Following are opening paragraphs to a chapter of my work in progress, A Working Life. They begin a section on moving to Big Grove Township in 1993. It occurred to me the second paragraph should happen and I spent an inordinate amount of time crafting it. This opening stands up, I believe.
Big Grove Township was established before Iowa Statehood. The first sawmill was built in 1839 by Anthony Sells on Mill Creek. Put the big groves of trees together with the sawmill and you have us. The oak, walnut, hickory, ash, elm, and cottonwood that once thrived among numerous pure springs were long gone when we bought our lot here. What dominates is the culture we and others brought with us to an area where what was native once existed in abundance yet no longer does. There is something essentially American in that.
Also quite American is forgetting about natives who lived here for thousands of years: ancient, unnamed hunter-gatherers, mound builders, and the Oneota culture, which flourished across the Upper Mississippi River Valley for several centuries and gave rise to the historic tribes later known as the Ioway, Meskwaki, and Sauk. Oneota peoples cultivated maize, beans, and squash; built villages along rivers and streams; and moved seasonally across a landscape defined not by fixed boundaries but by ecological, social, and ceremonial relationships.
Not far from here, a small museum once displayed cases of stone points, pottery, and tools gathered from nearby fields—fragments of those lives, removed from the ground and arranged for viewing, now gone themselves.
In such context, we moved to Big Grove Township in August 1993.
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