Waseda Expands to Old Logerquist Home

Jim Logerquist had a big decision to make when his neighbor to the north wanted to buy the 120-acre former farm that had been in his family more than 125 years, on a road that bears his family’s name.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” he said about selling the property. But it helped that the man who wanted to buy the property is organic farmer Tom Lutsey of Waseda Farms.

“My grandfather, Anders Logerquist, came over from Sweden and bought the property in 1889, so it’s been in the family since then,” Logerquist said. “My grandfather lived into his 90s and he passed away before I was born. He had 10 children, my dad being one of them. My dad (Russell) and his twin brother (Raymond) took over the farm from Anders. They ran it as a dairy farm, cash crop farm and potato farm.”

Logerquist grew up on the farm until he went to college at Stevens Point and graduate school in Madison.

“I moved away back in 1981 and would come home a couple times every year,” Logerquist said. “My mother lived there until she passed away about four years ago. The property sat idle.”

Logerquist said it was almost two years ago when he was up from Madison checking on the property when he ran into Lutsey.

“He said, ‘So, you’re the elusive Mr. Logerquist.’ I said, ‘I haven’t been hiding, but what can I do for you?’ He told me about his operation and how he was interested in renting property from me,” Logerquist said.

“We were trying to rent and it turned into a purchase,” Lutsey said. “Every time we turned around with little items, it got more confusing to the thoughts of how we run it as a renter.”

So Lutsey asked Logerquist if he wanted to sell.

“I started to entertain the thought,” Logerquist said.

On Sept. 18 the deal was closed and Lutsey added the 120-acre Logerquist property to his 360-acre Waseda Farms.

Logerquist said it was Lutsey’s personality and his commitment to organic farming that made the decision to sell easier.

“I’m glad that it’s going to be a farming operation,” he said. “I tell myself that my grandfather and my dad and his twin brother would be glad that it’s being farmed. It’s a good use of the land. A couple things were important to me as well. Having tillable land and organic is wonderful. My dad and his twin were very environmentally conscious, more like conservationists, so I think they’d love that fact.

“At the same time I asked Tom if he would consider painting the barn with the [Logerquist] logo, and he had that done before we even closed the deal,” Logerquist continued. Lutsey and artist Rick Brawner repainted the striking Logerquist logo on the barn facing Logerquist Road this past summer.

“I think we’re all happy we painted it with the Logerquist name,” Lutsey said.

The property contains a roofless barn with two silos, a couple of smaller outbuildings and a 100-plus-year-old home fronting Logerquist Road, the house where Logerquist was raised.

Lutsey is not certain what to do about the roofless barn. Another back building that was once used for potato storage will be converted to house chickens.

“We can put a very nice modern situation inside of it,” Lutsey said. “We’ve got a building permit for a 1,200-square-foot structure to go there, a small addition to do some work on the eggs.”

He has also started the process of carving trails through woods on the property and making a protected winter pasture for his cows in a piney forested area.

And then there is the house.

“The original piece of the house where the kitchen sits was already there in 1889 when my grandfather bought it, and because he had 10 kids, he added on,” Logerquist said. “I didn’t want the house to be bulldozed.”

Neither does Lutsey, but he’s not quite sure what to do with it.

“A number of things first scared us,” he said about the house, but after investigation, those things turned out to be relatively minor. Moisture in the basement was caused by a lack of downspouts to lead rainwater away from the house. There was also concern that some stones had fallen off the outer foundation, but they turned out to be a façade on a stable foundation.

“It’s still a formidable house. Overall, it’s in pretty decent shape. It just needs some modern conveniences,” Lutsey said. “Maybe someone would come along and say, ‘We’d like to be up in Door County and restore a house.’ We’d like to get the word out, if anyone has ideas. We don’t have to have ownership. We can be very reasonable to work with.”

For more information about the old Logerquist home, contact Tom Lutsey at 920.839.2222.