Childhood Home

Lorain, Ohio

By Tara L. Conley

“This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is a memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say ‘home’”? –Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

In astronomy, there’s an idea that describes how displacement and difference observed in a perceived object depends on the viewpoint, or the location from which the object is observed. Parallax, from the Greek word parallaxis, or change, is a multidimensional way of seeing. In literature, and by extension film, parallax is a device sometimes used to tell a story about a single event, place, or person through the perspective of multiple characters. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) employs parallax, as does Netflix’s Kaleidoscope (2023) and Knives Out (2020-2022), as well as David Fincher’s 2014 psychological thriller, Gone Girl. 

In my classroom, when I discuss the idea of social difference, I hold up a marker. I ask students to describe exactly what they see from their vantage point. Each description is slightly different: “it’s plastic and round,” one student says. “It’s hard to see from where I sit,” says another. The story of the marker, as told by my students, contains multitudes. The point of this exercise is to show how perceived differences depend on perception, and to demonstrate how the relationship between subject and object is mediated. Perception is never truly unidirectional, and affected by our memory, ways of knowing and being, and a sense of place and environment. We don’t so much observe objects out there as we become affected by the experience of seeing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parallax lately as I revisit previous writings on Toni Morrison, fellow Ohioan and Lorain County native. During the summer of 2019, I published a piece for CityLab/Bloomberg about visiting Toni Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain a few days after she passed. My article was among others published at the time that highlighted Morrison’s legacy as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and cherished luminary on the Black American experience. I took a different approach, writing instead about the shape of borders, real and imagined, that make up the regional landscape both Morrison and I call home.

In The Source of Self-Regard (2019), when Morrison asks, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’?” I think about our shared home region of Lorain County, the shape of its borders, and the houses that hold memories of growing up during eras of radical social and political transformation. Born mid-February 1931 during The Great Depression, Morrison’s early life in Lorain was marked by an era of cataclysmic economic downfall. Born on the first day of February in 1981, amidst an economic recession, my early life in Elyria was marked by the rise of neoliberal economic reforms and New Right political movements. Despite the half-century gap between us underlined by different eras of social and political strife, Morrison and I belong to a shared ancestral line of Black American travelers who migrated to Ohio, seeking an escape from the south, what sociologist Karida L. Brown (2018) calls “the battered womb of the Civil War.”

The decades spanning roughly 1910-1970 transformed Ohio’s landscapes. During this historical period, known as The Great Migration, Black people left the South to seek opportunities in Midwestern cities like Elyria and Lorain. Once bustling, the region gradually decayed as industries left, businesses shut down, and economic progress stalled. For many, including my own family members, this fostered a visceral sense of being stuck in time. Amid the circumstances, Black people were especially vulnerable to the repercussions of these changes and subject to racial resentment as social institutions crumbled around them. 

Even the Black River, a natural tributary that flows into Lake Erie and connects Elyria and Lorain, was once a thriving center of commerce. As time passed, however, it became known for its polluted and treacherous waters that claimed the lives of those who ventured too close to its shores. The story of the Black River became a parable of the sower — once-vibrant, then weathered by time, reflecting the place and dispositions of the people surrounding it. 

Black travelers have always been keenly aware of landscapes that bend and close in on us. We also recognize when it’s time to leave. Morrison understood this too. She left Lorain in 1949 to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, and soon realized the price Black Americans pay when leaving home. During an interview with Colette Dowling in 1979 Morrison says, “if black people are going to succeed in this culture, they must always leave.” She continues: 

“Once you leave home, the things that feed you are not available to you anymore, the life is not available to you anymore … So you really have to cut yourself off.”

I left Ohio at a young age, but unlike Morrison, I returned to live, teach, and make stories about home. One of those stories is my documentary film called Dry Bones, about Ike Maxwell and the summer of 1975 when Elyria erupted in protest after Ike’s brother, nineteen-year-old Daryl Lee Maxwell, was shot and killed by a White police officer. Regardless of where I lived geographically, I always remained tied to northeast Ohio. The reason I returned isn’t merely rooted in being born and raised in Lorain County; rather, it’s the region’s story of social difference that draws me back.

