Penniless at 22, She Bought a $4 Wisconsin Cheese Cave — What Her Bestemor Aged Inside Stunned Her

Penniless at 22, She Bought a $4 Wisconsin Cheese Cave — What Her Bestemor Aged Inside Stunned Her

She was 22 and penniless. No family left to take her in, no roof of her own, just a small wooden cheese harp worn warm by four generations of women’s hands, a single thumbmed page from her Besteor’s aging book sewn into the lining of her coat pocket, and four single dollar bills she had earned washing milk pales at a small dairy outside Westby.

And with that $4, she bought a half- buried limestone cheese cave dug straight into the side of a wooded three miles up Valley Road in the small Norwegian settlement of Halverson’s in Vernon County, Wisconsin, in a stretch of the driftless area that had not heard a wooden cheese paddle scraped the inside of a copper kettle since the autumn of 1966.

The hand cut oak door had warped on its iron hinges. The path to it was lost under 58 autumns of fallen oak and maple leaves.

But what nobody knew, least of all Secret Halverson herself, was that aging on the cedar shelves inside that cold, dim cave, sealed in beeswax and wrapped in clean linen, was something her best and her best had set down there across 162 years that would change her life forever.

Before we go on, if you love stories like these, take a moment and subscribe and tell us in the comments where you are listening from tonight.

We’d love to see how far these stories travel. She had seen the cave on a hand printed card thumbtacked to the bulletin board of the small Vernon County co-op in Westby in soft pencil.

Limestone cheese cave halfacre frontage $4 or best offer. See Mr. N. Sorenson at the courthouse.

She had $6.80 folded in the inside pocket of her flannel work shirt, the last of 3 weeks of dairy wages.

She walked the half mile down to the small Vernon County courthouse on a cool Tuesday morning in early October with the sugar maples just beginning to flame red along the ridges.

And she asked the woman at the front desk for Mr. N. Sorenson by name.

Mr. N. Sorenson was 79 years old and had been the deputy clerk of Vernon County for 52 of those years.

He looked up at her over the long oak counter when she said her name, looked at her over the top of his bif focals, and went very still.

Halverson, he said slowly, the in the word from Halverson’s You’d be Astrid’s granddaughter then.

Seagrid nodded once. He folded his bif focals and walked back into a small store room without another word.

He came back 2 minutes later with a heavy iron key on a piece of plain hemp twine.

The iron warm from being held in a drawer for a long time. $4, he said.

We have been keeping this key 58 years. Your bestmore left it with my father back in 1966, and she told him plain.

Hand this to whichever Halverson girl walks back up Valley asking after the wheels. We had begun to wonder if any of you would.

He laid the key in her palm. She paid him four soft paper dollars, signed her name, and he walked her to the door, and set his old hand for one second on her shoulder, and he said very softly, “You go on up there before sundown, hun.

The cave has been waiting on you a long while.” She had grown up with the smell of warm milk and cedar shelves, with the deep warm grass smell of fresh evening milk coming up from a copper kettle on a wood stove, with the dry, sharp smell of renet being measured drop by drop into the kettle.

With the cool, clean smell of pressed curd being cut by a wooden cheese harp into squares the size of a thumbnail.

With the warm yellow smell of fresh butter being churned on a Saturday morning, with the deep amber smell of beeswax being melted in a small iron pot for ceiling wheels, and with the dim cool smell of the cheese cave itself, breathing slow out of the on a hot August afternoon, dry and old and full of years.

She had grown up sitting on a low cedar stool at her best’s kitchen table when she was three and four years old, watching her Besteor’s long red knuckled hands draw the wooden cheese harp slow through a kettle of fresh set kurd, judging the cut by feel and by sound with a slow patience that did not look like work, but like listening.

Her best was Astred Halverson, born in 1940 in the same small white clabbered farmhouse at the head of Halverson’s Kulie where Seagrid would later be born.

The only daughter of Lars and Eningga Halverson, she had learned the wheels at the side of her own mother on the same copper kettle in the same wooden cheese harp her great-g grandandmother had carried out of Telmark in 1862.

