Research Journal: Stork Forest: A "Poets' Corner" in the Upper Arboretum
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| The 1900 Plat Book of Rice County shows roughly half of what is now Stork Forest in Carleton’s Upper Arboretum as belonging to Robert Watson and W.W. Norton. The section of the Upper Arboretum just north of Stork Forest, including Postage Stamp Prairie and Monument Hill, was owned by a son of W.W. Norton, A.W. Norton. The area of the current Upper Arb is outlined in green. The solid green area is Stork Forest. The Watson and Norton properties are highlighted in yellow. Click on the image to enlarge. (Image source) |
Robert Watson (1825-1913) arrived in the Minnesota Territory by steamboat in 1850 and settled in what became Cottage Grove. In 1878, he moved with his family to Northfield when his daughter Isabella entered Carleton College. The Watson home in Northfield was on the site of Watson Hall on the Carleton campus.
Watson became known for his promotion of tree planting and his role in hastening Northfield’s transition from a landscape of prairie and oak savanna to an urban forest. In his 1948 booklet The Trees of Northfield, Arboretum founder Harvey Stork wrote:
Northfield owes much to the pioneers who loved trees and started the earliest planing. Robert and William Watson were responsible for awakening an interest in ornamental planting seventy years ago. Some of the oldest specimens still standing in all their vigor on the property owned by the Watsons between First and Second Streets from Nevada eastward to the tennis courts were planted by these brothers in 1879.
Robert Watson spent his youth “botanizing” in the forests of northeastern Ohio before emigrating to the Minnesota Territory. He earned his living from farming, but he was also a horticulturalist, a keeper of phenological and weather records, and an amateur botanist. It may have been may have been from their father that Minnie and Isabella Watson learned to collect and press botanical specimens. The oldest specimens in the Carleton College Herbarium were collected by the Watson sisters in the mid-1870s, before the family moved from Cottage Grove, and around Northfield in the early 1880s.
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| A specimen of bird's-foot violet collected by Isabella Watson, 1883. Carleton College Herbarium. |
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| A herbarium specimen of hepatica collected by Isabella Watson, 1883. Carleton College Herbarium. |
In his memoir of the early days in Cottage Grove, Watson paints a picture of Minnie gathering prairie flowers:
As soon as warm weather came, Minnie, two years old, used to go wandering about the hazel copses, which were numerous, picking pussy-willows, hazel tassels and so forth; and later when the prairie grass and flowers came on, picking violets, tailed geum [prairie smoke], and other flowers in abundance. In the summer when the grass grew tall among the small bur oaks southwest of the house, she used to get lost in it.
Robert Watson was also a poet. According to his obituary in the Northfield News in 1913: “[Joined] with Mr. Watson’s love of nature was his great love of poetry.” In 1888, he published Gleanings, the first book of poetry published in Northfield, a book which included many of his own poems. One of his early poems, probably written during his first years in Minnesota, celebrates the farming and the Minnesota seasons:
A life in the prairied west,
Where the noble rivers flow,
Where the earth wears an emerald vest,
And flowers by the acres grow.
How sweet in some cozy nook
Of a sheltering grove to dwell;
Or near by the sparkling brook
That ripples adown the dell.
How fair in the blossiming spring
To behold the tender blue
Which the early violet spreads
As far as the eye can view.
I love from some breezy hill
To gaze o’er the charming scene,
Broad prairies of grass and flowers,
And young-leaved groves between.
Once more in the summer’s prime
The prairie plow I guide;
While the beauty of nature lies
Around me on every side;
I gaze o’er the landscape far
Till the hills are lost in blue;
Then nearer, I start at the scream
Of the lone and wild curlew.
Then the gorgeous autumn comes
With its mellow and hazy skies;
And the prairie’s freshness is changed
Into purple and golden dyes;
Then the farmer looks with pride
And the crops his hands have tilled,
Where the drooping ears proclaim
The promise of spring fulfilled.
And when the winter cold
Comes fown on the prairies wide,
When the snow into drifts is rolled
And Boreas the blast does ride,
We’ll sing that the corn’s in the barn,
We’ll meet in the social hall—
We cherish kind feelings to each
Nor forget the Giver of all.
Rev. William Wallace Norton (1822-1890) was the eleventh of the thirteen children of Ira and Lucy Norton, and one of nine who survived to adulthood. He was born in Great Valley (Cattaraugus County, New York), attended the local public school, and in 1858 was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in nearby Otto, New York. He served as an Army chaplain during the Civil War, then returned to serve the church in Otto until 1866, when he was called to serve the congregation in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Like generations of Nortons before him, Rev. W.W. Norton headed west.
Rev. Norton’s youngest son, Edwin, recalled that his father’s solution to every difficulty was “gumption.” Gumption meant hard work and self-reliance. It meant building a house and furnishing it with your own hands. It meant working long and hard to provide for the family. It meant thawing blocks of ice to bathe in the wintertime. It meant making the most of limited opportunities. Looking back on his youth in western Wisconsin, Edwin recalled that, despite its limitations, “life on the frontier was full of zest and hope and anticipation and friendly cooperation quite beyond our present day experience and expectation.”
But the frontier was best appreciated if it could be escaped. Its “lessons in self-reliance and ‘gumption,’” he wrote, “proved enduring assets for all who were exercised thereby, especially if liberation from such narrow environment was later effected.”
For the children of Rev. W.W. Norton, the means of escape from his narrow environment was Carleton College. His eldest son, Willis H. Norton, traveled to Northfield to enter Carleton (at the time still called Northfield College) in 1867. He was followed two years later by his younger brother A. W. Norton. The two brothers later founded Northfield’s Citizens’ Bank, and soon the Nortons became Northfield’s wealthiest family.
Willis H. Norton was the father of Grace Fallow Norton, the first published poet born in Northfield. She was born in 1876, a month after the bank raid, and went on to publish five books of poetry and contribute regularly to Poetry Magazine. But she wasn’t the first poet in the family. In 1886, her grandfather, Rev. W.W. Norton, moved to Northfield to assume the editorship of the Northfield Independent. That year in the pages of the Independent, Rev. Norton published one of his own poems, a long religious poem of 13 stanzas that begins with a reflection on growing old:
The outward man is failing,
Its strength of youth is gone;
Life’s banner low is trailing,
By feeble hands scarce borne.
Late march is sadly tiring
To those o’ertasked ere noon,
Hark! Sunset guns are firing,
And rest now cometh soon.
E’en now our place and burden
To others are transferred;
Let this retiring guerdon
Be ours from Thee, O Lord;
Thy peace, and sweet submission,
To all Thy will, as best,
While waiting the fruition
Of heaven’s eternal rest.
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