Homesteaders

A couple of industrious young people of our acquaintance are doing something ridiculously ambitious.  They are building a home in the wilderness.  By hand.  Basically they are homesteading.  The last people in our family lineage to do something like this were the pioneer first generation that came over in the 1850s.

I wonder what those grim faced, German speaking stoics would think of their descendants using sun powered, magical tools that came from China to clear brush??

CCC Camp Fairchild

 Something I ran across recently....

This sign is a bit difficult to read thanks to the attentions of various perching birds.  But it reads: FORMER SITE OF CCC CAMP FAIRCHILD COMPANY 1605 1933-1942.

This seems straightforward, but actually isn't.

There is a very helpful 1937 document on the CCC Camps of Wisconsin.  It indicates that Company 1605 was organized in June of 1933 at a Camp Fairchild that was roughly ten miles from where this sign is standing.  A lengthy description in the Eau Claire Leader from August describes an orderly, military style camp where 190 men lived in tents, operating on a military basis with bugle calls waking them up each morning.  The main work was related to the prevention of forest fires, through brush clearing and such, and fighting of same.

The article gives an interesting glimpse of how CCC camps were organized: "Drawn from company personnel is a permanent detail consisting of one company foreman, one company clerk, one supply clerk, two first aid men, one steward, seven cooks, seven group foremen (each in charge of a sub-organization of 24 men), one truck driver, one mail orderly, one athletic director and librarian, two guards and one charge of area."

 In November of '33 they moved to the spot shown above, right on the edge of Fairchild.  The old camp was presumably abandoned and the name transferred.

Although they arrived fairly late in the year 1605 seems to have been pretty industrious in the "new" Camp Fairchild. Among other things they dammed up the creek behind the camp to make a small lake,  and seem to have constructed a number of buildings.

After spending winter and spring on this site 1605 moved to another camp near Gilmonton for a summer of "erosion control work".  On their return to Fairchild the first thing they had to do was rebuild the previous wooden dam out of rock and cement.  It has held up well, traces of it can be seen in the modern dam that still holds back the Fairchild Mill Pond.  As an aside, I can see no visible evidence of a mill anywhere around this site, despite the fact that Fairchild was essentially a company town for a giant lumber mill somewhere nearby.....*

The first edition of the camp newspaper "Reville" came out in November of '34.  The nifty arches at the camp entrance were probably real, many camps had elaborate structures like this and were proud of them.  I suspect this is the exact perspective of the 2024 photo above, now a baseball field.

The second issue of the "Reveille" is largely focused on a camp wide quarantine that kept men confined over the holidays.  Scarlet fever and chickenpox went through the place. 

It is frustratingly difficult to get a sense of what the physical layout of the camp was.  The in house newspaper only drops hints.  There would be no need to describe in detail the things their readers saw every day.  But its clear it was a more substantial affair than the early tent city Camp Fairchild.  We know this because of the Dances.....

There seem to have been two of these in February of 1934.  They are described in the Eau Claire Leader Telegram.  This was presumably during the first stay at Camp Fairchild.  According to the article:

  "The first C.C.C. dance in Eau Claire county will be held at Camp Fairchild, Friday, February 9th."

"It is planned to throw open to the public at least the mess hall and recreation room and to have the grounds open for inspection so that guests may see how the boys actually live."

"Local business men and their wives and ladies are being asked to attend as sponsors of the affair".

A follow up article and announcement of a second dance based on the success of the first say that there were approximately 400 people in attendance.  Trucks were dispatched to area communities to bring guests in.  The dancing was in the mess hall, with the recreation room being elaborately decorated and used as a place for people to rest up.

It sounds as if there were a number of permanent buildings at Camp Fairchild.  But its occupation remained on and off.

1605, the CCC Company most associated with Camp Fairchild, moved around a lot.  The went back to Camp Gilmanton in the summer of 1934 to do more erosion control work.  They returned in October, only to move permanently to a camp in Dodge Wisconsin in the summer of 1935.  The 1937 CCC history refers to Dodge as a "portable camp" that was designed to be moved in quickly with the contents of 14 boxcars.  This seems to fit with 1605 being something of a mobile force.

At this point the Great Depression was starting to ease a bit, and the CCC was no longer expanding.  A new company, 3669, was moved in but records of events at Camp Fairchild become scarce at this point.  

