Dale Seaquist (92) stands at the apple counter in the family market and gift store chopping tasters for the customers. He has remarkable vitality, in keeping with the theme of the upper reaches of Door County, which is faintly unreal: even the fresh air seems infused with cinnamon and ruddy good health. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he says when asked the secret. “And an onion a day keeps everyone away.”
The Seaquist orchard has had an immense influence on the evolution of Door County. Seaquist gives me a brief history of the family: his great-grandfather, Anders Sjoquist, a skilled carpenter, returned from a trip north of Stockholm to find that the local sheriff had taken his children to the local pastor to have them baptised. So, Seaquist senior promptly set about quitting the place, crossing the Atlantic and moving the family to Marinette, Wisconsin, where he worked in a lumber mill before realising that the inlet across the bay was fertile planting ground. He started with apples and then walked to Sturgeon Bay and ordered 700 cherry plants at six cents apiece.
“There are seven cherry-growing areas in North America. And all of ‘em have bodies of water nearby. This one happens to have Lake Michigan all the way round it. This place was known as Cherryland.”
It’s a story he tells regularly to the many visitors to Door County but the point is to explain why only the Republican Party, in his belief, can ensure a family business can continue through future decades. He says that 95 per cent of all Wisconsin cherries are produced on the family farm. The old tradition of casual labour was replaced – 60 years ago – when Seaquist himself invented a machine “that would”, he explains, “harvest the cherries by hand, like an upside down umbrella that would circle the tree driven by a tractor”.
“Now we use bigger machines. We can shake about 17 trees a minute. We need 14 people to drive the machines and another 80 to supplement all the mechanical stuff in our processing plant. We got this robot – it cost us half a million dollars but it never shows up drunk on Monday morning! It doesn’t get tired, either. In the long run it is probably a good investment but we have so much machinery it is insane. We got six big trucks, a dozen small ones, and tractors.
“Every one of them takes fuel. And whether you pay four dollars or two dollars for fuel is the difference in whether you stay in business. And I don’t know what we are going to do because it is almost impossible now. Here we were a few years ago under Trump: we had independent energy. Now our stupid government has eliminated our own [Keystone XL] pipeline and here we are in trouble. It doesn’t make any sense. The nation doesn’t really get that a lot of farmers are in the same shape we are in. And it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Door County is unique in Wisconsin. Once a Republican stronghold, it has been finely poised and somehow elected the ultimate White House occupant each time in a streak dating back to Bill Clinton in 1996. It is 90 per cent white with a median age of 50-plus and looks like a perfectly sliced segment of the old, fragmenting American dream. On the surface, the Seaquist business is thriving. But the figurehead is worried.
“Yes. I am. I have 16 family members in the business with me. Fifteen million pounds of cherries last year, 80 products shipped all over the country. We close up for the winter in a week. I wasn’t terribly impressed by Trump in some ways. He is a little bit coarse. But he had good ideas and we had the best economy in 50 years under Trump. Now under this administration we have the worst in 50 years. One stop at the gas pump or the grocery store oughta be enough to convince you that something needs to be changed.”
[ US election explained: What role will the economy play?Opens in new window ]
That’s the argument that one half of the electorate in Door County, which has a population of 30,000, is making.
An hour’s drive up dreamy Highway 42 – single-laned, winding, every turn a photo op – takes you from the town of Sturgeon Bay up to “the top o’ the thumb”, at the northern corner of the county, with its ferry port across from Michigan. It’s like driving through a picture-perfect postcard of the American pastoral – the neat wheat fields, red barns, russet trees, the wineries and craft shops and period inns where the visitors sip hot ciders and enjoy the early sunsets.
On either shoreline, an endless run of beautiful, tasteful homes, canopied by trees and with dreamlike name signs – and because of the time of year, artful scary decor – a “Halloween-by-Tom Ford” vibe. There are no garish road signs in Door County and no global coffee or fast food outlets either. It’s as though the place has somehow stayed as perfectly preserved as one of the famous Seaquist jams: a model of Scandinavian-American minimalist taste and architecture.