In 2019, when I returned home to Lorain County, I noticed how neighborhood symbols and historical landmarks came to represent racial and social division. For example, while driving towards Toni Morrison’s former childhood home—a modest two-story pale blue colonial at the corner of Elyria Avenue and East 23rd Street—it was difficult to miss the house across the street adorned with a large Trump 2020 banner waving on the porch. It stood as a clear and intentional symbol of White racist attitudes and beliefs in one of Lorain County’s most heavily populated Black cities, along with Elyria. It also served as a reminder that within shared landscapes, disparate realities exist. Four miles away in Elyria, sits the YWCA building, an historical landmark located across the street from my childhood home. When I learned Daryl Lee Maxwell was arrested in the YWCA parking lot during the summer of 1975, bleak visions emerged of a young man I never knew heading towards the end of his life. Less than one month after Daryl Lee was arrested in the YWCA parking lot, a White police officer named Michael Killean shot and killed him outside a local bar, igniting a three-day protest and uprising. These moments, separated by time and space, and imbued with rememory, reveal the legacy of White power in America, persisting through its symbols of supremacy and authoritarian acts of violence.

Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain and mine in Elyria provide vantage points to reflect on the perpetual shadow of racial subjugation in our home region. Through a contemporary political symbol of White resentment and a nearby historical landmark of a haunting past, the answer to Morrison’s question about home crystalizes for me; home isn’t merely a broken place of shared memories or a place where Black travelers come and go. Home reveals a way of seeing with searing clarity Black people’s enduring resilience across cruel landscapes.

Tara L. Conley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at Kent State University. Her writing on Morrison and living as a Black woman in the Rust Belt have appeared in CityLab/Bloomberg. Conley is currently working on a book and a film about her hometown of Elyria, Ohio. For more information on Tara’s research and creative projects, visit www.taralconley.org. 

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Marmaton River
Fort Scott, Kansas

By Jeromiah Taylor

The grass is fuchsia, the sky bluntly cold, and the horizon swathed in haze. It is late November on the Osage Plains. In southeast Kansas, the distinction between grassland and woodland, or plain and hill, is blurred by the mile. Technically speaking, it is a tree savanna. As for creeks and rivers, we’ve got a few. On my little stretch of highway between Wichita and Fort Scott I encountered the Osage, the Cedar Hollow, the Bachelor, and the Owl creeks. For the rivers, there were the Little Walnut, The Fall, and The Neosho. And then, roping through the 155-acre Gunn Park in Fort Scott, the river I’d come to see: the Marmaton. 

It took some time to find the river on foot. Like most Kansas rivers right now, the Marmaton is low. In fact, one offshoot was completely dry, allowing me to walk the cracked bottom of the gulch. While I stood in the Marmaton’s dusty vein, the ground as I knew it rested ten feet above my head, with only the ombre sediment at eye level. In my silent memories, the idle river moves slowly, its wooded sentinels bending in the sharp gust. 

At 11 years of age, the photographer, director, composer, and writer, Gordon Parks, was thrown into this river by some white boys under the impression that he couldn’t swim. These events and his circuitous path to fame and fortune are documented in his 2005 memoir A Hungry Heart, a Kansas Notable Book. The river itself is part of a driving tour commemorating the filming locations of the 1969 film The Learning Tree, Park’s landmark film debut, which he wrote, directed, and scored. The film is based on his auto-biographical novel of the same name.

In A Hungry Heart, Parks describes Fort Scott as “touched by all the hands of nature”, and also as “the mecca of bigotry.” A place he refuses to flatten: “bathed in lovely twilights,” yet where “bigotry spewed its venom,” and where he “ate hatred, a lot of it,” as well as “cabbage, cornbread, [and] strawberries.” It was in Fort Scott that Park’s parents and siblings “sowed love’s harvest,” which he learned to share with those “who asked for no more than also to be loved.” 

And it is in Fort Scott that he is buried. After traipsing in the rain through Evergreen Cemetery on 215th Street, the sun-bleached lot markers having been no help, I found Parks’ grave, which bears his poem “Homecoming.” Parks reflects on Fort Scott therein, while also venturing, with a heap of triumphalism, that “hatred is suddenly remaining quiet, / keeping its mouth shut!” The unhappy irony of reading that rain-splattered inscription in 2022 will not soon leave my memory.

In 1950 Parks shot an unpublished photo-story for LIFE magazine called “Back to Fort Scott” amidst the Jim Crow-era turmoil culminating in the 1954 decision of Brown vs. Board of Education.  The Gordon Parks Foundation later published the story in a book. Isabel Wilkerson, in her introduction, describes Fort Scott as “neither North nor South, neither East nor West, right smack in the middle…and at the intersection of what it meant to be American on the eve of The Depression and as-of-yet-unseen social upheaval.”  

As for Parks, Wilkerson deems him the “documentarian of a watershed century.” That sentence caught me in its undertow, as figurative watersheds are a recent fascination of mine. Maybe because I live surrounded by literal ones. Wichita sits on the mouth of the Little Arkansas River watershed and Fort Scott is in the Little Osage River watershed. The Marmoton flows into the Little Osage which flows into the Osage which flows into the Missouri which flows into the Mississippi which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. “Right smack in the middle” starts to feel relative when discussing rivers.

