 Welcome to the Shiboyne County local history expo and today is May 2nd 2011. There's gonna be lots of things you're going to see and lots of people you're going to meet. Today's very special. We have 21 area organizations, local history organizations, not only from Shiboyne County but from Ozaki County, Calumet County, Manitoba County as well, all here today to show all their projects, their events, things that are under strategic plans of things to do and help the community. In addition this year we have some video of 1930s, 1940s from Shiboyne Falls, Wisconsin. We'll have three speakers today too, Rochelle Pennington, Jim Drager, and attorney Holbrook. So it's gonna be a very very good day. Thanks for viewing this this DVD. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Hello, I'm Angie Holland, one of the staff people at the Shiboyne County Historical Museum. We're here at the local history expo at the museum's booth. I'm sitting here with two of Shiboyne's famous daughters, Dorothy Schwartz and Carol Bushman, two of the original members of the Cordettes singing group. We were just going to ask them to do a little bit of remembrance about their early days in the forming of the Cordettes. So Dorothy, you were on the Arthur Godfrey show as part of kind of the Cordettes. Fortunate to win the contest in September, in the end of August and he signed us in September and we became regular Godfrey, little Godfrey's in September. We lived in New York. We were on every morning radio show and every Wednesday night the television show. Did you come back to Shiboyne again during that time? Occasionally I came back to visit my family and they had a homecoming for us where we sang at the auditorium with Fred Wehring and they met us at the train depot and we had a parade up 8th Street to the Feste Hotel and it was quite something. We were on a convertible and people were on all sides of the street walking on a welcoming outside. Carol, what do you remember about that time? Well, I was thinking of even before that when we started singing as a barbershop quartet. Jenny's dad was King Cole, president of Kingsbury Breweries and he also was very active in the barbershop organization and she had the music around the house and decided to try singing the barbershop stuff because at that time it was pretty 95% men singing and we were, we had a little coaching from a good friend there to walk and we thought we sounded pretty good so they put us on that Shiboyne show and we did very well there and people were so surprised and all of a sudden we're invited and all these barbershop shows all over the country. We were the novelty being the girls and that to me that always seems like the most fun of our career. Running around and singing all night long on street corners anywhere and everybody wherever you went in that town where the barbershop showed us they'd be singing, singing, singing. Milton Dachin was the man up in Manitowoc that helped us, that coached us. He would let the the barbershop chorus in Shiboyne and he kind of taught us how to sing barbershop, the freezing and the freezeology, the swelling of the chords. He was a good help. He actually gave us our style I would say with the interpretation of the songs, singing very quietly and getting very loud and you didn't have to follow a beat singing barbershop. You just kind of sang to a phrase, a word or so and yeah he was responsible for the style which started us. Then later of course we we went into accompaniment, accompaniment Well you're being natives of Shiboyne certainly means a lot to the community of Shiboyne even today. Do you have anything to any words to speak to that either of you? I always had I always wanted to get back to Shiboyne. I had no intention of staying with the group indefinitely and when I became pregnant I knew I wanted to get back to Shiboyne and I left the group in 52. I had been with the group seven years and I want to get back to the real world. So we came back the end of 52 and our son was born in 53. Never sorry for that decision. Well after Dottie left and we left the Godfrey show and Archie Blyar who was the music director of the show had always wanted to put a accompaniment to us and Arthur Godfrey didn't like want that. He wanted us to do strictly barbershop. So then Archie formed his record company and the second song we did was Mr. Sandman. So from there we went into another direction but we always sang a barbershop song or two in our in our act even though we traveled you know played Vegas or whatever. We always had the barbershop there too. But then of course songs like Mr. Sandman and Lollipop got us pretty well known and we got very busy into a lot of traveling. When did you ultimately come back to Shiboyne again? Well we let let's see. Oh Jenny who organized the group decided she had to her mother was ill and she wanted to go and be with her mother. And then I had done enough by that time to in between there I had a baby. But I was only out a couple of months. And so I where was I? So anyway when Jenny said she wanted to leave I decided it was time for me to go stay home because my little girl was three years old and I wanted to stay home with her and my husband. So then we just kind of disbanded. We had to cancel a few dates and a few of those that we had coming up we made. But then we just kind of retired and that was in well 63 or 4 or so. So it was close to 20 years the whole group was together. Including Daddy's very beginning. I wasn't there that first year. But the rest of the year