The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape

Prologue

The grass is wild—not the kind my dad seeds and mows in the yard. It reaches all the way up my short legs, brushes my waist with wispy plumes, and hides me if I squat. It tickles and itches, squeaks between the palms of my hands, and can cut me if I’m not careful. Spiky balls of pinkish purple peek up like polka dots through the grass, come loose in my fingers, and ooze sweetness between my teeth. Down a steep bank near the edge of the highway, mud squishes between my toes. My cheeks tingle with droplets of moist air. I can see across the highway and across a field sometimes covered with bales of hay to the slough, where frogs chirp and cattails rise in clumps. I know the cattails’ feel, like the velvety cloth on a chair, and I want to touch them, but I can’t go there. The highway is my boundary. I wait and look and listen. The sounds are comforting, the music of spring and summer, of freedom—no coat, no snow pants, no shoes. Two birds call to me: one sings a melody; the other trills the same line again and again. They will forever be the sounds of home. Above me, in a dome of sunlit blue sky, puffy white clouds like mashed potatoes float on a single plane. This is my earliest sensory memory.

A girl from long ago stands in the uncut grass beside her father’s smithy. She has been promised many times that the papa she barely recalls will ride up someday on his new horse when the war is over and the cavalry comes home. It’s a hard word to say—cabalry. She practices touching her lip with her teeth the way big sister Marietta has taught her. Papa will fire up his forge again and teach George and DeWitt the blacksmith trade. The dome of Amanda Speer’s world is a hazy blue. She tips her face up toward the white and shadowed shapes that float overhead. A breeze flits across the Big Marsh and picks up a pleasant watery chill. Out in the pasture where the animals graze, a bird her mother calls a meadowlark sings its pretty melody. Up the creek where the marsh fans out, birds with red patches on their wings trill their tune from cattail perches.

A few miles and years away, a ten-year-old lopes through fields and meadows, cutting through grass that sometimes reaches boy high. He wants to catch the exact moment when the marsh sounds take over—the quacks and honks, the constant chorus of peepers, the konkaree of the red-winged blackbird that sends waves of joy through his chest. The watery world beckons him, and he delights in the moist air, the shimmering sunlight, the pattern of clouds overhead, the gleam of water stretched out before him. The sounds and sensations produce words and rhythms in his mind, the poems that will help him preserve these moments. Each year of his youth, Elbert Ostrander ventures farther, until he reaches the eastern shore of the big lake at the north end of the marsh, where he finds black walnut trees, flowering alder shrubs, shore willows, pigeon cherries, wild lilies, and irises of royal blue. He returns again and again to climb on and lie under the arch of the mysterious oak that bent over and grew back into the ground. In his later years, he will recall Geneva Lake as the lake of my childhood dreams, the embodiment of an Eden, a Paradise.

Here in our contiguous Edens, we are finding beauty. We have no mountains to teach us grandeur, no roaring ocean surf to fill us with awe. We learn to love subtlety: the iridescence of a dragonfly, the bronze and copper hues of November, the brief blue twilight of a midwinter morning, the swish of a muskrat’s tail rippling still water, the crunch of acorn caps underfoot. We are Midwesterners making ourselves at home.

PART I

The Lay of the Land

Hollandale: An Introduction

There was a time—an eon of time—when water pooled and ribboned freely among the oak savanna and hardwood copses and in the prairie potholes of southern Minnesota. Crops grow there now, on dry land that might yet hold water in its low spots after a heavy, heavy rain. The absence of the old wetlands is to some a tale of triumph: agriculture’s conquest over waste and wild to feed a hungry humanity. To others it is a doomsday story of irreversible damage to the natural environment. We Minnesotans like to think of our state as natural, and it is often colored a lovely deep green on the US map. Yet the original landscape has been radically altered in less than two centuries of European settlement, not least by the miles of drainage ditches that crisscross the farmland and the even lengthier grid of hollow clay and concrete tiles and plastic piping buried beneath its soil. Freeborn County alone, now with 340 miles of ditches, had lost 98.5 percent of its wetlands by 1981.

Many people don’t know this subterranean network of field drains exists until, for example, a flood brings to light the risks of draining a heavy spring thaw or torrential rains into an already overburdened river. Alarms are sounding about the polluting effect of farm runoff—soil, fertilizers, and pesticides—on lakes and rivers, especially the Minnesota, which empties into the Mississippi, clogging Lake Pepin with sediment and nitrates and contributing to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the state’s farmers face continuing economic pressure to drain and cultivate more land.

