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John Oncken: Hazeltine's passion is farming
Earl Hazeltine calls himself a hobby farmer and that's pretty accurate. He owns Buffalo Ridge farm, 120 acres located on Wisconsin 92 midway between Mount Horeb and Mount Vernon in the town of Springdale some 25 miles west of Madison.
Some years ago, this was a land of small dairy farms and cropland that is mostly up and down. Nowadays the area has become recreational land and country estates owned by folks who commute to Mount Horeb and Madison.
During the 13 years Hazeltine has owned the property he hasn't done any farming. In fact, the land has been in the USDA Conservation Reserve Program from the beginning.
In spite of not doing any real farming, Hazeltine owns a half dozen tractors, a bulldozer, a sawmill, a big red barn, several sheds, a sauna, a couple of former hog sheds, a blacksmith shop to-be, a portable sawmill and a former cheese factory,
Hazeltine lived in small town Juda in Green County where his father was a truck driver.
"I always worked on farms as a kid," Hazeltine says. "I milked cows by hand at one farm and ran five milking units at another. One year I worked for a custom hay baler who used wire to tie the bales."
After high school he was in an auto accident and spent a year and a week in the hospital.
Hazeltine then worked as a meat cutter at a supermarket. "I became an expert meat cutter," he says with much pride. "At night I studied electronics with a correspondence course."
This led to five-and-a-half years working for General Motor's AC Sparkplug in Milwaukee. "They were the people who built the guidance system for the Apollo moon shot," Hazeltine points out.
After two years at UW-Milwaukee, he came to Madison and worked for the State Board of Health for a year or two then entered UW-Madison where he got a philosophy degree. "What do you do with such a degree?" he asks. "So I went to law school and became a lawyer."
Hazeltine spent a year working with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, half a dozen years in private practice, three years with the state Labor and Industry Relations Commission and a dozen years with the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.
Along the way he married, had two daughters, (Sheri lives in Florida and Deborah in McFarland) got divorced, retired from the legal profession, bought the farm on which he lives and remarried several years ago.
"I bought the farm from the Steinhauer family," Hazeltine says. "At one time it was a hog farm, that's why it has so many buildings. I'll admit my original idea was to buy the land as an investment and sell lots, but I changed my mind long ago."
Irv Steinhauer, longtime owner of Irv's Feed and Supply in Mount Horeb, knows all about this farm.
"My parents, William and Orpha, bought it in 1941 and I and my brother William Jr. were born and raised there," he says. "Yes, my company raised pigs there in the 1970s and early 1980's -- a long time ago."
Part of the original 260 acres was sold off -- 120 of them to Hazeltine -- but Bill Jr. retains 15 acres that has a sign designating it as the Steinhauer Heritage Farm.
For someone who bought the land as an investment, Hazeltine has surely put a lot of time, effort and money into making changes and additions.
There is the house that Hazeltine built himself. "It took me from 1999 to 2005 to build it," he says. "It's 3,800 square feet and I patterned it after some plans I bought at Menards."
Hazeltine is especially proud of the 20-foot tall stone chimney he fashioned. It's about the only thing visible from the highway because of the surrounding trees.
Then there is the sauna perched on a flat space on the hillside below the house that Hazeltine carved out of the steep hill with the 16-ton "Cat" that he bought from a Monroe construction company. He admits that he loves operating the big earth mover and that the sauna was a "practice building" leading up to the later house construction.
Down the hill, below the house and sauna, is a building that has all the earmarks of being an old cheese factory--which it was.
Hazeltine has read in a history of the town of Springdale that this long-defunct facility not only made cheese but was a brewing site of not-so-legal liquor during prohibition. Hazeltine says it was probably true -- in fact this is where he makes wine today.
The old building has the earmarks of a cheese factory. There's the long "make room," as well as solid stone walls and the still-visible loading dock where farmers drove their wagons to unload their milk cans.
Then there is the long red barn that Hazeltine has been working on for some years. Originally a big dairy barn (for its time), it was converted to raise pigs years ago and now is pretty much storage. As is usual in barns of this era, it has no supporting columns; it's supported instead by steel rods anchored in rafters in the hay mow high above.
The former cheese factory and the barn are now owned by Hazeltine's daughter Sheri, who plans to have a barn dance there one day, maybe this summer.
The farm that isn't farmed seems to have become a sort of bird sanctuary.
Members of the UW-Madison Department of Wildlife Ecology are regular visitors. "They found a Henslows Sparrow, a very threatened species that winters in Brazil," Hazeltine says. "We also have a big flock of Bobolinks that people come to see. Last year the federal fish and game folks came, as did the Department of Natural Resources, Farm Service Agency , UW Wildlife Ecology and Audubon Society."
With his original scheme of selling pieces of the farm for investment purposes long gone and the fact that his wife, Linda, a serious environmentalist would never agree to that idea, Hazeltine finds himself caught up in environmental activities. "Maybe its future is as a park or something like that," he says.
Hazeltine is a hobby farmer but not the kind that sometimes lives in isolation, stays clear of neighbors and the community and complains about cows mooing and tractors running. He doesn't raise farm crops but does harbor trees, birds, deer and wildlife of many kinds. And his construction projects and restoration of old buildings makes for a situation where the visitor has one foot in the past and the other in the present and maybe the future.
I suspect he could charge admission and draw crowds, but he won't -- that's not his way. He's doing what he's doing because he enjoys it.
John Oncken is owner of Oncken Communications, a Madison-based agricultural information and consulting company. He can be reached at 222-0624 or e-mail jfodairy@chorus.net.
Earl Hazeltine can see some of his land and lots of country from the deck on the house he built high on a hill south of Mt. Horeb.