Astred was tall and thin with the long red knuckled hands of a dairy woman, her white hair worn in a single tight braid pinned at the back of her neck.

Seagrid had called her Bestore from the first day she could shape the sound. Seagrid’s mother, Liv, had gone to Minneapolis when Seagrid was three and had not come back.

And Seagrid’s father, Bejorn, had been killed in a tractor accident in the lower when she was nine.

So the years had belonged to Bestimore from the time Secret could carry a tin pale without spilling.

She learned to tell evening milk from morning milk by the smell of the cream before she could read.

By 8 she could draw a wooden cheese harp through a set kettle of curd in a single slow even pass without breaking a single square.

By 12 she could read a wheel. She could stand at her best’s elbow at the long cedar shelves of the cave and see before her best told her whether a wheel had two more months or six, whether the rind was forming clean, or whether the beeswax seal had cracked and the wheel was going off, whether the cool dim of the cave was holding the wheel at the steady 53° the cave had always held, or whether the autumn warmth had drifted in too long and the wheel would have to be moved deeper.

By 18, she had pressed her own wheels for four full seasons, sealed 61 finished wheels in beeswax in her own hand, and learned every one of the 17 Telmark line aging signs.

Best said a Halverson woman had to know before she was allowed to seal a wheel under her own initials.

Bestdeore on a cool Saturday morning in October in Seagrid’s 18th year, walked out of the small white clabbered farmhouse with a single fresh pressed wheel of pull toss wrapped in clean linen and laid it in Seagar’s hands at the kitchen door and said, “You are a Halverson woman now, child.

The milk knows you. The harp knows you. The cave knows you.” And then she said in her quiet way, “And there’s a one thing your best has not yet shown you because the cave herself had to choose the morning.

Come up the with me.” But before Seagrid or Astrid, there had been Sve. SV Halverson had come down off a ship at the port of Quebec City in the autumn of 1862, 21 years old, with her young husband, Olverson, a small wooden trunk holding everything they owned, and a single cedar box of dried Brunost starter culture, and a small leather pouch of saved renet from her own mother’s dairy in the high mountain valley of Telmar in Norway that her grandmother had been keeping alive since 1839.

The Halversons had walked west across the Great Lakes country and down into the Wisconsin Driftless in the summer of 1863, and they had stopped at a deep wooded in northern Vernon County, because the slope of the ran clean and steep, and a small clear branch came down off a limestone bluff at the head of it, the way the streams came down off the high pastures of Telmar.

And SV had stood at the foot of the bluff with the cedar box of starter at her feet.

And she had pressed her hand against the cold cream limestone of the bluff. And she had said in the slow, careful English she was still learning, “This is the place.

The cave is here. We will not go further.” She had been 21. She had no money to speak of and no kettle and no cave and no one in Vernon County who believed a young Norwegian immigrant woman could keep alive a starter culture older than the state of Wisconsin.

But SV had set her hand on the cold limestone of the bluff, and she had begun.

She and Oled dug into the bluff with hand tools through the autumn of 1863, hauling out the soft cream limestone bucket by bucket, and they shaped the cave 12 ft deep and 10 ft wide and tall enough to stand.

And they built four long cedar shelves into the cave walls in the spring of 1864.

And they hung a hand cut oak door on handforged iron strap hinges at the cave mouth.

In the summer of that same year, SV pressed her first wheel of pultos in the cave in the autumn of 1864.

She kept the cave for 48 years. She trained her granddaughter Ingga at her side, and Eningga trained her daughter Astred.

And the cheese cave at Halverson’s Kulie held its wheels without a single empty season for 103 years through SV and Ingga and Astred until the autumn of 1966 when Astred was 26 and her own mother Ingging had just gone.

And Astred closed the heavy oak door of the cave on a cool October evening and walked back down to the white clappered farmhouse and did not open the cave again for 58 years.

Best had three rules for the wheels. The first was this. The milk is the teacher.

You do not make the cheese, child. The milk in the renet and the cave make the cheese.