The story that follows recounts one obscure but vital piece of Minnesota’s agricultural history: the drainage of an eighteen-thousand-acre wetland between Albert Lea and Austin. For generations, Dakota, Sac and Fox, and Ho-Chunk people, as well as family farmers of Anglo-European heritage, lived with this Big Marsh, gathering wild rice, hunting, fishing, trapping, and haying, until nonresident investors appeared on the scene in 1890, determined to turn it into a showcase of industrial-scale agriculture. For not yet a century, the drained bed and environs of Rice Lake, the deepest portion of the Big Marsh, have gone by the name of Hollandale. The upbeat public story of how Hollandale came to be verges on myth and miracle, and it ignores the first three decades of the drainage effort. This new account of the Big Marsh’s fate is a more complicated story of hope and loss, of conflicting values, of political intrigue, of family and home.

Map of Freeborn County, Minnesota, 2015, showing locations significant to the Big Marsh story. Cartographic print production by Matt Kania/Map Hero.

As a child in Albert Lea in the 1950s and 1960s, I thought of Hollandale, fifteen miles to the northeast, as different, an expression of skepticism in rural Minnesota. It was flat like Holland—flat and Dutch—with canal-like ditches. The rest of Freeborn County was rolling savanna or prairie, covered in corn and hay or grazing dairy and beef cattle. Hollandale farmers grew onions and potatoes, carrots and celery, asparagus and sugar beets, which were weeded and harvested by hand, by Mexican hands—Mexican Americans, actually, who spent the growing season in abandoned farmhouses or migrant shacks and left in the fall in pickup trucks and beat-up cars, headed back home to Crystal City, Texas. Hollandale seemed a distant place except to city teenagers who spent the summer in the scorching onion fields in years when migrant labor ran short. Albert Lea saw more of the migrant workers than of the Hollandale farmers. Saturdays treated us to snatches of Spanish and strains of Tex-Mex accordion music that hung on as the soundtrack of childhood summer evenings. Dutch diphthongs and the fricative g were seldom heard in Albert Lea, and Dutch music, whatever it might be, stayed confined in Hollandale’s two Reformed churches, one theologically and socially conservative and the other a little less so. We dominant Lutherans and Catholics counted the Dutch Reformed—if we thought about them at all—as a more pious form of Methodist or Presbyterian.

The Hollandale kids were bused to Albert Lea for junior high and high school. Blond and broad cheeked, they filled the De- seats toward the front of the classroom and the Van- and Ver- seats in the back. They stuck together at first, likely out of shyness and familiarity, which the rest of us easily misread as arrogance. Eventually, a few of the girls joined the popular clique while the boys retained a tinge of rural awkwardness. By graduation, we had probably driven some Hollandale friends home, dropping them at farmhouses along narrow roads or in the circle of houses on Maple Island, a grove of trees on a slight rise in the flatness. Some of us knew, if our families told stories, that Maple Island was once a real island and that Hollandale sat in the bed of an old lake. We heard that the Dutch were brought in specially to farm the wet, spongy soil, a job they were suited for because their ancestors had wrested Holland from the sea. They were newcomers, newer at least than the Danes in Clarks Grove and Alden, the Irish in Newry and Twin Lakes, the Germans in Conger, the Bohemians in Myrtle, and the Norwegians everywhere. Rumors flew that they had gotten rich, so rich they relied on Mexicans to do their work.

Swampland converted into fertile celery field, Hollandale, 1926. Minnesota Historical Society Collections.

The Hollandale kids knew a different story, a proud history of how their grandparents had turned a swampy wasteland into one of the most important vegetable-producing regions in the country. A few of the first settlers in the 1920s were fresh immigrants, but most of Hollandale’s 150 families had come from Dutch settlements in Iowa and Michigan, recruited with the promise of a decent family living on just twenty acres of fertile peat soil. The Hollandale kids heard tales of economic hardship and the physical challenges of farming easily flooded land, and how so many had failed and left their plots indebted. Those who survived were the strong, devout, and hardworking.

The local museum, the Hollandale Heritage Huis, tells how George Payne of the Payne Investment Company in Omaha, Nebraska, discovered reedy Rice Lake in 1918 and saw its potential for farming if it could be drained. He had helped develop sugar plantations in soggy Louisiana and would go on to build vegetable-farming communities in central California. Payne masterminded not only a successful drainage but also the colonization of Hollandale the Wonderland, the name he gave his dream, according to a promotional booklet put out by Albert Lea Farms Company, the holding company he formed to buy and sell the reclaimed wetland. Payne dreamed big, envisioning Hollandale’s products shipped to markets in the Twin Cities, Omaha, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. And his dream was precisely executed. Nothing was left to chance, the booklet boasts. Payne oversaw the layout of drainage ditches and roads, the choice of seeds, the branding and marketing of the crops, the selection of farmers, the bungalow design of the farmhouses, the Hollandale village plat, even the placement and design of schools and churches. The Dutch settlers began arriving in 1922, and Payne’s dream was realized on September 4, 1926, when two railroads—the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul—met at a union depot in Hollandale, from which the area’s bounty would be sent to market.

