This Week at Door County’s Crossroads: Settlers on the Land, The Big Read on Plant Ecology

Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by in Heritage, Literature

We have become aware that much the history of the Midwest is the result of flawed understandings of the environment.

Crossroads at Big Creek is a learning preserve focused on science, history and the environment. In many cases, these disciplines are inexorably intertwined. Take the settlement of Wisconsin. In the early 1800s, when European immigrants arrived in Chicago, they had the choice of going north or going west. Wisconsin was covered with vast forests. Northern Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska were prairies.

The rural lands in Europe had been cultivated for generations and many of these settlers had little or no education. So when European immigrants compared the towering trees of Wisconsin to the mere grass of the Great Plains, they assumed that the soil of the forest must be far more fertile than that of the prairies. Alas for those who opted to settle in Wisconsin, it wasn’t so.

But, in those early days, at least a plow could get through the stony soil of cleared forest land. Not until an Illinois blacksmith, John Deere, invented the self-scouring steel plow was it even feasible to break the prairie sod of what was then called the Great American Desert.

The Homestead Act and the end of the Civil War resulted in a growing number of people moving into the plains states. And strangely, the more people that moved to the prairie, the more rain fell. Some believed the rails of the railroads or the perhaps wires of the telegraph lines brought the rain, but when Charles Dana Wilber wrote in the book The Great Valleys of Nebraska: “Rain follows the plow,” people believed and for a while, this faulty premise seemed to be true.

The setting of My Antonia was Nebraska in the 1880s, a time when the soil was incredibly fertile and moisture was unusually plentiful. The farmers of this time were able to make a success at farming if they worked hard enough. Opening the prairie sod was backbreaking work for the men (and women, such as Antonia) but in an amazingly short period of time, the prairies were converted into farmland. Subsequently, dry and drought periods again became the norm.

Willa Catcher published her book long before the Dust Bowl and she probably never realized that the prairies she depicted would be 99% decimated in her lifetime.

On Thursday, January 28, at 2:00, in conjunction with The Big Read, Crossroads will sponsor the illustrated lecture, “Plants of the Plains, Posies of the Prairies.” The presentation will describe the ecological history of prairies. Videos of prairie remnants will provide images of a lost treasure.

Pioneer Games for Kids, the last Big Read event at Crossroads this year. The Youth Services Department of the Door County Library will help young people to enjoy the pastimes of our pioneer ancestors. Program will be held in the Historical Village at the Crossroads on Wednesday, February 3, at 3:00.

Crossroads at Big Creek is a donor-supported learning preserve located at 2041 Michigan in Sturgeon Bay. Trails are free and open to the public. The Collins Learning Center is open 2:00-5:00 daily.

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