Willow Leaves August 2

Rainmaker Wanted Hard-hit by drought during late June and July, farmer’s in northern Wabash County are seriously considering some old-time remedies for the situation. Seed and feed corn stand to be irreparably damaged if there is no rain soon. Locals report that although fertilization took place without a problem, the ears of corn are not filling out as they would normally. Soybean crops have perhaps two weeks more leeway than corn, but are also deemed at risk. So what are the remedies being looked at? Don Young, a seed farmer west of town, remembers a time when his dad loaded a shotgun with rock salt and fired it into the air everytime a cloud came over. He always thought the old man was a little loony for shooting at clouds, but it did rain eventually and Dan is seriously considering packing some 20 gauge shells with salt himself. Since moving to Willow Mills in the 70s, Donna Jones has become known as the herb lady. She still lives on the old agricultural commune north of the river. Donna cites several of the reference books on folklore with rituals and ceremonies for rainmaking. “You’d have to want rain badly to do some of the things these books suggest,” Donna says. But, she admits, she’d be willing to help put the ritual together if anyone really wanted to do it. Rev. Wilson at Holy Waters Baptist Church announced the beginning of a prayer vigil starting at last evening’s church service. He invites “prayer warriors” of all denominations to join in the round-the-clock vigil which he vows will continue “until the land’s thirst is satisfied and God’s people are victorious over the drought.”

Are Mystery Camper and Assailant the Same? Normally trusting residents of Willow Mills began locking their doors this week in the wake of a brutal beating in Laketon last week. An elderly gentleman was assaulted and robbed by a “white male, 5'5", about 200 pounds,” according to police reports. The assailant stole the old man’s car and drove off after the beating. The incident sparked speculation that the assailant might be one and the same as the mystery camper whose abandoned campsites have now been found on three area farms. Police have no indication that there is a link between the two, but approve of cautionary measures. When last seen, the assailant was driving a 1994 white Cadillac. If you have information that might be of help, please call the Sheriff’s Department.

The Herb Lady

The candle-making folks of the New Unitarian Church weren’t the only commune to form around the village of Willow Mills in the sixties and seventies. Some people say that the wealth of Indian sacred sites in this area attracted people of “alternate spirituality.” Others hold that rather lax enforcement of drug laws and a lush natural stand of canubis that was discovered nearby were the key contributing factors.

But whatever the initial response, some remnant of the old hippie communes still exists in the form of The Herb Farm out on the north side of the river. There was an abandoned farmstead about half a mile north of the iron bridge that was a magnet for vagrants for years before the hippies arrived. Now these weren’t all spaced out druggies. Some were pretty intelligent folks who were studying philosophy, pre-law, the arts, and literature at Manchester College. It happened that some of these folks knew how to read and research platte maps and deed records. And so, a small and enterprising group of young people found the old property to be in tax default and they slapped a payment down on the land before word got out that it was available. Breathing in the scent of their new found land, the group incorporated itself as The Herb Farm and began studying organic farming. Around here it was known as truck farming, though no one really knows why. It doesn’t require a truck to do it.

The original intent by these intrepid social engineers was to become a self-sustaining community with no need for the commerciality of the rest of the world. They’d all read Five Acres and Independence, subscribed to The Mother Earth News, had copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, Your Engineered House, and Geodesic Construction. They were convinced that eventually even their wind generators would provide enough electricity to power life as they wanted to know it. And they would never leave the farm.

They got a good start on things, too. They salvaged all the timber they could from the old house, barn, and outbuildings that were all but falling down. They lovingly removed the bent, rusty nails and stacked the lumber from the roofs on down, inventoried what they had and spent the next winter in their dorm rooms drawing plans for what to build when the spring thaw had arrived. The first big dispute was whether to build an earth sheltered domicile, an engineered house, a geodesic dome, or a yurt. That’s when the influence of Donna Jones began to be felt.

