The History of Fairfield and Jefferson County, Part 2: The First Settlers to Today

By the mid-1800’s Iowa had  found itself at the forefront of change and began to undertake the radical transformation from “primitive” to “civilized.” I don’t mean that Native Americans were uncivilized, nor am I implying that the settlers from the East were somehow a more enlightened group of people – nevertheless, those were (and still are, unfortunately) the words used to describe this change.

The  preface to History of Jefferson County Iowa (published by the Western Historical Company, 1879) puts it a bit more bluntly:

The March of Progress

… the magnitude of the undertaking is still further increased by the removal, by death or otherwise, of nearly all the pioneer fathers and mothers who first came to gladden the prairie and forests wilds with their presence, and scatter the seeds of that better intelligence, which, growing and spreading as year was added to year, has made the country of their choice rank second to none in modern accomplishments. The seeds they scattered ripened into the fullness of a plentiful harvest, and schoolhouses, churches, cities, towns, telegraphs, railroads and princely dwellings occupy the old “camp-grounds” of the Sauks, Foxes and other kindred tribes of red men.

Later, the viewpoint of the author(s) on Native American cultures becomes more clear:

… They toiled not, neither did they spin. They subsisted upon the fruits of the chase, and dwelt in rude tents or camped in the open air. To them the arts of industry were unknown and unpracticed. They occupied the land, but improved it not. The command of the great Creator that by the sweat of his brow man should earn his daily bread, was lost upon them. Of flocks and herds they had none, while the earth was regarded by them as only a hunting-ground that had been created by the Great Spirit for their special benefit and occupany [sic]. The history of such a people is one full of interest.

The same volume recognizes a John Huff – “who is believed to be the first white man that visited the territory now included in Jefferson County;”  and my other source (A Fair Field by Susan Fulton Welty) goes into detail about him. However, we know  that French trappers and traders had explored much of the state and beyond well into the 1700’s, so that title cannot be verified (nor do I see any special significance in it).

Tallgrass Prairie

Tensions between Native Americans and the settlers continued to rise. The War of 1812, for instance, had the British government supplying the tribes with guns and powder in an attempt to bolster their fighting power and resistance to settlement. The warrior chief Black Hawk (who had proved himself by being vital in wiping out the Ioway tribe), by the mid-1800’s mark, had risen to become the central chief of the Sauk and Fox tribes, followed shortly by Keokuk. There are a few conflicting sources on the triggers behind the Black Hawk War - the end result was the crushing of all Native holdings east of the Mississippi. Over time, mainly through the sale of the their lands, the tribes continued their westward journey, paving the way for settlers.

It’s noteworthy that Jefferson County has no history of violence between the settlers and the Native Americans, who, despite having sold the land, could still be seen traversing the county in abundance during the early settler years.

(At this point History of Jefferson County becomes a technical and obscure list of land grants, casualties from “the war of the rebellion,” political records, (oddly) a copy of the Constitution of the United States, “Practical Rules for Every Day Use,” and Abstract of Iowa State Laws (including two pages on “Intoxicating Liquors”), among other interesting but irrelevant sections. I recommend it for that time-capsule-like quality, but it may not be the most reliable source.)

The Founding of Jefferson County and the Origin of “Fair-field.”

Although John Huff had first staked out some holdings in the area of the Blackhawk Purchase, the first settlers in this area were the Kentuckians Thomas Lambirth, Samuel Scott Walker, and James Tilford (and their families). The time was February 1836, and the place was Round Prairie. By the end of that year the population in the Round Prairie area was around 57 people including children. Things as we know them began to take shape.

The center of the County is where Larch Ave would cross Reservoir 2.

“The history of Fairfield dates from the first Monday in March, 1839.” (History) It was around this time that county became legally separated from Henry county and officially surveyed to find the county seat. “They finally chose a bit of gently rolling prairie, bordered on the north and easy by a small creek, and fringed with timber, situated one and a half miles south and half a mile west of the exact center of the county. …”by driving a stake to be considered the center of said location,” in what is now Central Park.” (”A Fair Field“) The Square, then, was the most convenient “central” location for the entire county (the real center point, from my estimation, is in the middle of Reservoir 2 where Larch Ave would cross it).