and as I said didn't take me long to have a child. Well we certainly appreciate having you both here. We consider you treasures in our community. And thank you for being here tonight at the expo as well. Thank you. I'm Jim Drager from the Wisconsin Historical Society. I'm the Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer of Wisconsin. I'm here at the Fair to talk about Wisconsin architecture and about some of my favorite topics in Wisconsin architecture including my history of gas stations filler up the glory days of Wisconsin gas stations which was published about two years ago. I'm very interested in ordinary everyday buildings and what they mean to people. And I thought gas stations was a great topic to talk about the kind of background everyday buildings that people see every day and use but don't really think about them as being historic buildings or think about what they mean. So the book traces the history and development of gas stations over from a period of time of about 1900 all the way up to the present and explains why they look the way they do at any point in time and what makes them special. I also wrote the introduction to Encore Renaissance of Wisconsin Opera Houses which is a book that features 10 Wisconsin Opera Houses and traces their stories and talks about the important place that these performing art centers have in the state of Wisconsin and talks about the renaissance or the rebirth of them today as performing art centers. I'm here to talk a little bit about the Wade House and what we've got going on this year. We have a lot of our regular programs but we also have some new programs going on. For instance we're going to have our Dairy Day it'll be our second year where we talk about milk, milk products, making cheese, ice cream and butter. We're also this year brand new to the Wade House is we're going to make beer using 19th century recipes from period cookbooks. So we're going to be making ginger beer and molasses beer and spruce beer and we have hops here that are used in making the beer and we have ginger beer bottles and beer jugs that we'll be using for bottling our beer. We also have our hard side dinner programs where we're using our tin kitchen for cooking our meat during those programs. We're also using our wood burning stove for preparing meals. We will be doing jams again in the summer we're making raspberry jam and in 1860 this is a time before cans glass jars I should say with the screw on lids so we're going to be preserving them the way they did in the 19th century using jelly glasses. We put the jam in there when it cools you put branded paper on top a piece of paper soaked in brandy then you can it or seal it by using layers of tissue paper and then each layer is brushed with egg white and when that egg white dries it fills in all the holes and then you can see it really is it's drum tight so that will keep all the air out and keep your jam nice and fresh. We also will have our baseball Sundays this year again featuring the Dead Cities baseball club we'll be taking on the cream cities from Milwaukee the Milwaukee Greys and the Eagle Diamonds. We also will be hosting a Father's Day game where we invite everyone to come out with their dad and they actually will join in and they will play the Dead Cities so it's a lot of fun it's a participatory. We also have our day camps again this year and our big Civil War weekend in September. Hi I'm Mary Rousseau from the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center. We are looking at 518 Water Street in Sheboygan Falls in the Cole Historic District. We have been in existence for 28 years now I believe and have an estimated one million documents and half a million photographs that fulfill our mission of collecting and preserving the history of Sheboygan County. Today we have a nice assortment of some of the books that we carry in our bookstore. They range from Roger Robert Matzner's Prisoner 19053. We have two publications about Dutch immigration and Dutch immigrant letters. Bill Wongamans newest book on Sheboygan Tales of the Tragic and Bazaar. Rich Dijkstra's newest book about growing up Dutch in Sheboygan County. On the home front cheese factories in Sheboygan County. The tragedy of the Phoenix disaster in 1847. A fabulous new 60th anniversary edition of the history of Elkhart Lake and the road races that has wonderful pictures of the early road races that occurred within the village and on the county roads. Betsy Michaels book The Green Steed. One of our public school books we finally have published the history of Sheboygan Public Schools and our Arcadia series on Sheboygan County, Plymouth and Sheboygan Falls. We also have some displays today about Sheboygan County trivia. Cemetery trivia. Trying to find information about the board what was called the border of Egypt in Sheboygan County. So if anyone has any information about that we would love to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by our table. We represent the Manitoba County Civil War Roundtable and our goal is to learn and study more about the American Civil War which was a very very tragic period in our history. We started this roundtables are designed to do to discuss and learn more about the period which was so important in our history as I said. I'm originally from the metropolis of Gibbsville and therefore I'm back in familiar territory and it's a pleasure to bring some of what Civil War Roundtable does to the people here at the Expo. Roundtable started in the first one was in Chicago in 1940 