Museum of the Gilding Arts

Posted on November 29, 2023 by admin

The docent at the Museum of the Gilding Arts, a neatly dressed woman about 10 years my senior, wasn’t sure why the museum is in Pontiac – Pontiac, Illinois, that is, where I stopped on Sunday specifically to visit the diminutive two-room museum.

“I’m going to ask about that, because I’ve wondered as well,” she said. “I’ve only been here three weeks.”

Before that, she said, she hadn’t known much about gilding, but had been reading about it and spending time with the exhibits. For a while, I had a personal tour of the place, as she suggested things to look at, such as the various items that had been gilded, including decorative pieces but also machines.

Visit Pontiac is succinct about the place: “The focus of the Museum of the Gilding Arts is the history, craft, and use of gold and silver leaf in architecture and in decoration throughout a history that dates back to the days of ancient Egypt.

“There are examples of gold and silver leaf, artifacts used in the application of the precious metal leaf, and displays showing how leaf was manufactured.

“The exhibit features items from the Society of Gilders’ Swift Collection. The M. Swift and Sons company manufactured gold leaf in Hartford, Connecticut, and began its operations in 1887.”

The docent seemed most impressed by the story of M. Allen Swift, the last owner of M. Swift & Sons, who died at a very advanced age in 2005. The business died with him, having been founded by his grandfather, Matthew Swift, who emigrated as a youth from the UK in 1864. Before he died, Allen Swift had the foresight to preserve old-time elements of his family’s gold leaf factory, including an array of wooden work benches – which are now on display in the back room of the two-room museum.

Each bench sports one of the heavy hammers that late 19th-century workmen used to beat gold.

The 19th century was full of jobs that required great upper-body strength, and gold beater was surely one of them.

“The process of making gold leaf began with quarter-inch-thick gold bars, 12 inches long by 1.5 inches wide,” notes an article in Connecticut Explored about the redevelopment of the Smith factory in our time. “The bars were rolled to a thickness of 1/1000 of an inch and cut into squares. The squares were then dusted with calcium carbonate applied with a brush — often a hare’s foot — and placed between a thin membrane made of the outer layer of an ox intestine.

“These were then stacked, in as many as 300 layers, and repeatedly struck with a 16-pound hammer. The squares were cut again into smaller squares and the process repeated with a 10-pound hammer; the squares were then placed in a mold and struck with a 6-pound hammer. When finished, a layer of 280,000 leaves stood just an inch high.”

What happened to the residue of the ox intestine? Maybe I don’t want to know. Not only a tough job, then, but probably a dirty one as well, and ill-paying unless you were a Swift. Machines took over most of the heavy beating in the 20th century, but I expect it still was a tedious job. More about the museum, which opened in 2015, is at the Society of Gilders web site.

Before I left, the docent told me that I had been the only visitor that day. I was glad to hear it. I hadn’t gone too far out of my way, stopping after I’d dropped Ann off in Normal, and it was worth the small effort to get a glimpse of an entire industry I knew nothing about.

South Texas ’23: Kerrville & Bandera

Posted on October 29, 2023 by admin

Last Tuesday, my brother Jay and I drove from San Antonio to Kerrville, Texas (pop. 24,200) to visit an old friend of his, who has a separate small building in his back yard to house an extensive model train that he’s building. We got a detailed tour. Cool.

That was part of a larger trip that took me to Austin and San Antonio to visit friends and family. I flew to Austin on October 18 and returned from San Antonio today.

Rather than take I-10 west from San Antonio to Kerrville (though we returned that way), we drove Texas 16, which is mostly a two-lane highway that winds from exurban San Antonio and then into the Hill Country. Always good to drive the Hill Country, even on a rainy day. It was a rainy week in South Texas on the whole, but still quite warm for October. Had a few sweaty walks in San Antonio last week as well, more about which later.

Besides visiting Bob and his wife Nancy and his HO model train construction, we also stopped by the Glen Rest Cemetery in Kerrville (my idea). The recent rains had made it a muddy cemetery. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but also mud to muddy?

A curious figure. At least for a cemetery.

