Time ages all things, sparing nothing in its relentless path. Age provides the sag to once straight rooflines,
corners and edges. Buildings, once
constructed to last forever, start to bend and twist with the passage of
time. A couple of weeks ago, the last of
the buildings which occupied the Main Street block in La Farge where Mac
Marshall’s Hotel once stood started to come down. On a Saturday afternoon an avalanche of
falling bricks cascaded off the west wall of the building into the parking lot
at the neighboring Z-Zip Stop. The
gaping hole in the wall stretched from halfway up the windows on the second
floor down to the ground level. The pile
of fallen bricks and mortar spread out in a delta of debris at the side of the
old building.
After a
quick inspection by local and state officials, the building was condemned and
deemed unfit for human habitation. Two
upstairs apartments, rented and occupied when the bricks fell, would be quickly
emptied out. The business housed on the
first floor, Hometown & Country Realty, was moved out within days after the
bricks fell and a new site in La Farge’s business district is being sought. The old brick building, sagging with time and
twisted and bent with age, awaits the wrecking ball. (Actually, a big excavator’s bucket and claw
will probably pull down the old building, as it’s not quite tall enough to
merit a wrecking ball.)
The old
brick building is the last of five two-story buildings used for business
purposes on the south side of that block on La Farge’s Main Street. All of those buildings were constructed in
the late 1890’s to meet the demand for commercial spaces needed in the village
after the railroad came to La Farge in the fall of 1897. The building was known
in those early years of its existence as the Travers Building because Art
Travers owned it.
A.W.
Travers came to La Farge from the Woodstock-Bloom City region in 1897,
following the railroad into town. A businessman, Travers first rented retail
space in a La Farge building located on the village’s busy Main Street. In the January 7, 1898 edition of the La Farge Enterprise, Travers’
advertisement described his business as a “jobber in hosiery, fancy goods,
notions and cigars”. In May of 1899,
Travers teamed with Anson Cowee (who was probably helping with finances) to
build a new brick-veneer building. The
24’ x 44’ two-story structure was located “two doors to the west of the
Klondyke Hotel”. Bricks for the building
probably came from the Van Miller brickyard, which was located on the east end
of La Farge on Bear Creek. Travers moved
his notions business into the new store building that fall. The building was large enough for multiple
businesses and in September of 1900, the Randall Jewelry Store was relocated to
the Travers Building. The jewelry
business changed hands frequently in the next couple of years; it was owned by
a McCarty who moved up river from Soldiers Grove and later by Bob O’Neil.
In December
of 1901, a saloon was started in the Travers Building (probably in the space
where Travers had his notions store) and operated by John Trappe. Trappe, who had just returned to his hometown
after serving eight years in the Army, ran the saloon on and off for the next
three years. The businesses in the
building must have been successful because Travers built a large wooden
addition onto the back of the building in July of 1902. In September of that year, Travers opened a
pool and billiard parlor on the second floor of the building. Joining with Trappe’s saloon and O’Neil’s
jewelry store, the brick building then housed three businesses.
John
Trappe’s saloon ran into trouble in 1903.
In February, Trappe was fined $22 for having his saloon open after
hours. Times worsened for saloon trade
in La Farge when the village’s citizens voted to go “Dry” in the April, 1903
elections. All four of La Farge’s saloons
were closed the week after the 4th of July - sort of. In late September, Trappe and three other
“former” saloon operators were arrested for operating “Blind Pigs” in their
establishments. Blind Pigs were illegal
no-license saloons operated behind shuttered windows in the evenings. The village apparently turned a blind eye to
the Blind Pigs for a couple of months before cracking down. Trappe paid his $40 fine and was done with
the saloon business. (The others kept at
it, being arrested again later in the fall.
C. E. Yeomans, the drug store owner in La Farge, who was selling liquor
illegally out of his store, was arrested two more times before leaving town at
the end of the year.) Art Travers opened
a notions & confectionaries store in his building in time for Christmas of
1903.
When La
Farge put in new curb and gutter along Main Street in 1906, Travers had a
cement sidewalk put in front of his building in October of that year. La Farge voted to go “Wet” in the spring of
1907 and in June, five saloon licenses were applied for, one of which was to be
located in the Travers Building. That
didn’t last long though as La Farge was back to “Dry” after the 4th
of July in 1908. Earlier that year, the
village had granted Travers a poolroom license for his building and that
business, sometimes operated by Anson Cowee, remained there for many years to
follow. In December of that year, S.E.
Strait opened a blacksmith shop, the fourth in the village at the time, in the
back of the Travers Building.
Art Travers
was involved in many ventures in the village over the years. He ran a poultry buying business in La Farge
beginning in 1908 and often had ads in the Enterprise
telling of having railroad cars at the depot on certain dates ready for loading
birds. In November of that year, Travers
reported doing $1000 in business that month as a poultry dealer and sending
several loaded railroad cars of birds down the line. Travers was also the village assessor for
several years. Eventually he teamed with
a series of partners to run a real estate business from his brick
building. By 1914, Travers was traveling
to Sawyer County and other places in northern Wisconsin, buying land for La
Farge speculators. Travers would lead
carloads of investors and land buyers to the North to look at land at that
time. He also traveled to the Dakotas
and Montana to negotiate land deals in the American West. Many contracts for purchasing land were
signed in Travers’ real estate office in his brick building on La Farge’s Main
Street.
Next time, we will
continue to look at the history of the Travers Building including its times as
part of Mac Marshall’s Hotel and the home of La Farge’s post office for forty
years.
If you have
memories or photos of the Travers Building or other stories about La Farge to
share, contact me at bcstein@mwt.net or
P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639. Working
together we can tell the story of this little Kickapoo River town.
