Bill Tishler:
Good morning, I’m Professor Bill Tishler. Welcome to another lecture in Landscape Architecture 250, an introduction to landscape architecture. This morning, we’re going to be looking at some highlights of a recent field trip that we took to Old World Wisconsin. Old World Wisconsin is our state’s most ambitious historic preservation project.

And many years ago, when I first came to the University, I was presented with the enticing offer to prepare a master plan for project. And after a number of years of work, this indeed was completed. It’s been fascinating to watch the project evolve and get built over the years.
We’ll be looking at a small rural crossroads village and some of the most fascinating vernacular buildings that were built in Wisconsin. These are actual buildings that were moved here from throughout the state. Nearly all the buildings were endangered. Their time was limited. Their days were numbered. They wouldn’t have lasted in their original setting. You’ll see them reconstructed meticulously, with an extensive amount of background research behind what we’re going to be looking at. I think you’ll enjoy our visit again to Old World Wisconsin this morning.
We’ll pass through this low-lying wetland area and then you’ll see one of the German farms that we’ll visit, where the Kepsel House is located, the huge, half-timber building with a watertown brick, cream city nogging infill. It’s a really interesting building. We’ll talk a little when we stop there about the history of buildings and how they’re laid out and point out some of the details about them, then we’ll talk a little further there about what we’ll be seeing on the rest of our visit.

But just kind of take a look at the site, as well, there’s a lot of careful attention given to laying out what’s here. And of course, this is not, by any means, nearly complete. They will be adding many more buildings over the years.

Student:
Do you...

Tishler:
No, they’re usually rebuilt, unless it’s a stone building. Then, like the Waterville store, which we didn’t really take a look at, all of those buildings, all of those stones, rather, were marked very carefully. It was very carefully photographed and measured.

One of the reasons the site has such interesting topography is that it’s right at the juncture of two huge glaciers that came down. The Green Bay lobe is the name of one; the Lake Michigan lobe is the other one. They kind of came together right about where we’re standing and ground away on the landscape, and ground away on each other, so you get all these fascinating eskers and kames, kettle holes and moraines and other interesting glacial features. So, the site is interesting just because of the geological history, much less the plants and the wildlife, you might see some wood ducks here or some mallards today, as well as the historical things that have been brought here.

This is one of the German farmsteads. It was built by north Germans, immigrants from Pomerania, “Pomern,” as the Germans would say, which is the German state where most of Wisconsin’s Germans came from. You’ve probably heard me mention, several times earlier, that of all the states, Wisconsin never had the most immigrants from Germany, but as a percentage of its population, it always had the highest percentage of German-Americans. And most of them came from north Germany. The southern Germans tended to be Catholic. The northern Germans, in general, were Lutheran. And Pomerania is in a region of Germany that became Poland after World War I, near the Oder River, up by the Baltic Sea, in northeast Germany.

Some interesting details about these buildings. Notice this barn. This is really a treasure, because it has that ancient spirit hole, or barn gable cutout. See that Maltese cross-like configuration right into the gable? I think I mentioned in one of the lectures the meaning of that. That was a spirit hole, which dates back to ancient Pagan times, back to pre-Christian era. Back to a time when people more or less believed, as part of their Pagan beliefs, whatever that may have been, that wherever they lived, they were at the center of the universe. And when someone died, their spirit would go off into the next world, wherever that was, you know, heaven, we would-- many would later come to think of that as being. And in order to do that, the spirit had to exit where the body was lying in state, usually that was in a house. And in the old days, houses didn’t have chimneys, they had a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. Typically, the spirit could escape from this world through that smoke hole, but later in time, they developed fire places and then wood stoves. And so, they needed a place for the spirit to exit this world into the next. That’s the traditional, symbolic meaning behind that symbol.

And of course, in the old country, and much of Europe, central and eastern Europe in particular, people lived in house-barns. The traditional peasant dwelling was a building where the people would live with their cattle, their machinery, the stored crops, all under a single roof. Well, when these immigrants came to America, there was plenty of land. It was generally cheap. There was always the hazard of fire. If that one building burned down, you’d lose virtually everything. So, they scattered their buildings about in a loose configuration. But because of a tradition that had long since left its, lost its original meaning, they still kept that cutout configuration.

