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   (1876-1952)

Ada James is remembered as Richland Center's and Richland County's most prominent suffragette and for her work with disadvantaged children and women. Ada came to the suffrage movement naturally because her mother, Laura, in 1882 was one of the founders of the Richland Center Woman's Club that worked tirelessly for women's suffrage. Indeed, the Woman's Club may have been the first suffrage organization formed in the state. Two years later the Woman's Club hosted the first regular convention of the Wisconsin Suffrage Association. In 1886, Susan B. Anthony spoke in favor of suffrage in Bailey's Opera House in Richland Center.

In 1892, Ada and several other high school girls formed the Equality Club to assist in the campaign for women's suffrage. Later, in 1911, she was a founding member of the statewide Political Equality League. Ada served as its president for two years, including the crucial state referendum fight of 1912. Ada used unprecedented tactics - hiring a motorboat to distribute leaflets along the Wolf River and employing an airplane to drop brochures on county fair crowds - in this campaign. However, women's suffrage went down in a resounding defeat, by 90,000 votes; a trouncing Ada blamed primarily on the lavish spending by the brewing interests that feared women voters would support temperance.

Late in 1912, after the ill-fated campaign, the Political Equality League and the Wisconsin Suffrage Association merged under the latter's name and Ada became a vice president. Although the WSA continued its work, World War I, which the United States entered in April 1917, created the conditions that compelled President Woodrow Wilson to support women's suffrage. In 1919, Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Wisconsin won this distinction because Ada's father, state Senator David G. James, traveled to Washington, D.C. via train and hand delivered the documents to just nose out Illinois for this honor. Women voted nationwide for the first time in the presidential election of 1920.

With the suffrage battle finally won, Ada James devoted the remainder of her life to numerous other causes - temperance, pacifism, world peace, and assistance for underprivileged children. She became keenly interested in the latter cause when she began bringing poor children from Chicago to Richland County in the summers. These "sunshine children" caused her to realize that Richland County had its own underprivileged children. During 1920, Ada led a campaign that convinced the Richland County Board to create a Children's Board, the first such organization in the state. She poured her energy and money into this cause. Thus it is most fitting that Richland County's shelter for abused women and their children is named Ada James Place.

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   (1868-1961)

" Dr. Bertha,"as her patients called her, was a woman pioneer in the practice of medicine. She was born in 1868 in Thiensville, Wisconsin, into a family of doctors; nine of her brothers and male cousins entered the medical field. In 1892, Bertha's family moved to Nebraska where she attended the Lincoln Normal School and she taught for a few years.

But her real love was science. Bertha studied chemistry and botany at the University of Nebraska, but her male instructors discouraged her from pursuing her M.D., as did the many doctors in her own family. Undaunted, Bertha enrolled in the Women's Medical College of Chicago in 1898 and graduated three years later as an M.D.

She joined the practice of her brother, Dr. Nelson Reynolds, in Lone Rock in Richland County in 1902, having been unsuccessful in finding any other position. From the start, people called her Dr. Bertha to distinguish her from the "other Dr. Reynolds." In 1904, Dr. Nelson Reynolds moved to Milwaukee to advance his career, leaving the Lone Rock practice to Bertha. As the only available doctor, she began to win grudging acceptance.

Dr. Bertha rode her horse sidesaddle during decent weather and used a horse-drawn cutter in winter to reach her patients. She was the first in Lone Rock to purchase a Model T, which increased her ability to make house calls quickly. Sometimes, however, the elements conspired to make the Model T useless. In the spring of 1923, the roads were too muddy and the streams too high to permit any type of land travel, but Bertha had patients to reach. She learned that a barnstorming aviator had landed at the Lone Rock airport for service. After a quick consultation, Dr. Bertha was flown across the swollen Wisconsin River to Clyde and then to Plain by Charles Lindbergh, then an unknown aviation pioneer.

