Welcome to Agincourt, Iowa

GÜD BOOKS

We know the maternal role played by Necessity, but who’s the fertilizing-father of Invention? Lacking a name, we’re left to imagine Invention as a bastard child. That sure works for me.

Blessed with five manuscripts, two of them never before published in book form, a publisher has eluded me for the last couple years. Since the sand in my hourglass has drained almost entirely to the bottom, it’s time for a decisive — not to say desperate — measure: the world of publishing has grown by one. GÜD BOOKS has applied to the state for registration; we’ll soon have a P.O. box and a bank account. Only time will show the wisdom of this decision. We’ve also purchased a block of ISBN numbers.

Our first products will be five titles out-of-print or never before available in print versions. All deal with aspects of Dakota Territory’s last decade, 1880-1889, what we’re calling “The Dakota Quintet”. The first is the result of a twenty-five-year long investigation of my own. The others are works of both fact and fiction.

• FAITH & FORM: the Ecclesiological career of Benjamin Franklin Cooley. If you know me, you’ll be hard-pressed to not recognize the name: Rev. Cooley was rector of Gethsemane Episcopal church in Fargo for five years early in the target decade, 1881-1885.
• The Book of a Western Town is a vaguely fictional treatment of life in Fargo during those same years. Written by Ellen J. Cooley (née Hodges), clergy-wife of the good Father mentioned above. The Cooley’s time in Fargo were successful for the denomination but troubled for Rev. and Mrs. Cooley. She waited twelve years after their departure to write her novel, a thinly veiled tale of the abuse she endured; identities slightly disguised with borrowed names. Boom was published in 1897, went through one printing, and was unavailable in a Fargo-Moorhead library when I learned of it in 1994. Imagine that.
• “Trip to America” is a travel diary recording one hundred days in 1884 when Arthur Sykes and his friend and travel companion George Pritchard-Rayner sailed to and from Liverpool to inspect land investments each of them had made in Dakota Territory. Sykes was an older brother of Richard Sykes, founder of Sykeston and four other town in D.T., a dealer in more than 75,000 acres of what were claimed to be some of the most fertile agricultural land that aren’t in the Steppes of Asia. Arthur’s grandson provided a copy of the diary and permission to publish it in North America. who am I to pass up an invitation like that.
• The Sykes’s investments were real and representative of a wave of foreign investment at the end of the 19th century as the “Frontier” closed. A fictional treatment was written by Sarah Mabie Brigham, the comparable investment by a fictional member of the British gentry. WAVERLAND: A tale of our coming landlords explores the idiosyncrasies of that upper class as it (in her view) transplanted its valued from the Britification of Ireland to a parallel in the America West.
• Finally, William Hardman, editor of the London Post newspaper, trekked most of the way across our continent as part of “The Rufus Hatch Party” on its way from NYC to Yellowstone Country. Trip to America (not to be confused with the Sykes diary, of similar title) records the junket in pieces published serially in his London paper and later in book form in 1884, but never reprinted.

A few of us hope there’s enough interest in the history of this place during one of its most transformative periods. And, not incidentally, not leave me with a garage full of unsold paperbacks. Besides, I don’t have a garage.

Etruscan necropolis, Cerveteri, Italy / ca550 BCE

τεθνήκαμεν. σώζετε δάκρυα ζώσιν. / We are dead. Save tears for the living. ¹

The Shades is Agincourt’s formerly-Protestant, now non-sectarian cemetery located at the east edge of the original town site. Odd that I’m willing, even eager, to engage its design, while I’m constitutionally unable to cope with The Square and its focus on the memorialization of War.

The cemetery name, The Shades, invokes a decidedly non-Christian mythological reference to the dead — “the spirit or ghost of a dead person, living in the underworld” — reaching back to the middle of the 18th century and its fascination with the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime. Subtle distinctions lost on most of us today. Indeed, cemeteries are little-visited by anyone under the age of fifty, if at all, and only under duress.

I have only fond memories of Saturdays with my grandmother visiting the grave of her husband, my grandfather, Roy L. Ramsay (for whom I’m partially named. We’d pack a shopping bag with some lunch and small garden tools, then walk the two blocks to the bus stop on Archer Avenue (by the Moffet Technical Center, but that’s another story) and await the Bluebird suburban bus. The Bluebird ran this route from downtown Chicago southwest all the way to Joliet, and along those forty-five miles there were several large suburban cemeteries: Bethania, Resurrection, and finally Fairmont, where we had family plots. There’s a fourth at St. James-at-the-Sag, but that’s too far.

