Harley Cochran Email and Phone Number

Raised on a small farm (established by an ancestor who was a California "49er") near Lucas, Iowa, in the southern Iowa region known as "Lapland", where some Missouri-like speech and landscape "laps" into Iowa. During college years worked as factory line worker, rail road worker, at greenhouse work, also at the Iowa State Conservation Commission Nursery. After completing archaeology field school at Iowa State U. became an archaeological site monitor for sites impacted by logging and by construction of the Saylorville Reservoir. After college, stints at landscaping in Colorado & Washington State, followed by a return to archaeology in North Dakota, where I was involved in field excavation and laboratory analysis, then Alaska, where Beth and I worked as ethnoarcheologists who combined oral history collection & historical research with field techniques to aid Yu'pik Eskimo groups in the effort to retain control of significant ancestral sites; we wrote professional reports oriented to inclusion of sites on the National Register for Historic Places. Declined an offer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation apprenticeship program in order to move to Wisconsin and establish Stockholm Gardens in 1987; continued work in landscaping included design and installation, furniture and garden feature design and construction, winter carpentry. 1996 began an increasing specialization in stone walling and stone masonry leading to creative construction and historic restoration projects. Recent historical research has revealed a predominant Scotch-Irish ancestry following a line of pioneering farmers and a few stone masons from County Donegal, Ireland, differing locales in Scotland, and Affoltern am Ablis, Switzerland.