Each Saturday morning, I’ve been going to the Sauk-Prairie Historical Society and working with fellow archivists to scan and analyze local glass negatives from the early 20th century.
I feel like the person in the movies who sits in a dimly-lit library at night, only it’s morning, paging through thick volumes of material and looking for that obscure clue. I’m Lisbeth Salandar tap-tapping into online databases. Last week, I signed an email “Sherlock Holmes”. Next time, maybe, Encyclopedia Brown or Inspector Clouseau.
I was sharing with my daughter some of the subject matter. In the very first image, there was a man crouching in the bushes with a child while his wife posed in the foreground with a bicycle. Yesterday, in what looks like a graduating class of six young women, way over on the edge, there is a man peeking from behind the skirt of a girl. Silas joked that this must have been the photo meme of that generation, the 1910′s version of planking. Glass negative bombing, if you will.
When I get home in the early afternoon, I sit down with a stack of books at my desk and my favorite online databases open on the computer, and I take out the notes from that day’s scans. I generally find a few hits and I get sidetracked by a lot of misses. By Sunday, my desk is covered in papers, they are my tracks in the snow. Arrows. Lists of names and places. Initials instead of whatever RMV means.
Next month, I hope to share the project on PortalWisconsin’s blog, where I am a new contributor. Jody Kapp wrote a nice introduction to the glass slide project HERE.
[The daguerreotype above was found behind another photo when I bought a vintage frame several years ago. More here.]
If I’m going to keep a journal, I suppose that I should aim for coherent ramblings rather than disjointed thoughts that I won’t be able to make sense of tomorrow, much less years from now.
I remember driving home the other day, noticing little summer rental cabins that are in disrepair and I thought about so many of them that are already gone. I saw a building that was once a motel, and then became an efficiency rental year-round. Now, it sits empty amongst piles of junk. I went past a tavern that used to have cottages. Instead, I saw a shack of a bar with a volleyball court. These places that were mysteries to me when I was a child seem so much more mysterious now.
I can clearly recall my paternal grandparents coming to pick me up nearly every weekend to stay with them. I knew that we were close to their house when we crested the Baraboo range and I could see the lights of Badger Army Ammunition Plant. It always looked like a Christmas tree to me. As a young adult, before moving back, I would frequently make this drive to visit family. I always wanted to stop my car at the top of the bluff and take photos of all the little buildings that were visible from there. (This was before I had any idea that they would all, slowly, disappear.) It looked so huge. I was seeing maybe 100 acres from there when, in reality, there were a total of 7,354 acres behind the fence.
Years later, I personally took part in reclaiming that land from its 60-year past, removing invasive plant species to make room for native prairie plants to stake their land. In many buildings, it was already happening, plants stretching out through the windows, waving their outstretched limbs. The parking lot where I watched for my grandpa’s car when he was still a steamfitter had crumbled; The grasses had taken it back. We volunteered for about a year and I enjoyed the work. I kind of managed to keep some of those photos in one place. I also tried to hold onto this past by helping the Badger History Group for a while.
It feels weird to be nostalgic about a place that was an ammunition plant run by the government. It must sound even weirder.
I still have the Baraboo Range. For the most part, it isn’t going anywhere. It is some of the oldest exposed rock in all of North America, with the quartzite and red rhyolite coming in at about 1.6 billion years. One of the world’s oldest mountain ranges, it lives an unassuming life in Wisconsin. It is quite literally a gigantic and strong figure from my childhood, a constant, unchanging.
It seems like I started out this journal entry attempting to thwart incoherent ramblings.
I live in an area that is often cloaked in fog, and a few times each year I wake up itching to get to the river and the dam before the sun breaks through the magic to just sit in the quiet cold, watch the fish jump, and get lost in the other-worldliness of it all.
On Thursday, I was invited to be a judge for the Sauk-Prairie Historical Society‘s annual pie contest. It was an honor to be asked but, more importantly, I was going to have the opportunity to taste a whole lot of pie. (And have serious fun while meeting a bunch of nice people.)
All of the pies were good, but what really put a skip in my step was an apple pie with a bacon and cheddar topping, called ABC pie. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I am going to get that recipe or, maybe, just attempt to replicate it. So savory.
And now, I shall humbly post photos onto the very public internet, taken by my sweet man with a phone camera, which include pictures of this very author making a variety of faces and, apparently, PIE-GANG signs. I swear, I was not revealing important pie judging information.
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