Glen Rest – which is incorrectly noted as Glen Rose on Google Maps – dates from 1892, according to the Texas Historical Commission plaque on site. “Glen Rest Cemetery is the final resting place for many pioneer and historic families of Kerrville and the surrounding Hill Country,” it says.

En route to Kerrville on highway Texas 16 is the much smaller burg of Bandera, pop. 829 and seat of Bandera County. That means a courthouse, and we stopped to take a look.

The courthouse itself isn’t unusual, but it is positioned unusually. Instead of being the focus of a square, it’s simply facing the highway. So are a handful of memorials. This one honors “All Cowboys” because Bandera is “Cowboy Capital of the World.”

This stone oddity honors a Bandera pioneer named Amasa Clark, giving his birth and death dates as 1825-1927.

More about him is at Frontier Times magazine, which annoyingly doesn’t say when the text was written, who wrote it or where it was published. Internal evidence, along with the style of writing, puts it in the early 1920s, probably in a local newspaper. Clark came to the site of Bandera in 1852, not long after serving in the war with Mexico, and stayed until his death in 1927 as a very old man.

Also along the highway in Bandera is a strip center including a store the likes of which I’d never seen before. Neither had Jay.

We had to take a look inside.

I should have asked to woman behind the counter how long the store has been in business, or whether the man himself gets a cut, or some other questions, but I was in vacation mode, not interview mode. So all I know is what I saw, which was enough. For the record, and this is no surprise, Trump overwhelmingly carried Bandera County — 79.1% to 19.7% for Biden — in the 2020 election.

The Peshtigo Fire Museum & Fire Cemetery

Posted on August 27, 2023 by admin

You can drive from Sault Ste. Marie to metro Chicago in a day. It would be a long day, maybe eight or nine hours depending on traffic, construction, etc., but you can do it. I decided against such a long day, breaking the trip roughly in half by spending the last night of the drive around Lake Superior – which I was leaving far behind by this point – in Marinette, Wisconsin.

One reason: so I could enjoy a leisurely drive through the UP, including westward on Michigan 28 and then south on National Forest 13 through Hiawatha National Forest.

These are roads unlikely to make it on conventional best-drive lists, except for one that I might compile myself according to idiosyncratic lights, which might also include the Icefields Parkway, Lake Shore Drive, Alamo Heights Blvd., North Carolina 12 on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, among others that come to mind. That the UP has two such favorite roads says something about the car-commercial driving to be had in the mostly forested UP.

Light enough traffic, at least on National Forest 13, that you can stand on the center line and take pictures at your leisure.

Another thing about NF 13: It took me to Pete’s Lake once upon a few times, and again on August 5, though I didn’t camp this time or experience a thunderstorm or yahoos yelling in the distance. It remains a sentimental favorite spot.

On the morning of August 6, I finally headed home, with one more stop in mind: Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a place that demonstrates, if nothing else, that the human mind is a creature of habit.

That includes me. I only mentioned the town in passing in 2006, when we stopped at the Peshtigo Fire Museum.

The building is a former Congregational church, on the site of a Catholic church that burned down in the firestorm of 1871 – which remains the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Remarkably, the Maui wildfire is, for now, placed at fifth; modernity can’t protect us from everything.

“On the night of October 8, 1871, in Peshtigo, a lumber town about seven miles southwest of the Michigan-Wisconsin border, hundreds of people died: burned by fire, suffocating from smoke, or drowning or succumbing to hypothermia while trying to shelter in the Peshtigo River,” notes USA Today.

“But the fire also raged across Oconto and Marinette counties into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, while another blaze burned across the bay of Green Bay in Brown, Door, and Kewaunee counties.”

No one knows exactly how many people perished in the Peshtigo fire — I’ve seen varying estimates, all in the low thousands — but it was certainly more than in the Great Chicago Fire, which happened the same day. Which one is mostly remembered? Chicago, of course, thus illustrating a habit of mind. Once a thing enters the tapestry of the popular imagination, it can crowd out similar events.

Peshtigo isn’t a large museum, but it is full of stuff.

The museum includes much information and a few artifacts from the fire, though naturally not much survived. The fire itself is illustrated not by photography, but artwork.

