Whiteley Creek Homestead

a minnesota winter

If you truly desire to gain an authentic appreciation for winter, just leave. For twenty-four years. That's what Dick and I did. Over the span of our dual state lifestyle, we always returned to our central Minnesota home to live during the spring, summer, and autumn seasons until, in April 2017, we sold our Florida winter home to reside full time on our homestead where we have shared forty-three years of marriage. There is a Mary Englebreit greeting card which I have saved years upon years for the message it holds that resonates through to my soul. It is a quote by French author, Marcel Proust. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Jack Pines, which thrive in the dry conditions of a sandy woodland, are a predominant feature along one edge of our property. They are rarely intentionally grown as a landscape tree, as their drooping, crooked trunk and branches make them less desirable conifers. Let me just say that I've historically found the mature trees to be quite spooky. Until I reassessed my view of them. So much so, that Dick and I knew we wanted none other than a small Jack Pine for our Christmas tree in the north. After several treks through our woods, we spied a proud little tree which became our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. The day before Thanksgiving, we set our tree into its stand, then we drove downtown to see Brainerd's Christmas decorations that had been put up the day before. "New eyes" saw them not just as pretty wreaths draped across the street's expanse and hung from light poles, but as memories of Christmas past. And then, as my camera recorded the moment, big, fluffy snowflakes began to gently flutter down. At that instant, I was in the moment and transported to my past. Simultaneously.

After a late-autumn hard frost, if efficiently trimming perennials to ground level is your normal routine, don't. There will be time in early spring for cleaning out beds to prepare for new growth. The dried stems and branches provide texture and interest to a winter landscape all on their own, but, when covered with snow, it's like an empty room versus one arranged with furniture adorned with little touches.

And the "spooky," less-desirable Jack Pine? Fifteen years ago, we intentionally transplanted a little one at the entrance to our house's front door. It is not so little anymore. My eyes no longer see the drooping, crooked trunk and branches. Instead, I see snowy cotton balls artfully positioned on its branches as I look upon it outside my living room window. I hear the whisper of my Jack Pine, "See, I am beautiful." And I smile. March 27th post note: This morning, the sky's brilliant blue, magnified against the snow's blinding white, was the view out our front door after yesterday's heavy snowfall.

 

   

a little bit

"A little bit about me before you go... " This phrase has been floating around in my brain... song lyrics, I think. Each of us has a story... a song. Here's mine.

 

 

Hello. My name is Adrienne Cahoon (a.k.a. "queen of the meadow blooms"). I grew up in a family of fourteen on a 160-acre farm ten miles southeast of Brainerd. I attended first grade in a one-room schoolhouse 1-1/2 miles from my childhood home. The following year, schools were consolidated and we were bused into Brainerd. Throughout my childhood, I helped tend gardens and fields on the acreage that my father farmed in addition to his full-time job with the Minnesota State Highway Department. I had an apron-clad stay-at-home mom who baked made-from-scratch fresh from the oven bread and cookies for when I got off the school bus. It is from this background that I developed a love for all facets of homekeeping, gardening, land stewardship, and related environmental issues. During my eleven years as a full-time classroom teacher (six years in Minnesota and five years in Florida), I was selected 1996 Conservation Education Teacher of the Year for the state of Florida and recipient of Disney's 1996 Teacherrific $3000.00 Top Program Award for a school-wide waste management system utilizing composting. In 1993, I earned a Master of Science Degree in Curriculum and Instruction and completed my Master Gardener certification through the University of Minnesota in March 2000. In 1999, I opened Whiteley Creek Homestead Bed and Breakfast on the property where my husband, Dick, and I have lived since our marriage in 1974. We closed our business at the conclusion of the 2016 season to allow us the flexibility that retirement allows. I have three daughters. My eldest daughter lives in New York with her husband and five children. She is a full-time wife and mother with a background in graphic design as well as an author and illustrator of children's books. My middle daughter lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children where she is co-owner of a graphic design business. My youngest daughter lives and works in Atlanta as a visual manager for Anthropologie.

dirt roads

Growing up southeast of Brainerd on a farm surrounded by dirt roads all around, life took on a slower pace. Recently, paved roads have encroached within one mile on two sides of where the old homestead still remains, but the "washboard" gravel road thus far hasn't been covered over with asphalt in the name of progress. Agates are fewer in number than when I collected them forty plus years ago walking down the dusty road to the swimming beach 1 1/4 miles away, but the breeze rustling the trees with no noise of airplanes, cars, or trains is the same now as then. The half-mile long driveway that leads to my present home, where Dick and I have shared our life for thirty-five years, has become a bed and breakfast symbolic of the richly simple life I had as a child. Bob C., a longtime friend, shared this Dirt Roads message that encapsulates all the feelings that I have never sat down to express on paper. (My brother, Greg, has his arm around me in this 1955 photo. Dick likes think it is him instead.)

