Circle M Market Farm B&B: a journey of healing
Known for its outdoor recreation opportunities, the Wisconsin Driftless area also boasts inns, hotels, parks to camp in, and Bed and Breakfast venues. Shannon and Kriss Marion offer a twist on bed and breakfast venues with their Circle M Market Farm B&B.
Located in Blanchardville, Wisconsin about an hour drive Southwest of Madison, Wisconsin, Circle M is established on a hobby farm rather than in a conventional house. Throw in staying a night or two in a vintage camper, and you have a unique Bed and Breakfast experience surrounded by beauty.
Kriss, originally born and raised in Pennsylvania transplanted to the Midwest, specifically Chicago, to attend college at Northwestern University earning her degree in Journalism. She married the love of her life Shannon and the two raised a family.
Spending twenty years in Chicago, homeschooling their four children, and loving the diverse setting Chicago affords, Kriss said that she really loved being in a diverse setting and learning from that setting. “I'm very curious, I guess, because I'm a journalist,” she said. “We lived right next to the most diverse zip code in America. We were in a little neighborhood next to a cemetery. So, you know, our neighborhood Andersonville, but we were in Bowmanville which is like literally a bunch of dead ends, next to the cemetery. And two blocks away was a big Indian neighborhood, you know you're like two blocks from little Germany, three blocks from little Korea. It was just so fun,” Kriss said smiling.
Unfortunately, Kriss’ health would take a turn for the worse changing her life. “I came down with acute rheumatoid arthritis, which went like zero to 60 really quick in about a year. Of course, the symptoms were probably there, but I was putting it off as I'm drumming too much, I'm gardening too much, I'm knitting too much, you know, I'm sore all over because of this or that.”
She found herself in bed for about a year, and during that time was reading a lot of Wendell Berry books. According to the ‘New Yorker’ magazine, Berry has published more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, but he's perhaps best known for “The Unsettling of America,” a book-length polemic from 1977, which argues that responsible, small-scale agriculture is essential to the preservation of the land and the culture.
Kriss noted in a humorous way that was dangerous because she started to fall back in love with the green spaces of her youth. She reminisced that she would climb up in a tree with her little unicorn journal and write. “I grew up in a township, on the edge of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but it was very much like this, rolling hills dairy country. You could ride your bike, a half an hour and be in the middle of kind of nowhere.” She admitted that it's not like that anymore, saying, “it's all built up.”
Kriss shared there was just something about lying in bed all that time that made her crave greenspaces again. “So, my husband, who's from rural Missouri never loved Chicago like I did, and he had always been saying, ‘are you ready to move, are you ready to go to somewhere, you know, not so crowded?’”
As soon as she was open to Shannon’s idea, they immediately started looking for property in 2005. “My husband's job was regional to the Midwest, so he could live anywhere. We had spent some time in Wisconsin, because it's near Chicago, and in Door County we had friends with property up there. We've camped and kind of driven through Wisconsin, so we knew it was beautiful. When we started looking and we took a couple road trips with the kids, we came up through Monroe, Wisconsin. Suddenly, all that flat from Illinois turned into rolling hills and those quilted and contour strips of crops. I've never really seen anything like that since I was a kid, and I literally burst into tears. It was so beautiful to me, and I knew that we were going to move here, and I knew I was going to feel better when we got here.”
The couple found their property on the edge of Blanchardville and within six months made their move. “Yeah, we sort of picked up in a hurry. Our friends were like ‘What? You're like the most, Chicago loving person I know.’ But I just wanted to feel better, and I didn't have a hope of ever recovering from rheumatoid arthritis, I just felt that I would be soothed. I know it's not really rational, but I just felt like I would feel better if I could be surrounded by green.”
True to Kriss’s intuition, within two years, she was off all her medication, had an organic farm, and within five years she and her husband had 160 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members. For those not familiar, CSA is a way to buy local food directly from a farmer. You purchase a “share” and become a farm member.