The Albert Lea Farms booklet called Payne’s vision monumental:

By the expenditure of much money and hard work, a large tract of land, which for uncounted centuries was unfit for human habitation and which added nothing to the food supply or to the wealth of the world, has been completely transformed. For untold centuries yet to come, that tract of land will do its full share towards furnishing food for the world. It affords today and will continue for all time to afford comfortable homes for hundreds of families. And the children of those families, under the influence of church and school, will grow up, generation after generation, to be good citizens of the republic, citizens who by their intelligence and their industry will bring prosperity to themselves and make Hollandale a credit to the nation.

Of course, the dream was overblown. Heavy rainfall could be devastating, and drought and the Depression took their toll on Hollandale farmers as well as others in the county. Despite serving on the board of the American Peat Society, Payne evidently didn’t foresee that peat soil deprived of its water source and the annual cycle of plant decay would dry up and lose its fertility. Thirty years later, a small vegetable plot could no longer support a family a third the size of the original settlers’. Some farmers sold out and others bought up until farms grew too large for a single family to manage and required migrant labor, in violation of the Dutch ethic that a respectable farm family does its own work. Soon these larger farms required expensive machinery as well, and fertilizer to replenish the depleted soil. Like so many of their rural cohort, Hollandale’s third generation took their intelligence and their industry off to towns and cities and more dependable, less rigorous work. Corn and soybeans reign in Hollandale now, as in the rest of the county, and its farms are few, large, chemically fertilized, and expensively mechanized. Trains no longer run there, and even the tracks are gone.

The half century in which Hollandale enjoyed its unusual reputation is a brief, colorful blip in the landscape’s history. Ethnic and economic unity made for shared values, habits, and pastimes that generated treasured memories. Age-old theological differences and the competing needs of upland and lowland farmers—in a landscape that looks flat to outsiders—complicated and spiced those communal memories. Yet, among other county residents, the miraculous Hollandale story carried a shadowy undertone. When my dad, born in neighboring Moscow Township, talked about how Hollandale had once been a lake, he didn’t share in the awe of George Payne’s creation story. I sensed that something had been lost. Rice Lake seemed to stand for something regrettable: a faulty decision, a mistake in judgment, some obscure, localized fall from paradise. My granddad always said God put the sloughs there for a reason, Dad told me in his later years.

Hollandale natives I have talked with about this rueful tone sense it themselves and read it as being looked down upon or as outright hostility. Certainly the lens through which I saw Hollandale was marred with distorting scratches. I wondered what might account for this mutual wariness but had no inkling of the contentious effort to alter the landscape that predated George Payne’s vision of a garden paradise. In fact, I stumbled upon the inglorious earlier story of the draining of the Big Marsh quite by accident.

One day while at work on another project, I sat down in the Minnesota History Center’s microfilm room and began scrolling through issues of the Freeborn Patriot, a Depression-era newspaper sympathetic to Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party. A headline on the front page of the July 19, 1935, issue caught my attention: Connivings of Dishonest Men/Cheat Nature As Well As/Fellow Beings, Writer Avers. The article opened with a nostalgic description of Geneva Lake, Hollandale’s northwest boundary, in its natural state, back when it was the author’s boyhood ‘Mecca.’ It went on to rail against a drainage project completed years before the creation of Hollandale that had been conceived in iniquity and taken up by foreign interests who employed local mercenaries. The drainage had emptied Rice Lake and threatened the existence of Geneva Lake. The essay didn’t name the culprits, but the Spoiler who with wanton malice laid the hand of greed and avarice with dire devastation on the beautiful scene had obviously arrived well before George Payne. The author also charged malfeasance in the construction of the ditches and a conspiracy to cover it up. The hyperbolic tone of the essay made his point of view clear: We, the lifelong residents of the county, massed together in solid array against the Spoilers, who, intent only on furthering their own material interests at the expense of the natural resources that are the common property of all people, and we demanded that the hand of greed and guilt be stayed in regard at least to this one beautiful lake.

