52 Ancestors – 52 Weeks

The theme for Week 15 is “Fire.” I chose to write about a fire that changed my family forever.

My dad, John Joseph Fitzgerald, was a farmer and he really didn’t like farming all that much. He was raised on a farm in the Town of Lebanon, Waupaca County, Wisconsin and since he did not attend high school he didn’t have a whole lot of options for work. I suspect he chose farming because he knew how to do it.

Dad married my mother Mary Elizabeth Flannery in 1947 and they took up farming on eighty acres of land in rural Bear Creek, Waupaca County, Wisconsin. They had four children, two girls and two boys. By 1963 my parents decided that they wanted to do something else for their livelihood. Dad knew the feed mill business from his farming experience and he located a feed mill in Shiocton, Outagamie County, Wisconsin, about fifteen miles from where we were living.

During the summer of 1963 our family moved to Shiocton. I had finished eighth grade and would be starting high school. My sister Jean had finished seventh grade and had one more year of grade school to finish. My brother Don was entering sixth grade and my brother Tim third grade. In those days there was no family discussion about moving and changing schools. Children did as they were told by their parents.

Our family adjusted well to living in Shiocton. People were friendly, there were lots of kids our age in the neighborhood and dad had a successful business at Shiocton Milling Company, a former dance hall.

In the fall of 1967, after completing high school, I moved to Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin to attend Edgewood College. It was a difficult adjustment for me to leave my family.

On the morning of Saturday, October 21, 1967 I received a call from my mother’s sister, Aunt Rita, who lived in the Madison area. She called to tell me that dad’s mill in Shiocton had burned to the ground the night before.

Details of the fire were described in the Appleton Post Crescent (see below). The fire destroyed the building and all its contents. The local fire department of twenty-five firefighters took several hours to put the fire out. The fire was fueled by years of feed and dust and there was no stopping it. There was never a determination made of what started the fire.

The fire changed all of our lives. Dad struggled with what to do next as he did not want to return to farming. I remember my mother telling me that dad would lie in bed at night in a full sweat worrying about the future.

It didn’t take long for my parents to decide what to do. The family moved to Sun Prairie, Dane County, Wisconsin, on January 1, 1968 because my parents had purchased the feed mill there. My siblings had to change schools in the middle of the school year. I was able to stay at Edgewood College and continue my education.

I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if there had been no fire and our family had remained in Shiocton, Wisconsin.