If you’ve ever been driving in rural Washington County, north of the city of West Bend, you might have noticed a sleepy little zoo with a unique name.
Located off Highway 144 the Shalom Wildlife Sanctuary, 1901 Shalom Drive, stretches across 100 acres and is home to deer, red fox, raccoon, skunk, and mink; even elk and bison. Tours and programs are offered May through January.
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The zoo is named for the road it’s on. But the origins of that name – the word for peace in Hebrew – are more unusual than you might imagine.
A young start
David and Lana Fechter were newly married 19 year olds in 1979 when they decided to purchase 30 acres off Shalom Drive in the rural town of Farmington. At that point the land wasn’t yet a zoo, but simply a scenic stretch of land they were eager to preserve and make their own.
The couple was familiar with the property, having worked for its earlier landowner, Leonard C. Fleming, on his estate – Lana as a housekeeper and David as a caretaker. In 1977, Fleming sold his 115-acre estate to a psychiatrist, who hoped to make it a home for himself and his wife, David Fechter said. That winter there was a terrible snow storm, however, and the couple was snowed in for nearly a week.
As David recalls, the psychiatrist’s wife was a “city girl” and had had enough with rural living after the incident. The psychiatrist was just about to subdivide the property up for development when he ran into financial troubles, and the Fechters managed to buy that first 30 acres, they said. Two years later, they secured another 65 acres.
A feud
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But how did the zoo and road get the name Shalom?
To find that out you have to go back to the 1920s before there was even a paved road at all in that part of the town – when a German-American industrialist by the name of Arthur J. Ehne decided that the parcel would be the perfect spot for his new family to make their home.
Ehne, whose family owned a steel firm, soon set about building a sprawling estate, even hiring a man and a horse to dig what today remains Ehne Lake, and paying to pave the street in front of his home: Ehne Drive.
Over the course of the 1920s and 30s, Ehne employed much of the town of Farmington, David Fecther said. Trouble started when in the early 1940s the town hit the businessman with a new tax.
Ehne was angry about the taxation, Fechter said, and he sold the entire estate to the Catholic Church for $25,000, knowing that the new owners would not be required to pay property taxes. The buildings and grounds that had once been the Ehne estate became a place for girls training to become nuns.
In an effort to get back at Ehne for the sale, the town reportedly went to the nuns and asked them to pick a new name for the Ehne Road, Fechter said.
“They decided to call it Shalom Drive,” because it is and was “a very peaceful area,” he said.
The church owned the estate until it got into financial trouble and the property was sold.
A curious visitor
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When the Fechters first purchased the land they had no intentions of turning it into a zoo. They merely wanted to preserve it.
The idea of showing the place off didn’t occur to them until the early 1990s when a young man pulled up in his car and asked for a tour.
The couple was busy laying the fieldstones for the entry to the property, but obliged. The next weekend four more people showed up looking for a tour, and the weekend after that, 16, Fechter recalls. Over the years the family added more wildlife to the one-time deer farm. In 2010 the wildlife sanctuary became licensed as a zoo.
The Fechters, now both 55, have had jobs while running the zoo – David managed a printing company for a number of years, and Lana was a nurse – but now the zoo is their primary focus.
While the zoo is named for Shalom Drive, Fechter said the family also just really thinks the word is a fitting moniker for the sanctuary.
“People that come here always tell us it is like a spiritual experience,” he said.
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A zoo named ‘Shalom”
Have you ever seen advertising for the Shalom Wildlife Sanctuary? In recent months, you may have seen a billboard on Highway 45 for it. This is the story behind the small-town Wisconsin zoo that’s named for a Hebrew word.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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