The earth was fertile and prosperity came easily with the harvests of wheat and alfalfa. Catherine gave birth to four sons: Boniface, Peter, Francis Calixtus—Georgia’s father, born in 1853—and Bernard. They were expected to take over the work on the farm as they matured.
The story of Georgia’s maternal grandparents was slightly more exotic. During the same year that the O’Keeffes were cultivating their land in Sun Prairie, Count George Victor Totto was losing his land to the Austrian emperor. Totto had been linked to the 1848 Hungarian uprising against Austrian rule and, fearing imprisonment or execution, he fled to America. After arriving in New York City, he took rooms at the Wyckoff Hotel and befriended the innkeeper, Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff was from a well-established Dutch family that had been in America since the eighteenth century, yet he was sympathetic to the plight of the displaced aristocrat. Like Totto, he yearned for adventure and listened eagerly to Totto’s dreams of a fresh start in the country’s heartland.
In 1852, Totto traveled west to join a community of German and Hungarian immigrants in the small village of Haraszthy, Wisconsin, later incorporated as Sauk City. He joined the Freethinker Congregation there and sent word of promise and opportunity to Wyckoff. Two years later, Wyckoff moved there with his two daughters and second wife, Elizabeth. He planned to open another hotel but shortly after arriving died in a cholera epidemic. Out of duty or passion, Totto married one of Wycoff’s daughters, the twenty-five-year old Isabella Dunham Wyckoff, on May 21, 1855. Her eighteen-year-old sister, Jane Eliza, had already married an adventurer named Ezra Varney and traveled further west to try their luck in the California Gold Rush.
Count George and Isabella Totto, distinguished, even sophisticated, must have seemed an odd couple in the rough atmosphere of the developing Midwest. Over the next fifteen years, they moved frequently and their children were born in various small towns around the state of Wisconsin.
Alletta, Josephine, and Charles were born in a log cabin in Waunakee on the north side of Lake Mendota. In 1864, the Tottos moved to Westport, where Ida Ten Eyck, Georgia’s mother, was born that year, and, later, Lenore, nicknamed Lola, and George, named after his father. In 1872, the Tottos and their six children moved to an area southeast of Sun Prairie where they bought two hundred acres adjacent to the farm of Pierce and Catherine O’Keeffe.
Sun Prairie was discovered in 1837 by August Bird while leading an expedition of forty-five men to clear the land and build a road from Milwaukee to Madison. After two weeks of fighting their way through blinding rain and thick forests, the party emerged onto a crescent-shaped prairie of several square miles. Rays of light broke through the clouds and someone carved the words “Sun Prairie” onto a burr oak tree, thus establishing the name of the town to come.
In 1844, Bird’s brother Charles retraced the party’s route and became the first white settler. Within twenty years, Sun Prairie offered stores and hotels, a collection of churches, and well-kept streets where frame and brick houses were surrounded by white picket fences.1 Charles Bird himself commissioned the covered footbridge from Main Street’s dance hall to the Sun Prairie House hotel “so that the festive beruffled, full-skirted gowns and the Prince Albert coats would not be wet from rain or snow.”2
In 1859, Sun Prairie became the terminus of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. A pair of grain elevators was erected so that, in addition to shipping local crops, farmers could bring wagons of wheat from as far as Illinois. After the fall harvest, it was common to see long lines of farmers on their wagons, waiting in the dawn light for a chance to ship their produce to market. The town prospered as Sun Prairie residents opened general stores, pharmacies, feed shops, livery stables, and other businesses to cater to the farmers’ needs.
Although Sun Prairie’s reputation for opportunity and growth had attracted the Tottos, shortly after their arrival the railroad extended its line to Madison. Business began to slow, and farmers in the area, including the O’Keeffes, turned to dairy farming as an added source of income.