It was during this time that the large Bonnifield family had settled in. Their cabin, being a popular social hub (given several unmarried daughters live there, and being the place for unofficial church services), was the natural meeting place for the finished surveyors to come and discuss their work – particularly, what name to apply to the new County Seat.

“They may not have known that it had been called ‘Paynesville’ in the original legislative bill, or that this name had been struck out and ‘Randolph’ substituted. … But Governor Lucas had vetoed the bill in which their names appeared, and no name was included in the one later enacted. The Commissioners were free to chose, and in the discussion of the pretty prairie they described, they appealed to Mrs. Bonnifield for her opinion. She suggested “Fairfield” for the “fair field.” Her choice was instantly approved and adopted.

Twenty states now have towns named Fairfield, and it may be that some others fit their sites as well as Fairfield, Iowa. Still, Fairfield, Iowa, has a unqiue name in that it is both a memorial and a joke, as well as an accurate description. Nancy Bonnifield must have laughed to herself when she thought of it. Not every woman can name a town for her family, even by a synonym. But that a “Fair” field is a “Bonny” field, no one can deny.”

Pioneer business was no less typical here than elsewhere during these growing years. Oddly, we have more trees now than we did then – in 1841, one Henry B. Mitchell was crossing the Crow Creek in his ox-cart, near where Chautauqua Park is now, and broke an ox-tongue. There were no trees big enough or suitable enough to make a new one, and had to make due without. By 1880, however, Fairfield was nicknamed “The Forest City,” a clear break from the almost complete prairie it had previously been.

The history pours on thick now, and transcribing and compiling all I’ve read so far (simply skimming) would take vastly too long. From here on in, I hope to paint a picture of a growing community and perhaps spark some interest to learn more.

The Square, 1908

In 1840, Fairfield had a population of 110. By the end of 1847, that number was 651, and by 1851 it was nearly 1,000.

In 1845 the county had organized into the following townships: Round Prairie, Lockridge, Walnut, Cedar, Penn, Liberty, Fairfield, Locust Grove, Black Hawk, Des Monies, Polk and Buchanan. Towns once active in the county that no longer exist: Mt. Starling, Absecum, Parsonsville, Wooster, Vega, Glendale, Krum, Baker, Merrimac, Milton, Perlee, Brookeville, Woolson, Veo, Coalport, Cross Lanes and Jockey Hollow.

On October 13th, 1852 Fairfield had its first “Annual Fair” near the present intersection of West Broadway and North Fourth Street. At the second Annual Fair, over eighty-three different varieties of apples were exhibited – one Charles Cox showed forty-nine from his orchard alone. In 1854 the first Iowa State Fair was held here, and again the next year, before it began to be held in various towns in Eastern Iowa, eventually moving to Des Monies in 1886.

The first train reached Fairfield on September 1st, 1858, to a cheering crowd, cannons booming a salute, and a brass band. (It would be another 150 years before the residents of Fairfield no longer welcomed the sound of the significantly louder and more frequent horns.)

In the same year the recently-created Fairfield Public Library was having difficulties – as the Librarian (the Library was run out of his private office) said: “… All these arts and all this eloquence proved utterly futlie; and we want no better illustration of the dogma of total depravity than the startling fact that my next-door neighbor (a vender of peanuts, cakes, beer and candy) grew rich and increased in goods, while the Library languished or only maintained its existence. The result may also prove that, while every man has a stomach, very few have brains.” But by 1893 the first Carnegie Library west of the Mississippi was built, and established the Library for good.

In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, Jefferson County was home to 15,038 people. In 1870 it reached its peak  at 17,839. Today the county population is 16,181. However, in 1870 the population of Fairfield was only 2,226, whereas today it is over 9,000.

There was once a “Fairfield University,” which lasted from about 1854 to 1874.

Carnegie Library, with original roofing.

Parsons College was incorporated on Feb 24, 1875.

In 1882 the city erected a 185-foot tall steel-framed arc-light electric tower, making it the second city west of the Mississippi to have electricity.

The Fairfield Golf Club, founded in 1892, is possibly the first golf club west of the Mississippi.