Watersheds, idiomatically speaking, are dividing or turning points. Parks’ writing is filled with recollections of watersheds. For example, as he lay dying, Park’s older brother Leroy, told a 10-year-old Parks, who’d been caught fighting, “Your brain is more powerful than your fists, try using it. You’re to remember that — ok?”  One year later, after being thrown in the Marmaton and left to drown, Parks stayed below the surface, swimming to the opposite bank, so that his white attackers wouldn’t see him escape. A brain more powerful than fists indeed. 

Jeromiah Taylor is a writer based in Wichita, Kansas, who is passionate about the cultural life of his region. He is a staff writer for Fauxmoir Literary Magazine, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Kansas Reflector, The Sunflower, The Penn-Capital Star and others. Get in touch at jeromiahtaylor.com.

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River Cabin
Blackhawk Island, WI

By Shanley Wells-Rau

I was the solitary plover

a pencil

______for a wing-bone

What more solitary place than a small off-grid cabin on an island that’s not really an island jutting into a lake that’s not really a lake. The cabin was a writing sanctuary for Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), said to be America’s greatest unknown poet, who will forever be linked to Blackhawk Island in southeast Wisconsin.

Look at Blackhawk Island on a map and you’ll see it’s actually more of a peninsula that points into what is called Lake Koshkonong, an open water area that is really just the Rock River being messy all over its flood plain. The river likes to outstretch itself and in its flood-prone ways created a recreational haven for boaters and fishers.

Placed less than 100 feet from the Rock River, Niedecker’s cabin was bought as a kit from a catalog and assembled by her father in 1946. He sited it closer to the road than the river in hopes of preventing displacement during the regular floods of spring. Elevated on concrete feet, the 20×20 one-room house hovers over four cement steps. The front and only door faces east, away from the river, as if to shrug off the idea of annual flooding. This one room contained her life: bed, books, table, typewriter, sink, pencils, hand-held magnifying glass. With no running water, she hauled buckets as needed from her parents’ house across the road. That was the house she grew up in. The house she needed to escape.

Her father, a congenial carp seiner and fisherman’s guide who was inept with finances, was carrying on an affair with a married neighbor close in age to his daughter. This neighbor and her husband were milking Henry Niedecker of property and money. Her mother, Daisy, had lost her hearing after her only child’s birth and turned her head away from her husband. Her “big blind ears” couldn’t hear what her eyes couldn’t see. A lifetime of fighting flood mud, “buckled floors,” and increasing poverty seem to have settled around her like a mourning shawl.

Niedecker left the area a few times—for college until the family’s finances made her quit (early 1920s), for artistic and romantic companionship with a fellow poet in NYC (early 1930s), for work as a writer and research editor for the WPA in Madison (1938-1942), and finally for Milwaukee in 1963 when she married a man who lived and worked there. But that spit of land brought her back after each exodus. Once married, Niedecker and her husband, Al Millen, returned to the river every weekend, eventually building a cottage riverside just steps from her cabin. They moved into the cottage for good in 1968 when Millen retired. Niedecker lived there until her death on Dec. 31, 1970.

In the opening lines of her autobiographical poem “Paean to Place,” Niedecker submerges herself deep inside a location she said she “never seemed to really get away from.”

Fish

____fowl

________flood

____Water lily mud

My life

____

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

_________________born

____

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Painted green when built, the cabin today is chocolate brown. Sturdy wood, unfinished inside. A brass plaque by the door shines with the lines: “New-sawed / clean-smelling house / sweet cedar pink / flesh tint / I love you.” Her signature is embossed below. When I visited, it was hot and dry. The riverside window was open, allowing a breeze to push stifling July heat into the plywood corners. A lovely space. I could see myself writing there. I told myself I could even manage life with “becky,” as she called her outhouse.

It’s not hard to imagine the constant cleanup from the river’s yearly ice melt and flooding. Tall maples and willows accustomed to watery life block the sun over a dirt yard that would easily mud with rain. The only access to sunshine seemed to be on the riverbank or in a boat on the river itself. The tree canopy jittered with life, a “noise-storm” as Niedecker once wrote to a friend. I looked to see what birds were holding conference, hoping to meet one of the famous plovers so linked to her work. I saw none. Just movement, shadows, and chittering, and I thought of her technique to overcome her own failing eyesight by memorizing bird song. She could see birds as they took flight. Sitting still, they were invisible to her except through their calls and conversations with one another.

