Lady of the Wilderness

Emma Toft

Independent producer Eileen Littig has produced documentaries on social issues such as Teens, Grief and Death for Wisconsin Public Television, but said making the documentary Emma Toft:  One with Nature“was a labor of love” for her because of her own connections to Door County.

Littig has called Green Bay home for years, but her mother was a teacher in the one-room Cherry School in Door County and her family lived in Sturgeon Bay until she was in 5th grade. Her parents are buried at Bayside Cemetery in Sturgeon Bay.

“I never met Emma, but I knew of her all my life,” Littig said. “When I first walked onto Toft Point, I felt so calm.”

It all began with a phone call from Mark Dupuy, who is married to Trudy Toft, daughter of Ruby Toft, wife of Miss Emma’s nephew, Thorval Toft. Ruby was moving into assisted living and while going through her belongings, a treasure trove of Emma Toft material was discovered.

“He said, ‘Eileen, you can’t believe the material Ruby has that relates to Toft Point and to Emma’,” Littig said. “Once I saw the material, I knew this was a story that had to be done.”

She put a crew together with Dean Leisgang, executive director of Educational Television Productions of Northeast Wisconsin (ETP-NEW) and began interviewing Ruby Toft, which led to other sources of information.

The documentary features relatives of Miss Emma and a number of Door County luminaries who knew and appreciated her perseverance for preservation, including the late Norbert Blei and Peninsula Pulse/Door County Living contributor Roy Lukes.

The documentary tells the story of the Toft family settling on what is now known as Toft Point and their legal fight to prevent commercial development of the area that is now owned and managed by the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay (well, technically, the UW Board of Regents) and The Nature Conservancy.

Ruby Toft died during the production (on Oct. 12, 2012, at age 96), as did Norbert Blei (April 23, 2013, at age 77) and one of the funders of the project.

“Norbert gave such a marvelous interview,” Littig said.

It may, in fact, be the final interview he gave, but he gave it his all, Leisgang said.

Leisgang said in keeping with the nature of the subject, he wanted to maintain a small footprint while documenting the Door County Miss Emma loved, so he fixed a camera onto a small drone aircraft called a hexacopter for some amazing aerial shots of Toft Point.

For another set of shots, Leisgang enlisted the aid of his children, 8 and 5, to build a remote control erector set car with a 2-inch mini-camera mounted on it.

“We could have got the shots without it, but we would have been tromping on flowers,” he said. “The technology is unbelievable these days, so we might as well use it. And that really energized me throughout the process, getting these different angles.”

Both Leisgang and Littig said they had way more material than they could fit into the allotted time of 26 minutes and 46 seconds, so they hope to create a website dedicated to Toft Point with more interviews from the people in the documentary.

And both said talking with various Door County luminaries about Emma Toft revealed a wealth of stories that need to be told about an aging group of interesting, talented people in Door County.

“There are so many great stories to be told in Door County that really need to be told,” Leisgang said. “I hope we can tell them.”

Both Eileen Littig and Dean Leisgang will be at Crossroads at Big Creek in Sturgeon Bay when the documentary is aired at 2 pm on Saturday, Sept. 7. For those who can’t make that showing, the documentary airs on Wisconsin Public Television at 7 pm on Sept. 12.