The house is built by Frederic Kepsel, who was a farmer and a woodworker, carpenter. But you can see how these timbers have been cut. They’re shaped with an adz, see the little fish scale-like pattern to the cut marks? That means it wasn’t hewn with a big, wide broadaxe like the Scandinavians, the Finns or the Norwegians would have done, but with an adz. You’d stand on the tree trunk and you know, it has a curved handle, you know what an adz looks like. You could work it back like this, whereas if you’re hewing a log, you have to get up close along side and hew off to the side. That’s why the handle on a broadaxe, at least a hewing broadaxe, is actually curved, so you don’t skin your knuckles when you’re up close to the log.

Here you can see clearly where some new members have been added. See, the sill log on the bottom is new. It hasn’t quite weathered down to the texture of the older beams, which are well over a hundred years old. Notice the unusual lock joint, that scarf joint it’s called, at the corner, so that these timbers lock into position. These are oak timbers, so they’re mighty heavy. When oak dries out, it’s real difficult to work, too. If you work with a green oak log, it’s fairly easy to hew flat with an axe, but once it dries out, it’s like iron almost, ironwood.

So, these people clearly knew all their woods and knew just what tools to use, and they didn’t have calculators and slide rules, but because of the fact that they learned by doing, and learned under a long and well-established system of apprenticeship, they knew their stuff.
Somebody asked a good question before. With all the wood around in Wisconsin and this area, why did they keep building a brick building like this? Anybody have any thoughts on that?

Student:
Fireproof?

Tishler:
Fireproof, that’s a good answer and was an important consideration. But the main reason was because of tradition. If somebody spent “X” number of years learning to be an apprentice builder back in Germany, and you know, people had lived in buildings like this for generations, for centuries back in that part of the world, when they came to America, being Germans, who tend to be, often, a little more tradition-bound, perhaps, some would maintain, they would keep doing what they were familiar with. Even though the wood was cheap and available, they still used the old-fashioned methods.

Back off in remote areas, where there were large enclaves of people who had the same language, the same religion, you know, probably many of them were inter-related, things were a lot slower to change. They didn’t pick up those new Yankee innovations right away. Although, Kepsel did adapt the concept of the porch to this building. That certainly was not something you’d typically find back in north Germany.

Student:
Like, if this part of the beam started rotting and just kind of falling out, this would start cracking?

Tishler:
Yeah, it would. They’d either replace it carefully, maybe even from the inside. But this is oak. This is probably white oak, which is relatively decay resistant and a very strong, you know...

Student:
You can look at it and tell that it’s...

Tishler:
Ancient type of wood. So, even though it’s weathered off a bit on the outer surface, the structural integrity is still basically really quite sound. Notice the old mortar that was used in this restoration. This is the old lime mortar. It was made by mixing lime, which was burned somewhere in a kiln, and usually, this was done locally, with the sand. They had a formula, it was a shovel-full of lime and two shovels-full of sand, and mix it with water. And then the lime would heat up and bubble, give off the heat that drove out the moisture from the initial limestone bedrock.

When many people restore a building, though, they use Portland cement. That’s a more modern-day type of cement. And it’s not quite as strong. It doesn’t have the give, the flexibility with differing temperature ranges that the old lime mortar did. What a lot of people will do when they restore an old building, is they’ll use, they’ll go down to Menard’s or Home Depot, or wherever, buy a bag of mortar, and it’s really Portland cement, and use that. That’s much stronger. And you get a different coefficient of expansion. And if the extremes are bad enough, it’ll actually crush the material you’re trying to hold in place, maybe a softer stone or brick, rather than that Portland cement, because it’s so strong, cracking by itself.
Well, maybe they’re not hungry yet. And they’re really good swimmers, as I pointed out earlier, I think, to some of you. They also have hearts and stomachs that we are beginning to use.