Alighting from the bus, there was a greenhouse where my grandmother purchased geraniums, then crossed Archer and passed through the gates. It was a hike up the hill along a winding road between several mausolea—not much vanity at Fairmont—until we came out on the broad flat southeastern (and far less picturesque) portion of the place, with few trees and much more orderly placement of graves: efficient, economical. Jeffersonian, like rural America; gridded, like Chicago.

We’d remove grass and weeds from around the headstone, a distance of three or four inches. Then plant the geraniums, one or two on either side but always symmetrical. My job was carrying water from a spigot some distance away. Odd that I don’t recall what I used to carry the water. Then we’d have lunch, enjoy the passing clouds, the breeze, and finally walk back to the bus stop at the bottom of the ravine for the trip home.

This was an important part of my childhood rhythm.

I’ve imagined just one special interment at The Shades: Agincourt’s half-term mayor Edmund FitzGerald Flynn and, some years later, his widow Amity Burroughs Flynn, a far more savory character than hizzoner. But their mausoleum is also far less romantic than the example pictured above, the former Medill McCormick tomb at Winnebago, Illinois.”² It’s time for me to tackle the larger, fuller story of Agincourt’s rhythms of death, burial and commemoration.

¹ Many thanks to Dr Carol Andreini for her translation into ancient Greek of this phrase, inscribed at the public entrance to The Shades.

² The McCormick tomb was designed in 1927 by architect Raymond Hood, far better known for his Art Deco and Moderne design. Vandalization of the tomb by teenagers seeking a place to drink caused the family to relocate the burials and destroy it in the 1970s. So I feel at liberty to “borrow” the Medill tomb for The Shades.

With reference to the last sentence in the last posting, I should warn you that my 3:00 a.m. epiphanies are nudging me ever closer toward a goal, for me at least, to put Agincourt into print a.s.a.p.

So, stay tuned for further developments. If this works out, you won’t be able to shut me up.

The Youth Music Scene

Out on Hiway #7, there’s a turnoff just east of the Muskrat bridge. Behind a thick hedgerow you can just see the bowed roof of a former municipal maintenance garage. Welcome to the Yellow Brick Roadhouse, site of Agincourt’s youth music scene. My last visit was a few years ago to experience He-She and the Screamers, passing through on their way to Council Bluffs. Bet I was the eldest person in the room.

And what a room it is. Bowstring trusses span the whole of it, open above their bottom chord and showing the wood rafters and plank above. That probably helps the acoustics — not that He-She needed the resonance of a Stradivarius to be heard in the nether reaches.

The city “abandoned” the building in the ’70s for a site near the new high school. It sat vacant a few years until the Youth Council formed (a bit late) after the turmoil of the Sixties. Hereabouts, we say, “In Agincourt, the Sixties didn’t happen until the Seventies.” There’s a time warp that still holds true, though the gap lessens each year. As municipal property with a new purpose which was a municipal agency, title transfer required nothing more than a city council vote: 4-to-1, and I’ll bet you can name the “No” voter. He resigned a couple years later and moved out to Nimby, to be in “better company”. Since then, with a now-peeling coat of paint and leaking crank-case stains showing where the snowplow used to park, it’s housed any number of needs, now for the Under Eighteens — well out of acoustic range from the nearest residential neighborhood.

You might know this would turn into a lesson in structure, though, the bowstring truss being one of the more graceful ways to span a wide berth. It consists basically of a bottom chord, parallel with the floor below, and a quintessentially arched chord (and a bunch of connecting pieces between) which, when you rotate it 90-degrees looks remarkably like the longbows that won the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. [Not incidentally, it can be installed upside down, which tends to create an uncomfortable compression on the human psyche.] There’s another equally graceful example not a thousand yard east of the Roadhouse: the old Hiway #7 bridge, now serving as part of the hike-bike trail system between Forth Dodge and Omaha. So that neighborhood has a respectable population nearly 24/7.

Sorry to have been away from the keyboard for so long. The rhythms of retirement haven’t quite settled yet but i feel the urge to write my way to the “dirt nap”.

Agincourt lost one of its principal contributors on August 22nd, 2022. If you have to ask, an explanation is going to take a long time.

Some Thoughts on MSY

While working on a current project, I found this quote from Claude Monet: “To see, we must forget the name of the things we are looking at.” [It probably sounds better in French.] He seems to be saying we cannot find our way to design solutions while hemmed in by nouns on every side, because architecture is a verb and needs room to breathe. Names get in questing’s way.

