Exploring a historic farmstead that helps tell the story of the Driftless Area
PORT ANDREW — Ben and Bruce Moffat could be twins.
They were born a few years apart but their vision and motivations are perfectly synchronized thanks to their childhood upbringings and their professional experiences over the past 40 years.
And those life lessons are good news for the future of a restored historic property here that provides one of the best examples of early settlement in Wisconsin.
It was their great, great grandfather, John Coumbe who was the first European to throw down stakes in what is now Richland County. His 200 acre property a few miles west of Muscoda has remained in the family and this is where the Moffats have established the Crosscurrents Cultural Center, designed to preserve and celebrate "the human and natural history of Southwest Wisconsin," also known as the Driftless Area.
The center, which opened this fall, is housed on a property that holds Coumbe's home, barn, smokehouse and outhouse, all built in the early 1860s. But the Moffats are determined to include Ho-Chunk educators, dancers and historians in their programming since prior to white settlement the Ho-Chunk and Meskwaki tribes had seasonal villages here surrounded by agricultural fields and effigy mounds. The Moffats also see a time when they pass the property on to a foundation that will keep the history alive and preserve the homestead for generations to come.
"A lot of this is inspired by our mom and our grandmother, teaching us that this place is bigger than our family," Ben Moffat said. "So, whether they intended to or not, they basically trained me and Bruce that we don't really own this place. It's a place to share."
The Heritage Center is developing a program schedule for 2025 but held its first three events last month. They included historical presentations, tours of the house and barn, storytelling and music dedicated to three women in the Moffats' family all of whom are credited with keeping the farmstead in the family. Ben's wife, a native Hawaiian, also presented a storytelling program about efforts to save endangered species.
The Moffats' grandparents at one point considered donating the Coumbe property to the state but when the Wisconsin Historical Society proposed dismantling the house and moving it to Old World Wisconsin, they rescinded their proposal. That decision has provided a unique opportunity for the Moffats to create something on the original land at what is considered by historians to be an intersection of Native and European cultures. The property, referred to by the family as "Tippesaukee," includes views of the river, a more than 300 year-old oak tree near the front of the house and the nearby cemetery that holds the remains of Coumbe, his wife and others from the family.
The property, a few miles northwest of Muscoda, is also near Frank's Hill, home to some of the most well preserved effigy mounds in the state and is where Pere Marquette and Louis Jolliet paddled past in June 1673 on their way to the Mississippi River.
"This is extraordinary, not just for the riverway, this is extraordinary for the state of Wisconsin and is an extraordinary story for the settlement of the Upper Midwest," said Mark Cupp, executive director of the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway Board and is president of the board for the Friends of Crosscurrents Heritage Center. "For Bruce and Ben Moffat to go down this path is truly amazing. It's a great leap of faith."
The bespectacled, bearded Moffat brothers grew up in California in the backyard of Stanford University, but their summers would bring them to Port Andrew where they would immerse themselves with the dairy cows and pigs on their grandparent's farm and the cool waters of a natural spring. After they both graduated from Vasser College in upstate New York, Bruce, now 71, would dive into a career working with nonprofits in Washington, D.C., and Costa Rica. Ben, now 68, would focus his efforts on theater, dance and storytelling in the University of Hawaii System.
The combined talents of the brothers are being put to the full test. Bruce lives in Madison while Ben and his wife live part of the year in the upstairs of the house and part of the year in Hawaii.
"The possibilities are vast," Bruce Moffat said of the Heritage Center's potential. "The more people get to explore the place, the more allies we'll have."
John Coumbe was born in in England in 1808 and when he was about 20 years old, joined his parents who in 1828 emigrated to the U.S. where they eventually made their home in Ohio. John Coumbie would later leave Ohio to mined lead in Galena, Illinois, worked in a bar in a hotel and eventually, in 1838, make his way to English Prairie, now known as Muscoda, after hearing about available land. Over the next 12 years he would build three cabins and in 1861, using massive timbers, begin building a barn. In 1863 he built a one-room house on the hill up from the third cabin and then construct a two story addition seven years later.
One of Coumbe's seven children was Warner Coumbe, who would go onto become a doctor and then marry and have two children, Camilla and Lottie. Camilla had two children, John Coumbe Kirkpatrick and the Moffats' mother, Mary Moffat. The Moffats are quick to pay homage to their grandmother Camillia, great aunt Lottie and their mother, who is 97 years old and living in memory care, with preserving the farmstead, which has set the stage for the creation of the Heritage Center.
"There's kind of a hunger for learning more and building on that sense of place," Ben Moffat said. "It has the stories of our family but it's just one example of the settlement of the west. It also has the stories of the native people, the river, the plants, the soil. It's like a window into the past."
But the past had caught up to the house. It was infested with carpenter ants, the ceiling was sagging, plaster was cracked, the floors were uneven and wall paper was peeling. That's why in 2017, a multi-year restoration was started. The work included jacking up the house, adding a massive metal beam to shore up the ceiling, finding matching wallpaper and replacing lathe and plaster.
"It was kind of scary at that time, there was an air of panic," Bruce Moffat said. "This house was very unstable. If you walked anywhere in this room the glass in those shelves would rattle. You set a glass down on the counter and it would slide. We knew we had a ticking time bomb."
Restoration work was completed in 2019 with the family room near the kitchen home to original furniture including the dining room table, a spinning wheel, hutch and a rocking bed for a baby. The room also holds a pump organ. But the showpiece room is the parlor, designed to look as it did when Coumbe and his family lived in the home. It includes furniture Coumbe bought after shipping three box cars of cattle to market in Milwaukee. A pot belly stove sits in a corner and there's a piano from Newton & Co. in New York that was transported to the home via steamship.
Door handles and hinges in the house are original as are the chip marks in the front door made by children banging the door open while carrying in firewood. Prior to the addition being made to the house, children slept in a loft above the family room.
Uploaded PhotosBut while dairy operations ceased in the early 1990s on the farm, the family still leases out 112 acres of cropland to local farmers and rents a pasture between the house and the highway to a local veterinarian for his beef cattle.
Work on the barn is on going and being undertaken by Roger Bailey, an experienced carpenter who has lived in the area his entire life. He has shored up the barn with interior supports and during a tour pointed out the massive beams that Coumbe and his work crews installed during the Civil War. The largest white oak beam is 30 feet long and likely weighed around 4,000 pounds when installed. The barn, with wooden floors, considered rare in the 1860s, also includes an area for livestock, hay and grain storage and has stalls for horses.
"It's a pretty amazing structure," Bailey said. "When John Coumbe had this built, he probably had all of his livestock in here in the winter. Chickens, hogs, cattle, oxen, horses. That's what they did back then."
Barry Adams covers regional news for the Wisconsin State Journal. Send him ideas for On Wisconsin at 608-252-6148 or by email at .
