europe after the American civil war interrupted the supply of sugar from the Gulf of Mexico. My great grandfather emigrated from Germany, I believe entering the U.S. through New Orleans. He went up the Mississippi and used his training and experience to become a railroad car builder in Detroit and later Stevens Point, Wisconsin, near Green Bay. Later, he brought his younger brother from Germany, who was also a craftsman. The younger brother was soon recruited to Whatcom County to help with the late 19th century Bellingham Bay real estate boom.

Arrival in Whatcom County

My great grandfather Gottlieb saved enough in the car yards to buy farm land near Wells, Minnesota. He apparently did well, but the frigid winters and broiling summers of the upper Midwest were not to his taste. His brother wrote about the mild climate and opportunities in Whatcom County. My great grandfather decided Washington would be a more hospitable to a family farming operation and made the move to Washington state.

Gottlieb leased a railroad stock car, loaded it with machinery and livestock and sent it to Bellingham with his two oldest sons riding along, tending the cattle, horses, and a few chickens. The railroad allowed only one rider to tend the livestock. My grandfather, only thirteen or fourteen, hid in the cattle bedding when the railroad officials came around. Gottlieb, his wife, daughters, and younger sons rode on a passenger train. On arrival, my great-grandfather bought a quarter section of land on the northeast corner of Aldrich and Smith roads in south east corner of Ferndale township.

The Matzkes, my grandmother’s family, were from Pomerania, near Prussia. They were also mill builders and had ties to my great-grandfather’s family. They also emigrated from Germany to Whatcom County, arriving a few years after my great-grandfather and settled on the west side of Aldrich Road close to my great-grandfather. Romance soon blossomed between my grandfather and grandmother. They married and planned to start their own family.

Buying the homestead

With the help of their parents, my grandparents, Gustave and Agnes Waschke, purchased forty logged acres in 1906. This plot became the Waschke homestead. Gus was born in Minnesota, but working on his father’s farm, he soon learned enough about Whatcom county to decide exactly the kind of land he wanted. The loggers who harvested the Nooksack plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took only prime timber— mostly Douglas Fir and Red Cedar—leaving behind brush and trees they considered trash like Big Leaf Maple, Alder, and Birch, and, perhaps surprisingly, a few firs and cedars too big to cut by hand. Gus’s father’s farm was part peat bog, plagued with bog iron, and uneven, which made cultivation difficult.

Gus looked for a parcel that was flat with rich, neither waterlogged nor, dry soil. Not too many cedars—that signaled wet ground that could not be planted until late in a wet year like his father’s bog ground. And not too few cedars either—that meant dry ground that would not yield a good crop in a dry year. He also looked for big fir stumps, tough to clear with a team of horses, but a sign of fertility that would yield abundant crops. He found the mellow loam he wanted on the high ground on the verge Silver and Deer Creek watersheds and north of the skid road that paralleled the Smith Road. In those days, oxen still trudged the skid road pulling strings of logs cut on the Deer and Silver Creeks to the Nooksack river at Ferndale.

Gus and Agnes built a one room cedar shack in the northeast corner of the property, close to Agnes’ parents’ house on the Aldrich Road, where they lived for their first ten years together. Early in their marriage, a dry August northeast wind blew a brush and forest fire through the area. Gus and Agnes defended their home, beating out the flames with wet burlap sacks and shovels. Agnes recalled that they fought the flames until dark. Then they went to bed. She shook her head when she told this story, wondering that they survived, but they were young and life was an adventure.

I plan to write more about the homestead and its history in later blogs.

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Thoreau, Minks, and Muskrats

When I first read Walden for a book report in the eighth grade, the famous quote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” stuck with me. I knew quiet desperation. It seemed like Thoreau’s words captured everything my thirteen-year-old self knew and feared.

I had Thoreau confused with James Thurber when I started reading. Walden was hard going for a kid caught in a pre-adolescent Heinlein reading spree, but Thoreau captured me. My father had spent the preceding summer in a state mental hospital fighting off suicidal depression. His return to the farm a few weeks before I turned thirteen caught in my throat. Walden helped me get it down, although some spots in my gullet are still raw.

Thoreau talked about problems I could understand. I don’t now remember reading these lines when I was thirteen, but I know I understood Thoreau when he wrote “From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

I knew minks and muskrats. Three mink farms were within 3 miles of our farm and I had seen the sleek brown streaks of escaped minks roaming the woods and fields. My father trapped muskrats in the crick to the north of the farm when he was a kid. I set Dad’s collection of traps a few times. The only thing I ever caught was a hapless field mouse that I skinned and whose hide I salted but never got around to tanning. I saw several muskrat lodges along the crick, but the rats were elusive and fugitive minks were too smart to be trappable.

But oh how I envied those minks and muskrats! Like the lilies of the field, they never spun, toiled, or knew clutching desperation.

Since the eighth grade, I’ve read Walden several times. Thoreau is not as easy for me to take now. From years as a corporate wonk and manager, I tend to dismiss anyone who chokes on decisions that must be made, right or wrong even though I frequently choke myself. Sometimes I feel an evasive strain in Thoreau’s words, but he is so eloquent, so logical, I can’t dismiss him. Instead, I listen and realize he often says the things that I wish I had said myself.

I conclude that I may be a whiner myself. Well.

A decade or so ago, my wife made me a lavish Christmas gift of a complete reprint of the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s journals in 14 volumes. I’ve made it a practice each morning to read an entry from the journal from some year corresponding to the current day. I often lose control and read much more than a single day’s entry. I jump around between years. And I neglect the practice for weeks on end, but eventually I come back.

There is a new edition of the journals now which is said to be much better edited than the one I have. I’m a Thoreau reader, not a scholar, so I don’t know, but I have gained a lot from my old reprint. I read Thoreau’s journal in the dim hours before sunrise when I am still muddled with sleep and building my resources for the moment when Albert, the border collie who owns me, drags me out to walk in any kind of weather with complete disregard for my state– or lack of state– of mind.

I am an early riser, but not a lark, I need a few hours to take a run at the day before my thoughts clear and flow freely. Fortunately for my weak mental state, Thoreau tends to be candid rather than persuasive in his journal. When he is persuasive, he is usually showing off how he could be persuasive if he were convinced of the truth of his assertions. His tentative stand is protection in weak moments from the strength of Thoreau’s intellect. Without it, I am afraid I would be futilely at his bidding, setting up a riderless underground railroad or some other half-baked version of a 19th Century project in the 21st Century.

The journals are not polished like Walden, but they are a textbook for finding brave minks and muskrats.

These are my thought today on Thoreau. I would love to hear other people’s impressions of Thoreau if they care to share a comment.