I grew in green

slide and slant

_____of shore and shade

Neighbors saw her walking, always walking, stopping to peer in close at some flowering plant. She bent in—nose distance—to see past her own bad eyesight. Before her marriage to Millen, she worked as a hospital janitor in Ft. Atkinson. Her failing eyes required that she work with her body, no longer able to serve as a librarian’s assistant as she did in in the late 1920s or a magazine proofreader as in the late 1940s. Her eyesight wouldn’t allow her to drive. If a ride wasn’t available, she walked the four miles to work. Four miles home again.

Out-of-place electric guitar riffs float past underbrush the afternoon of my visit. Someone is listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” seemingly not at peace with bird song or tree breeze. The blaring music makes me think of Lorine’s struggle with disrespectful vacationers and rude neighbors. She persisted in centering poetry inside her hardworking life in a community slowly turning blue-collar loud. Her neighbors didn’t know she was writing her way into the poetry canon.

The current owners are descendants of the couple who bought the property in 1986 from Millen’s estate. They kindly allow poets on pilgrimage, and they seem to care lovingly for the property. As I walked to the river to meet it up close, the owner appeared with a genial greeting. He asked if I’d noticed the 1959 flood marks on the wall inside the cabin. I hadn’t. Eagerly, he guided me back to Niedecker’s “sweet cedar pink” to show me that and other details. After friendly conversation, I decided to head back to town. I didn’t need to meet the river up close. I’ve already met it many times in her poetry.

After a career in the oil industry, Shanley Wells-Rau earned her MFA in poetry at Oklahoma State University, where she served as an editorial assistant for Cimarron Review. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming in The Maine Review, Bluestem Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Plants & Poetry, among others. She teaches literature and writing for OLLI and OSU and lives with her husband and a clingy dog outside town on a windy hill, where she wanders the prairie to visit with native flora and fauna.

_____

For further reading, digital archives, and more, please visit the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. Special thanks to Amy Lutzke, who spent a very hot day driving me around and showing me Niedecker’s personal library.

Photograph by Jim Furley, April 1979. Permission granted by Dwight Foster Public Library.

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Rail Bridge
Sauk City, Wisconsin

By Kassie Jo Baron

Sauk City, Wisconsin, is best known as the home of the first Culver’s. Then probably the annual Cow Chip Throw, where residents spend Labor Day weekend seeing who can throw dried cow poop the farthest. Then, finally, for author August Derleth, who was born in Sauk City in 1909.

Growing up, I knew almost nothing about Derleth. We were told he was a kind of Mark Twain meets Henry David Thoreau of Wisconsin. We never read his work in public school, even though the locations were, quite literally, in our backyards; instead, we fell asleep on our assigned copies of A Sand County Almanac.

But what I do know of him was that as an 8-year-old, I would hold my bowl of orange slices in the back of my mom’s car as we crossed August Derleth Bridge over the Wisconsin River and passed Derleth’s state historical marker on my way to soccer games at August Derleth Park. On other days, we’d head to Leystra’s, a local restaurant, and pass the massive pie case to head into “Augie’s Room,” where we could enjoy our slices surrounded by Derleth memorabilia.  

About a half mile downstream from the August Derleth Bridge stood a disused pony truss railroad bridge that was built in the 1901. One of Derleth’s portraits shows him walking across this bridge, a part of his regular route sauntering around the town he dubbed Walden West. “It was a good place to be alone,” he wrote, “I could meditate on any subject I chose…. How many poems came into being in that place! How much my view of Sac Prairie was expanded there!”

By my own childhood, the brown trusses were out of place and certainly out of time. In 2002, much to the delight of certain pyromaniacal children (I will not say if I was among them), the center portion of the bridge was demolished. In 2018, the remainder of the bridge was taken down, but I wasn’t there to see if it exploded. The spot is now the trailhead for the Great Sauk Trail, a bike path that runs through town. A chain-link fence erected in the same rusted brown of the bridge is now all that prevents visitors from stepping out onto the remaining span, which juts precipitously over the rush of the river twenty-some feet below. Wisconsin & Southern Railroad’s “No Trespassing” sign stands in front of extra trusses strewn haphazardly—if such a thing is possible—across the sun-bleached wood of the tracks.

It wasn’t until I started my Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa that I discovered Derleth might not just be a hometown boy after all. During a standard ice breaker, a professor shocked me by saying “isn’t that where August Derleth, the Lovecraft guy, is from?” I promptly went home and fell down an eldritch rabbit hole. It never occurred to me that Derleth did anything more than write a book about a mystery on Mosquito Island (which you can see if you look upstream from August Derleth Bridge).

