ISALY CALEDONIA
THE BRAINS BEHIND ALL OF IT
Isaly Caledonia (pronounced EYES-lee) is a border collie from Huntington, Indiana. She is named after the ISALY DAIRY CO. — a heritage North-Central Ohio dairy company & ice cream shoppe famous for originating the Klondike bar, alongside its skyscraper cones and “chipped chop ham.” Originating in Marion, Ohio, the Isaly family ended up commanding a mid-century dairy empire that stretched across Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Today, only a few Isaly Shoppes remain in metro Pittsburgh. The last Isaly’s Shoppe in Marion, Ohio closed in the 1990s; but the fading name can still be seen on manufacturing buildings in the downtown core, where the dairy processing facility once operated.
Isaly was adopted from the Huntington Humane Society in Huntington, Indiana, outside of Ft. Wayne — where somebody threw her over the six-foot-high fence into the shelter’s back enclosure in the middle of the night. The day we came to get her, an ad had been sent out to the paper with a giant photo of Isaly, begging some someone to adopt her. It got to press after we already had her home in Ohio. This is the first-ever photo we ever took of Isaly, when they walked her out from her shelter enclosure to meet us, waaaaaaay back in June of 2013!
These days, Isaly is present for almost all Caledonia Northern Folk Studios activities; she is a gifted fieldworker in her own regard, and is a very kind person. She’s accompanied us on farm tours & interviews for the Growing Right: Ecological Farming in Ohio, 1970s-Now project, was there for the first-ever meeting in MLK, Jr. Park on Marion County’s West Side that kicked off our flagship Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program, and barked all the way through the series of 60+ ambient environmental field recordings we made while building a soundscape library for the GREEN RIVER AMBIENT project during our artist’s residency with EPICENTER in Green River, Utah, in Summer 2019. Isaly is always glad to remind us that documentation is not life, and does not preserve or substitute for life. So, you know: make sure to make time to go swimming, fetch a ball, enjoy “towel time,” and hunt some squirrels!