At age 71, in 1939, Dr. Bertha retired. A Distinguished Service Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison was among the many accolades she received. But this was a short-lived retirement. In 1942, when Clyde's doctor was drafted, Dr. Bertha went back to work and continued to practice until 1953 when, at age 85, she again retired. Dr. Bertha Reynolds remains prominent among Wisconsin women who broke into male dominated professions.

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   (1846-1921)

Paul Seifert, destined many years after his death to be included among the nation's best itinerant folk artists, was born in Dresden, Germany, in June 1846. Twenty years later Paul allegedly fled Germany to avoid military service during the Austro-Prussian War. He arrived in Milwaukee in 1867, having traveled west via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. He then journeyed to Portage where he hitched a ride down the Wisconsin River on a lumber raft. Whatever the reason, Paul dove into the river and swam ashore at Richland City, near the confluence of the Pine and Wisconsin Rivers.

Paul found refuge with the Krafts, who spoke German, and fell in love with Elizabeth, whom he married in 1868. The couple purchased land near Richland City and through hard labor slowly carved out a truck garden whose produce Paul marketed in nearby towns. Paul trucked his produce by wheelbarrow two miles to Gotham where he either sold it or loaded it aboard the train to sell in another town along the tracks. (Gotham supplanted Richland City from 1880-1885 when the Wisconsin River current changed course to strike the north bank and slowly erode the soil from beneath Richland City.)

In a decade, roughly 1875-1885, Seifert periodically packed his canvass bag with paper and paints and set off in search of farmers willing to pay $2.50 for a painting of their farmstead. Sometimes Paul finished the painting on the spot and sometimes he made a sketch and finished the work at home in his shop. Today Seifert's paintings are treasured for the detail they provide about 19th century farmers' possessions and farming practices in Richland, Grant, Sauk and Iowa Counties. Seifert used toned paper and he permitted the underlying color to peek through to form part of the landscape.

Seifert was "discovered" in the 1950s by a New York folk art historian who included samples of his work in a textbook. Suddenly Seifert paintings commissioned for $2.50 to $5.00 became worth thousands. A New York gallery purchased several and still has them displayed. Others remain in the hands of families whose ancestors purchased Seifert's talents. Along with Grandma Moses of the 20th century, Paul Seifert ranks among the best folk artists in the nation.

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   (1885-1974)

Earl Sugden, "the sage of Richland County," was born April 17, 1885, in Podunk, a small hamlet in Sauk County. Three years later his father moved the family to a wilderness homestead on Hawkin's Creek in Richland County. Here, at age 4, Earl learned the alphabet from an older sister and taught himself to read and write. Soon, he related in his autobiography, he had devoured all the printed material in the home, committing long passages of the Bible and literature to memory. In his autobiography, Earl also explained that he quit first grade after three days when he "realized he knew more than the teacher," who was a young girl. Earl finally earned his grade school diploma, at age 21, in five months, skipped high school and enrolled directly in the Richland County Normal School to earn a teacher's certificate.

During the years he taught in rural one-room schools to enhance his small farm's income, Earl proved to be an unorthodox but highly effective teacher. When the lesson and mood struck him, Earl took his pupils on all day field trips into the surrounding woods and fields to teach them about nature. To reinforce lessons about birds, he cut out and painted 135 tin replicas of Richland County birds that won praise from birding experts for their accuracy.

Always restless, Earl thought and studied constantly. He claimed he used textbooks to teach himself geology, botany, zoology, astronomy, mathematics, philology (literature), psychology, physics, paleontology and several languages. He translated poems and literature from French, German, Spanish, Italian and Norwegian. Earl also taught himself special arts such as the manufacture of musical instruments from at-hand materials and complex sand bottle paintings. These claims, which one is tempted to discount as ego inflation, were authenticated in the 1940s when Life (31 March 1941) included Earl among six featured in "Rural Arts in Wisconsin" and when the state government recognized him as "Wisconsin's most versatile farmer-artist in 1945."

Yes, Earl Sugden merits his reputation as "the sage of Richland County." A few of his creations are on display in the Richland County History Room of the Brewer Public Library in Richland Center.

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