And you only stand beside the kettle in the shelves, and you read what the milk is telling you, and you do what it is asking.

A cheesemaker who thinks she decides what the wheel will become is a cheesemaker who will lose two wheels out of every five in the cave because the milk will turn against her on the kettle and the rind will crack on her in the cave.

The second was this. The cave is the keeper. The cold dry of the cave at a steady 53 degrees year round is what ages a wheel slow and true.

Not us. We seal the wheel in beeswax and we wrap it in clean linen and we set it on the cedar shelf and we mine the door and we mine the air and the cave does the rest.

A woman who thinks she ages a wheel is a woman who is fooling herself.

The cave ages the wheel. The third was this. The starter is the family. The cedar box of brunist starter culture your great great grandmother carried out of Telmark in 1862 has been alive in this kitchen and this cave for 162 years.

Never once gone cold. Never once gone sour. Never once allowed to die in a careless winter.

We feed it warm whole milk three times a week. We keep it on a cool corner of the back of the wood stove.

We never let it grow more than it can use. And when a Halverson woman is gone, the next Halverson woman feeds it the same morning with her own hand in the same small earthn croc.

Mind the starter above the other two daughter. The wheels can be remade. The cave can be repaired.

The starter cannot be replaced. Bestdeore died in November of 2023 on a cold rainy afternoon in her chair beside the wood stove in the small white clapped farmhouse at the head of Halverson’s with the open thumbmed aging book in her lap and the small earthen croc of warm brunist starter on the side table beside her.

The doctor said it was her heart. Secret was 21. She did not cry. She came home from her shift at the dairy outside Westby and found Besteim in the chair, and she sat down on the floor beside the chair and laid her cheek against Bestimore’s cool hand, and she stayed there until the funeral home came.

She fed the starter herself that night with a small ladle of warm whole milk in her own careful young hand, and only when the croc was set back on the cool corner of the wood stove, did she sit down beside the cold wood stove, and finally let herself cry.

The small white clabbered farmhouse at the head of Halverson’s belonged to the bank. Because Besteor had taken a small second mortgage on it during her last sickness, and within four months of funeral, the bank had come and asked Secret to be out by the 1st of October.

She had left with the small wooden cheese harpeor had pressed into her hand on her last clear afternoon.

A single thumbmed page torn carefully from Bestimore’s aging book sewn into the lining of her coat pocket.

The small earthn croc of warm brunos starter wrapped in two clean dish towels in a wool sweater.

A small canvas bag of her clothes and the photograph of three women standing at the open oak door of the cheese cave in 1948.

If these stories are reaching you tonight, take a second to subscribe. It truly does help us keep making them.

And tell us in the comments, was there ever a small living thing in your family that someone kept warm and fed for years on end?

A starter, a sourdough, a tended fire that you carry with you from a woman who is no longer here.

The three-mile walk up Valley Road from where the borrowed pickup would no longer make the muddy ruts of the Koolie Road was steeper than she remembered.

The sugar maples were flaming red along the ridges. The bur oaks were going deep gold in the bottom.

A clear, cold branch came down off the limestone bluff at the head of the the water bright over rounded fieldstones.

She found the foundation of the small white clampboard farmhouse first, four courses of fieldstone in a square of new grass, and just beyond the foundation set against the foot of the mosscovered cream limestone bluff that rose into oak hickory woods, the hand cut oak door of the cheese cave.

The oak planks were silvered and split and warped on iron strap hinges. Rusted dark.

The limestone framing the door patched green and silver with moss and lyken. 58 autumns of fallen oak and maple leaves banked deep against the threshold.

She did not cry. She brushed the deep bank of leaves away from the threshold with her boot, fitted the heavy iron key into the rusted iron lock plate, worked the key gently for the better part of 2 minutes until the wards remembered how to turn, and then the bolt slid back with a small dry sound, and the warped oak door eased open on its iron hinges with the slow groan of a door that is held for 160 years.

The cool, dim breath of the cave came out to meet her. 53° and dry and smelling of beeswax and aged linen and the faint warm, sweet ghost of 162 years of slow wheels.