Count Totto, however, was a gentleman farmer. His wife, raised in Manhattan, was unfamiliar with raising crops or milking cows. They used hired workers to help in the fields, but as the economy slowed, so did their income. In 1876, four years after settling in Sun Prairie, Totto sailed back to Hungary, purportedly to claim his lost inheritance. He never returned. Nearly twenty years later, he died in the home of his nephew, Emmanuel Tottis, a linen dealer in Budapest. Isabella remembered him by one special gift—a pair of gold and emerald earrings.
It is not known if Totto was prevented from returning or simply chose to stay in his native land, but he left the lives of his wife and children in shambles. Isabella could not maintain the farm by herself, so she leased the acreage to her neighbors, the O’Keeffes. She moved with her children fifteen miles south to the city of Madison. She was joined by her sister Jane Eliza—known as Jennie—whose husband died of tuberculosis in California. With unusual pluck, Jennie had returned to Wisconsin on a sailing ship that went around the tip of South America. Being childless, Jennie helped Isabella care for her large brood.
After they moved to Madison, the children were raised with ideals informed by town rather than country. Young Ida, who was nearly thirteen when her father left, was thought to have special prospects because of her intelligence. For seven years, the women clung to the hope that Totto would return. Meanwhile, the O’Keeffe men had been plowing their fields and had grown curious about the future of the farm.
The Tottos were not alone in their misfortune. Around the time that Count Totto returned to Budapest, Pierce O’Keeffe died of tuberculosis. His son Frank quit school to help his two older brothers with the work on the farm. Frank had hoped for a more adventurous life and fled to the Dakotas as soon as his younger brother Bernard was old enough to take his place working the land. Frank hoped to pursue opportunities in hunting, perhaps mining, but he had barely established himself when he received a letter from his mother stating that the Totto lands were available. He was needed at home to farm the larger acreage.
Isabella Totto considered herself to be above the farming class of the O’Keeffes. She had hoped that her daughters would adopt professions or at least marry into professional families. Yet without her husband, and having only a minor income, it would be difficult to find suitors for her daughters. During discussions with Catherine O’Keeffe, she realized that her family’s position would be strengthened if her daughter Ida could marry Frank. She would be able to sell her lands yet retain them through her daughter. In addition, the strapping O’Keeffe sons would work the land properly. Isabella, who had married Count Totto as a strategy for survival, now committed her daughter to the same fate.
Frank, at thirty-one, had the curly dark hair, pale complexion and blue eyes typical of the so-called Black Irish. With a stocky physique and an open face, he was ambitious but uninterested in the issues of culture or education so important to the Tottos. Instead, he was practical enough to abandon his personal adventure when duty called. Perhaps Ida was part of his reward for returning to a life on the land. Certainly, he was in awe of her privileged heritage, her awareness of manners and society.
With the hooded eyes of her mother and patrician profile of her father, Ida’s beauty was exotic and sculpted. She had known Frank throughout her formative years and probably felt secure about the choice. At one point, Ida had considered studying medicine to become a doctor, an indication of her intellect. Such a goal was all but unheard of for a woman of her time. Instead, she agreed to become Frank’s wife, the only one of Isabella’s four daughters to marry.
On February 28, 1884, the couple and their families gathered together for a simple Episcopalian ceremony held in the Totto house in Madison. Despite their straitened circumstances, the rights of the Totto clan were determined from the outset. Frank was meant to know that he had married up. The Catholicism of the O’Keeffes was the religion of new immigrants; Episcopalians retained the edge of upper-class distinction
. Ida would retain her Episcopalian allegiance, even though the nearest church was in Madison. As their daughter Catherine O’Keeffe Klenert later observed, “She was down on the Catholic Church and he was down on the Episcopalian; [they were] always making fun of the opposite church.”3
Over the next twenty years, Sun Prairie’s economy was revived through the efforts of City fathers to attract new business. By the standards of the west, the fifty-year-old town was well established, with a population of one thousand and a distinct social hierarchy. It was, however, no match for the university town of Madison, where Ida had spent her teenage years. She was the only one of her siblings to return to Sun Prairie as something of a martyr to the well-being of her larger family. Being a woman of her time, she willingly took up her duties as a farmer’s wife, just as Frank had given up his adventure to become a farmer.
