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The little brick house built in 1853 was donated by Castle Rock Foundation, a private local foundation, so the society didn't have to spend any money to acquire it. But it also didn't have any money to restore it. The society had acquired an historical gem but had few resources for polishing it.
With little money and few volunteers, the historical society was looking for help wherever it could find it.
The first place it found help was right down the street from Ardys Keilholtz, president of the historical society. Her neighbor is Janet Alcamo, a member of the Bluff Country Master Gardeners Club. Keilholtz had a heck of a big project for Alcamo: restore the gardens at Goerke House to how they might have looked when the original inhabitant, Henry Goerke, lived there.
Because the garden restoration could be started right away without a huge cash influx, it seemed the logical place to start, Keilholtz said. Money for historic restoration is hard to come by when you live in a community of less than 1,000. And what money they did raise — $5,440 to match a grant given by the National Trust for Historic Preservation — was used to pay for a historic sites report. That report was necessary so they would know how to proceed with the restoration, said Jeanne Fugina, who wrote the grant request.
But it's just the first step in a long, expensive restoration process and the society wanted to show it was serious about restoring this house.
So the gardeners got to work.
"It hadn't been tended for years," Alcamo said. "There are five or six of us who get together at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and that's when we do major work."
To get the plantings right, Alcamo found a group in Missouri working on a similar project and received plant lists and diagrams from them. Then she started hunting for plants.
"We got donations of plants from people's yards, and we also went to Seed Savers Exchange," Alcamo said. "We got Grandpa Ott's morning glories. That's the whole background for the herb and perennial bed. We have that growing on a grapevine trellis."
For Alcamo, this was a project literally in her own back yard, as it is a block from her house. She and the other volunteers cleared out weedy areas and found the bones of past gardens.
In the perennial/herb border, they anchored the bed with the morning glories, building a trellis of grapevine because those materials would have been available when the Goerke family gardened there. And because Grandpa Ott's morning glories are a German variety, it's possible that the German-born Goerkes were growing that variety.
Other plants in that garden include coreopsis, coneflowers, lupines, yarrow, baptisia, asters and wild ginger along with mint, thyme, German chamomile, Johnny Jump up, sweet William, foxglove, feverfew, pulmonaria and lamb's ear. There is also phlox, bleeding heart, zebrina malva, cleome, buttercups, iris, cranesbill geraniums, daylilies, hesperis, hollyhocks and perennial sweet pea.
But perennials are just the beginning. The really important garden for the Goerkes would have been the vegetable garden, and that, too, has been revived. On the sunny western side of the house, the garden is filled with pole beans, corn, sunflowers, speckled looseleaf lettuce, tomatoes, cabbages, dill, Swiss chard, kohlrabi, parsley and marigolds as an edging to deter insects. There are also onions, garlic chives, borage and nasturtiums.
A third garden has been devoted to antique annuals including snapdragons, Amish cockscomb celosia, Empress of India nasturtiums, red spider zinnia, globe amaranth, yellow marigolds, balsam and moss roses.
But gardening is just the beginning. When society members get the historic sites report later this month, they will have a guideline for repairing, restoring and preserving the building.
"It was the first courthouse in Buffalo County," Keilholtz said. "It's just a very simple little brick house, but it was used as the very first courthouse."
Though people can tour the house, it's empty right now, which is why there's no admission fee.
Fugina said the plain little house is worth restoring because of its history. Henry Goerke was the second white man to settle in Fountain City and his wife, Katherine was the first white woman who settled permanently there. "They both came from Germany," she said, but they married in Galena, Ill. Henry returned to Fountain City with his bride in 1847 and bought out his partner in the trading post.
In 1853, Goerke bought a large section of land and began building his home. "Previous to that, they were living in the trading post," Fugina said. When the house was built, Goerke sold the trading post and moved to his new home.
In 1854, when Buffalo County seceded from Jackson County to become its own county, the county board needed a place to meet. That place was the Goerke House. "The first county board met at the Goerke residence, and it became the courthouse for seven years," Fugina said.
That makes this worth saving for both Goerke's history and the county's history, Fugina said.
"It's a lot of work and will continue to be a lot of work," Fugina said. "We want to repair, restore and preserve the house, and we're trying to do that for the grounds. We're trying to return it to what it was."
That's made more challenging by its hillside location. "Everything in Fountain City is on a hillside. The front yards were terraced. You can see remnants, and we want to return it to that," Fugina said.
Geri Parlin can be reached at gparlin@lacrossetribune.com or (608) 791-8225.
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