The Dougan Family of Beloit. Taking his place with his father, Wesson Joseph Dougan and his wife, Vera Wardner Dougan in the Beloit Hall of Fame, is Ronald A. Dougan. A graduate of Beloit High School, he attended Northwestern University until in his junior year when he left college and went to France to help in the rebuilding of the devastation caused by World War I. While in France he met and married Verna Wardner, his bride for the next 64 years.

Returning to Beloit in 1924, he finished his education at Beloit College, graduating cum laude with a degree in Chemistry and went into the family farm and dairy business started by his father, Wesson Joseph Dougan in 1906, with two cows. For the next generations of Beloiters, the sight of Dougan Dairy trucks, with the logo “The Babies Milkman” on their sides, was a familiar sight throughout the community, as were “Dougan Hybrids” signs in the corn fields throughout the state.

The Dougan Farm, with its distinctive round barn, became a leader in scientific breeding and Ron Dougan became one of the incorporators of the Rock County Breeder’s Co-Op and one of the founders of what is now called the American Breeders Association. Ron and his father pioneered in the field of hybrid seed corn developing and marketed Dougan Hybrids for many years. For many years Ron set aside two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall, where every first-grade student in the Beloit Community had the opportunity to take a class trip to visit the Dougan Farm and learn from Ron Dougan personally, as their tour guide, about the dairy and farming business, watch milking, bottling, pet a cow or a calf, have a hayride and drink lots of chocolate milk. For hundreds of the youth of Beloit, their first job will be remembered as being hired by Ron Dougan to detassel corn in the Dougan fields as teenagers.

In 1970, Ron and Vera Dougan donated the one room school, originally built in 1850, that Ron had attended at a youth and later acquired and preserved, to the Beloit Historical Society and it was moved from the Dougan Farm to the Hanchett-Bartlett Homestead, where it stands today, preserved as a fully equipped one room rural school house, for generations to come to visit. As comfortable in his overalls as he was in a tuxedo, Ronald A. Dougan was a renaissance man, who was a scientific farmer, land conservationist, a patron of the Beloit-Janesville Symphony, Treble Clef, an en-thusiastic member of the Ned Hollister Bird Club, Beloit Chess Club, where he claimed he once beat his friend Judge Luebke, and the First Methodist Church.

In 1987, he was honored for his past presidency and 60 years of membership in the Beloit Rotary club and remained a member until his death in 1996. There are so many stories about Ronald A. Dougan that they called for a series of stories published in The Beloit Daily News, in the 1980’s, called Tails from the Round Barn and to be preserved in a book by his daughter, Jacqueline Jackson, called The Round Barn.