ONE
A Century of History and Heritage: The Roots of an Environmental Focus
THE CALDWELLS: A PIONEERING FAMILY
On November 21, 1913, Lynton Keith Caldwell, the first child of Lee Lynton Caldwell, the local school superintendent, and his wife, Alberta, was born in the local hospital of the farming town of Montezuma, Iowa. If his father had not departed from two hundred years of family tradition by taking up a profession other than agriculture, Caldwell might well have grown up to be a farmer himself. Genealogical records trace his paternal farming heritage back in an unbroken line to the 1760s, when his branch of the Caldwell family, believed to have emigrated from Ireland, resided in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. In 1808, during the period in which President Thomas Jefferson hoped to establish a largely self-governing agricultural society in America, John T. Caldwell, born in 1776, traveled with his wife and thirteen children to Ohio, thus becoming among the earliest to settle in that state. One of his sons, also named John, married when he was eighteen. Of this Johnâs eleven children, the third-born, Nicholas, became Lynton Keith Caldwellâs great-grandfather.
In May 1855, accompanied by his wife, Abigail, and their three children, Nicholas moved from Michigan, where he had relocated in 1848, to the small settlement of Lewisburg, near Corydon in Iowa. Here he was soon joined by two of his brothers and their families. On June 2 Nicholas bought eight hundred acres of unimproved land in three lots, for which he paid one thousand dollars. He then signed over two of the lots to his younger brother James but kept for himself the core farm area of 440 acres. At the same time, his older brother Levi, who had married Abigailâs sister Louisa, purchased adjacent acreage.
The brothers all lived at first in rough âboard shanties,â which, as they began to prosper, they replaced with âsubstantial farm dwellings.â1 Despite their early difficulties, it turned out that the brothers had chosen an opportune time to resettle their families. From âprobably not more than fifty white people living within the limits of the future stateâ in 1832, Iowaâs population had swelled to more than 324,000 by 1854.2 That year, the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad finally reached the banks of the Mississippi River, across from the town of Davenport. Indeed, the rapid spread of the railroads during and after the 1850s acted as a major catalyst for this phenomenal rate of growth. Although steamboats had come into use around 1819, their use in trade and commerce became hampered by the fact that for several months of each year the northern sections of the Mississippi froze over and became impassable, while in the summer water levels in the southern sections tended to drop too low for safe navigation. The railroads changed everything, quickly improving both transportation and communication. In the decades that followed, ever larger quantities of Iowan farmersâ produce â corn, wheat, hogs, and cattle among them â were shipped to Chicago, which was then rapidly expanding into the major transportation, distribution, and industrial hub of the Midwest.
NICHOLAS AND ABIGAIL CALDWELL
By 1866 Nicholas had turned his original purchase into âan excellent farm of 385 acres.â Perhaps nostalgic for the woods he had left behind in Michigan, he was apparently responsible for âsetting out the First Tree in Lewisburg.â3 Abigail also bore him four more children, of whom Lewis Napoleon, born in 1860, became Lynton Keith Caldwellâs grandfather. It is not known why the child of a rural farming family was given such a grand name, but at the time of his birth Lewisâs namesake, Louis NapolĂ©on III, ruled as emperor of France.
The Civil War broke out when Lewis was two years old. Nicholasâs older children ran the farm while their father served on the Union side in an Iowa state militia unit called the Southern Border Brigade. The period that followed the end of the war was quiet, although â according to family lore â the Caldwells did have one brush with fame â or infamy. After years of committing murder and mayhem in Kentucky and Missouri, the notorious James Gang, led by brothers Jesse and Frank, began crossing the northern Missouri border to attack trains and rob banks in Iowa. After one such raid, as the gang fled back to comparative safety in Missouri, they stopped off at Nicholas and Abigailâs farm to water their thirsty horses.4
LEWIS AND LUCY
Historian John Mack Farragher notes that âin 1830 about one in five heads of household shared his surname with the heads of at least two other households; thirty years later that proportion had doubled. . . . A significant minority of marriages among the descendants of original families took place among sibling sets, the brothers and sisters of one family marrying the brothers and sisters of another. Such marriage patterns seem strange today but were commonplace in the nineteenth-century countryside.â5 Farragher could well have been describing Caldwellâs family. Nicholas and Levi Caldwell had married sisters Abigail and Louisa Curtis. In their turn, Nicholasâs daughters, Harriet and Sylvia, married two brothers from a local Lewisburg family. Then, when Nicholasâs sons, Charles and Lewis Napoleon, grew up, they married sisters Jeanette and Lucy Ellen Surbaugh, their next-door neighbors.
