About a year ago I spent an afternoon in a small cemetery on a rural road in north central Wisconsin. I had the cemetery to myself for a few hours as I worked to clear away the out-of-control daylilies that had obscured my grandparents’ headstone.
The Summit Township Cemetery is full of my mom’s family — the Simon clan that once dominated the farms in this rural stretch of northern Langlade County.
My great-grandparents, Stefan and Margaret Simon, immigrated from Germany in 1884. They immediately went west, and after three years in Milwaukee, moved north and started farming the land that perhaps felt a bit more like their Bavarian home…