[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 188 (Thursday, November 16, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7292-S7293]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    TRIBUTE TO JACKIE DOUGAN JACKSON

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, in a few days, Americans will celebrate 
Thanksgiving, a holiday that is filled with meaning and memories and, 
if we are lucky, sumptuous meals shared with family and friends.
  Thanksgiving began as America's national harvest festival, a day to 
give thanks for our rich and fertile land and the great bounty of food 
it produces.
  On this long Thanksgiving weekend, I plan to spend a few hours 
reading the latest book from one of my favorite friends whose works 
capture in loving detail life on her family's Wisconsin dairy farm, but 
even more, the rock-solid values that sustained her family and her 
life.
  The book is called ``The Round Barn: Biography of an American Farm.'' 
As one reviewer wrote, reading it ``is like sitting on the porch of an 
early 20th century dairy farm and watching an era in American history 
pass right before your eyes.''
  The Round Barn books--there are three of them now--are the creations 
of Jackie Dougan Jackson, a novelist, poet, professor, mentor to 
generations of writers, and one of the best-loved residents in my 
hometown of Springfield, IL.
  She lives in a big, old home in Springfield which, legend has it, was 
once visited by another master storyteller, Abraham Lincoln.
  Loretta and I are lucky to count Jackie as a dear friend of many 
years. She is a kind, creative soul who never fails to reach out to 
help others. At the age of 89, she is still filled with energy, empathy 
and curiosity about nearly everything.
  The Round Barn books keep a promise that Jackie made to her 
grandfather W.J. Dougan when she was just 15 years old. She vowed then 
that one day she would write a history of the dairy farm that W.J. had 
founded in 1906, the farm on which three generations of Jackie's family 
lived and worked.
  Jackie Jackson throws open the Round Barn doors at the Dougan family 
farm to tell us an American story. She gives us a rich history of farm 
life at the mercy of the forces of science and the market but grounded 
in rock-solid Midwestern values.
  Some of those values were painted onto the silo of the family's round 
barn. W.J. titled the list ``Aims for the Farm.'' They were: ``#1. Good 
Crops; #2. Proper Storage; #3. Profitable Live Stock; #4. A Stable 
Market''--and most important of all--``#5. Life as Well as a Living.''
  W.J. Dougan was a deeply spiritual man and a hard worker. He 
struggled for years to put himself through college and became a 
Methodist minister, but encroaching deafness forced him to give up the 
religious life he loved.
  In 1906, he bought a dairy farm near Beloit, WI.
  The Round Barn was built in 1911. W.J. chose the unusual shape 
because he believed that a barn braced on a central concrete pillar was 
cheaper to build, more efficient for a dairy operation, and less likely 
to blow away in a tornado. The Round Barn quickly became a county 
landmark.
  W.J. marketed himself as ``the Babies Milk Man,'' and he succeeded 
through hard work, dedication to his customers and community, and an 
unusual talent for spotting and adopting cutting-edge advances in 
agriculture. In 1925, he was named a ``Master Farmer'' by a prestigious 
agricultural organization, one of only 23 Midwestern farmers so 
honored.
  Even so, the Great Depression, which destroyed so many family farms 
and businesses, nearly wiped out the Dougan Guernsey Dairy Farm. In 
1930, bankruptcy papers were drawn up but never filed.
  Jackie was born in 1928, the year before the Great Depression, one of 
four children of W.J.'s son Ronald and Ronald's wife, Eunice.
  Jackie was a natural born writer, a prodigy. When she was 8 she wrote 
a short story that took first prize in a Beloit citywide contest. Her 
first novel was serialized in the Galesburg Post in Illinois when she 
was 10.
  She majored in classics at Beloit College, married, and then moved 
with her new husband to Ann Arbor, where they both earned master's 
degrees.
  The couple had four daughters. Jackie would go on to earn a doctorate 
in Latin from the University of Wisconsin.
  She was teaching writing at Kent State University in Ohio in 1967 
when her father suffered a heart attack. Jackie went home and sat at 
his hospital bedside for weeks as he recounted stories of life on the 
family farm.
  Back in Ohio after her father's recovery, Jackie became aware of a 
deep longing within her to reconnect with her rural beginnings. As she 
described it in one of her Round Barn books:

       There has been another clock within her. She didn't set it 
     nor place it there. It's been geared not to hours but to 
     cycles; the daily precession of milking and bottling, feeding 
     and cleaning the yearly procession of planting, cultivating, 
     harvesting. It's been set to sun, moon, health, cold, wet 
     dry. But now if there's a heavy spring freeze, she puts on a 
     coat without sensing the loss of crisp that might result from 
     too-late planting. If the sky lowers black, she takes an 
     umbrella without feeling the sway of the hay wagon racing to 
     reach the barn before the cloudburst. Her dailiness is not 
     this class, that lecture, the next trip to the stacks. . . . 
     It was the ground she'd stood on, the air she'd breathed. She 
     had no special moment, no epiphany to explain the realization 
     of loss that came over her. She only knows that something 
     elemental is gone and has been gone for some time. That it's 
     probably irretrievable, unless she changes the path she's 
     treading.

  So that is what she did. Jackie Jackson changed her life's path. She 
moved to Springfield, IL, and accepted a position teaching literature 
and writing at an innovative university that was just opening, Sangaman 
State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield.
  For years, she had been collecting stories and recollections about 
the Round Barn, her family, the dairy's customers, and the townspeople. 
Her trove of tales included her own notebooks, stretching back to when 
she was

[[Page S7293]]

8, the stories her father had told her from his hospital bed, letters 
and notes left by her grandfather, and much more.
  She became a sort of detective, finding more letters tucked into 
framed pictures, stuck to the attic floor in the old family home all 
sorts of unexpected places. Each letter or scrap of paper became a 
piece of the family puzzle.
  In 1976, she began to fashion the notes and letters into the first 
Round Barn book. The book published this month, ``The Round Barn: 
Biography of an American Farm' is the fulfillment of her promise to her 
grandfather, her magnum opus, a detailed and loving portrait of a way 
of life that no longer exists.
  The Dougan Guernsey Dairy Farm ceased operating in 1967, just as 
agribusiness and large corporate farms were beginning to redefine 
American farming.
  In 1979, the Round Barn was added to the National Registry of 
Historic Places.
  By 2012, the dilapidated old structure had become a safety hazard, 
and it was torn down, but thanks to Jackie Jackson's beautifully 
detailed biography of her family's farm and the people who lived and 
worked there, generations from now readers will still be able to visit 
the magical world of the Round Barn.
  As this Thanksgiving Day, this American harvest festival, approaches, 
I am thankful for the Round Barn books that capture a bygone day of 
American farming like holograms, and Loretta and I are grateful to our 
friend Jackie for giving the world such a gift.
  (At the request of Mr. Schumer, the following statement was ordered 
to be printed in the Record.)

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