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T urn the kaleidoscope of Liberty once more and its historical mosaic changes completely. Onto this new stage two entirely different characters move forward. For them, neither Hugh Bennett, Aldo Leopold, farmers, ranchers, foresters, nor the Soil Bank would hold any meaning; their concerns were far too different. These two were intensely focused on real estate, the engine that drives our system of property . They ramped up the engine in Liberty, so real estate must be our focus as well. Yet their presence in the township was as much a consequence of the Soil Bank (and the larger rural trends it represented) as were contemporary ranchers. With its low human density on the land, its high concentration of property in outside hands, and its sensitivity to shifts in markets or the physical environment, ranching created ideal conditions for real estate speculators to enter the scene, to steal it almost. Sometime around 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, realtors Thomas White and James Smith saw southwestern Wisconsin through different eyes. Though White and Smith lived there in coulee country, they could imagine what a crowded, harried, tense Chicago couple might see on stepping out of their car and taking in the valley vista for the first time. After inhaling slowly, deeply, the couple would surely gaze with delight at a generic folk country of fields and forests. The thrill of discovery would be intoxicating: Here was a lifelike landscape painting—rolling hills as far as the eye can see; shimmering streams wending through the valley; crops and trees forming seasonal mosaics of green, gold, and red. An idyllic drive would add detail with quaint villages and the occasional black-and-white cow by a fence. Every angle, every moment would offer a world utterly 61 3 What the Real Estate Ads Don’t Tell You charming, utterly peaceful. They could imagine themselves returning to this place, perhaps settling in. A practical image might hover in the back of their minds as well: property at a bargain—lots of cheap rural space if you were smart enough to grab some before everyone else discovered this little piece of paradise. Land, after all, was safe; land held its value. All this White and Smith surely saw. Then with the clarity of prophets, they envisioned an empire: not one built on land, but on the landscape. White and Smith formed a partnership called Woodland Farms. Figure 6 shows the fragments of the Woodland Farms development in Liberty, the product of a distinctive vision of property and nature. This vision is worth being precise about because Woodland Farms had counterparts throughout rural America. The township of Liberty was but a local chapter in a national book of rural land speculation and fragmentation. In its basic form, the speculative method is to buy cheap land, subdivide it, advertise the new parcels in promising markets, and sell them at a profit. Woodland Farms accomplished this by bringing property and nature together in ways that their urban clients would never have anticipated. The buyers simply did not have all the relevant information in front of them, which was exactly what everyone involved with Woodland Farms intended. Few people understood property as well as White and Smith. They knew it was not only a legal arrangement for transferring a title from one person to another; just as important, it was an informational arrangement for transferring the relevant facts and history about a real place. What any prospective buyer from Chicago might see and hear in the Kickapoo Valley could start or stop a sale. Hence Woodland Farms made it their first priority to control that information every step along the way to a transaction , beginning with their newspaper advertisements in Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis: “Once privately held wilderness lands in S. WI are now being made available,” claimed an ad in the Chicago Tribune.1 “Divorced Owners Must Sell,” began another in the Minneapolis Star Tribune .2 “Bank Sale $7,500. This rolling woodland in a secluded river valley of S.W. WI is being offered by a local farmer to avoid foreclosure.”3 And the whopper, “Wilderness Church Camp . . . Father White sacrificing for $10,000.”4 Yes, Father White was actually realtor White. None of these advertisements was true.5 In writing such ads at all, we might say that Woodland Farms was not selling land, property, or nature; it was selling a fraudulent emotional connection between a city...

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