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
These were about, I think they were about two years old, maybe. No, about a year-and-a-half old, and they were cross breeds between these Tamworth we have here and the Ossabaws. They were some that, our farmer kept saying, “She can’t be. She can’t be. We didn’t breed her. We didn’t breed her.” Well, she was. (laughs)

Tishler:
You never know.

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
But the boar had gotten out, so we have babies unexpected.

Tishler:
But that was just dedicated, you can tell, just planted in the ground, because the soil hasn’t even grassed over.

Student:
This is new, isn’t it?

Tishler:
It is, yep. We were just talking about that. That’s new. Neat. If you’re photographing a complex of buildings like the ones back there, you get some nice foreground elements in the fences. They give a feeling of depth and scale to your photographs. These are split-rail fences, sometimes called snake fences or worm fences. They were great wildlife corridors because you couldn’t mow up-close. So, you had songbirds, some small wildlife, maybe some pheasants, and so on, living in them. When barbed wire came along, of course, you didn’t have to spilt those rails. It was cheap, but you lost that swath of landscape and wildlife cover.

As you can see, it’s made out of cedar blocks, probably about 16 inches thick. As I was told by one family, the girls would each get on the end of a crosscut saw. And this log would sit up on saw horses and they’d buck off a chunk. Later, when they had motorized sawmills, which they often hook car engines and so on up to, they would just slice these off. But you could build a building like this easily, much more easily, of course, than the half-timber buildings we looked at, where you had to shape all the joints with a mortise and tenon joint, peg it all together. You could slap these up in a bed of wet lime mortar and it would make a perfectly suitable building. Because the log thickness was quite extensive, it also had a high R factor. So, the insulation quality was good, especially if you could leave an air cell in the mortar.

Notice there are some replacement blocks here, at the lower level in particular, where you’d get run off from the roof and splash back from the ground. These would not dry down as quickly, dry out as quickly. Decay would be more prevalent. You had to let these blocks sit for a year or two to season. Otherwise, they would check, or crack, like this one did. And if the ones in the bottom checked enough, why, snakes could crawl in, and mice, and there were drafts and mosquitoes and so on.

Here, they just hewed out some longer lengths of log, laid them in at alternate courses, sort of like coins in a building. And that’s how they did it. But I’ve seen other examples where they would anchor a big corner post at each corner, connect it together with a few rows of barbed wire, twist that barbed wire together, then stack the stove wood chunks in beneath. In other cases, they would stack the blocks like the end of a wood pile, stacking them up sort of like that.

They’re kind of unique, really. You don’t find them all over the country. Wisconsin probably has the most of any of the states. And I’ve spent a lot of years looking for them, studying them, researching them, and so on. Unfortunately, it looks like only a handful are going to continue to be around for future generations, which is kind of too bad.

You’re limited here by things like, you know, how are the old people going to walk around, if they want to walk, if you’re all scattered around, a mile apart, or whatever. So, there are compromises that have to be made, visually, functionally, from a management standpoint, and considering other factors.

When you do a design for something like this, you get as much information as you can, and then you have to finally synthesize it, put it together. And that means juggling, you know, making compromises here in favor of advantages there, or compromises there in favor of advantages here. So, this is what design, in part, is about, making those trade-offs, making the best decision with what you’ve got to work with. You’ve got to consider cost, you know, you need more roads, that’s more building and upkeep, etc., it takes longer for the vehicular circulation system to make the route, etc. So, there are always compromises in a historical setting.

Okay, this is an old grain barn, again, of Germanic origin. It has some real interesting details. If you look inside, you can see how massive those timbers are. This building is way over-engineered. Whoever built it, whomever built it, certainly wanted their great-great-great-great-great grandsons and daughters to be able to use it.

It has a thatched roof, which is rather unusual. But there were actually thatched roof buildings built in parts of Wisconsin that Germans settled in. They didn’t use the kind of reeds or bullrush-like plants in the thatching that they had back in the old country, however. Here, they used rye straw. The rye straw has enough resin in it to make it reasonably decay resistant and able to shed water. As you can imagine, with all those air cells bundled together, this roof has a high insulation capability.