Reading this a few weeks ago, I was inclined to link this notion – how we see — with something Cecil Elliott told me, more than once, about Bruce Goff. Cecil had worked with Goff a few years in Oklahoma and said that you never dared take Bruce into a hardware store, because you’d never get him out. Goff would roam the aisles, grazing bin to bin, fingering every nut, bolt and widget, imagining how each could be used in some wondrous way, totally outside the manufacturer’s intent. There is someone, someone we celebrate today, another architect living without bounds, without strictures, who also thought outside the box. Like Goff, I’m not certain Milton believed there was a box. If there were, it was certainly such a disquieting space that no one could endure it for very long. Clients valued Milton for that very reason; students grew in his tender care. Colleagues like me depended upon Milton’s ability to help us back away from the dead ends of orthodoxy. Life is too short. His surely was.

His energy came from that marketplace of ideas. I saw it firsthand during our old summer foreign study tours. Whether it was Stockholm, Berlin, Prague, or Vienna, Milton would disappear from the group, only to be found in a hardware store or flea market: using “stuff” to explore ideas. But, really, it was an opportunity for him to engage people and explore character. I once dissuaded him – by moments – from buying a radial arm saw in Berlin.

We grazed the offerings at Stockman’s department store in Helsinki, deBijenkorf in Amsterdam, and KaDeWe in Berlin, where neither foreign language nor pre-euro currency discouraged his engagement with the locals: staff a patrons alike. Once, in Reykjavik, Milt enjoyed an extended conversation with a produce clerk at the Pétursbúð grocery about hydroponic vegetables and the benefit to Iceland’s gene pool of wrecked Iberian cod fishermen who had to be “warmed” after being pulled from the freezing North Atlantic: look for black eyes, she said, and olive complexion, a sure sign of rescue. Education was never more “liberal” than with Milton.

On another occasion, in Dresden, he began conversation with a stone mason busily restoring the cathedral (the Roman one). We observed his skill at replacing deteriorated stone with a new piece chosen for its subtle color, then to give it both shape and surface texture, achieving weathered familiarity through the next three hundred years — yet practically unnoticed thirty meters above our head. Who would see it? That craftsman shared his craft, grateful for an impromptu audience, I think. Lou Kahn said the first school happened beneath a tree between someone who didn’t know he or she was a teacher and others who didn’t know they were students. It happened that very afternoon through a chain-link fence in what had only recently been East Germany.

A poem is “a safe place for a difficult thought.” Twice poetry has rescued me from moments like this, helping explain the intensity of our loss: first, almost twenty years ago for my lifelong neighbor Marilla Thurston Missbach and now for our friend Milton.

In 1912, at age twenty, Edna St Vincent Millay wrote “Renascence”, her first published poem. I commend to you its consideration of “human suffering, death, and the refreshing rain” that will soon enable us “to experience joy and the rebirth of life”. She concludes with these three striking stanzas:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.

Only then does Millay warn us:

But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat — the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

I’ve known few hearts big enough to counter that pinch of East and West. And fewer still are those sky-piercing souls. We gather here to celebrate such a friend, such a treasure, to tell the World it may not see the likes of him among us very soon.

There will be a special showing of the 1985 Argentine film “Desaparecidos” next weekend at the Fay Raye Theatre, 15 South Broad Street in Agincourt. Showings at 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; Sunday matinee at 2:00. Hope to see some of you there.

…but it sometimes does, when you least expect it.

Someone commented on the Agincourt blog on Saturday that the BBC History Magazine had mentioned the town of Agincourt, Iowa in its current (February 2025) issue.

The article concerns the invocation of Agincourt through history, its meaning and how it was intended to be understood. Imagine my surprise when I found the article (the last page of which is reproduced here) and discovered we’ve been mentioned. My shrink, Dr. Bob, always said that Agincourt was a healthy outlet for my creativity to the point where I begin to pack for the move there. Frankly, retirement in Agincourt would be a treat. And y’all could drop in whenever it was convenient and sit a spell.

If this is the last entry in the blog, my work has been done. And I hope, done well.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

Unknown Artist (French; active mid-19th century)

Landscape—Barbizon School

1844 (dated but signed indistinctly)

oil on canvas (on the reverse of another painting) / 22 inches by 29 inches

A characteristic painting of the Barbizon School of the mid 19th century, this landscape is (arguably) far more interesting than the urban streetscape on the front of the canvas. The artist (whose name is illegible) made a judgment which work to show, but we modestly disagree.

This may be the only work in the Community Collection retrieved from the boulevard during Spring Clean-up. “One person’s trash….”