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See the little houses that inspired big Wisconsin writers

Jim Higgins
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
People driving through downtown Fort Atkinson can see the opening words of Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” on the exterior wall of a building.

While working on a book about literary giants from our state, I discovered the secret formula of how to be a great Wisconsin writer:

Live in a tiny house. 

Young Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House in the Big Woods" was a simple cabin. Aldo Leopold's Shack outside Baraboo was a converted chicken coop. Lorine Niedecker's tiny house on Blackhawk Island near the Rock River is no bigger than a mobile home. 

A tiny house promotes many qualities useful to a writer, including organization, ruthless decision making and resourcefulness. (Niedecker wrote an amusing series of poems on the pages of a biweekly calendar, pasting her handwritten words on the center of each page. The width of the pasted sheet and the size of her handwriting determine the line breaks.) 

It’s a laboratory for emotional intimacy and human conflict. You’re observing other people and yourself in close quarters all the time. There's nowhere to hide.

Finally, it drives people outside. Nobody wants to stay cooped up in that tiny house all day.

Close observation of the natural world is a quality we often associate with Wisconsin's great writers. But now we can flip the script on them by observing their habitats. Whether you hope to absorb a speck of their magic, or simply enhance the pleasure of a favorite book, there's a Wisconsin writer trip waiting for you.

Here are a few suggestions.

Visitors can explore a replica of the Ingalls family cabin outside Pepin.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Pepin

The image of Wisconsin that young Laura Ingalls describes in "Little House in the Big Woods" may still be the primal ideal of this state in the back of many people's minds:

“The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. … There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.” 

She was born on Feb. 6, 1867, seven miles north of Pepin in the Chippewa River valley. "Little House in the Big Woods," her only novel set in this state, has an almost timeless quality to its depiction of chores and cozy family life. For example, the story makes almost no allusion to the recently ended Civil War that tore apart the nation.

In contrast to the year depicted in "Little House in the Big Woods," Wilder actually lived in Wisconsin twice: first, from her birth in 1867 until 1869, when her family moved on to the Osage Indian Reserve in Kansas, where they lived about a year — illegally, it turns out. The Ingalls family returned to Wisconsin in 1871, in part because the man who bought their former Wisconsin property couldn’t pay for it. In early 1874, they left the state for good, crossing frozen Lake Pepin into Minnesota.

A bread warmer celebrates Pepin as the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Wisconsin honors this famous daughter through the modest, homey Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, 306 Third St., Pepin, which features several rooms with displays of books, images, clothing, tools and artifacts related to Laura, or inspired by her, or representative of her time. The museum is open from May through October; call (715) 513-6383 or visit lauraingallspepin.com for information and opening date.

In 2019, Pepin's annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Days will take place Sept. 14-15, with crafts, pioneer activities, contests and general Laura-ness. The 2019 special guest will be artist Renée Graef, illustrator of many of the "My First Little House" picture books. 

Be sure to visit the Little House Wayside on County Highway CC, about seven miles northwest of Pepin. This replica log cabin stands on the spot where Charles and Caroline Ingalls built their own modest home. It makes a fine photo stop, and walking into the small cabin helps a reader of "Little House in the Big Woods" grasp how cozy the Ingalls family environment was.

The Shack near Baraboo was Aldo Leopold's respite and research lab.

Aldo Leopold

Sauk County

In 1935, Aldo Leopold acquired a worn-out farm in Sauk County on the Wisconsin River as a hunting base camp and family getaway. Leopold and his older sons cleared a year's worth of manure out of its old chicken coop and put on a new roof. Over the years, the Leopolds would refer to it simply as the Shack. It became the heart of their family recreation and the co-star of his book "A Sand County Almanac."

In 1936, Leopold and his family planted 2,000 pine trees and many shrubs on the property, the beginning of a restoration project that continued for years, with Leopold and company doggedly planting thousands more trees after many of the first ones died. The Leopolds visited the Shack as often as Aldo’s work and the children’s school schedules allowed, though they were limited during the World War II years by the need to conserve gas coupons. 

A University of Wisconsin professor and a pioneer of wildlife management, Leopold compiled a book of ecological essays and observations of nature in the 1940s. Published in 1949, a year after his death, "A Sand County Almanac" has sold millions of copies and influenced waves of conservationists who have followed him, inspired by the principle he expressed in his essay “The Land Ethic”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” 

No species in this ecosystem is too small for Leopold’s attention or too insignificant to support his preferential option for wildness. In “Prairie Birthday,” he describes how he looks forward each July to the reappearance of the compass plant in “a pin-point remnant of the native prairie” found in a local graveyard. When a fence protecting the plant is removed, Leopold worries that this accidental bit of wild Wisconsin will disappear forever: “Keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.”

The Aldo Leopold Foundation visitor center is one of the greenest buildings in the country.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, established by his children, manages the Aldo Leopold Shack and Farm, which is open for both guided and self-guided tours when weather permits (the Shack is inaccessible during heavy snow cover). Walking around the Shack on a humid August day, I admired the labor of the Leopolds, planting and replanting thousands of trees here — and wondered how many billions of mosquitoes they fended off. 

The Leopold Center, less than a mile from the Shack, is one of the country’s greenest buildings, earning a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design honor from the U.S. Green Building Council; it was built from pines that the Leopold family planted in the 1930s and 1940s.

For information about tours and the foundation’s work, visit aldoleopold.org.

Reminders of Leopold abound in this state. In 2008, the state of Wisconsin renamed its system of recreational trails, adding up to 1,728 miles, the Aldo Leopold Legacy Trail System. The Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona teaches thousands of children each year. 