the next one was started in Milwaukee in 1947 and now there are over 300 Civil War Roundtables all around the world including Australia and Hungary and or Hungary and Britain and Germany and so forth that because so many history people want to study what happened in this experiment with democracy. We sometimes forget about the fact that here we were only 85 years after the Declaration of Independence and the country was coming apart at the seams and it wasn't for people like Abraham Lincoln who who kept us together we would now be two countries. The country had developed two different societies one with slaves the in the northern period they discovered that slaves weren't as important economically therefore when people stop talking about something they unfortunately start killing each other and that's what happened here families broke up and the wife of our president for example Mary Todd Lincoln's three brothers fought for the Confederacy and two of them died doing that and when the war started everybody thought it would be over very very quickly within a matter of months the US Army had only about 16,000 people in it and our soldiers and by the time it was over or around three million men would serve in in the Army. One of the things we do for our members is provide an opportunity to buy a magazine called the Gettysburg magazine. This magazine is devoted strictly to the probably the largest battle every fought on the North American continent. Very few people realize that in that three-day battle there were 162,000 men involved. Those numbers are just staggering because they're so much greater than anything that we comprehend or think about in today's battle or today's world. One of the things that we are celebrating right now is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and our round table is put together some souvenirs, t-shirts, caps, buttons and so forth to commemorate this period in our history and we will be marketing those for all those who are interested. I'm Lori Shahan. I'm a member of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War. We have an organization in Manitowoc which is part of a national organization for direct descendants of veterans of the Civil War. Actually there has been hasn't been a tent in Wisconsin's for 50 years but some of us have ancestors and we wanted to do what we could to honor them and to help the today's veterans and there are three national veterans homes that we help. We make cookies and we make pretty things to raise money for the soldiers and we help buy them sundries to help them and in our programs that we have monthly we talk about our veteran ancestors and we have other speakers like somebody would come to talk to us about Mary Todd Lincoln or Mary Todd Lincoln's sister. We have programs like that monthly meetings and we will have a family picnic during the summer but mostly we have monthly meetings and meet together and see what we can do to help the soldiers make plans for what we can do to help the soldiers and we have nice programs to teach each other about the history of the Civil War. I'm sorry. Oh Mike I'm president of the organization and my name is Lori, L-A-U-R-I-E Shahan, S-H-A-W-H-A-N. My address 3324 Waldo Boulevard in Manitowoc 54220. We'd love to have to hear from anybody who is interested or who has an ancestor who fought in the Civil War. She could become if she's a direct descendant she could become a member of our organization and actually do you know that there are about a dozen ladies who are actual daughters of Civil War veterans and they can tell the stories that their fathers told them about the Civil War and we had a lady her name was Jeanette Bastiball and she was a granddaughter of a veteran of the Civil War in Manitowoc County the oldest living veteran of the Civil War and she was a deer we lost her just yesterday and the daughters of Union veterans of the Civil War have a special ceremony that we can offer and we did that yesterday as rather touching and patriotic part of the funeral ceremony was a lovely lady we she was a real joy to listen to her talk about her ancestor because she sat on sat on his lap and listened to his stories we honor our veterans today and the veterans of the Civil War also it's very much of an honor of us to do this if we have any questions we'd love to hear from anybody and help them with their research and help them join our organization if they would care to my name is Dan Buckman and I'm president of the Plymouth Historical Society that's located in downtown Plymouth we're primarily collecting information that's relevant to the history of Plymouth and the local area and on our display we've got a few things that we brought along today and one of them is actually from the Plymouth Cigar Company this was a cigar cutter where gentlemen would have cut cigars on here and this is an actual photograph of them making cigars and that building that was located right in the downtown and they would actually wrap them roll them cut them and then they would sell cigars Plymouth made cigars right on that cutter we've also got a few of the old telephone books a lot of times people will come they're actually looking for information on descendants of who lived in Plymouth we have a variety from about 1900 through maybe 1940 they can locate you know names and what's interesting is a lot of the phone numbers that are inside if you look up a name their phone number will be 103 or 141 very short no area code very easy to work with the other thing that we've been