Brown County Seasons

~by Mark Blackwell

Like most places in the Midwest, Brown County has four regular seasons. It also has about eight to twelve sub-seasons, depending on the year. We just finished up one of those sub-seasons which turned out to be about the hottest “Dog Days” I can remember. It was so hot this year, according to a friend of mine, his hens were layin’ hardboiled eggs. He said he lost some of his chickens when they up and headed off to KFC in the belief that conditions there couldn’t be any worse. But things are getting better now as we head into another one of those sub-seasons, “Late Summer Brown County Appreciation season.”

While the LSBCA season is not as famous as our fall, there are those who enjoy the calm quiet days between the beginning of squirrel season and the first turning of the foliage. Days that start with cool mornings and stretch into warm afternoons punctuated with the whirring of grasshoppers and katydids, and the lonesome calls of mourning doves. It is a time of anticipation. A time of nature beginning its metamorphosis into autumnal glory.

The misty mornings, warm days, and cool evenings are perfect for hiking, camping, canoeing, and a whole lot of other outdoors stuff. If you are enjoying a visit to Brown County at this time, then you are a participant and a contributor to the LSBCA season, and I thank you. For the local folks it’s time to gather in the last of the garden harvest and time to check the water level in the cistern. Also, it’s time to start thinking about getting in enough firewood to get through one of Brown County’s later seasons.

After the last grasshopper sings its song there is a noticeable shift in the daylight. When the cool mornings turn to downright chilly, and the woodstove has been fired up a time or two, there comes a day when the green hues of the trees of summer give way to the brown, gold, yellow, and red of fall. A quiet call goes out from the hills and hollers beckoning to every person with an artistic soul. It really was artists, at the turn of the 20th Century, who discovered the rustic charm of the hills and touted that charm to the wider world. There were a considerable number of folks already established here who felt no need to go out of their way to extol the many virtues of county to outsiders.

The old-timers were content to live their lives as they saw fit. They had been getting along without recourse to modernity and didn’t see a lot of advantages in the complexities of trying to keep up with a world that didn’t know how to be content. But the future cannot be held at bay for long, and many of those caught up in the heedless rush for the next new thing felt that maybe something had been lost in a past that was so quickly being discarded.

When stories about the beauty of the hills and the hand-built log cabins that nestled in the hollers by little spring-fed creeks got published in big city newspapers, people took notice. To those people living their modern lives in those big cities, Brown County sounded like a way to go back and visit simpler times. And so, the tourist industry was born.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that tourism in Brown County really caught on. Before that, the unimproved dirt roads were barely drivable and the same could be said for most of the early automobiles. In the times before that, horses, wagons, and carriages were the only modes of transportation making day trips impossible. You could get to Helmsburg or Fruitdale by way of the railroad that came through in 1906. But then you had to hire a carriage to get to Nashville. It took most of a day to get there—that is if it didn’t rain and the roads weren’t muddy, because then it took a lot longer.

When tourism became popular, it brought quite a few changes to the county. Tourists needed to be fed—so the restaurant business took off.

Automobiles needed gasoline, oil, tires, and repairs—so blacksmiths and livery stables gave way to mechanics and garages. Folks needed places to stay—so hotels were provided. And tourists wanted souvenirs to take back home as mementos of their visit.

The desire for souvenirs led to county folks turning their talents towards crafts like basket making, wood carving, quilting, and more, to create those souvenirs. And then shops were needed to sell the local crafts. Pretty soon the little village of Nashville, that consisted of fewer than four hundred people in 1900, began to resemble the tourist destination it is today.

Like the artists who came to Brown County and made important contributions, tourists have also made major changes to the way of life here. The qualities that make the county what it is, the surviving attitude of self-reliance, the crafts people and artists, and the people who come to visit, are all part of a symbiotic web that we call “Our Brown County.”