In 1900 the Burlington Hawkeye wrote: “Fairfield is one of the brightest, most progressive inland cities in Iowa, and is a pride to the first district.”  This is not the only praise it received around this time, and we’ve seen that over the past 110 years Fairfield as maintained its position as a leader, a pioneer and the pride of Iowa.

The writing of these two posts took vastly longer than it should have, simply because I kept getting sucked in to the very engaging and colorful history of the county and town. I highly recommend reading my source material and seeing all the people, places and events I was not able to cover. These are available at the library (as soon as I return them) :

“A Fair Field” Revised Bicentennial Edition by Susan Fulton Welty

“History of Jefferson County Iowa” published by the Western Historical Company (1879)

“Men of Ancient Iowa” by Marshall McKusick   … and, of course, Wikipedia.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.

The History of Fairfield and Jefferson County, Part 1: The Beginning of Time to the End of Pre-History

When I say “history” – I mean it. In school our history lessons only covered the classical Euro-centralized conquests of the “uncivilized world.” Indigenous populations and their subsequent elimination are a side note, an unfortunate by-product of a less-enlightened age…. and that brings us to today.

I don’t buy it. I’m not a professional historian, but if I’m going to cover the history of our county and city, I’m going to start at the beginning. The REAL beginning!

It Starts:

Somehow, the universe began. Or maybe it didn’t, and we only think it did.

After the beginning of the universe, there was at least one generation of stars that formed, lived and exploded, some quite near where our Sun then formed. The formation of our solar system took place around 5 billion years ago (the age of the Sun being about 4.5 billion years old, the same as the Earth). Or maybe it all happened less than 10,000 years ago.

The geological history of the Earth is both fascinating and long – over the 4.5 billion years it’s been floating in space, single-celled life has been around for some 3+ billion years… but the more interesting critters (like multi-cellular organisms) have been around for a little more than a billion… so let’s skip ahead to the Paleozoic Era, starting about 543 million years ago, when things are can call “animals” began to take over the Earth.

The start of this era began shortly after the breakup of the supercontinent Pannotia, and ends around the formation of the more famous supercontinent Pangea. Or maybe it didn’t. In any event, it ended quite dramatically – with the sudden death of almost 90% of all life on the Earth.

But whatever. Now we get DINOSAURS! And with them, the Earth was shifting into the shape we all recognize – which means we can start focusing in on the area of North America we would come to call Iowa. It was during this time that the Western Interior Seaway existed, with Iowa being part of the adjoining coastal lowlands, being something of a tropical, swampy mix of floodplains and rivers.

Time keeps marching - K-T occurred, paving the way for the rise of mammals in the era known as Cenozoic - our current epoch. While early humans were evolving in Africa and Europe, North America became home to “megafauna” - short-faced bears, mastodons and mammoths, camels and lions, saber-toothed cats, and my favorite, the ground sloth (you can see a replication of the ground sloth at the Natural History Museum in Iowa City). All of these became extinct around the time human beings showed up.

The Ice Age and the Rise of Man:

The classroom version of the newly-evolved mankind’s travel to North America, if I remember third grade correctly, goes something like this: “The last Ice Age dropped the level of the ocean (the water going to create those massive glaciers), revealing to man the Bering Strait, between Russia and Alaska. Mankind followed the animals and plants, eventually finding himself on a new continent. He then traveled south, eventually traveling across all of North and South America.” (one account of how people came to live here)

There are a lot of holes in this theory, of course, but for our purposes it means that we now have human beings living in or around the area we call home today – and we have a name for them: “Clovis.” And this means I can now begin to use some of the books I checked out of the library – the first being “Men of Ancient Iowa” by Marshall McKusick (1964 – 977.7 MCKUSICK).

Mr. McKusick uses the term “Paleo-Indians” to describe the people living here, up until about 8000 BCE. By “living here” I mean Iowa, and Eastern Iowa specifically – note that means the entire eastern half of Iowa. It’s not until much later that we can narrow in on our county. Native cultures can be roughly categorized in the following groups (based on religious, tool and cultural developments) in Eastern Iowa:

Post-Glacial Paleo-Indians: 10,000 to 8000 BCE

The last great glacial advance in North America, known as the Wisconsin, reached its maximum stage around 40,000 years ago, reaching down into the northern third of Iowa and dropping the sea level by 460 feet (due to the massive amount of ice locked in the glacier). By 10,000 BCE Iowa was ice-free, and central Iowa made a transition from coniferous forests to deciduous forests (mainly of oak, around 8500 BCE). By 6500 BCE these forests were largely replaced by prairie grasses.