Outside of Sauk City, Derleth is best known as H.P. Lovecraft’s publisher and the founder of Arkham House, a publishing company specializing in weird fiction that is still located in Sauk City, but is now all but defunct. A minor scandal arose when Derleth published stories as a “posthumous collaborator” with Lovecraft, viewed by others as an inappropriate imposition into the mythos. And Derleth’s scandals didn’t end there. In 1951, he was engaged to 16-year-old Sandra Evelyn Winters. In 1953, Derleth told a reporter from the Rhinelander Daily News, “We hope to be married Easter Monday—that’s April 6.… I’ll be 44 on Feb. 24 and Sandy will be 18 on March 1.” Residents certainly raised eyebrows, but they weren’t scandalized enough for me to hear this vital piece of hometown gossip until 2021, four years after I’d left the state.

Leystra’s restaurant closed in 2017 after 30 years, marking the end of Augie’s Room. Two years later, Sauk City completed construction of a splash pad and playground in what used to be August Derleth Park. The park was creatively renamed Riverfront Park and the formerly rustic sign at the entrance replaced with a significantly larger sign featuring cartoon turtles and racoons with, I am convinced, murderous impulses in their fiberglass hearts. During construction, the state historical marker was taken down.

These signs now decorate the walls of the August Derleth Society, currently in the building where I used to take tap dancing lessons. I visited the society for the first time earlier this year. “The only thing left is the bridge,” I joked with Jon Caflisch, the society’s treasurer, a man so passionate about Derleth he convinced me to join even though, until then, I had never read any Derleth (it’s only $25/year, and I get the newsletter now). Jon pointed to the green “August Derleth Bridge” sign, hanging just over a bookshelf filled with Derleth hardcovers. The bridge, it seems, doesn’t have a name anymore.

Derleth’s legacy was a fixture in the Sauk City of my childhood, even though no one I knew could tell you a single thing about him. Piece by piece that legacy evaporated, replaced with Culver’s relics and those Lovecraftian wildlife statues. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to erase Derleth from the region he wrote so fondly about, but I’m not not saying that either. If you’re passing near Sauk City, make some time to visit the August Derleth Society because, as Jon told me, “We might not be here much longer.”

Kassie Baron is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature with particular interest in the literary representations of white, female New England mill operatives’ bodies during the first US industrial revolution. She is a native of the Sauk Prairie area, a newly minted member of the August Derleth Society, and has never competed in the Cow Chip Throw.

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Belle Isle
Waawiiyaatanong

By Daniel A. Lockhart

I’ve come to the river, as one does frequently in Waawiiyaatanong, in the closing weeks of winter. The land has begun to wake up from the snow and the river itself contains patchworks of ice, a south sliding quilt of the lakes above us. The air is thick with fog, giving the world an evenness of white and grey. Punctuated by the restless patterns of geese and swans rejoicing over the return of open water. Across from where I stand, separated by the Fleming Channel of the Detroit River, is the jewel of an urban park, Belle Isle. I reminded of the island and the city across the water from us nearly hourly, as the clarion tower sings out its song across the water and the city streets between. What is before me in this moment is that spirit made real. A near translucent moment of a city in the clouds, an island at its heart.   

To think, this is the same restless river in which, in his poem “Belle Isle, 1949,” Levine and his Polish high school girl were baptized “in the brine / of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, / melted snow.” The river of industrial stove making, the river before the monumental decline of the great Horatio Algerian city, the river that is hardly visible past the row of phantom trees that make up the horizon that used to be, and still is, the island anchor of Levine’s poem.  Today, even the vision of the opposite bank is gone and the river is a nexus of dull light. Sharp edges of fluorescent modern Detroit, and Windsor for that matter, are absent. I have loved the constellation of skyscraper lights that dominate us here. Even in daylight they are gone. But here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.

Is this the perfect calm of the water between city and island? “Turning at last to see no island at all / but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight.”  Before me, that darkness chased away and the river sheened as if it had never known of the Griffon, a burning Rouge River, the gore of Bloody Run. This river is a different river than Levine’s. More ancient, freed from ore haulers, the shadow of stoves, the traffic of Jefferson. At least, temporarily, between shipping seasons. Across the river there are certainly drums. A passing car on the island’s ring road, hidden in the dense fog bank hovering above shore. There is no possibility of touching the river beyond. Signs warn of its threat on the metal fence that separates us. Alone. There is no woman, there is no warmth of another in all of this.          The river is changed. And it is light now. And I find myself lost in thoughts of the warmth of a lover’s breath upon my skin. Taken by the heavy cold in the air around me, I understand that each time is of itself. The spirit lives on. But the impermanence of the world allows at best for anchors in our memories. We no longer build stoves. Few of us swim in the river. The water is undisturbed as it passes before me, its surface defiant and purposeful like sturgeon skin. And the world is the white of an elder’s hair; wèlathakèt returned. And the quiet, while the river slides by in her earliest stages of waking in this the earliest hours of spring. Moving us, in silence, “back where we came from.”