Two volunteer docents were on hand to spread the word about the fire. It’s the only distinction for modern Peshtigo, pop. 3,400 or so. One was a woman about my age, the other a woman about Ann’s age. Again, good to see young’ins up on their local history.

Speaking of that, the museum is actually more local history than the single incident of the fire, as important as that is. As such, there are many artifacts from the entire spectrum of the town’s history (including in the basement).

Next to the museum is the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery.

Including survivors of the fire.

Along with many who did not.

Too grim a note to end on. Not far south of Peshtigo is a roadside plaque I’d seen before, but not photographed.

“The most obsessive of all of 45th Parallel markers are the plaque-on-rocks sponsored by Frank E. Noyes,” says Roadside America. “We know that he sponsored them because he put his name on every one.

“Frank was 82 years old, a faithful Episcopalian and 32nd degree Mason, and president, general manager, and editor of The Daily Eagle, a Wisconsin newspaper founded by his dad. For reasons lost to time, he became fixated on the intangible world of latitude in 1938 and put up plaques around his home town of Marinette to mark the halfway line.”

There are other such signs, of course, not of Frank Noyes origin, such as at the Montana-Wyoming border, as seen in 2005.

Except for bathroom and gas breaks, the Wisconsin 45th parallel proved to be the last stop of the nearly 2,000 miles around the lake.

SS Valley Camp

Posted on August 24, 2023 by admin

Temps hit 100 degrees F. today at O’Hare, reportedly for the first time in more than 12 years. I’d have thought it would have been more recently than that, but no. Still, such heat is transient here in the North: Tomorrow’s forecast calls for only 83 for a high, and Saturday a mere 74.

While atop the 21-story Tower of History, whose only purpose is provide a way to gaze at the scenery below, I spied an ore carrier on the Michigan Sault Ste. Marie riverfront. One of the signs on the tower’s observation deck told me it was SS Valley Camp – a museum ship. The kind of information that raises my eyebrows to an “Oh, really?” posture.

So I paid a visit late on the morning of August 5. Glad I did.

The best views of the ship aren’t from the outside, but on top.

The view from near the bridge, looking back toward the stern, which permanently points toward the St. Mary’s River and Canadian Sault Ste. Marie.

The view toward the bow, pointing toward the Michigan Sault Ste. Marie.

The metal plates – which look like solar panels under the bright sun – are in fact cargo hatches, for the Valley Camp in its nearly 50 years as a working ship carried ore and coal and other bulk goods. Visitors are advised not to go roaming around on the hatches, and I could see why, as they would be first-rate trip ‘n’ fall hazards that would land you on some hard, irregular surfaces.

The bridge complex.

Displays of various quarters.

These days the ship is owned by Sault Historic Sites, the same nonprofit that owns the Tower of History. The ship dates from 1917, built for the Producers Steamship Co. as the Louis W. Hill by the American Ship Building Co. in Lorain, Ohio, on Lake Erie. (And I have to say, in those days, company names were nothing if not descriptive.)

State-of-the-art for 1917, at least according to Lorain newspapermen: “As modern as the genius of man can make her,” the Lorain Times-Herald said at the time. A later owner renamed the ship Valley Camp, in honor of the Valley Camp Coal Co. of West Virginia.

“From 1917 until it’s last voyage in 1966, the 11,500-ton ship logged some 3 million miles and carried in excess of 16 million tons of cargo,” says the museum’s web site. “A length of 550 feet, beam of 58 feet, and depth of 31 feet, the Valley Camp [had] a crew of 32 men. Purchased by Le Sault de Sainte Marie Historical Sites Inc. [now Sault Historic Sites], the ship arrived at Sault Ste. Marie on July 6, 1968, during [the city’s] tri-centennial celebration.”

Topside is pretty cool, but the real museum action is below decks. Much of the interior is given over the displays about the history of the ship, other Great Lakes ships, and the industries they served and continue to serve: photos, models, artifacts and more.

Including a fourth-order, working Fresnel lens.

It wouldn’t be a Great Lakes nautical museum worth its salt — its freshwater — without something from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. In this case, one of the doomed ship’s battered lifeboats.

You can wander around and see much of the original metal and glass guts of the Valley Camp, too.

