Mary J. Schueller

I am a graduate of UW-Eau Claire with a BS degree in Bus. Adm., a Psych. minor, and a certificate in Technical Writing. I am a lifelong resident of Wisconsin with a "northern Wisconsin spirit with pine in my DNA." Around 1998, I became aware of how much my family's activities completely paralleled the history of northern Wisconsin. My great-grandfather immigrated from Bohemia to the Ashland area where he worked as a logger and started a dairy farm. My grandfather was a logger and my mother literally lived her childhood in a logging car camp near Upson. Around 1998, I became fascinated with my father's service in the Civilian Conservation Corps. This research became two books. "Rustic Reflections of Copper Falls State Park" is an expanded and revised version of the document that I wrote to place the state park site on the National Register of Historic Places. "Soldiers of Poverty" highlights the human side of serving in the CCCs, where 32 of the 180 men in Camp 692 married a Mellen girl, including my dad. Ever since 2005, I have been a public speaker telling the important role the Civilian Conservation Corps has played in developing Wisconsin's parks and forests. I feel it is important to attach a human face to these builders of history so that we will remember what they gave us in their labor. In order to continue telling the story, I was a contributing writer of the musical comedy "Camp We-Kan-Tak-It" which was performed throughout Wisconsin including places such as The Boerner Botanical Gardens and Old World Wisconsin, both in Milwaukee. This production was honored with the 2009 and 2010 Wisconsin's Humanities Council's major grant.

My third book, "My Life To My Children, by Jack Vilas" is an edited memoir of Vilas' historic flights over northern Wisconsin as the first flying fire warden. A book currently in progress is "The Chronicles of the Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest: A Cultural and Natural History of Wisconsin's Largest State Forest" with a projected release in 2018. I self-publish under the name Rustic Books LLC.