 

Dirt Roads by Paul Harvey

What's mainly wrong with society today is that too many dirt roads have been paved.

There's not any problem in America today… crime, drugs, education, divorce, delinquency… that wouldn't be remedied, if we just had more dirt roads, because dirt roads give character.

People that live at the end of dirt roads learn early on that life is a bumpy ride… that it can jar you right down to your teeth sometimes, but it's worth it, if at the end is home... a loving spouse, happy kids and a dog.

We wouldn't have near the trouble with our educational system if our kids got their exercise walking a dirt road with other kids, from whom they learn how to get along.

There was less crime in our streets before they were paved. Criminals didn't walk two dusty miles to rob or rape, if they knew they'd be welcomed by five barking dogs and a double barrel shotgun… and there were no drive by shootings.

Our values were better when our roads were worse. People did not worship their cars more than their kids and motorists were more courteous; they didn't tailgate by riding the bumper or else the guy in front would choke you with dust and bust your windshield with rocks. Dirt roads taught patience.

Dirt roads were environmentally-friendly… You didn't hop in your car for a quart of milk. You walked to the barn for your milk.

For your mail, you walked to the mailbox.

What if it rained and the dirt road got washed out? That was the best part… then you stayed home and had some family time, roasted marshmallows, popped popcorn, pony rode on Daddy's shoulders, and learned how to make prettier quilts than anybody.

At the end of dirt roads, you soon learned that bad words tasted like soap.

Most paved roads lead to trouble. Dirt roads more likely lead to a fishing creek or a swimming hole.

At the end of a dirt road, the only time we even locked our car was in August because, if we didn't, some neighbor would fill it with too much zucchini.

At the end of a dirt road, there was always extra springtime income from when city dudes would get stuck. You'd have to hitch up a team and pull them out. Usually you got a dollar...always you got a new friend...at the end of a dirt road.

1955 homestead

I received a photo calendar from my sister Marlene for Christmas. One of my favorite childhood photos is of my brother Greg and I sitting by our hand pump that supplied all of the water for our daily needs including drinking, cooking, and washing clothes and for water for our milk cows. This photo taken in 1955 is a favorite, as well.

 
It has the look of homesteaders as in Laura Ingalls Wilder's day. The old door opening into the kitchen with the tablecloth so welcomingly draped over the table, the bib overalls (handed down from one to the next), the dirt-packed yard with patches of weeds... My mother's apron is missing. She always wore a bib apron. The baby in my mother's arms is my sister Rita. My father is holding me. My brother Greg and a sister Mary Ann are missing from the photo and there were three more not yet born (Ron, Rick, and Marlene) when this photo was taken making a total of 12 kids in all. The others in the photo L to R back row in front of my dad and mom are Ken and Bill with David, Darrel, and Cliff L to R front row.  

christmas past

It's Christmas Eve. Each year my thoughts drift back so very many years ago to my childhood in the 1950s and our tinsel-laden tree. 

The snowflake and icicle are two ornaments (the only ones) that I have from that original tree. 

mina miller edison and eliza miller clifton

I'd like to introduce you to Dick's grandmother, Olive Clifton Dullum, who is Dick's mother's mother. I will also unravel her relationship to Thomas Edison's second wife, Mina Miller. In 1914, Olive opened a boarding house eleven miles northeast of Brainerd in the little community of Woodrow, which was named after President Woodrow Wilson. It was near an underground mine first called the Wilcox Mine, then the name was changed to Omaha Mine when a new mining company took over. With capacity to sleep forty-two miners at $1.00 a day, the two-story 24x60-foot hotel building built by Dick's grandfather, John Dullum, had a general store and post office in the front part of the building. (The photo below is the back side of the building facing the barn.) Before moving to Woodrow, the Dullums lived in Wright, Minnesota where Olive was a teacher and John owned sawmills. It's likely that John built the hotel from lumber sawed at his mill. Although the lodging portion of her business would fill one's day, Olive and a hired girl also prepared meals and packed dinner pails for the miners who worked round-the-clock shifts.

In her weekly Farmer's Wife column in the Brainerd Dispatch that she wrote for twenty-five years, Olive stated, "When the mine closed down in 1919 (after the mining company went bankrupt), I had a big empty building, but you can't live on that. Well, we looked around for some land to plant. We had no horses or machinery. The neighbors loaned us their team and we opened up small patches and planted common vegetables. After a time, we could afford a $49 cow and I made butter to sell. We tried chickens and they helped some. There were a few jobs at what you'd now consider very poor pay, but we didn't join the W.P.A gang or go on any relief. In general, when you go broke, use your head. Don't go begging, go to work." I had the privilege of knowing this fiercely independent woman who continued to live in her boarding house after her husband John's death in 1963 until her death in 1973.