When Camp Globe, some 10 miles to the north, was closed in December of 1937, it was noted that the nearest CCC Camp was at City Point which is most of the way to Wisconsin Rapids.  It was noted that the Federal Government was scaling back the CCC program, and that only 12 of the original 26 camps remained.  Curiously I did find a solitary reference in 1939 to a new superintended being appointed to Camp Fairchild, so perhaps it remained in intermittent use to that point.

So what remains?  Well, if the run of camp newspapers interests you they have been  digitally preserved.    Much of the information within is of more daily than historic interest, but here's a page that alludes to the members of 1605 doing occasional radio programs, excelling in sports, and winning the "Best Camp Award".

And what else is left?  What trace is there of Saturday night movies and social dances and a life of outdoor work in a quasi military establishment?

Not much compared with other CCC camps I've explored.  The road by it is still called Camp Road.  On the lake side there are new homes now, and a baseball field that the athletes of 1605 would have really appreciated.  On the other side is an RV park/campground that would obscure any previous building.  But if you do a bit more looking around, on the shores of the lake that the CCC claims to have created you will find this:

Nothing fancy, just a floor surface.  Could it have been part of the mess hall where CCC Boys and local Belles danced to the tunes of the Keller Brothers Orchestra eighty years ago?

______________________________--

* It took a bit of searching old maps, but the big mill was indeed on the mill pond, just nowhere near the dam.  It was steam powered, not water powered and the pond was just for log storage.  As the mill went out of business in 1905 it is plausible that the CCC just rebuilt a deteriorated dam 29 years later.

Addendum:  The buildings of Camp Fairchild were demolished in 1936 by a crew from CCC Camp Globe.  The connection between these two camps was close.  Personnel went back and forth between them, and when Fairchild closed Globe acquired two dump trucks!

 

 

Kate Potter's Unlikely Employment Agency

As such things are reckoned I was an early adaptor of The Internet.  So I've got decades of experience with Spam email.  In general it is a low level annoyance, the equivalent of a single mosquito humming around your ear.  You swat it and get on with things.

But occasionally I run across a new species, something that holds my interest long enough to study it.  And I'll be honest here, I'm feeling bad for Kate Potter.  Maybe you've seen things like this:

"Housekeeper Quote - Reply to Griggs Griggs is looking for Housekeepers in Miami, Florida."

Ms. Potter's efforts to book talent and household functionaries are confined to a few small areas in Florida.  They can be generic, such as housekeepers, and weirdly specific.....Magicians.  And they are all on the behalf of people with identical first and last names.  

If you hold the emails up at a safe distance, obviously without opening any links, they purport to be related to something called Bark(dot)com out of London, England.

Kate Potter appears to be an actual social media/communications consultant out of Australia.  She is not happy to have her name and reputation sullied in this fashion.

On the other hand, Griggs G. Griggs (I'm just assuming the middle name) is probably very happy.  Various real estate sites claim the median price for homes sold in the zip code indicated are $12.75 million.  Or 8.5 mill, or 1.195 mill.  Hmmmm, I'm almost starting to become suspicious of economic activity in the Miami, FL area.....

Out of curiosity I decided to keep track for the month of May.  

My tally for the month: 18 emails, 15 housekeeper, 3 magician.   

And who is so fruitlessly seeking this help? Griggs Griggs, G G ,Yvette Yvette, Rita Rita, Vs Vs Emilio Emilio, Janet Janet, Guerline Guerline, Elizabeth Elizabeth and so on.  Each and every one with the odd doubled name.  What are the odds?

And more seriously, what is the point?

Clearly these emails are being machine generated.  It would be the only way to keep churning out this stuff and presumably sending it to millions of potential suckers on a daily basis.  I hope the AI spambots still receive a modicum of input from weaselly humans.  Said weasels have an idea, a concept.  Lets take a job description that is so specific that 99.9% of people will never need it....a Magician.  I've never even considered hiring one.  Oh, add on Housekeepers too.  Locate these hypothetical jobs in a swanky community, and make the potential employers sound totally not fake by botching the names on each of the emails sent out by the millions,  once again,  making them so implausible that 99.99% of people in Miami will not have names anything like that.  Sure....that's the ticket....

To add a final note of weirdness to this saga.....after getting these spam emails every day for a couple of weeks, and sometimes more than once a day, they just stopped.  Did Jose Jose finally step up and hire that Housekeeper?  Or have the AI Spambots just moved on to some other misconception of what will separate the rubes from the rubles?