Cargo Hold #1, a sign told me, hasn’t been converted into museum space. I didn’t need to be told. The yawning space shows just how large the ship is.

The hold did have an exhibit, which looked temporary, about the sad fate of the SS Carl D. Bradley, which went down in a Lake Michigan storm in 1958, taking 33 of its 35 crewmen with it.

A load of grain or coal typically filled that space on the Valley Camp; denser iron ore or taconite filled it only about a third of the way to the top, the sign said. Impressive.

The Tower of History & Holy Name of Mary Catholic Church

Posted on August 23, 2023 by admin

It did me good today to learn that admission to the Tower of History, in real terms, costs only a little more than it did nearly 50 years ago. Sault Historic Sites, the nonprofit that owns the structure, obviously isn’t trying to gouge visitors. Or maybe that, as interesting as it is, the tower is in out-of-the-way place, and the market won’t bear a higher price.

In any case, a newspaper article from 1975 tells me that admission for an adult was $1.25 that year. When I visited on August 5 of this year, I paid $8. An inflation calculator tells me that $1.25 that year has the current purchasing power of $7.10.

Thus I paid a little over the rate of inflation for all those years, but not much; we can round up the sum to pay for more maintenance, since the tower dates from 1968. Looks like it, too. Concrete all the way up and down.

The tower was the first place I went after returning to the United States that morning. It stands 210 feet over the mostly low-rise city of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. As concrete towers go, it isn’t bad, but I didn’t come just to admire it from the ground. It’s an observation tower, and I’m a sucker for those. You’re paying for the views.

Such as of the Canadian Sault Ste. Marie to the north, across St. Mary’s River, the connector between Lakes Superior and Huron.

The international bridge, to the west.

Part of the U.S. locks. Superior and Huron aren’t at the same elevation, with a difference of 23 feet, so the river has long been site of a canal, and indeed work is still under way enlarging the locks.

A docked ore carrier. More about that later.

The Michigan city, to the south.

In the 1960s, the Holy Name of Mary Catholic Church in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, decided to build a tower to honor the missionaries who came to the Great Lakes once upon a time, and picked the site of a log cabin and chapel built by Fr. Jacques Marquette, S.J.

Shrine of the Missionaries, it was to be, as part of a larger complex that would have also included a community center and a new church building. The ballooning expense of the tower torpedoed the other plans, however, and the Diocese of Marquette acquired the tower, which it eventually donated to the nonprofit that runs it even now. Tower of History, I assume, was a secularization of the name.

St. Mary’s still stands a stone’s throw from the tower. I’m glad the handsome 1880s Gothic Revival church wasn’t replaced by an oddity from the 1960s.

The church is also a pro-cathedral.

We stepped inside. Nice. I was reminded a bit of the smaller, but equally colorful Painted Churches in Texas.

Perhaps there is no air conditioning — I can’t say I checked — but if so, that makes for an interesting array of fans.

It was good to be back in the UP.

Around Lake Superior

Posted on August 6, 2023 by admin

Long stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway along or not far from Lake Superior are lightly traveled, even in summer. Driving the road isn’t exactly solitary, but traffic-free enough to allow your mind to wander. And by your mind, I mean mine, a few days ago.

Dear Mr. Prime Minister, I thought.

There must be a correct way to address the prime minister of Canada in a formal letter. Who writes formal letters to politicians any more? Still, the formal must exist, and I could look it up. Never mind, on with the letter.

Your Excellency,

I’m about mid-way through an enjoyable six days in your country, traveling from the port of entry at Grand Portage to an exit at the grand international bridge connecting the two Sault Ste. Maries.

I have noticed that very few places in Canada sell postcards, even tourist shops, and especially Parks Canada units. I had to struggle to find cards to send to my friends back in the United States, which is a minor hobby of mine.

Market forces, you might say. An erosion of Canadian heritage is what I’d call it, and I am writing to urge that your government do something to reverse the loss, against the day when – fully dismayed by electronic media — people return to physical media.

I leave the details to you and your Minister of Canadian Heritage (cc’d on this letter). Certainly Parks Canada can be persuaded to stock them again. For private shops, perhaps tax incentives to produce Canadian-content postcards and to stock them, and a public service campaign to encourage their purchase and use.

