“I am a true neutral.”
Matthew Johnson, a short, energetic Texan, was talking politics as he showed off his spread on the south end of Bagley, Wisc., about a thousand feet from the Mississippi River.
There was Abby, the miniature horse from the same sure-footed breed that once worked in the nearby lead mines; his father’s old gravestone protected by a working replica of an early 19th-century signal cannon; and, in a wooden crate, the traditional blacksmithing forge he built. Johnson breaks it out at fairs to reenact life on the American frontier.
Politics, Johnson said, leads to division. People in Bagley try to avoid the subject….