She stood in the doorway a long minute. Then she lit her best small brass kerosene lantern and she stepped inside.

The cave was 12 ft deep and 10 ft wide and tall enough for her to stand.

The natural cream limestone walls cool and dry and patched with moss only at the cave mouth.

The deeper walls bare and pale. Four long cedar shelves ran along the natural walls at chest height.

Handbuilt by SV in 1864. The cedar gone dark amber with age but uncracked. On the shelves stood the wheels, dozens of them.

Some squat round wheels of pultos sealed in deep gold beeswax. Some tall narrow wheels of nucalost stippled with whole carowway seed.

Some small dark brown blocks of ghettos, the way cheese the Halverson women had cooked down from their goats milk every autumn for six generations.

All of them sealed in beeswax. All of them wrapped in clean linen. All of them dated in her great great grandmother’s hand or her great-grandmothers or her grandmothers.

The small slips of waxed paper tied to the linen with hemp twine. The lantern light caught the rows of beeswax sealed wheels and threw warm amber back off them in soft shifting shadow.

The dim cool air of the cave settled in around her. She walked slowly down the center of the cave.

The lantern held up and she read the slips as she passed. Puls 1864. Pultos solving 1867.

Pultos solving 1872. Nucalost Sve 1875 the year she first grew her own carowway in the south garden.

Guosst 1879 Pultos Ingga 1901 Nucalast Ingga 1904 Guinga 1909 Ptoast Astrid 1948 her first wheel under her own initials.

Ptos Astrid 1966 the last wheel BTemore had sealed in beeswax before she had walked away from the cave.

The slow telmark line cheesekeeping of three generations of women alive on the cedar shelves of the limestone bluff for 160 years.

On the back wall on the deepest cedar shelf sat a small flat tin box with a hinged lid and a small canvas sack.

Seagrid lifted the tin first. Inside was the original aging book, thick sewn together with linen thread, the cover of soft tanned cowhide, the pages of cotton paper hand cut and hand rrooled, and on every page in the careful old hands of three generations of Halverson women was the whole record of the cave, the wheel, the year, the starter feeding date, the kettle temperature, the cut of the harp, the press weight, the cave shelf, the aging months, the break open date, the flavor noted page after page after page, 160 years of careful Norwegian cheesekeeping.

Inside the canvas sack lay 16 small American gold coins, $5 pieces from the 1860s and ‘7s.

The gold SV had carried out of Telmark in the lining of her own coat.

And folded into the back of the aging book, sealed with a drop of warm dark beeswax gone hard as amber, was a single letter, the wax still whole, addressed in long, careful, old Norwegian tinged penmanship.

To whoever opens this door from Sve Halverson, Ostapru Halverson’s 1865. She broke the wax seal with her thumb and read the letter aloud to the cave because there was no one else to read it to and the slow dims were the only thing listening to whoever opens this door.

If you are reading this, you have walked up Valley with a key in your hand and you have brushed the leaves from the threshold and you have lit a lantern in the dim and you have known to read the slips on the wheels and you are a Halverson woman and the cave has called you home.

My name is Sve Halverson. I was born Sylve in the high mountain valley of Telmar in Norway in the spring of 1841.

The eldest of three sisters and the only one my mother taught the wheels because I was the only one who would sit still long enough to learn to listen to the milk.

I came across the ocean with my husband Olay in the autumn of 1862 with a small cedar box of dried bruness starter culture my own mother had been feeding warm whole milk every other day since 1839 and I walked west across the great lakes and down into the Wisconsin driftless in the summer of 1863 and I came into this deep wooded in northern Vernon County and I stood at the foot of the cream limestone bluff and I pressed my hand against the cold stone and I knew the way a woman knows a thing once and keeps it for 50 years that the cave was here.

I dug this cave with my own two hands and holes across the autumn of 1863 and I pressed my first wheel of pulltos on the backseater shelf in the autumn of 1864.

