Navigation

Margaret Gilbert’s Door County Life

Margaret Gilbert, a former schoolteacher, stands by the alfalfa field on her family’s farm. She says, “You get an education growing up on the farm that you would not get in school. You get an education of life that you won’t get in college.” Photo by Len Villano.

Author’s Note: When I reached Margaret Gilbert by phone at her Sevastopol home in May I hoped to get a little perspective on the family farm that her two sons, Ron and Tim, now operate about three miles east of Sturgeon Bay. Nearly three hours later I hung up with perspective on so much more than a farm.

The story about the Gilbert Farm can be found in the current edition of Door County Living magazine. What follows is a snapshot of a remarkable Door County life.

For better and for worse, schools have evolved to emphasize preparation for a four-year degree above all else. It’s what parents demand of their school boards, what those boards demand of teachers. Inherent in this philosophy is the indoctrination that college is good, and anything less, like farming, is bad.

I, like most of my friends, bought into this way of thinking growing up. Farming was a fallback plan, something for those kids who simply weren’t smart enough or lacked ambition. It didn’t even dawn on me that someone would want to farm. It’s one of the many beliefs of the teenage me now so embarrassing to remember.

You might think that Margaret Gilbert, a former school teacher, would have a strict view on education, that she would have pushed her kids to get off the farm. She valued education and encouraged her children to go to college, but when her son Tim dropped out of school in the 10th grade to work on the farm, she understood.

“Tim always loved farming, it was all he wanted to do,” she said. “He was great with the animals. But education is education. You get it in all ways, not just by going to school. So many of the things you learn in school don’t matter. You get an education growing up on the farm that you would not get in school. You get an education of life that you won’t get in college. You learn what it takes to put food on the table. What it takes to manage money.”

Margaret would know. She grew up on a farm herself. In fact, she grew up just down the road from where the family farm is today. She likes to joke that she never really got anywhere in life.

“My dad came here in the mid-1930s when I was just a few years old,” Margaret said. “He settled about three miles from where the farm is now, and now I live a mile and a half from where I grew up.”

Her first job was to take the cows to pasture. She’d send her dog Shep in the gate to bring the cows up, then walk them right down Highway 57, the cows grazing in the ditches as they walked, eventually making their way through the woods to Lily Bay Creek.

“There were hardly any cars on the road,” she remembered. “Can you imagine seeing a little girl and her dog walking down the highway with a herd of cows now? But that’s how it was then.”

Times were tough, but Margaret remembered those days fondly.

“It seems when you’re a kid, that summer goes on forever,” she remembered. “You’re free, you run barefoot all summer.”

Born Margaret Weidman, she was one of six children, three of whom her parents would bury. A sister died of spinal meningitis at age five, while two brothers died in farm accidents.

Her brother Elroy was an artist, she said, who loved to draw horses.

Margaret Gilbert, who would draw with her brother Elroy by the light of a kerosene lamp as a child, displays some of her watercolor notecards. She needed to work up the courage to pick up the hobby again later in life, but now it is an integral part of her new life forged in retirement. Photo by Len Villano.

“We’d sit at the kitchen table by the kerosene lamp drawing every night,” she remembered. “His horses were perfect.”

Ironically, it was a team of horses that killed him when he was 15 when they bucked up while he was cutting corn with an old corn binder. Margaret was 12 at the time.

“At 12 you don’t understand when your brother dies,” she said. “But I tell you what, it builds a lot of character if you have a lot of problems. You just have to get through it.”

A second brother, Dan, died when he was just 40 while raking hay in the hay mow, when it fell down on top of him. Margaret’s son Tim, just 15 at the time, came home from school to help his uncle with the chores and found him, suffocated.

Margaret’s earliest memories are from the Depression, a time when she said you could separate the poor from the not-as-poor by the bread they made their sandwiches on.

“Those with money had store-bought bread, the poor kids had homemade bread,” she said. “Back then, if you had a farm, you could at least eat because you had a garden.”

They hoped to make enough each year to pay their taxes and feed the family, not to turn a profit, go on vacation, or save for retirement. They made their own butter and yogurt. The only things they bought were sugar, flower, salt, and coffee.

Margaret was the only one in her family to graduate high school. Then she went to the teacher’s college in Kewaunee, where she had a classmate named Roy Lukes.

She married Bruce Gilbert from the farm up the road in 1954. By then she was a schoolteacher at Sugar Creek country school, and she would teach at other one-room schools as well, including the Wilson School on County Highway S outside Sturgeon Bay and in West Jacksonport.

In 1955 Bruce bought a farm on the end of Forest Road. Margaret stopped teaching when they started having kids of their own, and eventually they would count 10 children in the brood. They struggled to gain solid footing, with milk selling for just $2 per 100 pounds and side jobs tough to come by. A house fire didn’t make things any easier, and when Bruce came down with rheumatic fever that nearly killed him, they lost the farm, but not their persistence.

They started over down the road on County Highway T with just eight cows, struggling to get money to stay afloat. To bring in money Bruce left to work on the ore boats on the Great Lakes, which he did for 13 years, leaving the farm for the boys to run, with Margaret keeping the books.

The farm would grow, but the setbacks continued. In 1983 the old barn burned down.

“That was a tough time,” Margaret remembered. “It was a few years after we lost our daughter. You get tragedies, sometimes right in a row, but we kept on going.”

The Gilbert Farm, in spite of tragedy, was growing. By the late 1980s they replaced the old barn with multiple buildings and silos. They began acquiring more property and adding to the herd. Today, the farm boasts over 1,200 cows and is a supplier for Belgioioso cheese.

In 1996 Bruce died at age 67, leaving the farm to the children. It’s run by brothers Ron and Tim Gilbert, their own sons now helping out.

Months after Bruce died Margaret reached back to her own childhood hobby. A man was giving watercolor lessons at the Senior Center, and Margaret decided to drive down to give it a shot. Over the years she had started over in so many ways, after so many tragedies and setbacks, but on that day she struggled to dream herself an artist.

She sat in her car in the parking lot for 15 minutes working up the courage to go inside. Once she did, she discovered she had some of her long-lost brother’s artistic talent.

After taking more classes at the Peninsula School of Art Margaret began selling her own work on canvas, postcards and bookmarks. She has since exhibited at the Miller Art Museum and sold paintings to people in Germany and Russia, a new life forged in retirement.

After nearly three hours of talking I finally decided to let her off the line and back to her work. I thanked her for sharing so much about her life.

“Life is interesting you know,” she replied, terribly understating the amazing life she had just laid out for me. “Every day brings another challenge and you just have to keep looking on the bright side.”