In the fall of 1976 I began teaching at the University of Wisconsin College in Sheboygan. Living in a small city was quite a different experience for me (other than the two years in a yet smaller town, Hamilton, NY), and I took quite a few photos that first fall and winter to document various places in the city and surrounding region. For readers unfamiliar with Wisconsin: Sheboygan is on Lake Michigan about 50 miles north of Milwaukee. The lead photo above shows part of the lakeshore; there's a beach at the left, and Downtown is several blocks beyond (i.e., west of) the beach.
Below is the very first picture I took in Sheboygan: a very handsome 1886 Downtown building next to the new public library (off to the right). It's still standing, though the "Next?" clothing shop has had several replacements. Interesting that the 'modernistic' street lamps have been replaced by much more traditional ones.
For my new job I needed a car (I had gone 10 years without one, living in NY and Chicago and an era of cheap airfares). The campus was at the edge of town, and there was no convenient public transportation anywhere beyond the city limits. So in Cleveland the month before, I bought a new Oldsmobile Omega, a compact car without frills (no AC or electric windows), shown here in a campus parking lot and then across the street from my first rental place.
A marina would eventually be built on the lakeshore just south of the beach in the top photo, within the breakwater leading out to a lighthouse. But when I first lived in Sheboygan there was just fallow land in this location (just north of the Yacht Club).
As for the lighthouse it was, and still is, a striking feature of the lakefront:
On a calm day it was an easy walk out to the lighthouse, with good views of boats on the lake:
I took pictures of a few other buildings in the city. I'm still looking for the buildings in the left photo; the church on the right I've been able to identify as the former "German Lutheran Church," in the nearby town of Plymouth, according to an old postcard online, but I don't know the present name or location.
[I've found the buildings on the left--they're in Plymouth, but the smaller, less distinguished building, has been torn down, and the others given new paint jobs.]
Beyond Plymouth I visited the nearest portion of the extensive Kettle Moraine State Forest, a half-hour drive west of Sheboygan. Below, you see "kettles": depressions in the land formed when balls of glacial ice embedded in gravel melted.
And those gumdrop-shaped hills (seen from the top of Parnell Tower, a lookout tower), also a result of a retreating glacier, are called "kames."
Next is Butler Lake as seen from atop the Parnell Esker (a gravel ridge). (I'm showing off the geological terminology I learned that fall.)
Another excursion I took, probably at the end of September, was to a state park on Lake Michigan near the town of Two Rivers, about a 45-minute drive north. From my slides I see that I did this drive with two campus colleagues, Joe Helgert and Royce Shaw. Here they are as we paused on the drive north along the lake to look at the bluffs near the town of Haven. (The road has since been moved inland, no doubt because of threat of erosion; the view to the south looks toward what is now Whistling Straits Golf Course.)
To get to Two Rivers you drive first through the larger town of Manitowoc, which has this striking view as you turn a certain corner:
(I'm curious to see how the view has changed, other than the cars.) Two Rivers State Park turned out to have beautiful sand dunes, along with a stretch of forest:
It was clearly a fine fall that year in southeastern Wisconsin. Here is a view of the road leading up to my university campus:
And here, later in the fall, is a little hamlet on the way to Gibbsville, southeast of the city. The church spire makes me think of a small town in, say, the Netherlands:
Another scenic location very near Sheboygan is Terry Andrae State Park, a stretch of sand dunes just south of the city. I was there one early evening and took quite a few photos. I was pleased by the way several of these turned out, but I'll just post them below without further comment:
I continued to take pictures of the Sheboygan lakefront . . .
. . . as well as this one of the lakeshore farther south, I think near Oostburg:
Whenever I drove to Milwaukee I was struck by a view from the Interstate of the small town of Lake Church, which, like the hamlet seen earlier in this post, looked like a European village. (The second shot was taken with my zoom lens, though I've cropped both shots.)
In Milwaukee on that trip I took just a few architectural photos, of buildings both built in 1895, clearly a time of prosperity for the city. First, the monumental Central Library:
. . . and then the clock tower of the City Hall, the second shot showing the capability of my zoom lens. (I didn't yet have a wide-angle lens to make it easier to get whole buildings within the frame.)
Back at home I took one picture of a yet older structure, the 1882 home of the Kohler family, who donated it as the core building of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center:
It was winter when I next took pictures, starting with the now frozen beach:
In the countryside I took note of a couple of picturesque buildings:
. . . and some moody landscapes:
One day closer to spring, Broughton Drive, the city road which runs alongside Lake Michigan, was foggy:
In March, smelt fishermen lined up along the breakwater to cast their nets after dark. The best I could capture is this blurred photo:
And looking from the beach toward Downtown, I could catch only a glimpse of the lights:
In late spring I took more excursions to new places, going with friends north to Door County, and in summer to Spring Green to the southwest. I'll show those photos in the next post.
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