Brownville

Notes from Lynn:

The toots blatted as noisily as gunshots when the minivan’s car alarm went off in downtown Brownville. It had been a quiet night in Nebraska’s first city, the onetime riverport boomtown crowded back in 1880 with about 2,000 inhabitants, ten stores, three banks, two newspapers, an opera house, 12 churches, 17 saloons and a calaboose.

When the noise stopped, I silently apologized to the townspeople of 2009.

All 146 of them.

We came here to take a look at the frontier steamboat landing where Cordelia Botkin grew up before the Civil War. I have been puttering around for far too long with a half-written nonfiction book about this histrionic historicity. Arrested in 1898 in San Francisco and charged with murdering her paramour’s wife with arsenic-laden bon bons, she claimed she had been born in England and educated in a convent school in County Kent. She never rhymed “bath” with “path.” She called it a “bawth.”

In reality, she spent her girlhood in a log cabin. On Saturday nights she would have had to wait her turn when her mother would heat up spring water for baths with her half-dozen siblings. Or bawths.

The 18-by-18-foot cabin was built of cottonwood logs by Cordelia’s pro-slavery father, Richard Brown, who with B.B. Frazier had founded Brownville in 1854. He modestly named it for himself and eventually built a proper house up the street (at left). After he gave up on dreams of Nebraska as a slave state, he moved Cordelia and his family to Kansas City and sold the house to the town’s leading banker, John Carson. The Brown-Carson House (admission $2) is now a relic of Brownville’s glory years before a bond debacle in the 1870s followed a botched attempt to replace steamboats with a railroad link. The once-thriving city turned quickly into a ghost town, its brick buildings and empty streets as overgrown with foliage as Mayan temples to forgotten gods.

We had dinner in the Lyceum, the tables surrounded by bookshelves, with local historian Harold Davis, the knowlegeable proprietor of a health food store. It specializes in stone-ground flour. It’s in the former Lone Tree Tavern.

If you have lemons, said the late Howard Gossage in San Francisco, make lemonade. If you have a history, make it interesting. From the ruins of old Brownville, most of its architectural styles frozen by abrupt depopulation in the 1880s, comes a boom in tourists who must be looking for an alternative to all the towns who are losing their civic souls to Walmart, Walgreens, Taco Joe, Days Inn, Denny’s, and so on.

With a nighttime population of 146 and an a daytime summer influx of hundreds, Davis said with pride that Brownville has become an art colony:

• Six art galleries (Antiquarium/Bill Farmer, Chaney, Gallery 119, Palmerton, Handmade Modern and the Schoolhouse Gallery & Nature Center), two folk art museums (Flatwater and Gallery of American Folk Art).
• Six history musems and houses (Brownville Depot and Railroad History, Captain Bailey House, Meriwether Lewis Dredge and Missouri River History Museum, Wheel Museum, Brown/Carson Period Houise, Furnas House and Arboretum).
• Three bookstores (Lyceum, A Novel Idea, Village).
• Several festivals and events (Wine, Writers and Song, in April; Old Time Autumn and Quilt Show, in October; River Rats Reunion (Missouri River history), in August), plus events on Independence Day and the Christmas season. To name a few.
• Miscellaneous: The Spirit of Brownville offers riverboat rides; tasting rooms at the Whiskey Run Creek Vineyard & Winery; cooking school, book publishing, antique shops, flea market, and a shop that makes and sells cornhusk brooms. Perhaps the oddest is a collection of old dental equipment on display in a shop window.
• Performing Arts in former churches (ten concerts in Brownville Concert Hall, 36 productions of five plays in the Brownville Village Theater).

It’s one thing to assert the birth of an art colony and another to prove it. That’s why I burdened the blog with a list. It documents what we learned in Brownville. And it might make up for those toots on a quiet night in the town where Cordelia grew up.

Notes from Margo:

One of the ideas of this victory lap was to fill in gaps in our knowledge of the countryside, and that has certainly happened: As we drove north through Iowa, the rolling hills gradually flattened out, and by the time we crossed into Minnesota, the landscape was flat as a skillet. Clouds textured the sky, making me think: They call Montana the Big Sky State, but how much bigger could the sky be than this? We had big sky and flat land for about five hours, driving north. The deciduous trees were changing color most of the way, and the roads were dotted with picturesque barns, some in service and some falling in on themselves. The barns have to accommodate all the livestock in the winter, so they are huge, with high, rounded tops, some with turret-like things protruding from the roofs, many surrounded by other outbuildings and silos. It looks like hard work to make it through the winter.

But another set of blanks being filled in for me has been the faces that go with the stories Lynn has told all these years. In Oregon, I got to meet the people behind the stories from the wedding in Arizona 50 years ago – the rides in the open cars out into the desert night. And just now I got to meet the faces behind some of Lynn’s tales from the Champaign-Urbana Courier in the early 60s. The players were young then, fresh out of college, learning to write on deadline, sowing some wild oats, falling in love. There was a story about trying to find the highest point in town with a topo map. The spot was called Yankee Ridge, and it turned out to be an imperceptible bump in the road. In fact, as we were trying to describe the Minnesota landscape to each other, Lynn said: This is as flat as downstate Illinois. Back in Champaign, Lynn married the newspaper’s telephone operator, Linda Wakefield, and moved to California. And Jeannine (that's her with Lynn, at right), the women’s editor from Ceres, California, married Bob (Pete) Schaub, the Stanford guy who was the wire editor. (He was also Lynn's roommate.) Bob and Jeannine ended up owning and running the paper in Boone, Iowa, which is where we dropped in on them.

Until yesterday, I knew them from stories of their youth. They are now, like Lynn, in their 70s. Now the most striking thing about them is their courage, and their ability to live day to day. Jeannine has had cancer twice – and a stroke. Bob has multiple myeloma, and was told he had two years to live. That was five years ago. They take their drugs, their treatments, the transfusions and bone marrow transplants, and then go about their lives. They wanted to travel to explore Canada. So they got in the car and went, between medical treatments. They go to an island in a nearby lake to relax, and when Bob needs a transfusion, they go back to town. They laugh at their own cluelessness about gardening – they had tossed a pumpkin in the compost last year, and had no idea what was happening when huge vines with big gourd-like objects emerged from the compost this year. We dined on that serendipitous harvest – baked pumpkin.

We all know we can die anytime. But these folks are living with the thought at much closer quarters than most of us. They just try to enjoy the time they have, in an astoundingly courageous and gentle way.

Mileage from Boone, Iowa to Trail, Minnesota: 535 miles

Mileage so far: 4,688