This time represents the earliest artifacts, in the form of fluted Clovis and Folsom spear points, which are typically found with the bones of camels, horses, mammoths and bison. As you can imagine, there is not a lot of information on this time-period.

Arachic: 7000 BCE to 1000 BCE

The introduction of small, side-notced stone points, suggesting that the bow and arrow was replacing the spear, marks the transition to Arachic society. The Arachic Indians were non-agrarian, lacking pottery and burial mounds (more on that soon). Diet and society revolved around hunting (bison, elk, deer, caribu) and gathering berries and seeds.

Knowledge of the Arachic time period comes mostly from small kill sites and campsites, as the tribes of the time tended to be nomadic and left little by way of artifacts. While copper mining may have started as early as 3000 BCE around Lake Superior, and copper was traded throughout North America, very little copper remains exist from this time period. Nevertheless, population growth and emphasis on a seed-based economy mark the transition to the Woodlands time period/culture.

Woodland: 1000 BCE to 1300 CE

Mr. McKusick asserts his belief that the transition to the Woodlands era was marked by a “superficial” introduction to and adoption of Early Woodland culture, and not by a migration of new Indians into the area (p. 80). The era divides into the Early, Middle and Late Woodland Cultures, and it is known for the introduction of two major innovations:

Pottery: Early Woodlands pottery has coarse granular tempering, crude and thick construction, low temperature firing, simple cone-shaped bases with straight-sided walls, and cord markings on both interior and exteriors of the pot. By contrast, Late Woodlands pottery is thinner, finer construction and stronger (1/8th of an inch thick walls, compared to 1/2 inch thick Early Woodlands).

Burial Mounds: “Burial mound” is a catch-all term for the significantly diverse practice of burying the dead. However, they can be grouped into seven categories: Red Ocher Burial, Cremation Pit, Burial Pit, Stone Alignment, Simple Mound, Linear Mound, and Effigy Mound.The various distinctions between these groups is outside of the scope of this article, although it is interesting to note that later Indian groups (such at the Oneota, all the way up until colonization) would occasionally use a pre-existing mound for burial.

Middle Woodlands: Somewhere around 500 BCE to 1 CE there was a sizable population growth, with regional populations becoming stabilized and more stationary. It’s not clear whether this means the full development of agriculture, but more work was being done in this area.

This may be due to the Hopewell Indians of the Illinois and Ohio valleys – at the time, they were reaching their apex, with numerous advancements in technology, political organization, religion and economic life passing, through osmosis more than migration, to the tribes of the surrounding areas. The Hopewell tribes were the first to make large ceremonial burial mounds, filling them with all sorts of specialized objects (pottery, spearheads, copper ornaments, shell beads, etc).

Late Woodlands: If Early and Middle Woodlands are marked by the growth of Hopewell ideas, the Late Woodland period is marked by their decline and usurpation by other tribes (most notably, the Oneota). Burial mounds were no longer filled with rich goods, eventually returning to simple bone deposits. Villages became smaller and more fortified, eventually being eclipsed by the Oneota.

Mississippi Oneota: 1300 to 1680 CE

The mark of the Mississippian culture that rose to power during this time was, oddly enough, was its Mexican influence. Extremely large temple mounds, compact and highly organized towns, widespread warfare patterns, the development of specialized crafts, and the introduction of a well-developed corn-based agricultural system were the hallmarks of the “Middle Mississippi culture” – of which the Upper Mississippi culture was a smaller reflection, lacking large temples and permanent houses, suggesting a less-tight social network. In fact, the term “Mississippi culture” is only loosely applied to Iowa and the Upper regions, following the basic idea of the Middle culture but lacking several important hallmarks.

This was the conquest by the Oneota culture – as a “reorientation” of the Middle Mississippi culture, it spread north following the major rivers. (I should note that, at this point and further on, no significant societal developments occurred on the prairies – other than nomadic tribes that followed game (bison, buffalo, etc), most of what we would call “developing society” occurred around streams and rivers, and in more forested areas.) One could think of the Oneota culture as a pragmatic mix of Middle Mississippian agricultural and societal ideas and Woodlands-era emphasis on hunting and life further north. The question of conquest over vs. assimilation of the Woodlands-era natives is unresolved – in either case, the Oneota people and culture moved in virtually unopposed.