Within a year, she was working on organic farms, partly because she always had a garden, even in Chicago. She was amazed by the amount of sun and fertility on her farm, noting that in Chicago there is a lot of shade and the soil quality is poor. When the couple moved to their farm, CSA was about becoming connected to a farm, and sharing in the life of the farm and immediately knew that their place was special and needed to be shared. “We’re sharing it through farm festivals we'd have in spring and fall,” she said. “People would come and pick up their boxes, and we delivered to Madison, Wisconsin. I grew to the point where I needed a six-person crew. My kids were part of that crew, and their friends were part of that crew.”
Kriss and Shannon were always looking for ways to monetize the farm, “I mean anybody who's got a small property, we’re on 20 acres, has to hustle to make enough money. So, in an effort to make a little more money in the margins when my kids started leaving, we started renting out the rooms in our house. At the time, and I think this is still the case, you could do ten B&B stays without being certified, “she said.
Eventually, they listed their rooms on Airbnb. To Kriss and Shannon’s surprise, their first booking was someone from France, of all places. “I kind of thought it was spam, because Airbnb wasn't that big at the time, this was about eight years ago. I had no idea how popular this was going to be, but we were booked solid. We were booked as we wanted to be from the first summer that we were certified and inspected,” she said. This led to space in their home being at a premium. Enter the idea of glamping in the Driftless.
Kriss and her husband began buying vintage campers and restoring them so bedrooms could be available for their family. Soon, their guests were clamoring to stay in the campers because they found them cute and charming. She said they kind of hit that wave of tiny house, vintage camper fever. The next logical move was becoming an inspected campground which would clear the way to renting out those vintage campers. In fact, the couple started tapering the veggie operation as the B&B grew, and became fully committed to hospitality for the past six years and running. Just before the pandemic hit, the B&B was bringing in 700 people a year before being completely shut down last year. “During COVID we just sort of had to think through how could we do this in a way that was safe. Did we want to continue doing it?” Kriss said.
Rethinking the situation, the couple decided to serve breakfast on the porch. In addition, every camper has its own campfire, instead of having one community campfire. “We made a bunch of investments to get it all very spread out and very private. Of course, some people still want to hang out with other people,” she acknowledged.
Hosting their B&B on a farm does have some advantages when it comes to food. “We really only raise meat,” Kriss said. She continued, “We have pastured hogs, lamb, and steers and all of that is on a pretty small scale. We serve lamb sausage and summer sausage in the morning and in our pick-up breakfasts. We don't grow any veggies anymore, but I have started planting perennials like plums, raspberries, currants, elderberries, and asparagus. Our veggie fields have been converted -this acre (pointing in front of her) is now a restored prairie, a pollinator habitat. That's just three years old so it's just getting rolling. Our neighbor has almost 200 acres of prairie and he's been a great mentor to us. Of course, we get to learn from his mistakes because everything's very fresh. We are renting our hoop house (a type of green house) to a young family that does veggies for a living. They grow greens in the spring and winter, and right now there are sweet potatoes growing in there. So, it's kind of nice to be passing on all of the work we did on soil building to somebody else,” she said with a big smile.
As for the resident chickens, she said they don't need a lot of eggs, and for the time being get their eggs from neighbors. Actually, because we let our chickens get old, we're kind of due for a refresh. But the chickens for us, they're just so beautiful and so fun to watch and a big part of what we do here is just beauty. The chickens wander all over the farm, and the ducks and geese are just for beauty’s sake.
Though Kriss holds down the fort, or rather the farm B&B, her husband Shannon plays an important role in the business. He mostly works from his home office, and sometimes travels into Madison but has found time to have built just about everything, building that includes the additions to the house, a cedar sauna in the barn, fencing, and restoring the vintage campers. She said they sometimes hire out painting and bring people in for different projects, but in general, said her husband is kind of the handy person. She has the vision and takes care of advertising, social media, and decorating.
