The nation’s first watershed demonstration project was conducted in the Coon Creek Watershed as a way for university and technical service providers to showcase solutions for the catastrophic flooding and soil erosion that had impacted the region since the late 1800s.
The project was launched 90 years ago in 1933 by such luminaries as Aldo Leopold and Hugh Hammond Bennett. It also signaled the launch of the new federal Soil Erosion Service (SES), which would later become the Soil Conservation Service, and finally, today’s USDA – Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS).
For this reason, the Coon Creek Community Watershed Council (CCCWC) held a ‘90th Anniversary Celebration’ on Saturday, Sept. 9, on the grassfed organic dairy farm of Tucker and Becky (Luckasson) Gretebeck. The location of the celebration was the Gretebeck’s ‘Pumpkin Patch,’ which was devastated in August of 2018 when the Luckasson PL-566 flood control dam, located just above in the narrow Rulland’s Coulee, breached.
The event featured remarks from state and federal conservation agency representatives, local farmers, and Curt Meine from the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Music was provided by Tapestry, and food was provided by Noble Rind, local farmers, and Brady Nigh.
“Tonight, I want to honor the memories of local farmers Jack and Burton Lee,” Meine told the group. “It was on Jack Lee’s farm, just outside of Coon Valley, where the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp was located. Jack Lee was one of the first forward thinkers in the watershed to adopt the new farming and land use ideas, and the CCC workers accomplished much of the work of the demonstration project, working with local landowners.”
Meine said that the work in the Coon Creek Watershed had a ripple effect throughout the region, the state, the nation, and the world.
“I want to thank your ancestors, you and your kids for carrying this vision forward to address today’s challenges,” Meine said. “Aldo Leopold, in 1933, was a brand new UW professor without a PhD, who had a driving passion for the dynamics of watersheds. He and two of his sons worked in the watershed in the ‘30s, and helped to start the conservation revolution that happened here.”
Meine emphasized that it was the two-way conversation between the university and local landowners that started this revolution, and changed the way the university thought about watersheds and conservation forever.
“As we stand here tonight on the ancestral lands of the Ho-Chunk people, we also need to honor the ancestors and current generations of their people for their care and stewardship of these lands,” Meine concluded.
“Thank you all for coming here to our family’s farm today,” Virginia Luckasson told the crowd. “My father helped to lay out the strips on our land back in the ‘30s.”
Tucker Gretebeck told the crowd that “Grandma is a big part of our lives every step of the way, in good time and bad.” He said that she would celebrate her 93rd birthday the following week, and led the group in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ for her.
Matt Krueger, Executive Director of Wisconsin Land+Water, the group that oversees the Land Conservation Departments in all of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, was there to join the celebration.
“I want to thank Tucker and the watershed council for inviting us to join this celebration, and thank all of the speakers for laying out the arc of history,” Krueger said. “The issues we faced in the 1930s were vastly different, but in some ways exactly the same. The county land conservation departments, approved in state statute in 1982, truly function as the boots-on-the-ground, and are unique in the nation.”
Krueger said that the multi-generational efforts of landowners, partnering with state and federal agencies and the university system, have created a resilient system.
These efforts were born in the 1930s, in the Dust Bowl era, and they were born of conservation issues that we are beginning to grapple with again as a result of today’s most pressing issue – the climate crisis,” Krueger observed.
Jon Carson, founder and managing partner of Trajectory Energy Partners, grew up in the Coon Creek Watershed. He told the story about how he had worked with Dr. Stanley Trimble while still in high school, and later as a graduate student in college.
“In the summer of 1993, my mom came and got me, telling me there was some guy at the front door wanting to talk about the creek,” Carson remembered. “It was Stan Trimble, and he asked me a question I could answer, and I wound up working with him all summer.”
Dr. Stanley Trimble, along with his graduate students, conducted research in the Coon Creek Watershed about historic soil erosion and the hydrologic process of the creek, from 1974 into the early 1990s. He is the author of the book, ‘Historical Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the Upper Mississippi Valley Hill Country.’
“There were really two thing’s that Stan’s work accomplished,” Carson said. “The first is to bequeath to us the results of his meticulous research, building on the work of Stanford Happ in the 1930s in the Coon Creek Watershed. The second was the fight he fought in the world of academia to document and convince them that the work of a community of committed local folk could produce such profound changes on the landscape.”
Federal agencies
“I am here with Sonya Keith, our lead on Watersheds at the NRCS headquarters, to affirm the commitment we made to this watershed, and this region, 90 years ago,” Martinez said. “We are gathered here today to celebrate this watershed moment, and I want to thank the Coon Creek Community Watershed Council for continuing to champion your conservation legacy – happy birthday, and I hope to return for the celebration of the 100th anniversary.”
Martinez observed that the ‘Public Law 566,” for which the ‘PL-566’ dams are named, was signed into law in 1956 by President Dwight Eisenhower.
“A group of visionary engineers, under the auspices of that law, went on to build 14 flood control dams in this watershed after the Coon Creek Watershed Plan was signed in 1958,” Martinez told the crowd. “What’s amazing is that more than 50 years later, most of them are still standing.”