Lewis married Lucy in 1880, when he was twenty and she just seventeen. For some years after their marriage the young couple made their home with his parents. On July 1, 1883, Lucy gave birth to her first child, a son they named Lee Lynton, who would become Lynton Keith Caldwellâs father. After the births of two more children, Harry and Harriet, Lewis moved his growing family into a newly constructed home across the road north of the farm. Here Lucy would bear four more children, of whom one died in infancy. Soon after they moved, Nicholas deeded Lewis eighty acres of surrounding farmland to help him start out on his own. Over the course of the following years, Lewis did well enough to buy the rest of the farm from his father. (By this time land values had increased a great deal. In 1855 Nicholas had paid $1.25 an acre. In the 1890s Lewis gave his father $25.00 an acre for the cropland and $18.50 an acre for the timbered land. Even these prices may have been below market rate, since Nicholas probably asked less from his son than he would have demanded from an outsider.)
LEE LYNTON CALDWELL: BREAKING THE MOLD
In 1900, the year that Lee Lynton turned seventeen and graduated with distinction from high school in Allerton, America was a very different place from the utopian agrarian society Jefferson had envisaged almost a century earlier. Instead, the United States had developed during the nineteenth century into an economic powerhouse, thanks to the mix of manufacturing, commerce, and agriculture that Jeffersonâs rival, Alexander Hamilton, had advocated and advanced as the nationâs first secretary of the treasury. By this time, the âWild Westâ had been âcivilizedâ: in 1890 the superintendent of the census issued a bulletin stating, âUp to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.â6
As the new century began, however, Lee Caldwell was not a happy young man. The census taken that year lists his occupation as âfarm laborer,â but Lee had ambitions, and the countryâs rapid urbanization and technical and industrial growth offered opportunities to young men of ambition that were far less physically demanding and certainly less unpredictable than farming. All over the country young men were leaving rural areas to try their luck in the booming cities, and a college education, especially for men, had become increasingly commonplace. Lee believed that the key to his own future success lay in earning a degree, but no one in his family had ever taken their education that far. He had also recently started seeing Alberta Mace, a young woman with nine siblings whom he had first met in high school. Her father ran a buggy shop in Allerton, where the family had lived since the 1870s. This occupation, however, presented a problem. As business people, the Maces considered themselves a cut above the Caldwells. To win their approval, Lee knew he had to prove he was worthy of Alberta.
When Lee finally found the courage, soon after he had turned eighteen, to tell his father he wanted to go to college, Lewis erupted in fury. Taking twenty-five dollars from his billfold, he threw the money at Lee, shouting that if he wanted to go, so be it, but if he left, he could neither return nor expect further financial assistance. Like the great preservationist John Muir, who, forty years earlier, had faced down his own father in an almost identical situation, Lee took the money and left.7 He would return to the farm only once, in 1914, when his own son, Lynton Keith Caldwell, was a year old.
Lewis Caldwell must have been certain that, with three strapping young sons, he had assured the future of his farm. But in the end none of them accepted their inheritance. Both Harry and Nicholas, who for a long time resented their older brother for leaving them with extra farm work, also eventually went into business for themselves. In the end it was Ruth, the youngest daughter, who took over the family inheritance after she married.
LEE AND ALBERTA: MAKING A NEW LIFE DURING THE PROGRESSIVE AGE
On March 30, 1904, Lee married Alberta at her home. In early 1906, at the age of twenty-two, he left Simpson College, in Indianola, without completing his degree in order to accept a position in Manson, Iowa, as âprincipal of Manson Schools.â At the end of his first year he had already made such a good impression that the school board offered him the higher position of superintendent of schools.
