by prairie fire could have been.
Twelve-year-old Mary Ann, the second daughter, was struck with “black diphtheria.” A highly contagious disease seen often in this era, diphtheria was common in the United States and Western Europe. The upper respiratory system was typically affected, with a thick membrane forming up and down the air passages. Victims — usually children — ran high fevers, had sore throats, and sometimes died when the deadly membrane literally shut down their ability to breathe.
Bernard and Ellen could do little for Mary Ann. She died after struggling for several days for breath. But the tragedy was not over. Within three days of Mary Ann’s death, three-year-old Martha also died in the same way. Two children dead in less than a week! The Caseys were grief-stricken but had little time to mourn their daughters. Several of the boys, including eight-year-old Barney, had also come down with the disease.
Trying to isolate their sick children, the parents hovered over their sons who were struggling to catch their breath. The prayers of the parents were answered. All of the boys recovered, although not without some side effects. Barney was left with injured vocal cords where the membranes had infected his throat. From then on, his voice was weak, somewhat high-pitched, and wispy, even into manhood.
Life continued in the face of losses for frontier families. In the 1880s, more than 20 percent of frontier children died before they reached five years of age. Death was usually due to primitive housing conditions and poor sanitation. And, even though their family still numbered nine children after the death of the girls — and although they believed very firmly that Mary Ann and Martha were with God — the loss always felt sharp for the Caseys. But Bernard Casey Sr. did his best to house and feed his children well. Unlike many farmers, he fed his milk cows over winter and always had a large garden to provide fresh fruits and vegetables.
There was an order to the Casey life. In part, it was set by the seasons and the need to gain a living from the land. In addition, Ellen and Bernard Sr. saw to it that another order, the spiritual order, was clearly visible to their children.
By the early 1880s, the Casey family circle had expanded with more children, apparently crowding the little house to its limits. After the death of the little girls in 1878, Edward was born in July 1879, and Owen was born in January 1881. By the summer of 1882, eleven-year-old Barney was in the older half of a clan of eleven Casey children. In order, they were eighteen-year-old Ellen, seventeen-year-old Jim, fourteen-year-old Maurice (who was entering the diocesan seminary at Milwaukee), thirteen-year-old John, Barney, ten-year-old Pat, eight-year-old Tom, six-year-old Gus, four-year-old Leo, three-year-old Ed, and one-year-old Owen. With such a houseful of children, life was rich, but it also wasn’t always easy on a day-to-day basis. So the Irish-born head of the Casey clan began to look for a larger frontier on which to settle his growing American enterprise — his family and his farm.
Chapter Two
Growing Up Well-Rooted (1882–1891)
In the summer of 1882, Bernard Casey Sr. was forty-two years old, a well-respected man who had farmed the Trimbelle place for almost nine years. During those years, the Casey crops were bountiful. The family, too, had grown to thirteen, with eleven living children, and Ellen was expecting another baby in September.
It was that same year that Barney Sr. heard of a 345-acre spread for sale just to the north of Pierce County, in St. Croix County, and rode up to look at it. The place had a six-room clapboard house, two barns, a large icehouse, a root house, and a lake on the property. Looking it over was like entering a dream.
The Willow River, which flowed close by the good-sized farm, intrigued the Irish homesteader. Equally intriguing to Barney Casey was the fact that a railroad line ran through the property and made a stop just two miles away. This meant easy transportation, by rail or by river, for his crops. He went home to think about it, but in a short while, the deal was made. The Caseys would be moving again.
As the family prepared for their relocation, young Barney’s baby sister, Margaret, was born on September 23, 1882. As always, there was plenty of rejoicing over the new baby. But Margaret’s birth was even more special. Since Mary Ann and Martha’s deaths, there had been only one girl among the eleven living Casey children — the oldest child, eighteen-year-old Ellen.
After the baby was born, and the harvesting was completed, the awesome task of moving began. Household supplies, farm equipment, chickens, cattle, horses, pigs, and assorted pets had to be transported, and all with one eye to the calendar and the other on the sky. The family needed to move before a sudden snowfall could block the roads and make traveling treacherous.
Fortunately, the Caseys were tucked in at their new home before the Wisconsin winter could catch them on the open road. Bernard Casey Sr. must have smiled broadly at the blessings from heaven. He had been given such a fine farm and a healthy, happy family, including a second daughter.
Like the rest of the family, Barney Jr. was thrilled with the new spread. Though he knew he would miss the place where he had spent most of his childhood, the lake, larger fields, and sheer size of the new property better fit the scope of his twelve-year-old tastes for adventure and outdoor fun.
Except for tending to the livestock, winters meant some time off for Midwestern farmers. Bernard Casey wasted no time finding a way to turn the slack season to good purpose. He became a distributor of religious books and sold subscriptions to the Irish Standard and Extension Magazine. He would travel to St. Paul by train and return with the books, heaving full canvas sacks off the train into the snowbanks as the train passed near the Casey homestead. Knowing about what time the train passed through, several of the older Casey boys would pick up the heavy sacks and put them on the wagon, while their father walked back home from the Burkhardt train stop, two miles away.
The Caseys enjoyed literature and music. In addition to the religious books they were allowed to read (if they didn’t soil them!), they enjoyed other literature. The works of James Fenimore Cooper, especially The Deerslayer, were family favorites. After dinner, Barney Sr. would often push his chair back from the table after prayer was concluded, hoist the youngest child up on his lap, and read aloud.
Years later, the younger Caseys could remember hearing stories about Abraham Lincoln, the verses of Irish poet Thomas Moore, and the poems of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In particular, the Casey children loved one long poem by the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier called “Snow-Bound”:
And ere the early bedtime came
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
It was a lovely vision the Caseys saw, winter after winter.
Ellen and Bernard Casey also made sure that their American-born children were well-acquainted with their Irish heritage. They passed on the stories and legends of their homeland. With a fiddle bought somewhere along the way, the head of the house would play and lead his household in singing Irish ballads. His children quickly learned that anything he lacked in musical polish, their father compensated for with enthusiasm.
If the railroad was helping to expand literary horizons for the Caseys of St. Croix County, it was also responsible for some other very practical benefits. Before the expansion of the railroads in the 1880s, all time throughout the country was local time. A clock in Milwaukee might be read 11:05 at the same moment that a Chicago timepiece struck 11:00. On Sunday, November 18,