Bill Simshauer pointed out that the Coon Creek Watershed Project, and the success of the work that was undertaken here and throughout the Driftless Region in the 1930s and 1940s had led to the formation of the conservation districts we see today.
“It is a privilege to be here today to bear witness to the birthplace of conservation, and to trace its beginnings to the movement here in the Coon Creek Watershed 90 years ago,” Simshauer said. “Wisconsin has always been a leader in conservation on the national stage, and soil erosion is not just a problem facing farmers but also for the general public.”
Simshauer pointed out that this watershed was the beginning of local, state and federal partnerships around conservation, and also the beginning of today’s cost-sharing program for implementation of conservation practices on the landscape.
Local inspiration
The remarks of the evening finished up with two fifth-generation descendants of Norwegian immigrant farm families – Mark Moilien and Nancy Wedwick. Moilien is the CCCWC’s ‘historian,’ and Wedwick serves as the president of the watershed council.
“At every meeting, I share a ‘Marc’s Fascinating Fact’ about our watershed,” Moilien told the crowd. “The highest elevation in the Coon Creek Watershed is 1,370 feet above sea level in Cashton, and its lowest point is 650 feet above sea level at the Mississippi River in Stoddard, a drop in elevation of 720 feet in 22 miles. This drop in elevation is greater than the drop of the Mississippi River between Stoddard, Wisconsin, and the Gulf of Mexico.”
Nancy Wedwick spoke last, and from the heart.
“I literally have no background in conservation, but to me and my family, the flooding in August of 2018, and the failure of five flood control dams in one night was a shock and an eye-opening experience,” Wedwick said. “Along with a lot of other people in the Coon Creek Watershed, I was searching for something that I could do to try to make things better, and the answer we found was the formation of our watershed council.
“Together, we must learn to remember the lessons our ancestors learned, the lessons we seem to have lost somewhere along the way – we need to remember that what we do matters to ourselves, our neighbors, and to everyone all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” Wedwick said. “My personal inspiration is my grandson, and all I know is that I can’t leave this Earth not knowing that I moved every stone, and every mountain for that little guy.”
Tour of watershed
Prior to the celebration on September 9, a group of about 60 people took a guided tour of the watershed on two school buses.
Their route took them to the historical marker sign just outside of Coon Valley commemorating the Coon Creek Watershed Project, to area farms where conservation practices such as strip crops and terraces continue to be employed, to the Village of Chaseburg, to view some of the flood control structures built by the CCC, and to the Norskedalen Nature & Heritage Center.
Perhaps the most awe-inspiring stops on the tour were at the farm Mark and Vickie Sebion, and of Al Seelow and Roderick Jorgenson. There, sturdy and enduring conservation structures built by the CCC to help with flooding and soil erosion have been cleared and reclaimed by the landowners.
The structure on the Sebion Farm, still in the process of being reclaimed was built in 1936, and receives storm water runoff from a 90-acre drain field, with a 160-foot drop in elevation from the highest point to the structure. It is a unique structure with an arched ‘headwall,’ and a crest ‘sidewall’ design.
“I continue to be amazed by the ingenuity that the Soil Conservation Service engineers and workers displayed in the building of these structures,” Wisconsin USDA-NRCS State Conservation Engineer Steve Becker told the tour group. “The arched design of the headwall gives the structure greater stability, and the drop helps to dissipate the energy of the runoff. These structures were designed to control headcuts that led to gullies, and in some cases, divided farms in half, making the working of the land much more difficult.
Becker told the group that ‘full flow’ structures like these, unlike the dams, don’t impound water and release it slowly – they take the water as fast as it comes, and drops the water from one elevation to another.
“The arched design is able to take more water with less depth than a straight weir, and helps ensure that the water won’t flank the structure,” Becker explained. “This design is hydraulically efficient and helps to improve the conveyance of the flow.”
Becker explained that at today’s prices and engineering specifications, structures like these are quite expensive to construct. He said that some of them have failed in large rain events in recent years, and the engineers that built them didn’t know about using a drainage system to protect the structures. Becker said that to replace a structure like this today would cost about $150,000.
“The problem in recent years is that we have been in a hydrologically wet cycle,” Becker said. “What this means is that we have seen lots of seeps and springs opening up, and dry runs that are now wet with running water.”
Becker said that an NRCS employee had inventoried as many of the CCC structures in the watershed as could be found in the 1950s, and he had found about 400 of them. The purpose of the inventory was to see which had lasted, which didn’t, and to try to learn from that.
Seelow/Jorgenson farms
The structures at the Seelow Farm have previously been reported on by this newspaper. They consist of a series of terraces on fields adjacent to an area which tended to gully, and weirs at the end of the terraces to channel water into a series of five drop boxes descending to a small dam with a farm pond behind it. The structures were built by the CCC between 1934-1936.
“The terraced hillsides leading into the structure are only on one side of it, because the landowner on the other side at the time did not embrace the new methods of farming demonstrated by the SCS in the Watershed,” watershed council member and tour guide Jim Munsch told the group. “For this reason, more topsoil was retained on the land of the farmer who adopted the new practices.”
Munsch said that of the total 800 farmers in the watershed at the time, 418 farmers had signed up for the program, and 255 had “stuck with it.”
