Sub Terra Vita #39: Questing for Normalcy: Roots Evolving to a Future of Growing

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

March 14, 2016

#39: Questing for Normalcy: Roots Evolving to a Future of Growing

Osceola's roots go deep, and far back, as a commercial center serving a farming area. Founded in the 1830s, the Osceola area welcomed Scandinavian, French, German and other immigrants during the post-Civil War boom. Through to the end of the 19^th Century, the new farmers cleared the wilderness of forest, planted crops, raised livestock, and grew families The people of the heritage married neighbors, setting forth more generations, gave them schooling, set them to work very, very hard, every day and all day, to build a great Middle America.

The values of that Middle America continued, and Osceola families continued to seed generations to local schools, to two world wars, and Korea and Southeast Asia, and to work in the Twin Cities, and even to return to the heritage to live. They built a community around Osceola. In the late 1950s, the changes in the USA following the Second World War started to seep and filter into the roots of local life.

The changes in Osceola, like changes everywhere in America, began as an evolution of slow growth and adaptation. As a result, the change might have succeeded to reflect and keep those past values. Yet, things inevitably changed, as things always do. Even as the education boom post-Sputnik radically changed America's demography, and people's potential and expectations, so too did education, work, play and fun change in Osceola.

In my youth, things looked cosmetically different in town, although the values of heritage, neighbors, work, church, factories, soil, crops, dairy, schools, athletics, and family remained the long standing values until I graduated from high school. In Osceola, we knew these values “our Normalcy.”

Of the more noticeable differences since then: the current post office housed the Bank of Osceola; the dry cleaner today housed a smaller post office; the laundromat/car wash lot had the milk house (from where Wendy Viebrock delivered milk to houses individually, and drank a cup of coffee with the family, on occasion, before the next stop); Osceola had two hardware stores; a co-op sat on the corner of US 243 and the WI Hwy 35; the feed mill worked for farmers on Second Avenue, where the grocery store now sits; and, the industrial park, just beginning, contained mostly an open, empty field; few houses outside of the village limits; and working family farms all around it all.

Many of these appearances have changed, because these structures outgrew their presence or usefulness. But other communities in the valley closer to the metropolitan area exploded recently. In those places, demography and economics changed the nature of work, play, entertainment and education. Whether they did so successfully and preserved their core values remains for their own evaluation.

Nonetheless, they serve as harbingers of what Osceola must confront very shortly, and more rapidly than in the past transformations. As past provides prologue, the future of Osceola offers many exciting opportunities as a model for other communities to do something others failed to do before: Get their transition to the future right. How? So as to save the essential values—the normalcy—that provides strength; guides the updating and transformation of old structures (both physical and social); and allows a stronger, prosperous, safer and healthier community to emerge from a radical 21^st Century pace of transition.

If the change in Osceola reflects its roots, instead of digging them up for valueless and uncertain foundations, it must combine old and new, both people and structures. The community as a whole made mistakes in the last 25 years, part too-much politics and money, and part too-little involvement by people directly affected. We cannot change any of the past, whether good or not. From here, to create a future, where the normalcy that made Osceola a great home and community will continue, the process of change has to involve everyone. Consider this, with the utmost seriousness. Prepare to engage the future, in person.