Although she was eleven years younger than her husband, Ida’s intelligence girded her independence and Frank soon found that he was no match for the strong-willed Totto women. Good-natured by temperament, he found it simpler to go along with most of the Totto plans, including paying rent to his mother-in-law to live in her old farmhouse.
Within a year of their marriage, the newlyweds were joined by Ida’s Aunt Jennie, soon to be nanny to a second generation of children. In 1885, Ida gave birth to her first son, Francis Calixtus, named after his father. Two years later, on November 15, 1887, she bore Georgia Totto, named after her Hungarian grandfather. Late in life, Georgia wondered, “Can you imagine? They named me after a man. . . . Can you imagine naming a baby girl after a man?”4
Isabella Totto thought that marrying Ida into the virile labor force of the O’Keeffes assured her family’s future, but she had not taken into account the clan’s genetic vulnerability to tuberculosis. After the death of Pierce, the eldest son, Peter, died from the disease in 1883. They watched, helpless, as Boniface succumbed in 1888. Four years after marrying Ida and taking on the responsibility of caring for her mother and aunt, Frank had lost most of his own family. Without the assistance of his brothers, Frank had to redouble his efforts on the farm and added a creamery to his dairy business. He also leased some acreage to a neighbor.
Soon he had enough money to design and build his own rambling farmhouse overlooking the planted fields. The wooden house was distinguished by a skinny turret on one side, a pitched roof on the other, and a confusion of fenestration, like a collage of details from a Victorian design book. In this house, five more children were born: Ida Ten Eyck in 1889, Anita Natalia in 1891, Alexius Wycoff in 1892, Catherine Blanche in 1895, and Claudia Ruth in 1899.
Childhood memories can be as meaningful as facts and often more powerful in forming the guiding principles of a life. As an adult, Georgia adored her father, whom she remembered as inventive and curious, a man who easily embraced new ideas. He traveled to the 1893 Chicago Exposition to see those temporary palaces erected to the twin deities of agriculture and industry. In conservative Sun Prairie, he was among the first to use a mechanical harvester to bring in the corn and to plant the unconventional crop of tobacco. He lobbied neighbors to permit the installation of telephone lines in the region and Georgia often boasted that her house was the first to have a telephone. She remembered her father as easygoing, given to playing the fiddle at parties, drinking, singing and dancing in the Irish tradition. Her sister Catherine described him as “jolly and fun-loving.”5
While her adoring father was farming from dawn to dusk, her mother was coping with the needs of seven children. Ida had neither the time nor the temperament for intimacy with each son and daughter, which wounded young Georgia. “As a child, I think I craved a certain affection that my mother did not give,” she later said.6 Georgia believed that she was hidden in a back room when company arrived because her mother thought her to be homely. More likely, she was put in the back room so that her mother could visit without the distraction of a young child. This seems even more likely after learning of Georgia’s proud confession: “From the time I was small . . . I was always doing things other people don’t do. . . . I was always embarrassing my family.”7 Whatever the reason, the incarceration in that back room proved so traumatic that it is one of the few childhood experiences that Georgia detailed in her 1976 autobiography.
If “Ma” was aloof, plenty of affection came from Jennie, known to the children as “Auntie.” She assumed the nurturing role by playing with them, mending their clothes, and providing instruction, if not discipline. Although Georgia found this attention to be “the headache of my life,” her siblings found Auntie Jennie to be an oasis of warmth in an emotionally chilly household. Apart from Jennie, endearments were rarely offered to children or displayed between parents.