RELATED:Young people embrace wilderness at Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona

In 1947, Leopold spoke at the dedication of a monument to the extinct passenger pigeon at Wyalusing State Park in Grant County, south of Prairie du Chien. The largest recorded nesting of the birds spread across 850 square miles of west-central Wisconsin in 1871, an estimated 136 million birds. But their nesting habits also made them easy to kill. The last known member of the species died in 1914.

Leopold’s talk, printed in "A Sand County Almanac" under the title “On the Monument to a Pigeon,” grieves and salutes the bird, still remembered by people living at the time. Leopold does not browbeat his fellow homo sapiens. Instead, he notes humanity’s capacity to grieve the loss: “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.”

A Leopold bench outside the Aldo Leopold Center near Baraboo is inscribed with the name
of his daughter, Nina.

Using available wood, Leopold made simple benches with backrests so he could spend as much time as possible outside. Leopold benches are a common sight today in parks, along trails and in some yards. There's probably one near you. 

Lorine Niedecker

Fort Atkinson

In the late 1950s, one of the finest poets in the United States worked as a cleaning lady at Fort Atkinson Hospital. When Lorine Niedecker couldn't catch a ride to work, she walked several miles from her home on marshy Blackhawk Island before getting down to scrubbing floors. 

Niedecker (1903-'70) spent most of her life in the same patch of Wisconsin. She was not widely known in that pre-Internet era. But a visitor to Fort Atkinson can see many traces of her there today.

Poet Lorine Niedecker's words are painted on two walls in downtown Fort Atkinson, her hometown.

At the corner of North Main Street and West Sherman Avenue downtown, words from her poetry are painted on two exterior walls. The first poetry wall, painted in 2009, offers the opening words of her "Paean to Place": “Fish / fowl / flood / Water lily mud / My life.”

In 2018, artist Jeremy Guzzo Pinc finished a new mural across the street, using more words from "Paean to Place," including the bird-loving Niedecker's description of herself as "the solitary plover / a pencil / for a wing-bone". Each word in Pinc's new mural is rendered differently in color, font or style, requiring a viewer to slow down to absorb it all.

Lorine Niedecker’s modest home on Blackhawk Island outside Fort Atkinson.

For much of her life, Niedecker lived on marshy Blackhawk Island, which is actually a peninsula formed by the Rock River flowing into Lake Koshkonong. The autobiographical "Paean to Place" describes the flooding that periodically
soaked her riverside abode. Her tiny home belongs to private owners and isn't open to visitors, but a historical marker notes the spot.

Niedecker once worked for the Dwight Foster Public Library, 209 Merchants Ave., Fort Atkinson; the Foster now holds the archive of Niedecker’s personal library
and other materials and has named a room after her. In fact, visitors who walk through the main door of the library are greeted by her words on the wall.

Visitors to the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson see poet Lorine Niedecker's words on the wall. Niedecker worked two different stints for her hometown library.

The Hoard Historical Museum, 401 Whitewater Ave. in Fort Atkinson, also has a Niedecker room and archive. (Niedecker worked for a time as a stenographer and proofreader for Hoard’s Dairyman, a farm magazine.)

The annual Lorine Niedecker Wisconsin Poetry Festival in Fort Atkinson, organized by the nonprofit group The Friends of Lorine Niedecker, honors her with readings by contemporary poets and other speakers. The 2018 festival presented events in June, September and October, including the dedication of Pinc's freshly finished poetry wall. Check lorineniedecker.org for updates about 2019 festival plans.  

More ideas for Wisconsin literary jaunts

Carol Ryrie Brink: About 12 miles south of Menomonie, visit the home of Caroline Augusta Woodhouse at Caddie Woodlawn Historical Park. Brink based her Newbery Award winning children's novel about a tomboy growing up in 1860s Wisconsin partly on Woodhouse, her grandmother.

The home of Caddie Woodhouse, who served as inspiration for the Newbery-award winning book "Caddie Woodlawn," has been restored and is open to visitors in a park south of Menomonie.

"The 1856 home is so big and beautifully restored that when I first stopped at the park, I mistook it for a present-day home and headed instead to the small shack on the other side of the park," wrote my colleague Chelsey Lewis about her visit there in 2018. 

RELATED:Bike trails, breweries and a charming B&B make for a relaxing rural getaway in the Menomonie area

"The Woodhouse home is a large, white clapboard Cape Cod cottage, a style popular on the East Coast, where the Woodhouse family was from," Lewis wrote. "The house, which is unfurnished, was even bigger when Caddie romped around — the Flick family removed a kitchen to use as a hen house."

Admission to the home and park is free. They are open during daylight hours from spring through fall: dunnhistory.org/sitecw.html. 

John Muir: The future environmentalist, nature writer and spiritual father of the national park system came to Wisconsin from Scotland at age 11. The Muir family farm in Marquette County is now part of John Muir Memorial County Park between Portage and Montello. That park incorporates a state natural area of uplands and wetlands surrounding Ennis Lake. A parking lot and trailhead for the park can be found on County Highway F about 8 miles south of Montello.

RELATED:Father of national parks John Muir called Wisconsin home

Hamlin Garland: The author of "Main-Travelled Roads" and the Pulitzer Prize winner "A Daughter of the Middle Border" was born in 1860 in a log cabin in West Salem. His success as a writer enabled to buy a house there, where he later spent several months a year. The Hamlin Garland Homestead, 357 Garland St. W., is open daily from 1 to 5 p.m. Memorial Day through Labor Day: westsalemwi.com/west-salem-history. 

Jim Higgins is the author of "Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar" (The History Press). Portions of this article are adapted from the book. 

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