It might not be Canada’s most pressing challenge, but it is certain worth a little of your government’s time.

Despite the minor postcard annoyance, it was nice to be back in Canada.

Every bit as scenic as the U.S., but a lot cheaper. The current judgment of the currency markets is that the U.S. dollar is strong against its Canadian counterpart (unlike in 2006).

Canada wasn’t the entire trip. Leaving on July 28, I drove from northern Illinois northwestward through Wisconsin, then to the shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, reaching the border on the afternoon of the 30th. I left Canada yesterday, August 5, proceeding home through the UP and then southwestward back through Wisconsin, arriving home today.

In effect, I went clockwise around Lake Superior: 1,937 miles all together, though some fraction of that was measured in kilometers.

This particular drive has been in the back of my mind for years. Years and years. In September 1989, I drove to the UP and went camping. One day I headed north from my campsite to Munising for breakfast, and then on to Marquette. Somewhere along the way, around the time I first saw Lake Superior, I also saw a sign like this (except not Ontario).

I’d seen Lake Michigan Circle Tour signs in Illinois and Wisconsin. Those were brand new in those days, created to encourage tourism in the Great Lakes region, and if you asked me a brilliant bit of design. Drive around the lake, the sign says. You will be well rewarded.

I agreed: The ’89 trip itself was around Lake Michigan, though I’m sure I would have done it without the signs.

I’d never seen a Lake Superior Circle Tour sign before, but I liked the idea immediately.

The prospect intoxicated: around Superior would be mean driving to Minnesota, through that remote part of Ontario, and the back through the UP. Or vice versa. What was up that way? Exotic boreal territory; small towns; few services; moose? At the time, my experience with Canada was limited to a rewarding but short stay on Vancouver Island.

The actual Circle Tour follows a specific set of roads around, and during this trip I followed them on the whole, mostly because that was often the only option, but in some places I took other roads, usually since they were more convenient. So I can’t claim to be Circle Tour purist.

Even so, now that I’m done, driving around Lake Huron seems like a good idea too – either by way of the Bruce Peninsula and Manitouline Island, or the long way around Georgian Bay. I don’t expect to have another 34 years to get around to that, so it will be have to be sooner, if at all.

Rotary Botanical Gardens, Janesville

Posted on July 27, 2023 by admin

Time for another summer break. Good to take those when you can. Back to posting around August 6. Or maybe the 7th. Not good to structure summer too much.

Didn’t get around to seeing either Oppenheimer or Barbie lately, though I’m much more likely to watch the former in a theater. I actually read The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) back when it was fairly new, and before that (’83) took an undergraduate seminar on the Manhattan Project, which involved much interesting reading, of course, and watching an excellent documentary, The Day After Trinity (1981), all of which inspired awe and dread.

As for Barbie dolls, I share the indifference that most men feel – though I suppose if there are men who like My Little Pony, there must be secret Barbie admirers as well, and not just out of solidarity with Ken. Ann, on the other hand, has a sentimental attachment to the dolls, even nostalgic feelings, whatever that can mean at 20. So she went on the movie’s opening night, helping it set its high box office. She reported enjoying it.

I did get around, yesterday, to finishing The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Well worth watching, though uneven to the end. The arc of Midge and Susie and Joel formed the core sympathetic heart of the show, to good effect. The older characters – Abe and Rose and Moishe and Shirley – pretty much went off the rails in the later seasons, which was too bad. Old people are just a hoot, eh?

Still, Abe did have a few touching moments toward the end of the last season, especially at dinner in the company of other old men, with mortality as the unnamed character at the table. My favorite minor character was Lenny Bruce, and his appearance in the last episode was a heart breaker, with addiction the unnamed character joining him. The drug that killed the real Mr. Bruce in 1966 was reportedly morphine, which strikes me as a little old-fashioned for the 1960s, but the comedian always did things differently.

Last Sunday I stopped at the Kansasville Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Wayside Park again for a quick look at the adjacent cornfield.

Much higher than a month ago. It’s a little hard to tell from the Drought Monitor, but I think that part of Wisconsin is on the border of moderate and severe drought. The corn looks healthy enough to this non-farmer, however. Northern Illinois/southern Wisconsin’s gotten some rain lately, including a storm that blew through yesterday around noon.

