"Our Own Business?"
by Amy

This is an amazing story about some evergreen trees. It was told by Mrs. Poole, and it is a true story that really happened to her and her family.

"We went to Marmion Military Academy to cut a fresh tree in some years, and in other years, as Matt's maybe told you....Well, my father had a lot of bright ideas and one of them was that us kids were going to take care of these Christmas trees that he was going to plant. He wasn't using about two acres between the back of our house and where I think my uncle was farming at the time and he thought, 'Well, why don't we put in some evergreen trees there and we could have a mini Marmion!' because Marmion had started doing this before. People could come and cut down their own Christmas trees. 'You kids can work the business and keep the profits!'

"Well, we were all girls. There were five girls before the first boy came along. So he's talking to a bunch of girls who are about...If any of you have sisters that are 12, 13, or 14, they're more interested in how their hair looks that day then they are in work like that. So we weren't very interested, but we helped a little.

"We had a machine that planted seedlings. You were supposed to have somebody hang off the back and drop the seedlings in as the machine made the holes. Well, the trees got planted, and my father got mad at us and about ten years later, darn it, the things weren't growing at all! But, they were supposed to be thinned out and nobody had ever thinned them out.

By that time, the lab had bought the land and Mr. Dorner bought the trees from my father. My uncle helped coordinate the sale because my father was off doing something else. They decided which trees were going to get tagged and moved onto the land that the Lab owned. So there were really no other evergreen trees that I remember except in the few front yards around farmhouses until the lab came along. When Fermilab moved the trees, most of them grew. I remember that some of them had big, curly trunks, but when Fermilab moved them where they have plenty of space to grow, the trunks straightened out and the trees are just beautiful now!"

It is possible to see the original evergreen trees on the Fermilab site. They are on both sides ot Batavia Road between Warenville Road and the Highrise.