There is serenity now in a place I know like no other. It is around Scales Mound, in the deeply etched panorama of Jo Daviess County, in the northwest corner of Illinois, where the land is crayon green in the spring and fleece white in the winter and stays that way until the thaw. Its hills and valleys are sectioned past a thousand horizons with woods and contoured farm fields. There is fish and game. The air smells good.
No jet planes scream in the sky, the major highways are two-lane blacktops uncluttered by billboards, and small rivers run under the planks of back-road bridges. The people are kind, go to church, pursue virtue, work hard with the land and cling to t heir families. From all these things they harvest contentment.
Out of chaos, struggle, the Colonial revolution and the push westward, the American character was shaped, and it now shaped the land. In 1818 Illinois became a state that included the hills of Galena and Jo Daviess County, named for a Kentuckian who died a hero fighting in the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe.
In 1673, near here, above the point where Illinois now meets with Wisconsin and Iowa, its carved bluffs piercing the Mississippi River, Jacques Marquette, an exploring French priest, made the first wonderstruck reports on the vistas that lay before his astonished eyes. He noted the existence of lead, the fertility of the land and the variety of game. It was an open invitation to adventurers: the French coureurs de bois, trappers, frontiersmen, lead miners, speculators, soldiers and fortune hunt ers.
Finally, farmers came to this wilderness. To them, to be good was to be independent, rugged, hard-working and never-betraying. These were an uncommon people of dreams who, though they loved the virgin lands, could blink their eyes and see tilled fields, nice houses, stock grazing and a good water supply.
The Latin word for lead gave Galena, the county seat, its name, and lead made it into a river boomtown. Samuel Scales built a post house alongside a mound by a stagecoach trail. The town of Scales Mound, only 10 miles from Galena on the stagecoach line, was on the edge of the frontier, but Galena itself was the rich metropolis of the Northwest.
But the prosperous days of Galena ended suddenly. The surface veins of lead ran out, the gold rush of ’49 lured people away and the Galena River began to silt in, making the channel to the Mississippi unnavigable for cargo boats. Jo Daviess County se ttled into farming.
Like the heads of the families Hoppe, Schap, Grube, Boettner and Eversoll of that time, John Rudolph Hammer, a farmer from Saxony, Germany, took his family from the German countryside and migrated to America. They went west over historic trails, the past entering into them as they entered Illinois country. When they reached Scales Mound in 1852, they bought railroad land. In one year Scales Mound would be a town, in three the railroad would arrive and in eight the Civil War would begin. Theo Hoppe and Anton Schap, barely able to speak English, volunteered and spent four years in a blue uniform. Both were from the area that became Schapville.
John Rudolph Hammer brought his family to a place that rolled into the bottom land of a creek in a hidden valley 15 miles from Galena and three from Scales Mound. He came to farm. Like the others, Hammer subdued the land with an ax and plow. He built a house and, with three other men, founded a church.
Five generations, echoes of his spirit, came after him. His son, Bernhardt, fathered nine children. Of Bernhardt’s children, George Hammer became the father of Willis Hammer. Willis Hammer became the father of Willis Hammer Jr. Willis Hammer Jr. became the father of James Alan Hammer, born 110 years after John Rudolph Hammer reached Illinois country. Of the six generations, none rooted far from the old homestead.
For 40 years I have witnessed, in friendship and with a camera, the births and agings of three generations of the Willis Hammer family and their neighbors. When I asked, a neighbor told me that I was allowed to make pictures because “it was your work, and we did not want to deprive you of earning your living.”
A little beyond John Rudolph Hammer’s homestead, the Willis Hammer homeplace lies in the seclusion of a hollow. On land laced by roller-coaster gravel roads, you go up ridges, down into valleys and along river bottoms. Cattle and horses graze, hawks circle, jackrabbits dart into the road. In the woods, although you cannot see them, are deer. The winters are hard, long and cold. The growing season is less than five months. When it is winter and the air is frigid, at a distance, red barns are like linoleum patches on a background of brilliant snow, and you can see puffs of breath coming from a farmer doing his chores. All is crisp and pure.
On such a winter day in 1954, over a hundred years after John Rudolph Hammer homesteaded, his great-great-grandson, Billy Hammer, aged 13, waited to meet me on his back road, which butted into the blacktop that covered the old stage line. He smiled an easy greeting. His sister, Janet, had won a national sewing contest, and I had come to photograph her for a magazine. Billy led me into the generations of his family’s storybook landscape. Mildred, Bill Sr., Janet and Billy made me feel comfortable immediately. I did my work, ate delicious food and thought about coming back to recapture the wonderful feelings I got from them.
When summer came, I revisited the Hammers. To my surprise, Billy had grown almost a whole head taller. His joy in life had increased proportionately. I made a picture of him walking alongside his father, who was driving the tractor. That struck off a n idea: One day I would make a picture of Billy and his son in the same way.
In the years that followed, as Billy grew, I was also covering depressing stories, but when I came out to the Hammers, joy returned. After one of my closest friends was killed photographing a war, I went out to the farm to reassure myself that the world, somewhere, still made sense.
In the morning the sun rises over the ridge, and you truly know the day has begun. Roosters really crow, cows moo, pigs oink, church bells toll and streams swish and gurgle. People work, pray and play. They crochet doilies, quilt, can food, bake wond erful cakes and eat well. The ground smells the way ground should, the tractor groans power, the manure spreader enriches the earth, the bees fly to cover, a neighbor on a dusty road waves as he passes in a pickup, the hay is sweet, the scent of sila ge is slightly intoxicating, the farm dog runs barking alongside the sheep or cattle he herds, the crickets sing, the birds go about their business. Everything goes about its business in a natural way. In the evening the sun goes down over another ridge, and you know you have lived a sensible day.
(When I had concluded 20 years of making pictures and notes about the Hammer family, they were published in the book “Farm Boy.”)
That is why I welcomed the call I got from Millie Hammer: “I just heard in church tonight that the old Hoppe farm is for sale. You better come out. It’s just the right place for you!”
We bought the Hoppe farm in 1973. In 1983 we moved to the farm full-time so I could be closer, more involved, more of a neighbor, more of the time. And continue my work here.
For the next 20 years, I continued to make pictures of the Hammers, our neighbors, the land around us, which was changing because of the farm crisis, the progress of new communities and perhaps the coming of the 21st Century. I had now made 40 years of pictures, which became the book “Neighbors” and in which I was faced with the ultimate sadness of the deaths of those I had come to photograph. Of the Hammer family, Bill Hammer Sr. died in 1977; Bill Hammer Jr. died in December of 1990, a few months before his 50th birthday; two years later Mildred Hammer died.
Living in this farm community with rural people, I began to understand the truth of Ecclesiastes-to understand a little of the meaning of the seasons, birth, death, endings and beginnings. And I understand what Millie Hammer meant when she said: “Like it says in the Bible, `It came to pass.’ It didn’t say `It came to stay.’ “