It’s almost too much – a combination of Buddy Holly and Hans Christian Anderson: it even has a drive-in outdoor cinema, which has closed for the winter. But it would be no real surprise to discover a poster for East of Eden starring dashing newcomer James Dean.
The only thing that ties this gorgeous confection of fabled Americana and nature to the year 2024 is the preponderance of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris signs on the edges of fields and outside houses. It’s a hot topic. Door County’s symbolic divide has put it in the national spotlight, with a segment on the CBS show Sixty Minutes explaining why it can be deemed the ultimate bellwether county.
One local business owner in Sturgeon Bay, the biggest town in the south of the county, admits she was dismayed when she saw the news feature as it may raise the temperature. She asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions.
“I’m a little scared too. I think I would otherwise be a lot more vocal right now about where we are. And I think even if I could help educate five people that are in my online community to rethink where they’re at right now and what the stakes really are. But I’m afraid of retribution. After the election in 2016 the monster trucks came through here and ... they just ... they were so empowered and emboldened, the loud trucks. And everyone in this county has guns!”
A Wisconsinite, she identifies as an independent rather than a steadfast Democrat but admits herself appalled at the idea of a second Trump presidency. The prevailing issue – the economy – doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
“You know, of course, everybody goes right to the economy without looking at what the recovery has been in other countries. And we’re doing quite well. So, I believe if we stay on this track, I would rather pay more for the next four years for everything, if it means that we’re not going into an authoritarian regime.
“I mean, good Lord, JD Vance was on [CBS’s] Face the Nation, talking about how there should be control over what is taught at the universities. It’s so obviously from the authoritarian playbook, just really in your face. And nobody sees it! I just, I kind of feel sick, you know, Two weeks to the election. What kind of world are we gonna live in?”
It has got to the stage where she is reluctant to broach the subject of politics with friends or casual acquaintances.
But already, Door County is preparing to go into hibernation. Many of the inns and artists’ studios and cafes have closed for the season. If anything, winter makes Door County appear even more beautiful. But it’s also a tough season to live through and many business owners shutter the doors for the dark months.
This will be Dale Seaquist’s last week chopping apples in the family shop until the spring. He talks about his formative years in the business, when some 12,000 migrants would come to the county to harvest fruit. On the Seaquist farm, about 20 Native Americans from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula would arrive down.
“They would camp tents by the lake. They loved it. Year after year. I grew up with those kids. There’s a picture out the front there of me with Johnny Boy Sands. The migrants were happy. The farmers were happy. But then government in Madison and Washington got in on the act and passed regulations. Most of them were stupid – one that said we had to provide housing for the migrants. We did. But they didn’t want to live in them. They wanted to camp on the lake. So, they stopped coming.”
It’s a more distant example of the age-old complaint of federal meddling in local business that ends up pleasing nobody. It’s hard to overstate how friendly and laid-back this corner of Wisconsin is. But there is a sense of trepidation about what November 5th will bring. As I am about to leave Seaquist’s, Dale quotes from his favourite piece of scripture – Proverbs, third chapter, fifth and sixth: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.”
“I found it to be very accurate,” Seaquist says. “I wish everybody could live like this because it would make a tremendous difference in our country if we have a spiritual revival that would give us back some of the things that made our country great.”
Seaquist’s farm shop stands as testimony to the immigrant story but Dale, born on the year that FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in a landslide, is as worried about the country as he has ever been.
“Yes, I am,” he says, his natural cheerfulness disappearing for a moment.
“Because of the polarisation, and the way people think... I think the Satanists are behind the evil part of this country. Really. I do. This probably won’t get straightened out until Christ comes back again. When He comes back, he is gonna straighten all of this foolishness out and it’s gonna be a marvellous place for a thousand years.”
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