This woman, of course, knows what the chickens are. I know you’ve all been wondering, so why don’t you clue us in.

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
The reddish ones, they’re buff colored, so they’re called Buff Cochins. And then the black and white ones are called Dominiques, and they’re part of our historic breeding program here. These are typical of what the old breeds would have been. The pigs, too, are the old Ossabaw Island pigs, one step up from the old wild hogs, popular in the 1860s.

Tishler:
Boy, that is an old breed of pig.

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
Mm-hmm.

Tishler:
So, who eats the eggs the chickens lay?

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
We use them in our cooking demonstrations.

Tishler:
Can you taste the difference between a barnyard chicken egg and the factory grown?

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never really paid that much attention.

Tishler:
There is a difference, I can assure you.

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
Probably.

Tishler:
This is the Finnish unit. And there are two distinctive building types. The sauna, which you all are familiar with, certainly, but this building, as well, the hay barn. One thing the Finns tended to do differently than many of the other groups was to locate their hay barns out and away from the farmstead complex proper, out in the actual hay fields. It had to do with the convenience of storing hay right where it was cut, conveniences in hauling or not having to haul it as far.

Notice how this building is built, though, very sloppy cornering, saddle joint on the corners, certainly not a tight fit. And the slant or cant that the wall has. Since this is a hay barn, the function of the building is to provide shelter for hay to dry on the inside. So, you need cross ventilation, therefore no chinking, no tightly fitted logs. The cant of the building, as well, helps retard the water drip on the interior of the logs. It sort of, you know, runs off the upper log, generally speaking now, before it hits the log immediately below.

There are very few of these left in Wisconsin. This one came down from Iron County. Iron County is where Hurley is. It’s also up on the Michigan state line, another big settlement of Finns up in that neck of the woods. The farmstead is right on our left here. And it is, as you can see, an all-log farm. Every building is of log construction, including the barn, the house. The house has three of those cells or units in it. It’s a triple pen, it’s called, log house. The pen being the basic squarish module that you’d get when you interlock four corners into a space.

The sauna is the building on our right on the corner. That has the hand-split shakes. Shakes are not the kind of shakes you go down to Menard’s and buy. These are different because they’re hand split. They’re very long, very thin. They’re not sawn like the cedar versions, although cedar was used sometimes, that we saw in earlier buildings. The sauna is actually the portion on the left. That’s the old log unit, called a savusauna, the Finns would call it. It was originally a smoke sauna. There wasn’t a stove and a chimney. You’d build a fire in this fire pit. The whole room would fill up with smoke. Some brave soul would then run in with a pail of water, throw a few dippers-full on the hot rocks, the steam would explode and drive the smoke out of the vents.

Later, to make it a little more convenient, they added the frame dressing room. You’ll notice the wall in between, the log wall has a little square section cut out where the kerosene lamp stood, where you could get light in both the rooms. The men and the women would usually bathe separately. It was a common Finnish tradition, but it’s also found in Russia, Estonia, many of the medieval European countries, but some of them lost that tradition. The countries that are on the Baltic Sea kind of hung onto it. Be sure to take a look in the sauna. You can still get the aroma, the fragrance of the wood fire.

Well, as you know, they often covered their log buildings over later, right, with wood clapboards. What would happen if you tried to cover this building over? You’d have to cut all these blasted things off, right? Although, I’ve seen in Russia, where they actually just put boards down the protruding log ends up in an old area of Finland. It used to be part of Finland, now it’s part of Russia. At any rate, it’s a very unusual notch, but it’s one that’s very sturdy, because it really locks things into place nicely. You have to be careful when you move this type of building, though, because these portions of the notch can get knocked off easily when you roll the logs around, and you know, tumble them down in place.

The idea was to build a Finnish farmstead here. What did that mean, anyway? How many buildings do you put into a Finnish farm? What kinds of buildings should they be? And more importantly, how should they be arranged? How would one ever know? No body ever wrote that down. Nobody ever drew any plans of it. How would you ever find that out? How would you, if you were challenged to do a study like that, how would you go about doing it?