The accusation of conniving and misdeeds in my placid home territory piqued my interest, but it was the byline that aroused my passion to pursue this hidden history. The author of the essay was Elbert H. Ostrander, my great-grandfather, my dad’s beloved maternal granddad. We who know anything at all about our ancestry likely have one forebear around whom legends spin. In my family’s case, it’s Elbert Ostrander, the man who kept a pet bear, befriended felons out on parole, and was personally acquainted with Minnesota’s radical governor Floyd B. Olson, to whom he dedicated a poem commemorating a state moratorium on farm foreclosures. Grandpa Ostrander’s appeal to me was tangible: the brown folder in our basement rec room desk that held samples of his poetry and essays. Someone in my family wrote. I could feel, in the urgency of his words and in the ghostly presence hovering about me as I walked from the history center to the parking lot, that my great-grandfather would like me to expose those dishonest connivers and tell the people’s story. I, however, set out to look for the truth of the matter.

Elbert Ostrander, his pet bear, and his daughter Marvyl, about 1915

I immersed myself in the area’s earlier history, before Payne brought in his Buckeye ditching machine and his fleet of tilers to finish the job. I focused on the first two attempts at drainage, in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. I wanted to know how this massive transformation had been accomplished and whether others in the community were as strongly opposed as Elbert Ostrander. If they were, how was their opposition overcome? Was it really a case of conniving? It began to look as though the drainage marked the arrival of agribusiness in Freeborn County, which threatened the family farm culture established by Yorker and European farmers who made no secret of their disdain for land speculators. Yet those Yorkers and Europeans had already altered the landscape by plowing up the prairie forbs and grasses and planting foreign trees among the bur oaks and scattered swatches of hardwood forest.

I often found my fascination drifting from legal wrangling and the mechanics of ditching to imagining what eighteen thousand acres of wetland might look like. I wanted to know how people lived with this wetland, how it served them, and how it inhibited their daily efforts to live well. Did they enjoy its bounty of fowl, fish, and furs, or did they curse it as a worthless eyesore and obstacle? I tried to see the landscape layered with the memory of all who have passed over it. I thought about the landscape’s own memory and how it relives its past when heavy rains leave water standing in the fields or send it cascading down the Turtle Creek ditch and into the Cedar River to flood farms and cities along its banks in Iowa. All along, I thought about how landscape shapes our sense of comfort and beauty and security. What happens to us when our familiar home landscapes—be they marshes or deserts or forests or seacoasts or even ditches and vegetable fields—are transformed over and over by changing human needs and attitudes?

The greatest fascination that writing holds for me is learning how personal stories intersect with public history. So it felt like a benefit that the history of the drainage is to some degree my family’s story. Just what role did Elbert Ostrander play in this drama? What about the Speers and Registers, my ancestors who farmed along Turtle Creek, the path of the main ditch? How much of my curiosity is due to a family heritage of opposition and loss, a six-generation claim on the landscape of Freeborn County? The deeper we probe the personal, the more likely we are to achieve universal resonance.

What writers and readers both long for are stories. Woven together, stories make history. History—what is history? Elbert Ostrander asks in his Freeborn Patriot article, then answers, A record of the past from which we may better shape the events of the future. It is a harbinger of civilization, a record of the rise and fall of nations, an established marker of the pitfalls that have engulfed the multitudes along the trodden pathway of Time. Maybe a close look at just one pitfall will offer stories enough.

Freeborn County: Home, but No Biome

As a biologist, I find all natural ecosystems brimming with intricacy and beauty. However, only the savanna fills me with emotion that I seem unable to plumb. I return to it again and again, to see what else the savanna has to say to me. I am passionate about its restoration.

—Sue Leaf, One Seed at a Time, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer

I lived at the edge of the world, on the border between an enclosed, secure environment and a wide-open, intimidating mystery. The change was subtle, but I could detect it on my family’s ten-mile Sunday drives west from Albert Lea to visit grandparents in Alden. I knew the route along US Highway 16 by heart. I could trace the curve along the Remakel farm’s white rail fence and catch the last glimpse of wooded, rolling hills south of the highway, where Pickerel Lake glistened in the distance. We passed two low spots in the fields where bushes (probably hazel) and spindly trees (probably willow and young cottonwood) marked the lines of drainage ditches. I knew where to look for a stile over a fence and for little boxlike houses arranged in a field on a mink farm. Shortly before Alden, the vistas began to widen in a way that made me uneasy, and I was relieved to see the row of metal corncribs, beams of reflected sunlight along the western horizon, that marked the turn into Alden. Beyond Alden, the land grew flatter, the trees fewer, the sky more imposing.

I kept that larger landscape in mind when I walked along my favorite country road toward Pickerel Lake. Between the gravel of the road and the barbed wire enclosing the farmland, milkweed puffed and wild roses bloomed pink among the more standard clover. I listened and watched for frogs in the low spot where cattails overtook the farmer’s attempt at corn. Even though the road wasn’t elevated, I felt as if I were balancing on the spine of the earth. To the east, I’d