Roy R. Meier was born on December 26, 1902 in the Town of Brannan (now Spirit), Price County, Wisconsin, the seventh son of a large German-American family living in the German Settlement. He developed a keen, life-long interest in history in elementary school classes and while listening to his mother recount many remembrances as she and Roy milked the small herd of cows on the Meier farm. He hastened to write down what he remembered, pass on verbally to family and friends what he had been told, and, later in life, to write and publish several histories mentioned later in this introduction or in the abstract. As the years passed, Roy Meier became not only a community leader because of activities and responsibilities ranging from 4-H Club to the Price County board of supervisors, but of growing recognition as the authority on the peopling and development of German, Swedish, and Finnish settlements in much of Price and adjacent Lincoln County. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places is a two story Swedish-built log house which Meier moved to a spot just west of his Town of Spirit farmhouse and which functions as a museum (“Our Yesterday House”) to display numerous artifacts and memorabilia that Meier has collected over the years. The Meier farm, at the time of the interview, continued to be a site for the sale of maple syrup, produced by Roy Meier and several of his sons and their families who live nearby.
