Editor’s note: Waverly Newspapers is revisiting some stories readers may have missed in our special sections earlier this year. This article originally ran April 1 in “Planting for the Future.”

Life on the farm could be lonely for women in the middle of the last century. Duties were many—farming, running the household, raising the kids—but there were pleasures, too.

One of them was the local social club, a chance to see neighbors and do something other than work—often alone—on the farmstead.

Colleen Heise Franzen, originally of Shell Rock and now of Waverly, remembers attending meetings of one of these groups—the West Fork Stitch and Chatter Club—with her mother in the 1970s.

“It was a group of neighborhood ladies that decided to meet for a social get-together, I could call it, but als

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