The last place we went in Janesville early this month was the Rotary Botanical Gardens. Saw it on an electronic map, looked it up, decided to go. That’s the way to find places in our time.

We were well rewarded for the effort. How often do you see golden Hakone grass (Hakonechloa macra) pushing through a pile of small boulders?

That flow of grass was part of one of the Rotary Botanical Gardens’ centerpieces, its Japanese garden. Good to find those in the heart of North America.

Complete with the styles of bridges that tend to be in Japanese gardens, across a large pond.

I don’t believe for a minute that evil spirits are too cowardly or disoriented to cross a crooked bridge; or rather, I don’t believe that belief is the origin of the design. I believe it is aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics.

The Rotary is a large place. Besides the Japanese Garden, it includes (among other sections) an English Cottage Garden; an Italian Garden; French Formal Rose Garden; Scottish Garden; Alpine Garden; a Shade Garden; a Sunken Garden; Fern & Moss Garden; and seasonal displays.

Bursting blossoms rise from the grounds. Or so it seems.

Along with arrays of other glorious summer blooms.

Curious name, Rotary. Do Rotarians have anything to do with the Rotary Botanic Gardens? Yes, they do.

The garden opened in 1991, occupying “the site of an abandoned sand and gravel quarry on Palmer Drive,” the garden’s web site says. “In 1988, the original site between Lions Beach and Kiwanis Pond was covered with debris and used as storage for the Parks Department and a BMX bicycle racetrack.

“The Gardens’ founder and original visionary, retired orthodontist Dr. Robert Yahr [d. 2021], approached the two Rotary Clubs in Janesville and inquired about their interest in developing a botanical garden for the community to enjoy.”

That they did. Nice work, Dr. Yahr.

Oak Hill Cemetery, Janesville

Posted on July 26, 2023 by admin

Oak Hill seems to be a common cemetery name. Sometimes I think there are only about a dozen cemetery names all together, at least for large cemeteries.

A quick Google search reveals boneyards called Oak Hill in Washington, D.C.; Cincinnati; San Jose; Clear Lake, Illinois; Bramwell, West Virginia; Griffin, Georgia; Evansville, Indiana; Lawrence, Kansas; and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, one Ernest Gary Gygax, reposes.

And more. One of which is the municipal Oak Hill Cemetery in Janesville, Wisconsin.

It’s a sizable cemetery, about 85 acres, with 24,000 or so permanent residents. I took a look fairly early on Sunday, July 2. The grounds aren’t quite hilly, but they do slope a good bit, with old trees — and some oaks — and a good variety of standing stones.

Some older stones, as befitting a place founded in 1851. Many of them have that headstone tilt that comes with time.

A well-placed veterans’ section.

And a handsome chapel.

Recently restored, I’ve read, the chapel dates from 1899. The cemetery was already well established by then as a more obscure, but nevertheless good example of a 19th-century rural cemetery.

Along the Rock River, Janesville

Posted on July 24, 2023 by admin

On the first two days of July, we spent some time in southern Wisconsin, staying the night at a hotel near the Rock River in Janesville, a burg of about 65,000 and seat of Rock County.

Late on the afternoon of the 1st, I took a stroll along the river in downtown Janesville. As urban riversides go, it’s drab, an echo of a time when cities generally ignored their rivers, except for purposes of commerce.

Even Rockford, Illinois, downriver from Janesville on the Rock, has a more pleasant downtown riverside, so small industrial-decline Midwestern cities can refurbish their riverwalks. So can the likes of Waco, Texas. The Rock, incidentally, is a direct tributary of the Mississippi, meeting that river at Rock Island, Illinois.

Still, the riverside isn’t completely without its interests. A fairly new pedestrian-bicycle bridge crosses near an equally newish riverside plaza, or at least an open space.

The bridge sports a boulder, too. It’s hard to see, but there’s an inscription on it: The Mick & Jane Blain Gilbertson Family Heritage Bridge.

