The Florine Farm

          One hundred years ago a young man from a small agricultural area east of Fort Atkinson became a war hero.  He is now a fixture of community memory.

          Paul Frank Florine went into active duty for World War I in 1917 and died in battle shortly thereafter, in the Meuse-Argonne region of France in 1918, where he was buried. He was the first man from Fort Atkinson to die in the war and is now the namesake of the small town’s branch of the American Legion. The last letter to be received from Florine after his death, to his sister Hilda, included a small note at the bottom from a fellow soldier who recounted that Florine ‘died gloriously.’

          Even now, Florine is remembered in his Fort Atkinson community as the namesake of the Fort Atkinson post of the American Legion, his name emblazoned on the front of their dugout.  The family name still belongs to the road he once lived on, Florine Lane, and the Florine family land just off Florine Lane is still farmed.

Dr. Peter Jacobs

        Now, almost a century later, the farm on Florine Lane is being revived by Dr. Peter Jacobs, a professor of geographical and geological studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. "All I ever wanted growing up was to own my own farm," says Dr. Jacobs, who has taken up haying and raising lamb on the land. The Wisconsin-born scholar returned from teaching in Valdosta, Georgia, in the 1990s, which had proven to be less hospitable than he expected. 

          Dr. Jacobs discusses the hostility he felt as a Midwesterner in southern territory by retelling a joke he’d heard from his mailman:

        Despite the rising cost of land in Wisconsin, the concept of home began to look attractive to Dr. Jacobs and his wife, with their two young children, and the prospect of beginning a family farm was ​enough to convince them to return to the state where they were born and raised​

The future--
          Dr. Jacobs has revived agriculture on the historic Fort Atkinson farm.  He speculates on the future of agriculture in the area and in Wisconsin in general.

With an eye on the trends of farming and agronomy, Jacobs reflects on the growing interest in local foods.  ​