collecting for a number of years to our Plymouth annuals we've got a series of series of annuals that start from about 1900 to the current day and they're very very earliest annuals were actually paper paper bound book that was maybe 10 or 12 pages long compared to these are like 1950s obviously in the format that they are what's interesting is the more current annuals are now going on to discs or CDs so we're losing our our ability to look on paper we've done also a few publications Walter Bade used to be a historian in Plymouth we've taken some of his transcripts and have put those into paper format he speaks in one of them about growing up in Plymouth and then he also did a history of Sheboygan County railroads this past year one of our bigger projects was we tried to find Isaac Thorpe and he is the first settler who came to Plymouth in the 1840s started to just look for basic information we ended up actually putting together a CD 60-minute story about Thorpe coming to Sheboygan County we found a lot of interesting things along the way and he had a lot of involvement with the Civil War so the the CD tells a lot of Plymouth during the Civil War and it also talks about him and his family they lived here in the 1840s but by 1870 they were pretty much out of the Plymouth area already but he is the gentleman who's credited for building the first log cabin then in June we have a project coming up where it's called the wall dogs there'll be a number of artists coming from around the world and they're going to be producing different types of ads that will be placed on the outsides of buildings many of these ads are their Plymouth companies the Plymouth packing company sort of the predecessor for the Plymouth canning factory in the early years they made Plymouth ketchup they also canned vegetables and what not the Plymouth Hi-Ho company more recent but they did make soda and that was located off of Stafford Street and we've actually found some of the bottles we created the ad and we also have a number of ads that they reflect what was in Plymouth such as the railroad other types of things that went on the Waldo gas company that go Pagoda used to be located right in the heart of downtown Plymouth next to the telephone company that building was torn down in the 1950s but that mural will be just adjacent to that filling station that's currently there which is now the frontier telephone company and then we were also noted for beer Plymouth had a brewing company which is still standing right now it's the Sartori cheese factory but they did bottle beer there in the late 1800s that's an actual ad that was on a label that was on a beer bottle and that'll be recreated onto many of the buildings downtown so that week of June June 22nd going to be very exciting time in downtown Plymouth because there'll be many artists coming in from around the world and they'll be painting 24 hours a day people can come and look they can participate they can watch and see these things being created we have a nice keel historical house and what we brought along today is some tools from the past this is a drill for drilling holes putting beams together and this is a planar and this is for a clipper for shearing sheep these are hobbles if you have a cow that it likes to kick a lot you put this around down by their lower part of their leg this here is them you put on your shoes for ice and this here is a veterinary uses for for his for the farmer's horse his back teeth if they become pointed he can't chew well the horse so then the veterinary uses that to grind off that point and of course this is for putting in a cider barrel or beer keg or a spigot and this here is for repairing shoes it goes on a stand and put your shoe on there and then you can pound pound or put soles on or point pound nails in or whatever you've been soaking your laundry in boiling water to get it clean you don't want to put your hands in that so you use this tool to fish it out then if your carpeting is soiled you beat the heck out of it outside this is for opening jars with the zinc covers the canning jars and then we have an old iron that was kept on the stove and then it was used it's very heavy this is for pastry cutting this is for your matches to grind meat sharpened knives and that's a early whisk like this is for making sausage cherry pit I'm sorry and this is for grinding meat whatever behind you is our upcoming program on weddings and anniversaries it's going to be held in keel at the community center and at our historical house and we're gathering memorabilia clothes dishes various things from early weddings and we have quite a collection that we'd like to show and the another thing is one of our churches lost its records for certain years and this was developed by one of our members and some of them even have pictures this is on find a grave and some of them even have pictures of the person that has died some have obituaries and you can link one person to another it's quite a unique setup there's a lot of work that was put together and it'll be constantly updated as more information becomes available this I'm Margaret waiter Schneider lifetime village of random lake residents this is my friend but Merlin know what the great grandson of the know what the first house that was built in random lake we're pleased to have you come and see us we have a little museum and we also have a know what house that we have on the north end of random it's on the Wisconsin historical society markers we're quite proud of what she got something