Father Solanus Casey, Revised and Updated. Catherine Odell

      Growing Up Well-Rooted (1882–1891)

      In the summer of 1882, Bernard Casey Sr. was forty-two years old, a well-respected man who had farmed the Trimbelle place for almost nine years. During those years, the Casey crops were bountiful. The family, too, had grown to thirteen, with eleven living children, and Ellen was expecting another baby in September.

      It was that same year that Barney Sr. heard of a 345-acre spread for sale just to the north of Pierce County, in St. Croix County, and rode up to look at it. The place had a six-room clapboard house, two barns, a large icehouse, a root house, and a lake on the property. Looking it over was like entering a dream.

      The Willow River, which flowed close by the good-sized farm, intrigued the Irish homesteader. Equally intriguing to Barney Casey was the fact that a railroad line ran through the property and made a stop just two miles away. This meant easy transportation, by rail or by river, for his crops. He went home to think about it, but in a short while, the deal was made. The Caseys would be moving again.

      As the family prepared for their relocation, young Barney’s baby sister, Margaret, was born on September 23, 1882. As always, there was plenty of rejoicing over the new baby. But Margaret’s birth was even more special. Since Mary Ann and Martha’s deaths, there had been only one girl among the eleven living Casey children — the oldest child, eighteen-year-old Ellen.

      After the baby was born, and the harvesting was completed, the awesome task of moving began. Household supplies, farm equipment, chickens, cattle, horses, pigs, and assorted pets had to be transported, and all with one eye to the calendar and the other on the sky. The family needed to move before a sudden snowfall could block the roads and make traveling treacherous.

      Fortunately, the Caseys were tucked in at their new home before the Wisconsin winter could catch them on the open road. Bernard Casey Sr. must have smiled broadly at the blessings from heaven. He had been given such a fine farm and a healthy, happy family, including a second daughter.

      Like the rest of the family, Barney Jr. was thrilled with the new spread. Though he knew he would miss the place where he had spent most of his childhood, the lake, larger fields, and sheer size of the new property better fit the scope of his twelve-year-old tastes for adventure and outdoor fun.

      Except for tending to the livestock, winters meant some time off for Midwestern farmers. Bernard Casey wasted no time finding a way to turn the slack season to good purpose. He became a distributor of religious books and sold subscriptions to the Irish Standard and Extension Magazine. He would travel to St. Paul by train and return with the books, heaving full canvas sacks off the train into the snowbanks as the train passed near the Casey homestead. Knowing about what time the train passed through, several of the older Casey boys would pick up the heavy sacks and put them on the wagon, while their father walked back home from the Burkhardt train stop, two miles away.

      The Caseys enjoyed literature and music. In addition to the religious books they were allowed to read (if they didn’t soil them!), they enjoyed other literature. The works of James Fenimore Cooper, especially The Deerslayer, were family favorites. After dinner, Barney Sr. would often push his chair back from the table after prayer was concluded, hoist the youngest child up on his lap, and read aloud.

      Years later, the younger Caseys could remember hearing stories about Abraham Lincoln, the verses of Irish poet Thomas Moore, and the poems of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In particular, the Casey children loved one long poem by the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier called “Snow-Bound”:

      And ere the early bedtime came

      The white drift piled the window-frame,

      And through the glass the clothes-line posts

      Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.

      It was a lovely vision the Caseys saw, winter after winter.

      Ellen and Bernard Casey also made sure that their American-born children were well-acquainted with their Irish heritage. They passed on the stories and legends of their homeland. With a fiddle bought somewhere along the way, the head of the house would play and lead his household in singing Irish ballads. His children quickly learned that anything he lacked in musical polish, their father compensated for with enthusiasm.

      If the railroad was helping to expand literary horizons for the Caseys of St. Croix County, it was also responsible for some other very practical benefits. Before the expansion of the railroads in the 1880s, all time throughout the country was local time. A clock in Milwaukee might be read 11:05 at the same moment that a Chicago timepiece struck 11:00. On Sunday, November 18, 1883, however, railroads throughout the United States adopted “Standard Time” to allow trains to run “on time.” People commonly went to railroad stations after that to get the exact time when the signal came over the telegraph.

      Life on the Casey farm was running on its own schedule, and the patterns of religious practice and faith were unchanging. The weekly Sunday trip to Mass was now a bit farther than it was from the Trimbelle property. St. Patrick Church at Hudson, Wisconsin, was nine miles from the Casey home. Each Sunday, some members of the Casey family started out for church a full two hours before the scheduled Mass. And, as the family settled into its new home during the winter of 1882–83, the tradition of evening prayer continued. As soon as dinner was over, Bernard Sr. called for quiet and began the prayers, including the Rosary.

      At age twelve, young Barney was starting to grow much faster. Even though the bout with diphtheria had left his voice weakened and wispy, and he did not seem as strong as his brothers, he was strong enough to love the outdoor life. Outwardly, he looked much like the other Casey boys, but there was something a bit gentler about his face and behavior. Barney played baseball aggressively, especially as a catcher, but refused to take part in the boxing matches the other Casey boys set up near the barn. His coolness to the sport mystified his brothers. This was, after all, the era of the great prizefighter John L. Sullivan! Barney wouldn’t touch the gloves that his brothers had pooled their money to buy. He gave no reasons for his distaste, and after a while his brothers did not pressure him.

      In the spring of 1883, the Caseys saw Maurice leave home to enter St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee. At the same time, Barney eagerly traveled to Hudson to spend two weeks in preparation for his first holy Communion. (Twelve was the customary age for first communicants in this era.) Fr. Thomas A. Kelley, the pastor of St. Patrick at Hudson, wanted to make sure that his communicants were well-drilled in the faith before they received the sacrament.

      Barney also “took the pledge,” agreeing to abstain from alcohol until he was twenty-one years of age. It was the custom then in Irish communities to ask young boys to make that promise before receiving first Communion. In 1840, the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore had recommended the establishment of “temperance” societies in all parishes to curb alcohol use, and the first statewide Wisconsin meeting of the Catholic Total Abstinence Society was held in 1871. But the enthusiasm to spread the “pledge” was primarily an Irish interest. German Catholics didn’t participate, and one German priest offered a somewhat slanted explanation for their attitude. The “pledge” movement was a good idea for the English and Irish, he said, because “as everybody knows, they drink solely to get drunk,” while Germans knew how to drink with moderation.

      At the time of his first Communion, Barney had a powerful experience of the Blessed Virgin. Thus, during the summer and autumn following his first Communion, he began to say his own Rosary each night, in addition to the family’s recitation.