The spread of the Oneota natives and culture touched eight Midwestern states, and some of the tribes that can be identified with the Oneota include Oto, Missouri, Osage, Winnebago and Ioway.

Historic Ioway: 1680 to 1840 CE

By this time French missionaries and trappers had already explored most of Iowa, although in a very informal way. The record shows that the Oneota continued to adapt European advances (guns, horses, iron tools, etc), but at their own economic disadvantage. Large-scale trade had not existed before then, and the inability of the tribes to retain self-sufficiency (unable to manufacture guns and iron, for instance) manifested an increased reliance upon the trading of furs. With the increasing alignment of various European factions and the increasing need for furs, tribes became more war-prone in an effort to establish larger tracts of territory.

At the same time, the introduction of European diseases began to wreak havoc on native populations – sometimes entire villages would die within a matter of months, with reports from some settlers of walking through “ghost-towns” in which the population had either died or ran away. In any event, the increased presence of Europeans generally eroded the life of the natives.

The Ioway were an interesting tribe – as described by Nicolas Perrot: “Never in the world were seen greater weepers than those peoples; their approach is accompanied with tears, and their adieu is the same. They have a very artless manner, also broad chests and deep voices. They are extremely courageous and good hearted. They often kill [buffalo] and deer while running after them. They are howlers; they eat meat raw, or only warm it over the fire. They are never satiated for when they have food they eat night and day; but when they have none they fast very tranquilly. They are very hospitable, and are never more delighted then when they are entertaining strangers.”

The Ioway continued to live in the state for another century, until dwindling population and increased pressure from tribes and settlers forced the tribe to sell their lands and move to reservations in Kansas and Nebraska. The final battle between the Ioway and the combined Sac and Fox tribes took the Ioway by surprise, was more massacre than battle.

I’ll end Part 1 with the elimination of the Ioway tribe, as we’ve now entered into the historical period and the rise of the settlers. Up next – Part 2: The First Settlers to Today.

The annual History Fair for the district served by the Great Prairie Area Education Agency was held March 16 at the Fairfield Arts and Convention Center, with schools from 15 surrounding cities attending. Eleven Maharishi School students were selected to advance to the state competition, being held May 3rd in Des Moines at the Sate Historical Building.

This year’s theme was “Innovation in History: Impact and Change.” Innovation suggests creative new approaches to any facet of life, within a historical context. This was a challenging topic, and students had to keep the entire theme in mind as they researched and created their presentations. Students presented their topics as a website, documentary, poster exhibit, performance, or historical paper. Only two projects in each category were chosen to advance to the state History Fair.

The students’ history teacher was Catherine Wadsworth. “All of the students did an amazing job; they developed their research and computer skills,” said Ms. Wadsworth. “The students challenged their arguments and developed critical thinking. Every one of them created fantastic projects.”

front: Bimba Shrestha, Navin Singh. middle: David Fleshman, Mickey DeAngelis, Alexander Hauptman, Dia Huggins, Heilani Muehlman, Leanna Miller, Camille Goodale and Hifza Akber, Solaris Nite

The Maharishi School winners are: Navin Singh, How the Camera Changed our Lives, an individual exhibit; David Fleshman and Mickey DeAngelis, Braille: Illuminating Darkness, Advancing Society, a group exhibit; Camille Goodale and Hifza Akber, Sign Language: The Unspoken, a group documentary; Leanna Miller and Heilani Muehlman, The Grapevine of Ballet and Isadora Duncan Dance, a group documentary; Dia Huggins, Biofuel: Why Now? Why Not Before?, a historical paper; Bimba Shrestha, Music Television Changed Music, a website; Alexander Hauptman and Solaris Nite, Antibiotics, a website.

Thanks to Catherine Wadsworth, Kathy Shaw, Karen Price and numerous parent volunteers who put in a tremendous effort to make the event successful for all.

The History Day competition is sponsored by the National History Day Foundation in collaboration with the State Historical Society of Iowa.