to say well my my dad bought the property in 1940 he paid twenty five hundred dollars for the house and the animals on the farm and I lived there from 1940 to 1946 then I went into service and 46 that's when I saw my first comment because we had outdoor facilities and anyway the surprise for me my dad sold the house in 1947 while I was in service and that was supposed to be a surprise for me I was kind of disappointed because I had a lot of ideas what I would have done with that little part but it didn't didn't turn out so anyway he sold he bought the farm for twenty five hundred dollars and forty seven he sold it for five thousand dollars then the person who paid five thousand for it put it up for sale for ten thousand and he went bankrupt so it went on a sheriff's sale and it's sold for sixty six hundred so the Lawrence Scheller bought the bought the property and he lived there until 1999 I believe 1998 and then they had the property up for sale and they were talking about 350,000 you know so from twenty five hundred to 350,000 he was unreal. Well I'm Al Yante and I'm Mary Yante and we are volunteer teacher and docent at the Heritage School which is a living history museum in Sheboygan located near Longfellow School on South 8th Street the school is was was created as a living history museum and fourth graders from all around Sheboygan County come for a morning of classes to experience what school was like in 1877 the program begins with a visit to the museum which is in one of the what was one of the classrooms and Mary who's the docent will explain the history of the school and what are some of the other things you talk about. We talk about the rules the teachers had for example I get paid $30 a month he gets paid $40 a month because he's a male I cannot date I if I get married I am fired and then we talk about other things that the teachers have to do prepare for the morning of school and then we have them in the classroom and they have to follow the 1877 rules hands on the desk folded they need to stand on the right hand side and talk to the teacher standing straight up and answering we do math on a what is that called the board slate slate on the slate arithmetic not math arithmetic and we do penmanship with a pen that they use regular rail ink and they have to dunk it in and they realize how long it takes to write in that way. So another thing we talk about in the winter the children would have to bring a piece of firewood to keep the stove warm throughout the day that they had school and that if the child forgot got their piece of firewood they'd have to sit furthest away from the stove so if the school ran out of firewood that day they'd be the first to experience the cold of the of the room. So it's a wonderful experience. Our background's art Alan used to be a principal Jefferson School in Sheboygan and I used to be an administrator at Milwaukee area technical college and we live in the town of Sheboygan and we've been doing this for about five years and we've thoroughly enjoyed it. Hi my name is Mike Mayer I'm the executive director of the Manitowoc County Historical Society and the society operates two distinct historical sites we have Pinecrest Historical Village which is located three miles west of Manitowoc and we also operate the Manitowoc County Heritage Center which is our main administrative office and museum and research library. During the spring summer and fall months Pinecrest Historical Village is open and that consists of 30 historical buildings that were brought from all throughout Manitowoc County restored by our staff and volunteers and are now open as a historical village which interprets village life in Manitowoc County around the turn of the century. We do a number of special events school programs and we're also open for daily tours. Our other site the Manitowoc County Heritage Center is actually in the home of the Old Manitowoc County Teachers Training College and the society acquired that building in 1998. Did the restoration work and now we have a beautiful museum research facility and again our administrative office is there. We do a number of exciting programs there both for the public and schools. Some of our newest projects that we're working on we've recently upgraded all of our software that we use to manage our museum's collection. We have over 10,000 archives objects and photographs that we use and we've again recently sort of modernized the the process we use to catalog all those. We are also as you're looking at right now working on our most kind of exciting project for this year. In 1998 the Historical Society moved the Hiram McAllister House out to Pinecrest Historical Village. It has sat there for many years waiting for the right time to be transformed into our new Welcome Center and we will be moving forward with that project this fall the fall of 2011 so very excited to improve our facilities at Pinecrest Historical Village and we very much appreciate the opportunity to be here at the History Expo and it's really fun to exchange ideas with people and see what everyone is doing in our area it's it's very refreshing to see how many different groups are passionate about their local history and we're very pleased to be a part of it. My name is Kay Net and I'm a member of the Board of Directors of the New Holstein Historical Society. Our society is very excited this year to be celebrating our 50th anniversary. We had a very committed group of people that started our organization 50 years ago and we're lucky to have the same