Olive, proud of the fact that she was related to Thomas Edison's second wife, Mina Miller, spoke of a family reunion in Wisconsin when she met Thomas Edison as a young girl. So, I set out to discover the relationship. I began by reading a brief biography by John D. Venable titled Mina Miller Edison Daughter, Wife and Mother of Inventors that I had purchased when we recently visited Thomas Edison's home in West Orange, New Jersey. Then, using ancestry.com, I researched the lineage of Mina Miller Edison and Eliza Miller Clifton, who was Olive Dullum's mother.  For three days, from morning to night, I pored over old census records, marriage and death certificates, passport applications, grave records, and family trees created by others doing similar searches. I made copies and took pages of notes. I learned names and lineage. I learned education and job history. I learned where lives took root and the location where the two families intersected (Ohio). But, I was still struggling to connect the two women generationally. Then, a breakthrough. In a box of old family photos, I found this handwritten family tree.

There, near the bottom, in Olive Clifton Dullum's handwriting... "My mother's Uncle Miller in Ohio invented the First Reaper." I know from my online research that she is referring to Lewis Miller 1829-1899, who had eleven children... one named Mina Miller. The crucial words are "my mother's uncle." So, this means that Olive's mother, Eliza Miller Clifton 1837-1923 (Dick's great grandmother), is a first cousin to Mina Miller Edison 1865-1947. Proceeding through the generations, this means that Dick's grandmother Olive Clifton Dullum is a second cousin to Mina Miller Edison and... insert drum roll... Dick is a third cousin to Thomas Edison's second wife Mina Miller. 

(Left Photo) First cousins Mina Miller Edison in her West Orange, New Jersey Glenmont Estate second-floor office in 1929 that she shared with Thomas Edison and (Right Photo) Eliza Miller Clifton at her home in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota that she shared with her husband Edward Clifton.

 

 

olive clifton dullum

The Brainerd Public Library's "Brown Bag Summer Author Series" spawned the early beginnings of my efforts to uncover how Dick's grandmother is related to Thomas Edison. I was so excited to attend the series for my very first time on June 9, 2014 that I packed a special lunch the night before... in a brown paper bag, of course. I made a sandwich with thick slices of local, grass-fed, nitrite-free beef summer sausage and freshly harvested, locally grown greens from my CSA share along with hummus and celery for dipping. After scooping a large spoonful of Good Mornin' Apple Crisp into a half-pint mason jar, I was ready. I wondered, "Do people really pack a brown bag lunch or is it just a catchy name for the event?" I decided to tuck my bag lunch deep into my backpack until I could survey the attendees to see what others were doing. You know. The 'ol gotta-fit-in, junior high school mentality.

That particular day, Rhonda Fochs (pronounced Fox) was presenting her book, Minnesota's Lost Towns Northern Edition which includes "lost" towns in thirty-two counties in northern Minnesota. Her definition of a lost town is one that was "once a thriving heart of a community that has little or no population now." What caused the towns to fold? Rhonda shared several reasons... 1)RFD (Rural Free Delivery) In 1893, congress passed legislation to begin delivery of mail in rural areas rather than people coming to the post office to pick up mail. 2)Automobiles Faster modes of transportation meant people could travel further distances to shop for better prices and variety. 3)Railroads Prior to the invention of automobiles, passenger and supply trains made regular stops no farther apart than what a farmer could travel by horse in one day.  With faster modes of transportation, the distance between rail stops increased resulting in a town's residents moving to the railroad hubs. 4)One-Industry Towns If a community is built around a single industry such as timber or mining, when the resources are depleted, the workers move and the town dies. 

She had created a Power Point presentation to show us photos from her book of some lost towns in the Brainerd area. A black and white photo filled the large projection screen next to where she stood at her podium. It was of a woman walking down "Main Street, Woodrow, ca. 1914," the caption read. (See photo in book below.) Rhonda explained the significance of the town of Woodrow to the area's iron ore mining industry. In 1914, a woman named Olive Dullum (pronounced due-lum) and her husband, John, built a boarding house for mine workers in Woodrow northeast of Brainerd. My hand shot up to ask Rhonda if she knew the name of the woman in the photo. She did not.

As Rhonda moved on to the next lost town near Brainerd, I continued to wonder. Could it be? Was the woman in the Woodrow photo Dick's Grandma Dullum? I was well aware of the boarding house that his grandparents built and continued to live in until their deaths... I was inside it when Olive still resided there, but... the photo. Then, recently, one of my grandsons asked to see a photo of Dick and I when we were "hippies" in the early 70s. As I rummaged through some photos, there it was... the same photo as in Rhonda Foch's book, Minnesota's Lost Towns, with a caption typed underneath confirming that it was Dick's Grandma Dullum.

