Author and poet Gary Jones summers in Door County and winters in Platteville where for a time after his retirement he taught at UW–Platteville. In 2019, the Wisconsin Historical Society Press published his book Ridge Stories, a work that earned first place in the 2020 Midwest Independent Publishers Association biography category. Jones inherited the Civil War letters of his great-great grandfather, John Clark Davis. The letters inspired Jones’s Wisconsin Arts Board-funded play, Up from the Fields.