D.A. Lockhart is the author of Breaking Right (Porcupine’s Quill), Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House), and Go Down Odawa Way (Kegedonce). His work has been shortlisted for Raymond Souster Award, and longlisted for ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and First Nations Community READS Award. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press and poetry editor at the Windsor Review.

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Grand Kankakee Marsh
Porter County, Indiana

By Matthew A. Werner

Indiana once had one of the greatest natural habitats in North America: the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Author Lew Wallace loved it so much, he kept a houseboat on its thruway, the Kankakee River. It was his respite. Then, in the name of progress, men obliterated the marsh and ruined the river.

Of the Kankakee, Wallace wrote, “Never in all my world travels have I seen a more perfect spot, nor a more tantalizing river.” He grew up near the Wabash River. During the Mexican War, Wallace swam the Rio Grande. As a Civil War general, he met the Mississippi. While U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire, he saw the Rhine, Danube, and Nile. As New Mexico Territory Governor, he crossed the Pecos and Sante Fe. The man had seen some rivers.

The Kankakee River meandered 250 miles through 2,000 oxbows from South Bend, Indiana, to Momence, Illinois. North and south of this stretch lay one million acres of marsh land — half of which flooded permanently and half with the changing seasons. Sand dunes that served as islands interspersed the flat, peaty marsh. The landscape included tall grass, cattails, oak trees, and giant sycamores. Wild apple trees, walnut trees, wild rice, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries grew in abundance.

The wildlife habitat had few peers — beaver, mink, otters, opossums, cougars, wolves, bison, elk, and fox lived there. Folklore claimed you could walk across the marsh hopping from muskrat den to muskrat den. The bottom was full of mussels. Lunker bass, walleye, and pike thrived. Bees stuffed hollow trees with honey; bats made homes in others. It was a bird paradise — purple martens, Carolina parakeets, loons, trumpeter swans, egrets, and whooping cranes nested in the marsh. Bird populations were so great that visitors described flocks that darkened the sky.

Local Potawatomi people lived with the marsh, using its abundance of mammals, birds, fish, and plants to provide food and medicine. The Grand Kankakee Marsh was a natural food pantry.

The United States government forced out the Potawatomi in the 1830s. As a result of the Swamp Land Act of 1850, Indiana carved the marsh into squares and sold it to speculators and settlers. It was said that the marsh was “the only place you could buy land by the gallon.” Many men sought to conquer the marsh and drain its water. Others, like Lew Wallace, enjoyed the marsh’s magnificence.

By the time Wallace arrived in the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1858, it was a hunter, trapper, and sportsman’s destination. Gun and hunt clubs that catered to wealthy men flourished on the sand islands and banks of the Kankakee River.

Wallace returned again and again over 43 years. He bought a lumber barge and converted it to a houseboat aptly named The Thing. It moored 100 yards south of Collier Lodge at Baum’s Bridge. With his friend, Ira Brainard, Wallace modified the vessel and created fixtures from neighbors’ unwanted furniture. The floating cabin was 10 feet by 37 feet in dimension. It had three sections (sleeping quarter, kitchen, and living room) and was topped with a framework of iron pipe and canvas. Early Porter County historian Hubert Skinner said, “There have been many boats on the Kankakee, but none ever attracted more attention than the queer barge he devised.” From the living room, Wallace likely wrote parts of Ben-Hur, The Prince of India, and his autobiography.

During his visits, Wallace fished, tinkered with his boat, and visited with the people of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He stopped at various lodges and hunting clubs along the river. “River rats, trappers, guides, pushers, and just ordinary home folks accepted him for his friendliness and his interest in the Kankakee,” wrote Skinner.

For a brief period of time during the Civil War, General Wallace was shelved. With no soldiers to lead, he retreated to the Kankakee to fish, think, and write before he was called back to battle and served through the end of the war.

Viewed as a land of financial opportunity, profiteers plundered the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Railroad box cars carted away the marsh’s splendors. Businessmen killed swans for down, egrets for fancy hats, muskrats and mink for fur, cattails for furniture stuffing, and mussels for pearls and buttons. Frog legs and waterfowl were killed by the thousands and served in Chicago and New York City restaurants.

To drain the water, men dug ditch upon ditch, but the marsh remained. Then men blasted a mile of limestone ledge on the river bottom in Illinois. The marsh retreated, but only a little. In 1902, steam dredges began straightening the bends and curves of the Kankakee River and doomed the marsh.