a different group but as equally as committed group helping our our society to exist now. Our mission of course is to collect and preserve and disseminate information about the history of New Holstein and the surrounding area. We do that in various ways we have lots of programs throughout the year throughout the year we have had various things going on the biggest of our achievements was probably when we restored the Tim House which is a home that was built in 1873 in New Holstein it had had suffered of course the years of of weather etc and we were lucky enough to get a grant from the Jeffers Foundation and in 2006 we reopened the Tim House and it's it's currently in its 1892 splendor. We also operate the Pioneer Corner Museum which is a museum that we have that is in an old store. We have been yet of various businesses of old New Holstein. We also have an area where we have a rotating exhibit that we do for two years at a time. This year we're featuring Let the Games Begin and it's a display about the connections between New Holstein and the Olympic Games. I'm Alan Buchholz and I'm vice president of the Ozaki County Historical Society. We are a 500 member group down in Ozaki County and our headquarters is the old Interurban Depot in Cedarburg where we've restored one of the only Interurban Depots left on the original line. We're a custodian for Stony Hill School up in Wabika which is the birthplace of Flag Day and we're also our biggest endeavor is Pioneer Village which is near Fredonia. On 10 acres we have 22 buildings that are all fully restored and inside each building it's furnished with period equipment antiques and things like that. Very mature property with large shade trees, the local garden society plants the village every year and then we have four major events every year starting with free admissions weekend in June around Father's Day weekend and our biggest event is the Revolutionary War reenactment on Labor Day weekend two-day event with battles at 11 o'clock and four o'clock each day as well as a total encampment. We have a bluegrass festival in August we have a tractor and machinery show in mid-July and our mission is like a lot of historical societies is to continue to keep the archives of the county but also keep and restore all of the artifacts and and in this case buildings from the from the county. We continue to add to the village two years ago we added a wood silo and right now we're building a another log cabin. My name is Kevin Wester and I'm the Executive Director of the Luxembourg American Cultural Society and Cultural Center in Belgium, Wisconsin and we are an international membership society and our focus or our mission is twofold we celebrate Luxembourg heritage throughout the United States especially in Ozaki and Sheboygan counties and then we also preserve or foster relationships between Americans and people in Luxembourg reuniting people and families building friendships and also we promote tourism and commerce between our two countries. We're kind of a new society we were founded in 2004 we work with the Luxembourg government the Ministry of Culture and in 2009 we opened a new cultural center in Belgium, Wisconsin. We have a museum and a research center and also a welcome center and we hold lots of different groups that we welcome and events at our cultural center. The showpiece of our cultural center is the last Luxembourg stone barn that was built in 1872 in the state of Wisconsin. We numbered all the stones on the barn and then we dissembled the barn and we moved it seven miles to Belgium, Wisconsin and that's our museum that's called the Roots and Leaves Museum. We have all different ethnic activities at our cultural center and kind of the highlight of our year is the second weekend of August we have our Luxembourg heritage weekend at Luxembourg Fest of America we call it the world's largest Luxembourg family reunion about five or six thousand people come from throughout the United States and Europe to celebrate their Luxembourg heritage. A lot of people don't know where Luxembourg is they think it's a city in Germany but it isn't it's a separate country and it's located between Belgium France and Germany it's one of the smallest countries in the world but considered one of the wealthiest countries in the world and it is really also known quite well in World War two because much of the Battle of the Bulge was fought there General Patton's buried in Luxembourg City with about six thousand American soldiers who are there it also has beautiful castles it's located on the Mosel River so it has some of the best wines in the world as well so it's really a unique country we're proud to be in Southeastern Wisconsin and we're just very excited to have people come and visit us and learn more not just about Luxembourg but about immigration in general so we hope if you ever stop on I-43 right past Belgium come in and visit us you don't have to be a Luxemburger but you can learn about this unique ethnic group and much more about immigration. Okay this is the sons of Norway organization where Lodges and Cheboygan and Manitowoc about half of our members come from the Cheboygan area on the other half from Manitowoc so every other month we switch from one place to the other and here on the table we have some of our things these trolls right here our hand carved by one of the members of our of our lodge and we've got some rose balling here that is pretty prominent in Norway. There's an old box that comes from Norway I can't recall how old it is but