It was the strangest bequest anyone in town had ever seen. On March 9, 2004, 89-year-old Raymond Brown, a native and part-time resident of Lodi, Wisconsin, died and left his entire estate, worth half a million dollars, to the Lodi Valley Historical Society. There was one major stipulation: everyone serving on the society’s board of directors had to resign within a year and could never again hold office in the organization. If they didn’t resign, the estate would go to probate court and ultimately Brown’s family.
The board members thought the will unjustly implied that they’d done something wrong, and it was not on the agenda of the LVHS annual meeting, held that April, shortly after the will was opened. “They wanted to keep a low profile,” says one LVHS insider. “They wanted the bequest to go away.”
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But word had got out, and around 30 members of a group called the Old House Lovers showed up at the meeting. “We announced we were there because of the will,” says Don Thistle, who acted as their spokesman and says Brown was his good friend. “We didn’t think the board had told their members about the will, and we wanted them to know.”
This sort of clash isn’t unusual in organizations with an old guard and a new, says Patti Gottschall Schuknecht, another LVHS charter member and its genealogist. “The former group feels it’s being run over by a steamroller, and the latter group thinks it’s dragging an anchor,” she says. “It is often better if they go their separate ways before things get rancorous.”
Old-guard LVHS members responded that Brown did see the house before they bought it and that he was pleased. They said the house was open to the public, though in recent years the posted hours had been replaced with a by appointment sign. In an April letter to the Enterprise Frances Clark’s 14-year-old great-grandson, Chris Sokol, recalled that Clark had kept regular hours at the Jolivette House and that he often went with her to help open and close up. “Most days not one person would come,” he wrote. “It would be just me and my grandma talking about the history of our cozy little town called Lodi.”
“Frances Clark kept meticulous books,” says Betty Barbian, a retired newspaper columnist who joined the historical society five years ago. “But she became an object of scorn. People phoned her and called her down and threw things on her lawn. Finally she would turn her lights out at night and sit in the dark so people didn’t think she was home.”
