The Prairie Moon Museum

In which I visit the site of the first Wunderkammer I saw, now partly under water.

Self portrait in concrete of Herman Rusch

I am in Wisconsin paying a quick visit to my family before heading to Chicago for an event at the Ragdale Foundation. The town where I grew up—Fountain City, population 820ish— is on the Mississippi, and this spring, the Mississippi is flooding. The lower streets in Fountain City are sandbagged, and in town, pumps are running to keep flood waters from swamping the lower parts of town. The marsh below my family home is usually a field of reeds and grasses, but this year it’s a lake. A pair of Sandhill Cranes are hunting there as I type this. Highway 35 which runs along the Mississippi is sandbagged at its lowest spots, and the river is not expected to crest anytime soon.

My brother and I went for a little ride to go see the extent of the flooding. We wound up at the Prairie Moon Museum just north of Fountain City. The museum is a collection of concrete sculptures, planters, fences and figures made by the late Herman Rusch. Rusch was the son of German immigrants who worked as a dairy farmer in the area. After retiring from farming, he bought an old dance hall on the prairie next to the Mississippi and began filling the hall with oddities. I remember a washing machine that was meant to be powered by a goat or a dog on a treadmill, and a hollow log with the back end of a fox sticking out one end, and the front of a taxidermied rabbit out the other. There were old cars, a 100 foot grapevine, stone arrowheads, mysterious tools, farm implements, dust. In the yard, Rusch spent years constructing sculptures out of concrete, stone, broken glass, shells. There were dinosaurs, a python with a forked tongue of snipped tin, towers, arches, fountains.