White Sucker

In my ongoing campaign to put "Strange Fish" geocaches out into the world I have had to concentrate on certain species.  The nature of the project pretty much requires shore fishing, and some reasonable access by foot.  So, its a lot of fishing rivers and streams, and that limits you a bit.

One species I've been trying to add to the portfolio is shown above.  May I introduce Catostomus commersonii.  I guess most people would call this a White Sucker.  Eh, in the age of NSFW internet searches that might not be the best name.  And besides.......

Way back in the early days of what is now Wisconsin there was a tiny corner down in the southwest part that had an early mining boom.  There was a little bit of trade in lead with the natives in the 1700's, and when the land was opened up for exploitation in the 1820's a rush of miners turned up.

Some of these miners wintered over.  They just took the shallow pits they had excavated and put a roof on them.  As they were living in their burrows they came to be nicknamed "Badgers".  This moniker was extended to cover all denizens of what is still The Badger State.

Ah, but what of those faint of heart, those delicate flowers from (mostly) Illinois who ran up the river in the spring and back down in the fall?  As this replicates the behaviour of our friend Catostomus, the term "Suckers" was applied to them.  I can report that the term is no longer used here to describe residents of Illinois.  They are usually called something worse.

Anyway, I was happy to catch the little guy shown above.  And will this lead to a Strange Fish Catostomus Geocache?

Why yes indeed.  And if I may say so, the technique has continued to evolve such that the representation is more accurate.  Thank goodness I won't have to try anything really challenging like a flounder!

 

Logperch

This cute little fella is a logperch.  It's been on my "try to catch one" list for a while now.  I was out in early May trying to find places for Strange Fish geocaches.  I was actually trying to catch something else but this over achiever kept hitting a worm/hook combo that was bigger than he was.  I downsized it a bit and got him on the second cast.

It takes some work to catch logperch.  They favor fast moving streams so people out casually drowning worms to catch panfish won't encounter them.  

And yes, the catch did result in a cache. Specifically: Strange Fish #7.

Redhorse Redux

With geocaches you can either go boring or high maintenance. 

For boring you use one of several standard geocache containers.  Things like film canisters, ammo boxes, or one of several commercially available waterproof containers.  And you put them somewhere predictable and sheltered.  Roadside signs in our part of the world are often supported by wooden 4 by 4 posts.  These posts have holes to, I suppose, deal with temp related expansion and contraction.  Film canisters fit neatly, but how boring.

I like to make custom containers and hide them in odd places.  Hence the Strange Fish series.  With considerable effort I've managed to catch enough weird, unloved fish to place ten geocaches.  One of which is Strange Fish 3 - Silver Redhorse.  

If you've never caught one, Silver Redhorse are a sort of sucker.  Not much good to eat but fun to catch and an indicator of good water quality.

They are kinda dopey looking, mostly because of the vacuum cleaner mouth, but have variable degrees of red color in their fins that makes them jaunty.

I've gone through three containers now at this geocache.  The first was hidden inside a chunk of wood....which was obliterated by brush clearing.  The second was a crafty bit of bark colored tubing that was attached to a gnarly shrub of similar texture.  When this lost its waterproofing abilities (a season or two of temperature extremes can do that) it was winter and I was busy. So I threw together a more or less fish shaped container with what I had on hand.  But I never liked it much and it too started to get damp inside.  That makes the geocache log hard to sign and is generally poor form.  So, down to the workshop.  My latest iterations are made of pvc pipe with snug end caps.  But can you make it look like a fish?

Here's container three below, underneath what I consider to be a much better version 4.0.  I even figured out a way to have surface texture similar to scales!

The fins are a bit over the top, but in part they are to keep the cache off the ground and hopefully a bit drier.  Construction technique is similar to the Strange Catfish cache but I'm with some effort getting better at this.

Dead Worm Number Five

When I'm off on archaeology digs I have a pretty good "eye" that lets me trowel away at a brisk clip and still detect changes in soil color, texture or the presence of small artifacts.  The problem is, I can never turn it off.  So on my daily walks with Hank the Dog I'm always seeing things.

Here a worm did not make it off the sidewalk when the sun got hot.  Farewell, Worm Number Five.

When I see worms struggling across sidewalks and streets I always - in the interest of Karma - pick them up and toss them to safety.  Of course I can't save them all.