Donna was the quintessential earth mother. Her hair hung in braids to her waist. She wore maxi-skirts with peasant tops. Make-up never touched her face nor a razor her legs. In her last year of pre-medical studies at Manchester College, she had taken a special interest in eastern medicine and herbology. She was a great believer in natural therapy and was well-respected by her peers in the infant commune. And she was able to bring agreement to the dispute. Like herbs, she said, certain structures were ideally suited to certain uses. She advocated building a geodesic greenhouse, but held with the concept of an engineered house. She conceded, however, that it was in good keeping with the energy-saving principles that the northern face of the house should be earth-sheltered and therefore chose the exact location for the house making best use of the natural contours of the land.

Then she dropped the big bomb. While shelter was necessary, they would have to plant in the spring before they could begin building. And they would need periodic labor from every member in the fields to keep them clean and growing without using chemicals.

And amazingly, they managed to do it. There were twenty members of the commune that went to work in the fields that year and by winter there were twenty-four. Each was given a task and a place to sleep. (The yurt idea did have some applications during construction of the lodge.) Their first structure was a longhouse in which all 24 could sleep and eat. That took the lion’s share of their ready supplies from the salvage job of the house and barn. After starting the summer using just handtools, they soon conceded to running a temporary electric line onto the property so they could use electric saws. Without that they probably would never have gotten the building built.

Donna plotted out a five acre patch and got Angus Fergusson to send a farmhand and tractor over to plow and disc it for them. It was then that Donna made the mistake that would send the little farm into the world of commercial reality. She carefully considered the kind of productivity that would be needed from the five acres in order to provide for 24 people for the winter and it looked bleak. She had to consider known high-yield crops over variety and focused on corn, beans, potatoes, and squash. A patch separate from the 5-acre plot she designated for herbs and planted and cared for that section herself.

They managed to keep up with the weeding, dividing up into a construction team and an agricultural team. They brought the crops to a harvest that was plentiful, then realized that they had no way to keep and store their bounty of food. The longhouse had taken so much time to build that they had not made a root cellar and had no freezer. Donna conducted a lot of canning operations, but canning containers and supplies were expensive. And the proportions did not come out quite the way Donna intended. The zucchini were the big surprise. They harvested zucchini by the bushel basketsful. It wasn’t long before they realized they would have to sell some of their stock or it would rot on the land.

They began with a roadside stand in front of the house and put fliers up around town, but that county road isn’t well-travelled and customers were scarce. Donna managed to negotiate some sales through the local IGA store, but the margin was poor. So they sent a truck out to route 15 and 114 on one side and to route 13 and 114 on the other side and spent the hottest part of the summer selling sweetcorn and zucchini to every passerby they could stop.

Well, they created a treasury and opened an account at the Eel River Bank downtown in Willow Mills. They used it to buy supplemental food in the winter and seed for the spring. Oh, their numbers dwindled in the winter. Several found the dorm rooms at college to be more to their liking than the big drafty longhouse. But in the summer, the numbers grew again setting a pattern that was to become the breath of the Herb Farm for years to come. Each summer they have welcomed a few new recruits from the college and occasionally one or two find their true home out there.

Donna dried herbs and within a few years found that her little roadside stand provided the mainstay for income for the property in herbs as they learned to balance their crops better and to preserve the food in a variety of ways. The group at the Herb Farm has maintained a vegetarian lifestyle for low these many years now.

Donna wasn’t always called the Herb Lady. She is truly a free spirit and has acted as a midwife and minister to many people round Willow Mills. She’s ordained in the New Life Church and conducts some ceremonies and rituals at what she calls the “rural holidays.” That earned her the epithet of the Witch Woman for a number of years, but Willow Mills isn’t a burning kind of community. When it turned out that people were using the term with a kind of pride that Willow Mills had its own witch woman, well those who looked askance sort of dropped the term. Now everyone knows that they can get any kind of herb at all out at the herb farm. And they can get instruction on how to use them if they want to sit through one of Donna’s lectures.

I have to say there have even been one or two curious teens who had their eyes popped open when they snuck out into the woods on Midsummer’s Eve to find one or more of their own parents dancing around Donna’s bonfire in celebration of the Solstice.