As the eldest girl, Georgia was more spoiled than her siblings. She had a room of her own from an early age while her younger sisters bunked together. Her sister Catherine recalled, “She was It. She had everything about her way, and if she didn’t she’d raise the devil.”8 Georgia later admitted, “I had a sense of power. I always had it.”9
Yet she could not overcome the fact that her parents seemed most devoted to the eldest son, Francis. She saw him as her competition and tried to beat him in everything from foot races to schoolwork. “My older brother was the favorite child, and I can remember comparing myself to him and feeling I could do better,” she confessed. The parental focus on Francis did, however, permit Georgia a measure of independence. It gave her time to dwell undisturbed in the realm of her imagination, playing games of her own devising by the hour. “I was not a favorite child,” she said, “but I didn’t mind at all.10
She could stroll the dirt lanes for hours and not see a building or a field that didn’t belong to her family. In the spring and summer, wildflowers bloomed against the wire and wood-post fence beyond which plains rolled out to an unbroken horizon. In the fall and winter months, she looked out her bedroom window at the broad gun-metal sky. This land left an impression of spatial grandeur on young Georgia and she would ever credit it as being integral to, even crucial in, her development as an artist. One way or another, she often re-created the swelling, heady sensation of pregnant space. “Where I come from, the earth means everything,” she once said. “Life depends on it.”11
Although relatively well-to-do by the standards of the farming community, the O’Keeffes lived modestly. Clothes and shoes were handed down from one child to the next. Each girl had two dresses, one for everyday and one for special occasions. At Christmas, homemade presents were found under a tree that was decorated with candles and strings of popcorn. Ida insisted upon a single luxury: education.
A typical day began at dawn, when Frank and his hired hands had breakfast. After they had left for the fields, Ida and the children came down to the dining room. The cook and hired girl who prepared meals filled the children’s lunch pails to take to Town Hall School, a one-room cabin located on the edge of the Totto property.
By the age of five, it was clear that Georgia had inherited her mother’s high cheekbones and her father’s pale skin and blue eyes. She wore her long black hair in a single braid down the middle of her back. Thin and wiry, she nearly ran to school in an effort to keep up with six-year-old Francis. At times, the wheat in the fields stood taller than they did and the air was redolent of loam. The dirt road to the school changed with the season—icy in winter, muddy in spring, and dusty in summer—and their teacher, Mrs. Zed Edison, often escorted them. Since Frank was a school board member and Ida actively interested in education, Edison boarded at the O’Keeffes’ house and the families in the community collectively paid her three dollars and fifty cents a week.
The grammar school teacher remembered that by the age of seven Georgia “would suddenly ask the most precise, unexpected questions.” For example, she asked, “When two big, black clouds bump together, is THAT thunder?” More ominously, she queried, “If Lake Monona [in Madison] rose up, way up, and spilled all over, how many people would be drowned?”12 When Edison could not answer t
hese questions, Georgia retorted that she would ask her mother’s sister Lenore. Aunt Lola, as she was known, had become a schoolteacher and lived with her sister Alletta, or Ollie, in Madison. “She knows everything,” sniffed the young girl.13
“Georgia . . . was good, quiet, and had her lessons,” the teacher said. “She did not mingle with the other children much. In fact, the family rather kept to itself.”14 Occasionally, when Ida went to visit her mother in Madison, Edison stayed over on the weekends to help Jennie with the growing brood of youngsters.
After school, the O’Keeffe children had chores. The boys helped in the barn with the cows and draft horses while the girls hoed and weeded in the garden or picked tobacco in the fields. When finished, they were allowed to play on the swings behind the house or play hide and seek in the hayloft. During the long winters, they worked indoors. All the girls learned to sew when young and made clothes not only for themselves but for their dolls. “I sewed unusually well and made wonderful dresses for them,” Georgia once recalled.15
Her family of china dolls lived in a house of her creation, two interlocking boards forming a cross to make up the interior walls of four rooms. During the summer, she placed it under the shade of the hemlock and apple trees. A pan of water became a lake and a boat was devised from a piece of shingle. There, her dolls took walks on sandy paths under trees made from tall weeds. In this innocent arena of play, Georgia came up with the notion that the family needed a husband and father. She sewed a pair of trousers to dress one of the dolls as a man. But the chubby legs of the girl doll stuffed into pants made the man look fat, while her father was thin. Seated on the small silver chair with the pink velvet upholstery, his unbending legs stuck straight out. “It was too discouraging,” she recalled. “I just played he was always around but we never saw him.”16
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