The Shack Enterprise

In each person’s life a particular place may stand out—a place where one spent a lot of time, a place one grew to love and recall for so many happy memories. Such a place for me was the Shack, on the floodplain of the Wisconsin River. In summertime, standing by the river, it was incredibly quiet, except for the occasional call of a kingfisher. It often seemed that high overhead one could hear a kind of humming. Look up and there were barn swallows turning in the air catching insects. Look down and the surface of the river was always quietly in motion, and rippling against a snag in the shallows. We were a hunting and fishing family. Although camping on weekends early on became a family tradition in Wisconsin, Dad got it into his head to buy a piece of land of our own on which we could camp, hunt, fish, swim, and study nature and even do some bow hunting. He also had a real itch to practice a new idea, ecological restoration, on his own land. At the dedication ceremony of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum on June 17, 1934, Dad told the audience: “The time has come for science to busy itself with the earth itself. The first step is to reconstruct a sample of what we had to start with. That, in a nut shell, is the Arboretum.” He was looking for a place of our own to do just that as well—“a place to show what the land was, what it is, and what it ought to be.” It was in January of 1934; Dad asked an archery friend of his in Prairie du Sac, Ed Ochsner, to help him locate and lease some land near the Wisconsin River. They visited an eighty-acre piece in the south-central part of the state northeast of Baraboo. Dad apparently thought it would fit his purposes. By paying the taxes we could buy the land for just eight dollars an acre.