In early 1909 Lee became superintendent of public schools in Parkersburg, Iowa, where the couple spent the next three years. Alberta, still childless, began to attend classes with her husband at Iowa State Teachers College. In February 1913, after nine years of marriage, she finally became pregnant. In June she graduated with a B.A. in education that she would never use professionally. In July, Lee, having graduated with the same degree, successfully applied for the position of superintendent of schools in the larger farming community of Montezuma, Iowa, where, âon Friday morning, November 21st 1913 at four Oâclock AM , nine months of happy anticipation were ended and we were made happier still by the arrival of our dear little son.â âWe have named him Lynton Keith,â Alberta wrote a few days later, âLynton for his papa. The Senior Class â14 [who, at the invitation of Superintendent Caldwell, had held a contest to choose his sonâs name] named him Keith and presented him a silver cup for Christmas.â8 Despite the familyâs choice of Lynton, from the very beginning Caldwell was always called Keith by his family and friends.
EARLY YEARS: THE GREAT WAR AND INDUSTRIAL GROWTH
Apart from a worrying bout of scarlet fever in April 1915, from which he quickly recovered, Lynton Keith Caldwell seems to have been a healthy child who, from a very early age, âdearly love[d] books and [was] read to every day.â9 In December 1915 Alberta gave him a sister, Margaret. In August 1916 the family moved once again, this time to Monmouth, Illinois, where Lee Caldwell had just been elected superintendent of schools. A second daughter, Dorothy, joined the family in 1919. As Caldwell grew into boyhood, he began to demonstrate an interest in nature, especially in birds. And in Monmouth, where the family lived for six years, nature could be found in abundance all around him. The town was then the center of a prosperous farming area containing about two thousand farms, many of them settled by immigrant German families. The Caldwells had lived in Monmouth less than a year when in April 1917, nearly three years after the Great War had first broken out in Europe, the United States declared war on Germany.
In September 1918 Caldwell started his studies in Monmouth at the local Garfield Elementary School, founded in 1902. He later recalled that on a Saturday morning soon afterward âmy father took me off to his barber. When we left, my long curls remained behind on the floor. My âBuster Brownâ haircut, very popular among mothers of that period, had been demolished. My mother was very upset but my father had decided it was time I looked like a boy.â10 Two months later, on November 11, the war ended. That evening, Lee took his young son down to Monmouthâs public square to watch celebrations that were held in similar fashion in many towns across the nation. Although still two weeks shy of his fifth birthday, Caldwell later recollected that evening well: âThere was an enormous bonfire and a great deal of noise. Men drove around in their Model T cars dragging behind them stuffed and burning effigies of the Kaiser.â The local newspaper reported the next day that the assembled crowd grew so enthusiastic that someoneâs carriage ended up being thrown into the bonfire to fuel the flames, but, the article explained, âa hat was passed among the crowd and there was enough money to buy a new buggy for the owner.â11
THE GREAT CHANGE: FROM COUNTRY TO CITY
In November 1921 Keith Caldwell celebrated his eighth birthday. His early report cards already pointed out the areas that would later become his academic strengths. In only one subject did he not improve: arithmetic, where his marks remained a steady, unwavering âfair.â
By this time, Lee Caldwell, who had worked hard to provide an equal education to all his students, had grown increasingly frustrated by his inability to obtain better funding for the growing school system. Much of Monmouthâs wealth and local influence came from retired farmers, but the town was also home to a large number of poor, unskilled families. Richer community members, however, already openly hostile to school taxes, fiercely opposed having these taxes increased to meet the educational needs of the less fortunate. Lee Caldwell thus began an active search for another position. Then, on April 24, 1922, an unsolicited and entirely unexpected telegram arrived from the president of the board of education in Hammond, a fast-growing town situated in the heavily industrialized northwest region of Indiana. The board had heard about his successful career and asked him to come for an interview. He must have made an excellent impression, for in June the family moved again.
HAMMOND, INDIANA, I922
In the early twentieth century, as James H. Madison writes, âIndiana industries became ever more successful in producing durable manufactured goods, particularly steel, auto parts, household appliances, and machinery. These products were produced in high volume in large plants . . . concentrated in growing cities of central and northern Indiana. . . and the Calumet cities of Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago.â12 John Bartlow Martin adds that Standard Oil had earlier selected Whiting, then a âtiny hamletâ near the southern shore of Lake Michigan, as the site on which to build âthe wor...