I have found that it’s difficult to clean out an ancestral farmhouse when history keeps getting in the way. Especially when it’s my family’s history. After delaying the chore for far too long, I have thrown myself into clearing out the home where my seven siblings and I grew up. A house ...

So many of the lessons and learnings and sayings we have in and take from the outdoors translate over to life in ways both metaphoric and tangible. “Don’t step on what you can step over,” means that unstable log you’re thinking about balancing a footstep on as you proceed on your way ...

When’s the last time you had someone tell you to hurry up? Over the years, I’ve heard that admonition many times. Naturally, it wasn’t that I was late for anything, but that the other person didn’t know what they saying and to whom they were saying it. I was always on the ball — ...

Editor’s Note: Because of the federal holiday and no mail delivery on Tuesday the Independent will not be publishing a printed paper on Tuesday. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s column is running in the weekend edition ahead of the Veterans Day holiday. On this and every Veterans Day, our nation ...

There’s something special about landmark anniversaries and the media coverage that they attract. We’ll have one such event on Monday. It’s the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald. It sank to the bottom of Lake Superior in a fierce storm that ...

We have been following Marland Burckhardt, a Russell High School graduate who married his Russell sweetheart in college and began an Army career focused on Military Intelligence and Special Forces operations. He deployed to Vietnam in January 1970 and then he and Barb had assignments at Fort ...