I had the pleasure of meeting with FHS teacher extraordinaire Scott Slechta yesterday to discuss the possibility of his students blogging for Fairfield Voice. It was a great meeting, with a positive outcome. At the end of the meeting however, Scott got serious and asked me if this would cost the school anything. When I assured him that it would not, he was relieved, for as we all know, our district has to cut millions from its budget to accommodate larger budget cuts at the State level. Which reminded me…

Education Cuts Hurt

Reminded me that I’ve  been meaning to write about this for a while, but  life got in the way. So here goes…

A few weeks ago, the Iowa Independent reported “Education to endure 58% of budget cuts from the State budget. 58%! At the time I thought, “are you shi***ng me?”  I mean, one of the reasons my family and I moved to Iowa was due to the quality of the education system. We are the home to the standardized Iowa test after all…

58% indeed. Which led to millions (my apologies, I can’t find the exact figure right now. ..) of dollars being cut from Fairfield’s education budget, which will likely end up as cuts in the arts (among other things of course) because they seem to always get cut before anything else. (But that’s fodder for another post…)

I just can’t help but to be angry about this. Angry at the State, angry at Washington. I still support what the White House is doing, however, both the President and the First Lady (as most Presidents and First Ladies have done for every administration I’ve followed) have spoken out about the importance of education in America. Yet, here’s where slogans such as “No Child Left Behind” really get us -  “The United States now ranks eighteenth in Education among the World’s industrial nations” – The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development November 19th, 2008

Eighteenth? Really? The world leader that is these United States?

I have always believed that there is nothing more important to the future of our country than education. And I know that many of you do too, particularly the group of wonderful, giving people who teach our children. My gosh, I received an email from a teacher at FHS that had a timestamp of 4:15 AM on it a couple of weeks ago. This underpaid, over-extended group has got our future in their hands. Yet, our government, who continues to talk a good game about education, continues to take these amazing public servants’ budgets away. Leaving them with wonderful choices such as “do we buy math books or a couple of trumpets” to make instead of being able to put that time into our children or, perhaps, into getting some sleep.

I am appalled that Iowa Governor Culver has cut so deeply into our future. Surely, governing is not easy. Governing is about making tough choices. There are major trade-offs that have to be made. I understand, I really do. But if education is his “centerpiece” as indicated on his campaign website, “Issues” Nov 7, 2006 – “Drawing on his experience as a teacher, Culver has focused on education as a centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign. As Governor, Culver will expand Iowa’s accredited early education programs, raise teacher salaries, create innovative programs to keep new graduates in Iowa to teach, and make college more affordable and accessible for Iowa students” then I am really confused.

It’s time for this madness to stop. This country is in trouble. It has been for years. And it’s not just due to what we read about in the headlines. I’d suggest that a big dose of what is wrong is that we (the government) have NOT prioritized education. For if we did, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of huge budget cuts year in and year out. We wouldn’t be making the already hard job of teaching our children ever harder.

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself. – John Dewey

I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Dewey and I couldn’t believe more in education – and I know that I’m not the only citizen who feels this way. Our government? I’m just not so sure anymore…

What’s your take?

Fairfield’s Singing Cedars Early Childhood Program is sponsoring a very special presentation by world renowned early childhood educator Helle Heckman entitled “The Child in the Care of the Authentic Adult”. She will address the issues facing anyone working with children 9 and under, such as parents, teachers, home-based caregivers, and home schooling parents in this very unique and engaging presentation.

“For the last few years I have traveled the world visiting kindergartens, childcare workers, nurseries and schools. Everywhere I have met a growing need to council parents about how to handle everyday life with small children. It takes guts for parents in this day and age to go against the stream and follow their intuition… knowing that children need to be given the space to develop naturally and in their own speed and way.” -Helle Heckman

Helle speaks of the importance of not engaging the child in testing or academic learning for the first seven years and advocates allowing the child to develop naturally through creative play. She says that children are based in doing and it is necessary for them to “do the work of life in order to be tuned into life”.

“It is a great honor for us to be able to bring Helle Heckmann to Fairfield” says Eniko Reeder, co-founder of Singing Cedars. “Helle was a huge inspiration to me. I met her at a critical point in my training… here was this truly authentic woman who brought all of herself to the children. I totally resonated with that as a way to teach.”