You’d go out in the field and look for a bunch of reasonably extent Finnish farms, right? Then, you’d carefully measure them up. In this case, we examined 24 of them, took all kinds of measurements; how far was the house from the barn; what orientation from the points of the compass to the house have, for example; how far was the sauna from the well; and what kind of plants did they have. Well, we documented 24 farms, measured them, photographed them, drew up plans of how they were arranged.

Then we did a statistical analysis of the building composition and arrangement. And if the distance of the house from the barn averaged out to be 124 feet, let’s say, for example, even though there may not have been one particular farm with that distance spacing interval, we knew that if we did set that distance on this composite plan, this representative plan, at least we’d be in the ball park. And that’s how we went about doing this arrangement of buildings. Everything was placed here for a reason. It all has a relationship based on the background research, which in turn, was based on a lot of extensive field work by simply going out, finding these places and documenting them.

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
Now, there’s one big definition, is that here, we do things just like Fred would’ve done in the 1880s. There is no making of those, you know, pie racks and things like that. Everything had to be done here, just like Fred would’ve done.

Tishler:
That’s coke that you use in the fire, right?

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
Actually, the coke forms naturally. I’m using raw coal. And as wood burns into charcoal, coal turns into coke. And as I put air into it, it’s going to burn hotter. And as it starts to burn off, that coal is going to separate all the impurities in it.

Tishler:
How long would people apprentice to become a blacksmith?

Old World Wisconsin Staff:
Well, roughly about four years. So, it’s like going to college with the same instructor, living in his house and not getting paid. Of course, you don’t have to pay tuition.

Tishler:
This has a thatched roof. You wouldn’t believe that some of the early buildings built in Wisconsin by Germans, Pomeranians, did have thatched roofs. Now, there never were any photographs found of a building with a thatched roof. And there was no other information, except one account in a diary. But by looking at evidence up in the attic of some of the old barns, we determined that they did indeed have a thatched roof. And the reason is because we found, see these little boards that run the lengthwise of the house with the pins on the ends to hold them in place, so they don’t slide out. Those are called thatching poles.

So, sometimes your best information about historic things comes from doing field work and what you find out in the field. But you have to know what to look for. You have to be able to put into context the things that you see.

They saved up enough money to have them shipped over. So, initially, he built this little part. Then, when the wife and two kids arrived, they added this north wing. And you can see in one interesting detail, in terms of how that was done. You always have a problem when you turn a corner and when you put on an addition, to make it tight. See how this old railroad chunk of iron was used, these are railroad spikes, to add a little stability. But you can tell that this was obviously built as a separate unit, this was added later. There’s another iron joiner.

Now, you can see here how the top log is left curve4, and the bottom part is hollowed out. There’s a special tool, like a scribe, that the Finns called a “votto.” And they’d just run it along the top of the bottom log as the upper log sat on it, ready to be cut. They’d know just how much to take off. Then, they’d take a double-bitted felling axe and hollow out that sort of V-shaped groove, stuff it full of sphagnum moss. That would usually blow out after a few years and they’d stuff rags in from the inside. But see how the hewing, you can virtually see very few hewing marks. Whoever did this was really a master with the broadaxe. In fact, the Finnish men would pride themselves in how well they could hew logs. It’s been said that a Finn was always born with a broadaxe in his hand.

One of the big problems about the museum was that people simply didn’t know where these buildings were, or what might become available. You can’t do a decent master plan unless you know what you’re working with, what the program involves, what goes into the program, what kind of buildings. So, that’s some of the interesting background behind what was done at this museum. It was a fun project. It was interesting to see it get built over the years. It’s still being built, of course. They add, usually, a few new buildings each year.

I hope you enjoyed revisiting Old World Wisconsin. It was a delightful fall day. I wish everyone enrolled in this course could go. Unfortunately, we only had two buses available. So, of course, not everyone could. But perhaps you can visit it again on your own some time. It’s open from the first of May through the month of October.