Wallace last visited the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1904. He died in 1905. In 1922, dredges bypassed the final bend of the Kankakee, turning its 250 miles of meandering river into a 90-mile-long ditch. Ninety-nine percent of the marsh drained away. Finally, the Grand Kankakee succumbed to its killers.

Loggers removed trees for lumber. In its wake, men planted rows of corn. The United States migratory bird population declined by one-fifth. No more duck, geese, cattails or frog legs shipped out. The hunt clubs vacated. The Kankakee River no longer flowed where Wallace moored The Thing.

Today, you cannot jump from muskrat den to muskrat den. Fox dens have been plowed. You won’t find mussels. There is no wild rice to harvest. Loons do not come here. Flocks of birds do not darken the sky. The marsh tries to reclaim its territory when heavy rains flood the corn fields, but the water stubbornly drains.

It would be kind to say the men who drained the Grand Kankakee Marsh did not know what they were doing. They knew. They called it progress. Men murdered that perfect spot, that tantalizing river that Lew Wallace loved. Had Wallace lived to see its death, he would have died of a broken heart.

Matt Werner is a story-teller and jack of all trades. He grew up on a farm in Union Mills, Indiana — land that once was the outer reaches of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He has authored three books — Season of Upsets, How Sweet It Is, and A White Sox Life — and numerous articles on history and interesting people. You can learn more about him at www.matthewawerner.com.

To learn more about Lew Wallace and the Grand Kankakee Marsh, watch Everglades of the North and visit the Kankakee Valley Historical Society and the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum.

The post Lew Wallace – Porter County, Indiana appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

The Leopold Shack
Baraboo, Wisconsin

By Marc Seals

I am not a Midwestern native — I was raised in the woods and swamps of north Florida, far from the Driftless Region of Wisconsin (where I now live). As a result, I was not familiar with Aldo Leopold or his work when I moved to Baraboo sixteen years ago. Soon after arriving, I picked up a copy of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, and I had not finished many pages before realizing that literature lost a fine nature poet when Leopold decided to dedicate his career to forestry. For example, Leopold writes, “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.” Or “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” And don’t get me started about the chapter where Leopold remembers watching the green fire fade from the eyes of a dying old wolf.

Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, published the year after he died in 1948, has been recognized as a foundational text in the field of environmental ethics for over fifty years. It has been ten years since I finally made the pilgrimage to the Leopold shack, riding my 1973 Peugeot road bike to Leopold’s farm just outside of Baraboo. I dismounted and peered in the windows, where I could see bunkbeds, a stone fireplace, the rustic kitchen — calling it “simple” would be an extreme understatement. Regardless, I knew that I was standing on sacred ground. This might seem an odd pronouncement, given the fact that the shack is a converted chicken coop (since no other building on the property was worth salvaging), but hear me out….

Leopold purchased the ruined farm on the shore of the Wisconsin River in 1935 for a mere eight dollars an acre to use the land as a sort of laboratory — he wanted to restore the natural forest and prairies. The experience helped him finalize what he terms the “land ethic.” Leopold calls for a new relationship between humanity and nature, writing, “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members.” He demonstrated this respect in his efforts to restore the property to its natural state. Leopold and his family planted over 40,000 trees on their frequent retreats from Madison, and the land is unrecognizable today. This “sand county” farm was not much good for farming, but it makes a great forest and prairie.

A Sand County Almanac is a memoir, a journal, a philosophical treatise, and more. Leopold honed his environmental philosophy on this property, and that’s why it’s sacred. There are not many chicken coops that helped give rise to a system of ethics. Beyond that, I struggle to convey what the shack means. I built a birdhouse replica of the shack last winter, and it turned out so nicely that the Aldo Leopold Foundation has supplied me with wood from trees planted by Aldo Leopold so that I can make birdhouses as a fundraiser for the Foundation. I’ve taken literature classes to the shack just after we finished reading A Sand County Almanac, where I was able to witness the wonder on the faces of students who drank water from original pump. I have driven out to the shack with Noah, my biology professor friend, on a ten-degree January day; we stood on the shore of the Wisconsin River and read our favorite passages to each other (for as long as we could take the cold). And I rarely cycle past without stopping in for a visit.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation, located in a wonderful visitor’s center just down the road, is continuing Leopold’s work, restoring the surrounding prairies to their original state. In short, every visit to the shack — and every rereading of A Sand County Almanac — feeds my soul.