this is all some more trolls dishes that we get with Norwegian dishes. Norway is also known for having a lot of pewter and over here we have some pewter pieces that are all made in Norway and these belong to myself and my wife and some of these dishes right here also another rose balling stuff on these dishes now the you see we have three different flags here we have the Norwegian flag the American flag and the Canadian flag and the reason for the Canadian flag is a lot of our immigrants from Norway came through Canada or Ellis Island so every every one of our meetings we start by singing the Norwegian national anthem the Canadian national anthem and the American national anthem now in Norway they also have basically two flags this one is their main flag and it's flown on all government buildings and things like that and on special occasions the other one is this this flag right here that is an everyday flag for the Norwegians and when we visited over there with some of my relatives we were told that this the regular Norwegian flag was flown because they had relatives from the USA otherwise they fly the the banner type flag and it's a wonderful place to visit and if you like fish it's a great place to visit and we do have a Ludifest dinner every November we pick we used to pick up along this highways we have a program where we visit the schools and give out mittens and have readings with them and we give scholarships to children they want to go to Norwegian speaking camps I'm Peter Dene from the Usberg Historical Society and we've got lots of obituaries and weddings and different history of Usberg and some of the buildings that we've got pictures of a lot of building and we've got a lot of school books and we're open on Saturday mornings from 9 to 12 and on Wednesday evenings from 6 to 8 during the summer months and we've got a lot of sports pictures of different teams and this year we're sponsoring the schools high school of Usberg and welcome to Centerville settlement where we are located up in Mantua County just off of let's see we're on range oh we're on Union Road yes Union Road and we've got a historic project that we're working on there called the Lipsy House Barn but Centerville settlement itself is an organization that takes a look at preserving rural heritage and we're doing that through several different ways we've got an oral history group we also have a group that offers tours once a while silos looking at stone masonry bound foundations and also a bake oven day one of our major projects includes restoration of an 1849 House Barn called the Lipsy House Barn and we're restoring it to about 1870 this timber frame structure is one of a kind in Mantua County and also the nation in fact in 1982 we received the designation of the National Historic Trust designation and today here I have with me Kathy Sixle the president of Centerville settlement who's going to talk a little bit about our display and what we have here Kathy come on over thank you Kate over here this display depicts sewing saw a while and being style and these are all clothes or dresses mostly that have been made on a sewing machine they are all hand stitched or not hand stitched but they certainly were not bought in a store like today and they've come into the collection this would be a wedding dress this would be a bridesmaid dress and at the end we have another outfit that is on a dress form underneath the domes we have various things such as buttons well sewing machine needles darning yarn and over there we have more needles buttons and we have safety pins this is a vest and you can see on the construction it was part with machine parked by hand and this was the thing that keep it intact this is a great big pin cushion and we also have the Madison Square Patterns book and I have copied several sheets out of there this pillow was just donated by a woman that's 97 years old and her mother made it for her so the well pillow is certainly over a hundred years old the display here depicts the Lutzi house barn and it is a work in progress and we work on it every other Saturday and we have a luncheon at noon so whoever comes in helps can join us for lunch and we have a regular dinner where this is from the aviation heritage center out at the airport we will be having all kinds of stuff going on this summer plus we have our father's day coming up in June breakfast for for wings and wheels and and then we have free movie nights out there on every second Friday of the month so people can come out there and check out the center how there's all kinds of stuff we got in the museum we got historical stuff like from Walter Kohler from the airport the old airport we have out there and then also in July we got the T28s and stuff coming like that and we also sponsor a lot of breakfasts we have out there and we had we had a couple art we had art fair out there this year on a Saturday we turned out we had a pretty good turnout for that too so that's open always to the public this afternoon I enjoyed a discussion of how I came to Sheboygan my work here in Sheboygan the things that I appreciate about Sheboygan some of the reminiscences that I have of the days when I was first here and when I arrived here I've been on the Supreme Court now for almost 10 years but I always think of Sheboygan as as my home I've lived in Madison I've lived in Fond du Lac most of my life I've lived in Sheboygan and and Mary and I have had many wonderful years here despite the fact we've had our trials and tribulations but I love Sheboygan