KADONSKY, JOSEPH FRANK, NOVEMBER 4, 1878-No matter where he came from, whether Germany, Bohemia, or whatever it was, Joseph Frank Kadonsky, who was born November 4, 1878, spent more than ninety years in Wisconsin among German, Bohemian, Polish and other settlers and made a big difference in their lives. He was raised on a homestead in a thinly settled area near Abbotsford, renowned for a monthly auction of vegetables and furniture in the center of Wisconsin, and attended schools here and there. He graduated from Colby High School, three miles south of Abbotsford, when it was the only one then available to children of homesteaders and loggers. As the population grew, he taught reading, writing, and arithmetic to children in the backwoods for a number of years and then went to the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture. He graduated in 1908 with a bachelor of science degree in agriculture.
From 1908 to 1914 he served as principal of the Marathon County Agricultural School, later known as Marathon County Normal School, at Wausau, Wisconsin, which afforded farm boys a college preparatory education as well as practical training in farming. Many sons of religious, hard-working Polish families in Marathon County attended the institution of higher learning. On July 1, 1914, he was appointed the agricultural agent of Gogebic County, the second in the Upper Peninsula of Wisconsin to appoint a county agent, and the United States Department of Agriculture, which directed the agents, was hardly able to hold Kadonsky from building up a dairy industry in Gogebic County.
He started out with 15 farmers who bought Guernsey cows, heifers and bulls and pretty soon the cream- and brown-colored cows were seen from one end of the county to the other. As the name implies, the cows were named after the isle of Guernsey, a tiny island in the English Channel off the coast of France. In Wisconsin, William Hoard, a newspaper editor who had a Guernsey herd, Kadonsky and others urged farmers to bring in and breed Guernsey cattle and to build dairy barns and silos, test cattle for tuberculosis and other diseases, and peddle their milk to stores in the big cities. No state has more Guernsey cows today than Wisconsin.
Kadonsky also played a major role in the state's corn club movement. He organized clubs in Gogebic County and instructed the members in scientific methods of soil improvement. It was a forerunner of the 4-H program.
Dissatisfaction with Ironwood, where he had an office, probably because his wife, whom he married in 1919, did not want to raise her children there, he moved to Abbotsford and joined the railway company to help it build businesses and homes wherever it had lines. Among them was the Farmers State Bank in Stetsonville, 10 miles from Abbotsford, and the surrounding dairy farms and cheese factories. What were originally lumber camps were now enterprising prairie villages and trading centers on the Soo Line.
His wife, a woman from Michigan, with whom he had four children, died in 1938 and was buried in Abbotsford, as was his father in 1920. He was still living in the 1970s at St. Joseph's Home in Kenosha. No one knows the correct spelling of the family name.
From: Edward Pinkowski - e-mail: [email protected] - (2011)