It is 1903. Arthur Kenney, with his wife Margaret and their two sons, buys two tracts of land in Mellen, Wisconsin. They’ll build a house on one and subsistence farm the other. Arthur will try his luck as a saloon keeper, but mostly work as a cook at lumberjack camps. This will lead to long stretches away from home, but they will still manage to have six more kids. The youngest, a daughter named Katherine, will become my mom.
Arthur working at a camp
The five Kenney boys
Mellen is a small town (population 1,000 in 1900) about as far north as you can go and still be in Wisconsin. Famous for its 1946 flood and for being the gateway to Copper Falls State Park. The high school sports teams are known as the Granite Diggers, but it’s been generations since any granite has been extracted in Mellen.
Mellen Flood of 1946
Copper Falls
Arthur passes away in December 1941, just days before Pearl Harbor. Margaret passes away in 1947. The land and house are left to my Aunt Mary, the most responsible of the siblings. Family lore has it they would have left it to one of the sons but for the fear that they would immediately sell to fuel the bender to end all benders. Mary lives in Milwaukee, but various other Kenneys occupy the house, as needs and considerations arise.
Mary Kenney
Kenney cousin picnic
My family lived in Milwaukee and, when we were kids, we’d spend part of our summers visiting relatives up north. By then it was either my Uncle John or my Uncle Francis living in the house, sometimes with the other living in an RV on the farmland, now lying fallow. Both had worked as cooks, so the vacations involved prodigious meals. We’d spend that week tromping around the woods, picking raspberries, visiting cousins, and generally living a life far from our Milwaukee experience. The house was an attraction in and of itself, with its spooky basement pantry, its ancient stove and its small winding staircase that led to tiny upstairs bedrooms.
Aunt Mary sold the house when she ran out of Kenneys that needed housing. Later, as she got older, she sold the land to my sister Monica and me. No one in our generation had a particular yen for the land but we were hopeful that it might pique the interest of someone in the next generation. It waited patiently, in benign neglect.
Kenney farmland
The Kenney ties to Mellen are deeply ingrained. After my dad died, I went up with my mom and we met my cousin Eileen and her mom, my Aunt Margaret, to see Copper Falls one last time. We ate at the Mellen diner before heading to the Falls and as we walked back to the car both women lamented that they had only seen two people they knew. Neither had lived in Mellen for over fifty years.
The Mellen- Kenney ties can be humbling too. After my mom died, my sister Kathy and I drove up to visit cousins we hadn’t seen in a long time. We stopped at the house and the current owner stepped out. He had never heard of the Kenneys and only knew of the previous owner. Kenneys built the house and owned it for over eighty years, but that time had come and gone. We would have stopped by the farmland, but we weren’t even sure where it was.
It is 2025. Monica and I have owned the farmland for decades, due as much to inertia as to heritage. An elevator conversation with my lawyer gives us a heads up – “don’t die owning land in another state.” With no one in the family expressing interest, we put it on the market.
Thus ends the physical connection between the Kenneys and Mellen. Of course it runs much deeper than that. It threads through our lives in ways we might not even notice. And in a treasure trove of memories, to be invoked as needs and considerations arise.
