Every July, for only a week or so, cherry pickers would come from hours away to pick pounds of pie cherries from Betzold's Orchard. When you took your buckets to the fruit stand, Viola Betzold would weigh them up and send you down to the pitting machine.
Viola and her husband Gene, grew all kinds of crops for over 50 years: strawberries, rhubarb, apples, pears and cherries. With their children all pursuing other careers, Viola started to think about the future of the land she had lived and worked on for most of her life. Before Gene died in 1999, the couple had begun looking into the possibility of preserving the property as a farm. In December of 2005, The Town of Bayfield Farmland Preservation Program (which BRC administered) purchased the development rights on Betzold's Orchards to keep the land open for farming in the future. I really enjoyed working with Vi through the process and got to know her strong feelings for preserving the land that had such fine soils for growing fruit.
This November Viola passed on. Although her death seems too soon (she should've been able to enjoy retirement) I know that she felt great about making sure the farm was preserved.
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