Helle is the founding director of Nøkken, a pioneering kindergarten in Denmark of mixed age children from 1 year to 7 years. She has traveled and taught throughout the Americas, Canada and Europe for the past eighteen years and is currently on a world tour. She is a member of the Danish Steiner Waldorf Kindergarten Association and serves on the board of The International Early Childhood Association.

The program will be at 7pm Wednesday, November 5, at the Public Library in Fairfield, IA.  Suggested donation of $15.

Presentation sponsored by the Singing Cedars Waldorf Community in Fairfield.  For more information call 641 469-3196.

“Every single day I am standing in the garden greeting the children – they can count on that. The children look me in the eyes and what they see is, there is an adult who knows what she is doing, who is real and authentic. That is what the children of today need more than ever.” -Helle Heckman

Gordon Rader

I met Gordon Rader through Astred Jones. Astred recently graduated from Gordon’s program, interned at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, and promptly got hired on full-time. Astred deserves all kinds of kudos – she’s smart, ebullient, has tremendous perseverence and is dedicated to the culinary arts. I’ll venture to guess that she was Gordon’s favorite student this year. Astred decided that Gordon, being the chef he was, should be introduced to Fairfield’s eclectic foodie culture and to me, being the food snob that I am. We met at Revelations over pizza on an ArtWalk night last fall and our introduction immediately spun out of control into foodie debate to the point where the rest of our party possibly started to feel alienated!

I did not keep in touch with Gordon since that evening several months back, but something about the whole sustainability and ongoing food discussion here got me thinking that I should respond to his long-outstanding Facebook friend request. It’s a good thing too. Gordon immediately invited me out to check out the Culinary Arts premises at Indian Hills. I trekked over to Indian Hills on Wednesday and was pleasantly surprised by the setup.

The kitchen has the standard setup, but what was of real interest to me was what’s called the “Studio”. Gordon’s recognized that the media frenzy around food should be a wave ridden with care. He’s also recognized (before any other program at Indian Hills, I should add) that social networking has value. The studio incorporates a ceiling-mounted camera pointed at an instructional counter, behind which lie the standard kitchen accoutrements: 6-burner stove, commercial oven, deep fryer, and more. The idea here is that students should be able to create instructional videos and upload them to Facebook, YouTube, wherever. A large flat-screen mounted on the wall nearby provides feedback, but is also used for instructional videos.

Gordon’s trying to instill the core of social networking and cosmopolitan cuisine into his students. There’s obvious resistance though. He regularly deals with the “But Chef I don’t like that Mexican shit” and “Chef, nobody wants that spice stuff”. It’s the sort of thing that would make my patience wear thin very very quickly. Gordon takes it all in stride (albeit with a bit of Hell’s Kitchen-esque attitude) and cajoles his students into realizing that culinary arts is not about making baked potatoes and some grilled beef alone.

Gordon’s challenge is large enough with only the idea of introducing global cuisine to a large disinterested student population. He has taken his students on trips to France and Italy. But add to this that he maintains a quite interesting blog which he’s working on getting his students to participate in as a general requirement for his courses, and his regular updates to FoodBuzz, and you just start getting the sense of Gordon’s drive. Watch his Twitter feed and you realize that this is a man who’s maybe marginally insane, but in a good way

Gordon invited me, my wife and my friend Rushad as his guests to his students’ Contemporary American Dinner special menu on Thursday, July 9th, prepared by students Mangal Tamang and Ron Wixom. My wife and I are vegetarian and the chefs-du-jour very graciously prepared vegetarian options for our culinary delight. Mangal’s a Fairfield resident, via Nepal.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had the snobbish and overly-opinionated view that Indian Hills could largely be written off. It’s an institution that does not inspire inventiveness or innovation as far as I could tell. I’m having to rethink all my prejudices thanks to meeting Gordon Rader.

In the upcoming parts of this series I’ll bring you Gordon’s vision of SE Iowa’s culinary future, including the American Culinary Foundation sub-chapter for this area and his work on sourcing locally, organics and green energy at the Indian Hills program. And reviews of the American Contemporary Dinner by Mangal and Ron.