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Dear Editor;
Last Saturday, August 21, there was a big auction held in Highland. The little house on the far north end of our community, no longer is the home of the Wallenkamp family.
To be precise, it was the home of George Wallenkamp for the last 83 years. George's grandparents came to this country in 1872. The second and present, Wallenkamp house was built in 1894. The house was in a kind of time lock, with little but the basic convenient updates made over recent years.
With a walk through the house, it seemed very like the turn of the century setting. Every drawer, trunk and spare shelf was a repository of memorabilia collected over the life of the family and the house itself. The house, like our "George", was all about history. George was a historian. He had a very sharp mind up to his last days. He had a near encyclopedic recall of local family names and connections, the business that once studded the up and down of main street and the dates of many Highland historical facts and events.
The other day, it struck me with the passing of George, and now sale of all the house collections, that the door to our Highland history is a little farther closed. All the fragments of his family have been sorted and absorbed into other collections, taken to other outside areas and into new family possessions.
If we could have digitally captured George's recall, and stored it for our Historical Collection would have been something. However, with all the tech knowledge at our resources today, we are at a loss. We will have to rely on the collected bits and pieces of George's writings and collected data to continue to see our past history, our ever changing community, the world we live within.
For me, I am a little sad. So many things have changed in Highland and will continue to change, but we must not regret the pass nor shut the door on it, but to ponder what was with amazement and gratefulness.
David Scheifel
Highland, Wisconsin