Sarah Nigbor

Every day I feel fortunate for getting to do a job I love to do. Ever since I was a little girl publishing my own little newspapers, I have loved telling the stories of our communities. I’m doubly fortunate to be able to tell the stories of the people in my hometown county.

You may have noticed a few more Spring Valley/Elmwood items in the paper the last couple of weeks. While we have always included them in our coverage, we left a lot of the coverage to Publisher Paul Seeling and the Spring Valley-Elmwood Sun-Argus newspaper. Journalists can be territorial about their coverage areas (it was a friendly “rivalry”) and we were saddened to hear of the Sun-Argus’s closing in December.

The Sun-Argus covered everything from birth to death for the eastern Pierce County communities. According to a farewell column written by Seeling, The Spring Valley Sun first began publishing on Dec. 4, 1892, “chronicling early settlers, lumber-era life, and the growth of a tight-knit rural village.” The Elmwood Argus began its publishing journey in 1921 and later the two papers combined.

For those who may be reading this column for the first time, I have strong ties to Spring Valley and Elmwood. My grandma, Thelma Larson Lundgren, grew up in Spring Valley on a farm off County Road I. Her brother Irvin married Betty Christopherson, who went to school with my grandma. Great-Aunt Betty is about to celebrate her 102^nd birthday in February; don’t try to get anything past her because you won’t succeed.

My grandma married Harlan Lundgren, who owned a dairy farm near Nugget Lake. They raised their three children there: Ron (I call him Uncle Ronnie), Eldon and Carol, my mother. They attended and graduated from Elmwood High School. My great-uncle Lavern and great-aunt Lorena, who was an Elmwood teacher, farmed on Norwegian Ridge. I spent many summer days there picking blackberries with my grandpa and eating treats in Aunt Lorena’s kitchen. I miss them all so much.

I feel fortunate because I have special ties to almost every Pierce County community. I was born in River Falls and graduated from high school and college there (Go Wildcats and Falcons!) I lived and worked in Prescott for many years, making wonderful friends at RC’s on the river and Philander’s. I bought my first house in Prescott and my daughter was born while we lived there. My daughter attends school in Ellsworth, so you’ll see me at many Panther sporting events (don’t worry, Andrew Harrington does a great job of covering sports all over the county). As for Plum City, my grandpa and mom and uncles were born in the hospital there (now Molly’s on Main, yum) and I spent a lot of time at Nugget Lake fishing and canoeing when I was a kid.

While we are a small staff, we will do our best to cover stories all over the county. Unfortunately, as you can see in one of our front-page articles, not all of them are heartwarming stories. Believe me, I wish they were. But it’s important that we cover ALL news, so people are informed about what’s going on around them. Awareness is a valuable tool.

If anyone has any story ideas, whether it’s eastern or western Pierce County, please reach out to me at sarah@piercecountyjournal.news or 715-273-8078. We would love to tell them.