Dick told me that his Grandpa Dullum's hobby was photography. On the second floor... the last room down the hall on the right at the back end of the boarding house facing the barn, he remembers a storage room that held photo supplies and equipment alongside beekeeping boxes and frames. The room had been transformed into a dark room where his Grandpa Dullum developed pictures. This remembrance validates the photo's caption. And, yes, despite only a handful of others eating from bag lunches, I reached deep into my backpack and pulled out my lunch.

sixth grandchild

Today, a miracle. Our daughter brought forth into this world a sweet baby girl. 

A small lamp casting a soft glow in the upstairs bedroom of a home tucked into the mountains of New York. Two skilled, seasoned midwives. A family gathered round. And then the long awaited moment. Heather giving birth. Our eldest grandchild cutting her little sister's umbilical cord. We were there. All of us. Heather's husband Patrick, their three children ages 4 1/2, 8, and 11 and Dick and I. And then a special, unexpected gift. One of the midwives crossed the room where I stood and, with our baby's vernix on her fingertips, massaged my temples ever so briefly as I closed my eyes to accept her special gesture. Vernix, which is the waxy, cheese-like substance coating a newborn that provides antibacterial protection and is an emollient to prevent skin from drying out, feels like butter. I believe her spontaneity was spawned by a brief conversation we had earlier in the evening regarding a yoga class my granddaughter and I attend. At the conclusion of the class, as we lie prostate on our mats with our eyes closed in a room illuminated only by the flickering light of votive candles and a little lamp, our yogi gently massages the temples of each of her students with essential oil. Calming. Vernix or essential oil. A simple human touch. Profound meaning in the context of the serenity of a home birth and yoga alike.   

rick

My brother Rick was born on September 29, 1958. It is his birthday today.

 
 
Sadly, after exhausting every resource and valiantly enduring much suffering attempting to overcome his cancer, he passed away on August 24, 2011 at the age of 52 years 10 months and 26 days. Here he stands next to his farmall tractor on his beloved farm near Isanti, Minnesota where he called home. 

 

His wife, Julie, wrote the most touching, comforting poem that was included in the funeral program.

When my journey is done
and my time here is at end
I hope you recall the good that I've done
and remember me as your friend

The sickness I bore
It ravaged me
The pain is no more
I have been set free

Just remember my love
that I am watching over you
Looking down from above
So do not be blue

The pain is all gone
My body is strong
I know people here
and I am getting along

Can't wait till I see you again
It will be soon
But only God
knows when

Until I reach out that day
To take your hand
Continue to live out
God's perfect plan

Rick, my brother David (who died  in 1990 at age 45 from lung cancer contracted from handling Agent Orange during the Vietnam War), and I share a special bond. Our birthdays are one day after the other... Rick Sept. 29, me Sept. 30, and David Oct.1. Happy birthday, Rick! Happy birthday, David! I'll bake a cake and light candles for us.  

hands that crochet

In each cabin and inn room at my bed and breakfast, there is a crocheted doily. It may be under a lamp, a vase, or draped across a nightstand. Each one was handmade by my mother. Throughout the years she made many... too many to count... we should have. As she grew older, her mind remained sharp to read pattern instructions. Her hands grew old, but her fingers remained nimble.

 
Whenever I would stop by for a wee visit, she was crocheting. She would ask about my day... Had I tried any new recipes to prepare for my bed and breakfast guests? She would often share her Capper's Weekly (a homey newspaper familiar to me as a child and now called Capper's Magazine) that always held tried-and-true recipes that readers had submitted. What antics had my chickens been up to? We would talk about the asparagus and rhubarb shoots poking through the soil in the spring... the pussy willows and lilac buds, the cream of asparagus soup recipe tucked into my CSA basket that I planned to try, and the rhubarb custard pies that she baked each spring with freshly cut rhubarb from her garden. She would share the doily she was presently working on. Our chats were about nothing really... and yet so much. Now, her 93 year old hands have stopped crocheting. Our chats have now ceased... or have they? No, we still have our chats. Why just today, I walked our property in search of signs of spring. I brushed the decayed leaves aside... remnants of autumn past. "There... see, mom. Bright red rhubarb shoots to be made into pie. I will use your recipe. Oh, and look... pussy willows bursting forth along the path beside our wetlands and budding dwarf korean lilac bushes along the sidewalk leading to my front door. What pretty early spring bouquets they will make! As I prepare my cabins and inn rooms for opening in two weeks, your doilies will be there."