Dave Wood

When I was in seventh grade I went with my class on a tour of important sites in Trempealeau County. First stop was Galesville and a trip to beautiful Marynook, which had been transformed into a Roman Catholic retreat after serving as Gale University for several years. Then it was on to Trempealeau village and a stop at the town’s organ factory to look at the northernmost site of Astor’s fur trading post. The big hit of that stop was when Gavin Strand and I took a “private” hike up Trempealeau Mountain where we, on the path we had chosen, encountered an angry rattlesnake rattling away. We hastily fled down the path to the sheltering arms of our classmates who had stayed in the village.

For me, our final and best stop was on Highway 121 between Independence and Whitehall to tour Trempealeau County Hospital, which housed poor and or confused residents who worked its 500-plus acre farm and lived in a Victorian brick and mortar manse. What struck me the most was the cornerstone which featured the names of the members of the county, one of whom was David Wood. “Woody, Woody,” shouted another student. “You got a building named after you!” Quite an accomplishment for a seventh grader!
When I got home, Dad cleared up the matter, telling me I was named after my great granddad, an early settler of Trempealeau County. As the years passed, I learned more and more about the origins of what most people called the asylum or just plain sylum. First, I discovered my grandfather Ralph’s massive history of the county published in 1917 where it was described as the very model of a “poor farm” that housed 150 inmates. (I prefer the word “residents.”)

In high school I spent a summer as a hired man for John Lamberson, a neighbor of the sylum, who changed work with the big farm further west of Whitehall. John sent me to the sylum as a field pitcher. It was there on the rolling plains that once was B.F Wing’s farm that I met my first mules. Lots of them. The sylum preferred mulepower to horsepower because mules are more sure-footed and less likely to throw a tantrum than a spirited team of Percherons.

The building was completed in 1900 and by 1917 the county history could report that its clientele had grown to 159, some who had mental problems, others who came on poor farm status. In the early days reports came that the supervisory team was – how should I put it — overenthusiastic, expecting too much work from the clients, but succeeding supervisors like the Erickson family, J.A. Johnson, Jens Clavestad, and former Whitehall High School Principal Carl Nordhagen concentrated on more humane practices.

Folklore, mostly factual, grew widespread about the residents who dwelled in the big manse looking over a huge lawn and ancillary buildings, like the dairy and the mule barn that tragically burned in the 1940s, a catastrophe in which law enforcement had to be called to prevent client-teamsters who attempted to rush in to save what they believed were their teams from immolation.

That might have pleased William Harvard Jr. who worked for a time as David Wood’s hired man, then headed west to seek better opportunities. He wrote several letters to my great-grandmother Mary Wood and David, telling about wonderful projects in his new home in Nebraska, one that must have caught David’s attention: Farms that were built for the care of poor and mentally feeble rural residents. That leads me to all the tales I heard as a kid growing up. My Aunt Helen Ringstad told me that she got company from Eau Claire one Sunday. “So I took them for what our family always called a ride around the ring that began on River Road and ended with a looksee at the Asylum on a Sunday.”

“Stop the car,” exclaimed a visitor. “Look out on the lawn. Those men are carrying rifles. They certainly don’t look TOO bad.”

“Too bad is right,” explained Aunt Helen. “One is my husband, the other is Basil Erickson.  They’re just out hunting pigeons.”

Actual clients who weren’t too bad had a good amount of freedom. One fellow, we’d see peddling his bike into town with a bundle of wooden items strapped to the luggage rack. He was busy selling his hand-carved lefse paddles to customers in town. Legend has it that the banker’s wife complimented him on the strength of his paddles. He explained that “I use good wood that doesn’t splinter, then spit Copenhagen snoose juice on the blade and rub it in real good!”

In a recent book on the history of the Green Bay and Western R.R., former section foreman John Beatty is quoted: “It was about 100 Degrees F., and my crew was replacing wooden ties adjacent to the asylum. Even I was wringing wet just watching. I approached the asylum fence, leaned on a fence post, panting. I looked onto the grounds and saw a patient sitting under a tree, who said to me, ‘And you fellows think WE are crazy!’”

Some of the clients amused themselves reading the Wanted posters hanging in the post offices.  “That cost me several disturbances at the supper table at home,” longtime paster Donald Write once told me, explaining, “When I sit down for supper, the doorbell would ring. I’d jump up to answer and always found an FBI agent, telling me that he had information regarding one of the criminals hanging on the post office bulletin board. I told him I’d give the directions to the county hospital.”

One last story, as personal as can be. My once witty Grandma Wood began showing signs of dementia. Symptoms grew worse and worse and when two nursing homes rejected her because she “disrupted the other clients with angry and violent outbursts,” my poor father reluctantly brought her to the sylum where Hallie Nordhagen accepted her and told Dad not to worry, but to stay away for a few weeks. Dad went home, stewed and fretted, felt nagging guilt. Finally, he came to visit his mother, who greeted him brightly. “How are they treating you, Ma?”

“Oh, real good. Good food. It’s a nice place. In fact, I think Pa (her father died 60 years before) likes it too. It’s so well equipped we’re thinking about buying the place.”

Grandma smiled, Hallie Nordhagen smiled and so did Dad—for the first time in weeks. A few weeks later my girlfriend Ruth and I dropped in on Grandma and presented her with a pair of fancy slippers. “Oh nice!” she said slipping them on and simultaneously hoisted her house dress above the knee and asked Ruth “D’ya think I’ve got nice legs?” We answered yes, because the witty, sometimes bawdy was back to her old self again.