Last Updated on November 17, 2025
To accomplish all of this, I was in multiple parts of five states: New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin; I traveled by two types of trains, four airplane trips and about 1,000 miles in family cars and a rental car.
The main purpose of my trip with Sandy was to work at Nachusa, a prairie owned by The Nature Conservancy in Illinois. It has been restored to prairie from farmland purchased or donated for more than thirty years, and it has a herd of bison to help with the restoration. When the bison herd is culled to keep it around 100 head, those bison are given to Tribal Nations for whom the bison is a part of their heritage.
Since 2007, Sandy has been returning for a week almost every September to help collect seed heads of flowers and to mill them so they will be ready for re-planting with the first snows. It was my first time, and what a beautiful sight to see the fields of yellow and gold saw-tooth sunflowers and goldenrod, asters of many hues, and milkweed to name a few I knew. We also were there to help with a Saturday fall festival.
Sandy was born in Illinois and still has family there. We had lunch with two of her cousins on our way to Nachusa. Three others joined us at the festival, and we went out in a wagon to see the bison up close. Later, a couple of us ate bison burgers. Sandy commented, “it is the circle of life,” but she ate a hot dog.
In Dwight, we saw a bank designed in 1906 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Pontiac had a Rt. 66 museum where we met a group of Brits following the Route all the way to Wisconsin so I could see the Wisconsin River joining the Mississippi River from Point Lookout. Heading there, the narrow roads curved between the acres of corn that stretched as far as the eye could see to the edge of a sky that was equally endless. We passed through neat and prosperous towns, some with a river running through them. Their main streets were lined with brick buildings, lovely flowers on the light posts and Civil War statues in the square. Some of these towns honored their immigrant heritage. In Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, a town with a Scandinavian background, forty trolls are all around in stores and outside. New Glarus was founded by Swiss people, and there is a Swiss Village Museum of original buildings built in the Swiss tradition. Pendarvis in Miner-al Point, Wisconsin, has reconstructed small stone houses originally built by Cornish miners who went there to mine lead. Then there was Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, Taliesin, in Spring Green, a very different sight from those towns. It is built on land farmed by his Welsh grandparents whom he honored by farming and leaving other acres as they were. Each window looked out on
lovely views of land and water.
As we were driving through the farmland, I often thought of the first lines of Katherine Lee Bates’ poem, America the Beautiful:
O Beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties,
Above the fruited plain!
She wrote this inspired by her trip to Pikes Peak in 1893.
So, if you are still reading, why am I writing this travelogue? One reason is that there was so much beauty in the simplest of things that I needed to share. The other reason is that we all need to get out of our comfort zones and get to know other people and places within this beautiful country. On this trip, for the first time, I was traveling with a cane and pain, and I often had to rely on the kindness of strangers. I was never let down. One not very young gentleman, who helped lift my large suitcase on and off elevators and the train, said as we parted ways, “God must have sent me here today to help you.”
As Thanksgiving approaches, may there be celebrating of home and heart with family, may you take a walk in the crisp air with a friend and kick the leaves, may you marvel at the glory of a sunset and may you share kind-ness with friends and strangers alike.
Stephanie Leddy, President
Charlestown Residents’ Council