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Updated: May 24, 2025
Our harvest of that day seems pitifully small as I sit on my veranda and look at my barns and silos, and see the straight rows of corn leaning like the characters of God's handwriting across the broad intervale of Vandemark's Folly flat, sloping to the loving pressure of the steady warm west wind of Iowa, and clapping a million dark green hands in acclamation of the full tide of life sucked up from the richest breast that Mother Earth in all her bountiful curves turns to the lips of her offspring.
I had plowed firebreaks about my buildings and stacks, and burned off between the strips of plowing, but I felt that I ought to be at home. So I rode on at a good trot to make my circuit of the marsh to the west. The cattle could get through, but a horse with a man on his back might easily get mired in Vandemark's Folly anywhere along there; and my motto was, "The more hurry, the less speed."
I could see the houses of William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost from my house; and I knew that Peter and Amos Bemisdarfer and Flavius Bohn, Dunkards from Pennsylvania, had located farther south. All these settlers were located south of Hell Slew, which was coming to be known now, and was afterward put down on the map, as "Vandemark's Folly Marsh."
The control shifted from the north side of the slew to the south side according to the weather; for you couldn't cross Vandemark's Folly in wet weather.
I told them about the quantity of wild strawberries I had out in Vandemark's Folly, and when Virginia asked the sheriff if the elder and his wife and herself might go out there with me for a strawberry-and-cream feast, he said his duty made it incumbent upon him to insist that he and his wife go along, and that they would furnish the sugar if I would pony up the cream of which I had a plenty.
I expected to get back before night, but when I struck the trail of the stock it took me away back into the region in the north part of the township back of Vandemark's Folly, as we used to say, where it was not settled, on account of the slew and the distance from town, until in the 'seventies.
In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries in Monterey County on the ancestral estate of the criminal, known as Vandemark's Folly, and by the use of prison labor, and through the generosity and public spirit of our rising young fellow-citizen, Jacob T. Vandemark whom we hereby salute we are promised another strawberry festival before the crop is gone.
The Governor was not even a citizen of Vandemark Township, but he had some land in it. Buck Gowdy's great estate lapped over on one corner of the township, Governor Wade's on the other, and Hell Slew, nicknamed Vandemark's Folly Marsh cut it through the middle, and made it hard for us to get out a full vote on anything after we got the township organized.
So when I was put on the independent ticket to turn this ring out of office, Dick went after me as if I had been a horse-thief, and made a great to-do about what he called "Cow Vandemark's criminal record." Now that I have a chance to put the matter before the world in print, I shall take advantage of it; for that "criminal record" is a part of this history of Vandemark Township.
I rode from the railroad to Foster Blake's in his sleigh, looked over my herd which he was running on shares for me, and crossed Vandemark's Folly Marsh on the hard snow which was over the tall grass and reeds everywhere. How my grove had grown that past summer!
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