The wheels on these shelves daughter are not money. They are not gold. They are better than money because money buys a season and a sealed wheel of true telmark line ptos in beeswax in a cold dry limestone cave feeds a family for years.

The starter in the small earthn croc by your kitchen stove daughter is the inheritance and the cave is the inheritance and the wheels in the cave are the inheritance.

The gold in the sack is only the small grease that keeps the inheritance dry.

And I trust you will not spend it for any reason other than to mend this oak door or repair these cedar shelves or buy fresh whole milk from a neighbor.

In a year the cows go dry. Do not let the starter die. Do not move the wheels.

Do not be greedy with the cheese. Feed the starter warm whole milk three times a week set on the cool corner of the back of the stove.

Press your wheels slow and true. Seal them in beeswax. Lay them on the cedar shelves of the cave.

And when a Halverson woman is gone, the next Halverson woman feeds the starter the same morning with her own hand in the same small earthn croc.

The starter is the family. My whole hand and my whole heart. Solve Halverson, Ostapru, Halverson’s Kulie, Vernon County, Wisconsin.

The 14th of October 1865. Seagrid laid the letter flat on the deepest cedar shelf.

She set her open palm across it. She did not cry. She closed her eyes and breathed in the cool beeswax and cedar smell of the cave and the faint warm sweet ghost of 162 years of slow wheels.

And the tight thing that had lived in her chest since the cold November afternoon she had walked into her best kitchen loosened.

The name of the loosening was home. She drove the gold pieces down to a careful coin dealer in Lacrosse the following week, a man named Mr.

Halver Kudson, who valued the 16 small $5 gold pieces at $37,600. She sold five of them.

She put $12,000 in a savings account at the Vernon County Bank. And she walked back up Valley with a fresh oak plank for the door, two coils of new iron hinge strap, a small cake of new beeswax for ceiling wheels, a small can of new kerosene for best lantern, and a half gallon of fresh whole milk from a neighbor for the starter.

She did not move the wheels. The wheels stayed where Sulv and Eningga and Astred had set them, on the cool cedar shelves of the cave.

But she did that first November walk down off the ridge with a single small slice of pull toss wrapped in clean linen to the older women of Halverson’s and three coolies around it.

Mrs. Secret Olsen, 88, who had been a child when Astred pressed her first wheel.

Mr. Halver Patterson, 84, whose father had bought from Eningga in 1941. Each one took the small slice of pool tossed in their old hands and looked at it for a long time.

Each one said the same thing in some form. We had begun to wonder if any of you would come back.

And in the early spring, an older woman drove up the road from the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research in Madison, who’d been searching for 15 years for surviving genetic lines of prepasteurized Telmark tradition starter culture.

And she stood in the open door of the cave on a warm March afternoon with her hand against her mouth looking at the rows of beeswax sealed wheels under the lantern.

Amber and she said only, “Please, hun, please let me come back with a lab.

That is the thing about the cheesekeeping our grandmothers teach us, the slow kind, the kind we learn at a kitchen table beside a small earthn croc when we are 3 years old.

It is not really about the wheel. The wheel is the wage. The starter is the trade.

The trade is the small earthn croc kept warm on the back corner of a wood stove for 162 years and the cold dry of a limestone cave at a steady 53° and the beeswax seal laid careful on a fresh pressed wheel of pulltos on a cool October evening.

The trade is the older women and men of three coolies who walk out to their porches in November holding a small slice of true telmark line pull tossed in their old hands and weep quietly and say, “We had begun to wonder if any of you would come back.

The trade is above all the truth Salvi wrote in her letter on the 14th of October 1865.

The starter is the family. The cave is the keeper. The wheels are the inheritance.

We are only the next pair of hands. Secret Halverson was 22 years old and penniless.

She had $4 to her name, and she spent them on a half- buried limestone cheesecave dug into the side of a wooded 3 mi up Valley Road in Halverson’s in Vernon County, Wisconsin.

It was the best $4 she ever spent. If this story has kept you company tonight, thank you for sitting up with us.

Sleep well, breathe easy, and see you in the last warm light of the