Voices from the Heart of the Land: Rural Stories that Inspire Community

Narrator Biographies

RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY 151 NARRATOR BIOGRAPHIES Emma Abplanalp Abplanalp farm, Amacher Hollow May 27, 1918–April 26, 2007 Emma is the only “voice” in this book who moved to Arena from farther away than a couple of hours (by car, not horse team). She grew up on her family’s farm in Lake Benton, Minnesota, but met Adolph Abplanalp in 1936, shortly after she graduated from high school, when his family — Swiss immigrants to Amacher Hollow — was visiting friends near Emma’s childhood home. Emma graduated from normal school (a one-year course) and took a job teaching all eight grades in a country school near her family’s home. After Emma and Adolph married in 1939, Emma moved to the Abplanalp farm and never left. The couple raised two children there, Leroy and James. For years, they farmed with horses until they eventually bought a tractor — first a Ford, then an Allis. They milked up to 36 Holsteins and pastured pigs and sheep on the woodland pasture portion of their 420 acres. Emma is known and loved for her many years of community leadership with the Coon Rock 4-H Club. Adolph died in 1976, too soon in a long life, but Emma continued to live in her home on the farm. The world lost a compassionate, gracious, and truly civic-minded soul when she passed. She is loved and will be missed by all. “In the middle of the ridge field there used to be the best sweet apple tree; and those apples’d be about that big! The field was cropped, but we’d go around that tree; it was a good-sized tree. I don’t know the name of the apple [variety], we just called it a sweet apple.” — Emma VOICES FROM THE HEART OF THE LAND 152 Rodney and Christine Anding Anding farm, Coon Rock b1946 and 1950 In 1995 the Anding farm received the Century Farm Award, marking 100 years of continuous family ownership of the farm. Both the Salzman (Rod’s grandmother) and Anding families emigrated from Germany and settled in the area. Rod was born the last of five children to Roy and Lorraine Williams Anding. The family farmed and milked 27 dairy cows. Roy served on the Iowa County Soil Conservation and local school boards most of his adult life. Lorraine was from Ridgeway, just down the road from Arena, and was a teacher at the Coon Rock School, a one-room schoolhouse located at the end of the Anding farm driveway. Naturally, Lorraine met Roy, and within a couple of years the two were married. Rod was trained in industrial education at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville and taught school from 1969 to 2000 — he says he taught through five decades — most of those years in the River Valley school district. In addition to running the family farm and teaching, Rod raises draft horses for parade and to show in the Arena Draft Horse Plowing-Planting Days, an event he initiated. Rod is also a founding member of the Coon Rock Yacht Club, possibly the only dry-land yacht club in the world. Christine is from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and earned her degree as a registered nurse at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She and Rod met while she was in school, and they were married in 1971. Chris has helped on the farm and worked as an RN in the area ever since. The couple raised four children on the Anding farm, Roy, Gwen, Wade, and Becky. Roy, named after Rod’s father, is taking over the farm and represents the fourth generation to do so. Rod says that the trick to good teaching, like good farming, is to tie the old to the new. Narrator Biographies “I have pictures of my grandfather up the valley with a team of horses and I’m wondering what he must have been thinking when he was tilling the ground. . . . Oh, if the land could talk, tell us what those before us thought, what they were doing when they were here. . . . The land has a calling for me.” — Rod RURAL STORIES THAT INSPIRE COMMUNITY 153 He says, “The students humbled me with their appreciation, but when you have students as I did, who have roots and family, it sure makes it a lot easier.”    Henry and Ruth Berg Berg farm, Blue Ridge b1930 and 1932 Albert and Johanna...