Jane Blain Gilbertson is CEO of Blain’s Farm & Fleet, a big box chain with 44 stores in the upper Midwest and headquartered in Janesville. The stores carry, among many other things, agricultural supplies and equipment. I remember visiting the one in Montgomery, Illinois, years ago to see what there was to see inside.

Downtown Janesville was eerily empty that late Saturday afternoon. There were a few kids – and I mean junior high or high school kids – hanging out near the bridge, making giggly noises. A small party of adults was having a cookout in the yard of one of the apartment buildings near the river. A few cars passed through the area, but not many. Then there was me.

Every town has one of these. Oddly, it was tucked away in a cul-de-sac.

Why visit Janesville? Why stay there? I’d passed by many times, but not spent any time in the town. I guess when it comes to Wisconsin, I’m something of a completist.

Janesville has some handsome older buildings within a few blocks of the river, most still occupied, but some not, such as a one-time First National Bank.

The McVicar Bros. and Helms buildings. Part of a larger block.

Other buildings.

Evidence of a more robust downtown life in the past: an old Kresge building. Kresge, of course, was the ancestor of Kmart, and a mighty retail chain. Once upon a time.

I had to check: As of more than a year ago, there were only three U.S. Kmarts still open.

That means that this 1987 reference in Calvin & Hobbes will be lost to time. Is already lost to time. I’m sure if I mentioned “blue light special” to either of my daughters, it wouldn’t register.

Calvin: Dad, how do people make babies?

Calvin’s Dad: Most people just go to Sears, buy the kit, and follow the assembly instructions.

Calvin: I came from Sears??

Calvin’s Dad: No, you were a blue light special at Kmart. Almost as good, and a lot cheaper.

I never went to Kmart much, but I did go occasionally, and I remember being in one once, probably in Nashville in the mid-80s, during a blue light special. I heard “Attention, Kmart shoppers!” They did say that. I didn’t buy whatever it was.

That’s the kind of thing that came to mind wandering the empty streets of Janesville.

Delavan, Wisconsin

Posted on July 23, 2023 by admin

On Friday, a week after the Bastille Day Lightning Strike — certain things in one’s life just need their own names, such as that or the long-ago Mirabella Incident, when I was the focus of an Italian town’s attention for a few minutes — I opened the deck umbrella to shield myself from the noonday sun, which is pretty much the only thing the umbrella is good for.

I have a conversation piece for anyone who visits my deck in the summer.

Early in July, we passed through Delevan, Wisconsin, pop. 8,500.

“During the second half of the 1800s, as many as two dozen circuses flocked to the Walworth County town of Delavan to winter their horses, elephants and other big tent critters,” said the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a 2011 article.

“The famed P.T. Barnum Circus was organized in Delavan in 1871… The Mabie brothers, who ran the U.S. Olympic Circus — during its time the largest traveling show in the country — quartered their animals during the off-season at the site of the Lake Lawn Resort on Delavan Lake because of its abundant pastures and water.

“Alas, the last circus closed its winter digs in 1894, and within 25 years, the huge ring barns and other landmarks were gone.”

So Baraboo isn’t Wisconsin’s only circus town, though it is the one with the Circus World circus museum. Baraboo claims the Ringling Bros. circus. Delevan, which is in southeastern Wisconsin only a few miles northwest of Lake Geneva, claims P.T. Barnum’s circus, as this Walldogs mural attests.

Barnum’s circus – mainly, he lent his name and financial backing – later merged with Bailey’s circus, and that entity was eventually bought by Ringling Bros. So I suppose Baraboo prevailed in that sense, though the combined circus skedaddled to Florida in the early 20th century anyway.

We stopped for a look around and possibly lunch, which we ended up eating in Elkhorn, a few miles away. Delevan has a pleasant main street, Walworth Ave., marked by century-old (at least) buildings.

Note the street bricks. They are apparently distinctive enough to be on the National Register of Historic Places as Delavan’s Vitrified Brick Street. So we trod on historic ground, very literally.

The mural isn’t the only reminder of the town’s circus past.

Those figures are in the aptly named Tower Park. A water tower emblazoned with the town name dwarfs them.

Unlike many water towers, you can stand right under the one in Delevan.

Maybe I should take more pictures of water towers, though of course I’ve taken a few other images over the years.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Small Town USA