Kriss and Shannon’s hard work and dedication is certainly appreciated and it shows with what one of their guests shared. Susan, along with her two daughters drove from Madison, Wisconsin for a quick getaway. “I actually had a friend mentioned it to me. It must have been just before COVID when I was looking for a place to go glamping. I liked the idea of it, and he had told me about it. He's stayed here, he's from the area and it's one of his favorite places. I heard about it and then I wasn't able to go last summer. So, this summer I finally found a couple days, booked it, and here we are.
Susan said it was a trip that is nice and easy with the kids. “It's not difficult to like throw a few things in the car, it's not like a big like an expedition. They've been running around; they love the cats. That's their favorite. I mean, they're teenagers and the fact that they're even getting along for two days is amazing,” she said with a quick laugh.
Susan feels it's isolated enough without being too isolated. “It's really peaceful it's really quiet, it's relaxing and it kind of just feels like I'm getting away without having to go far away. It really is a different world. I mean, even coming into the Driftless area where all the landscapes are so different. Last night, we were watching the stars and just listening to the sound of the crickets and no noise. That was peaceful.” I think this is gonna be an annual trip for us. This is our first time here and I think it will definitely be something we do every summer and that's cool. Awesome stuff.”
The couple are also on the lookout for one more camper to restore and will be adding an outdoor bathroom and a new outdoor shower. Beyond that, Kriss doesn’t see too much growth in the future. “There's a lot of potential here, our campground license is for up to 15. So, if we added another septic and did some work on that end of things we could grow. But what we offer is very quiet and peaceful and I don't know if that I'd want to change that. So, I'm not sure that growth is in our future. I think like, maybe one camper, of course campers or just camper remods are addictive. It's just so fun looking for campers, so fun buying accessories that match the era.” As of right now, there is a 50’s camper and two-60’s campers, but she thinks it’d be kind of fun to have a 70’s themed one.
Also wearing the hat as a Lafayette County supervisor, Kriss feels rural tourism is having a moment and it is the time for counties, municipalities, and the state, to get on board with rural small-scale tourism. “We need to invest in this,” she said, stressing the necessity of rural broadband internet connections. “People will stay two days longer if they can have solid internet. I'm blessed to be on the outskirts of town I'm on a reclaim TDS phone line.” This allows them and their guests the ability to stream and use Zoom. “During the pandemic three of us worked from home, all at the same time. But the next farm over it's not the case. So, very soon, all of these people lose the ability to do what I'm doing. That's really a shame. I've been also very vocal about the need to figure out broadband. I've worked on that really hard at the county level, but also, well that's one of the reasons I've run for state office. I see so much opportunity that is being missed. And, no beautiful historic Main Street should be going dark in Wisconsin. There's just no good reason for any town that has one or two blocks of Main Street not to be full right now. And the only reason they wouldn't be is because they don't have the basic tools to communicate with the rest of the world. I have a lot of guests who come out here from Chicago and Minneapolis. We’re just two and a half hours from Chicago, so it's really easy for people to come out. And post COVID, it's even more like people are so hungry for this, and they would like to move. I have a shortlist of realtors that I hook my guests up with to then go look for properties. It's a non-starter if they can't have solid internet. We're missing out on a lot of new entrepreneurs, investment, and young families who would be in our schools so our schools don't have to consolidate.”
Since her move from Chicago with her family, healing from sickness, and starting a venture of love, Kriss has been very outspoken in terms of water quality and other environmental issues. She really believes the opportunity for people to move to the country, be surrounded by green, live a healthy lifestyle, and raise their kids where they can be healed is rare. “I really want to preserve this landscape because I think it's unique and special. I am a Driftless lover, from all kinds of perspectives, but at a base level, the Driftless has healed me, and I will be working to protect the Driftless for the rest of my life in one way or another.”
Visit Circle M Market Farm BnB on the web at: circlemfarm.com or on Facebook @circlemfarm