Marc Seals is a professor of English at the Baraboo campus of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where he teaches courses in American literature, composition, and film. He has published articles and book chapters on authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dashiell Hammett, and Zona Gale. A native of the Deep South, he has grown to love the Midwest.

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William Henry Harrison Tomb
North Bend, Ohio

By Sean Andres

It’s not hard to find something of historical significance in the Cincinnati area, but many people don’t even think about North Bend. The town was founded by John Cleves Symmes, father-in-law of President William Henry Harrison, who swiftly and violently removed, swindled, and stole the land of the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Territory, including those who had resided where North Bend now stands. As a child, too young to remember and appreciate, I had visited Shawnee Lookout and the William Henry Harrison tomb with my family, and North Bend soon became a town I passed by on the way to the dentist.

But then in 2010, in my second year at Ball State University, I was introduced to little-known poet Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt in an American Literature course. This was the beginning of a challenging hike up a steep hill. While working on an ongoing project on Cincinnati area women’s history, I delved into Piatt and, through a Piatt family member, began connecting to other researchers.

Soon I was enveloped in Piatt’s life and her work, which revealed her to be deeply sympathetic to Indigenous and enslaved peoples and grievously anti-war. Because the most famous woman in the Western world had fallen into obscurity after her death, I was able to uncover over twenty poems and a narrative, from her youth to her late years. When I found out she had lived in North Bend, every time I passed by on the way to the dentist, I wondered whether random houses were hers. Then I learned that one of her houses was a half-mile up Mt. Nebo from Congress Green, where Harrison’s tomb sits on what was believed to be a Native mound. As steamboats passed by, it was customary to fire a salute in his honor.

There, at the tomb, Piatt sings loud in my head with her sympathetic, sharp-tongued wit. I envision North Bend as she might have on her daily walks to the tomb with her husband and their children, spotting the wild rose, wild grape and violets she documented in her poems. The river runs below, and I’m reminded of what the Cincinnati Commercial wrote about Piatt’s writing, that it appears “sweet and peaceful” but proves to be like “the depths of a dark river,” “shadowy and terrible.”

Many people had drowned below that tomb and the Piatts’ home, a weight Sarah carried with her. Still, without doubt, Piatt’s “A President at Home” swells in me.

I pass’d a President’s House to-day —
“A President, mamma, and what is that?”
Oh, it is a man who has to stay
Where bowing beggars hold out the hat
For something — a man who has to be
The Captain of every ship that we
Send with our darling flag to the sea —
The Colonel at home who has to command
Each marching regiment in the land.

This President now has a single room,
That is low and not much lighted, I fear;
Yet the butterflies play in the sun and gloom
Of his evergreen avenue, year by year;
And the child-like violets up the hill
Climb, faintly wayward, about him still;
And the bees blow by at the wind’s wide will;
And the cruel river, that drowns men so,
Looks pretty enough in the shadows below.

Just one little fellow (named Robin) was there,
In a red Spring vest, and he let me pass
With that charming-careless, high-bred air
Which comes of serving the great. In the grass
He sat, half-singing, with nothing to do
No, I did not see the President too:
His door was lock’d (what I say is true),
And he was asleep, and has been, it appears,
Like Rip Van Winkle, asleep for years!

The tomb, for me, is less about the Harrisons and more about the Piatts. It’s hard not to think about her two children, here alluded to as “child-like violets up the hill,” for they lie in unmarked graves beneath a tree somewhere on this “beautiful burial-hill” of grief, as Piatt refers to it in “Death Before Death.”

While the tomb succumbed to the forces of nature, the Piatts continued to keep North Bend historically relevant by placing emphasis on the tomb. Aside from Sarah’s regular visits, her husband J.J. lobbied for the tomb to become a national park, writing a bill that made its way to the Congressional floor. When that failed, he intended to save the old-wood forest around the tomb by purchasing it and turning into a park with proceeds from The Hesperian Tree, a book he edited, collecting work from Ohio and Indiana authors and artists, including William Henry Harrison’s granddaughter, Betty Harrison Eaton, reflecting on life as a Harrison in North Bend. The book did not sell well. His attempts failed, and the forest was logged.

I certainly don’t mourn the man in the tomb who violently swept through the Northwest Territory and lies in rest on top of their dead. However, I do grieve for the long-forgotten poet, Sarah Piatt, who seems to try to atone for her predecessors’ sins, seeking rebirth through the cruel river below.

Sean Andres is a marketer, writer, and educator at non-profit KnowledgeWorks. With Chelsie Hoskins, he operates Queens of Queen City, a public history project lifting the voices of women in the history of the greater Cincinnati area through local schools and publications. He loves to be outdoors among the trees and woodland critters when he’s not glued to the computer — researching, writing, and working.

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