L.A.’s Outback : Neenach : Named after a Wisconsin hometown--but misspelled.

Neenach isn’t much these days. But it never was.

Except for a small school that was closed in 1948, Neenach has mainly been a patchwork of farms. For the most part it’s just been a name on the map, as is Pine Store, a former town a couple of miles to the south. The only large building is a Spanish-style edifice with a tower, located a few miles west, that once served as a switching station for a telephone company.

“My grandfather homesteaded here in 1887,” said Bill Barnes, a white-haired Neenach farmer who looks like he stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Wearing blue bib overalls, a red plaid shirt and a baseball cap, he stood in front of his house, leaning on his shovel, when visitors approached recently.

Neenach was founded by pioneers who came from Wisconsin, Barnes said. They named it after Neenah, a town back home on the shores of Lake Winnebago, but messed up the spelling.

This area is changing, too. Just east of Neenach is Holiday Valley, a growing housing development of a few hundred households.

The growth has prompted the Westside Union School District to begin construction of a 120-student elementary school, scheduled to open next year, directly behind the house where Barnes lives with his wife of 43 years, Eldora.

The schoolchildren will be able to look out on a museum of sorts--some might call it a junkyard--that spills over Barnes’ property.

It’s his collection of dozens of tractors, trucks and threshing machines--some dating to the early 1900s.

“There’s all kinds of history when you look,” Barnes said.

Farming is hard out here. The Barnes clan has practiced dry farming--relying on rain to water the crops.

The fields have remained bare during the recent drought. So perhaps that’s why Barnes hangs onto the tractors, washing machines, gas pumps and old tires.

They remind him of good times and bad times, he said: balancing the family budget, buying the equipment, fixing the hardware, mashing fingers.

“Every one of those things has a memory,” he said.