Blackwell Family Henry B. Blackwell Porter, O.E.[*Copy*] *OFFICE OF* Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, 3 Park Street. Boston, Dec 26 1894 C E Porter Esq Viroqua Dear Sir I warmly appreciate your kindness in walking 12 miles from your farm to the one made by my wife & myself in the summer of 1856. You are correct in saying that Hoverson never lived on it. We hired him to break the sod, paying him $3 per acre for doing so. We also fenced it, I think with rails. He put in a sod crop of wheat & oats which yielded about 5000 bushels of grain the following summer-upon which he had the halves-& out of which we (living in the East) cleared only $300.-much less than the breaking & fencing had cost us. The following year I exchanged the farm with a German named George Burek for an unfinished stone house & land near Montclair New Jersey, heavily mortgaged, and2 Buck moved out-But I afterwards heard of him as the keeper of a lager beer saloon in La Crosse & he appears never to have lived on or built on the place. The two fine white birch trees & little clump of rocks on the tract you visited, have doubtless been cleared off. It was only a small outcropping & could easily have been effaced. I should value very much a photograph of the "three chimnies" & also of the rocky tower which used to exist in Viroqua itself-There was a third one south of your farm on or near the ridge road to Prairie du Chien. If you ever come across The Censor containing my letter, I shall value it & perhaps it may be used in the memoir of my wife, which my daughter is compiling. I honor your enterprize and courage in running a milk-route to Viroqua in your semi-arctic winter climate. With many thanks for your kind reply to my last, I am, your friend Henry B Blackwell