A MYSTERIOUS DEATH - PART II

It has been over two months since I wrote the initial part of the story of the events that happened in La Farge on that fateful October evening back in 1947.  Since the article was published in July, I have heard from many people about the incident.  They had many different aspects of the story to tell.

            Nearly a decade ago, LaVerne Campbell told me about the shootings that occurred that night to make sure that I knew what he thought actually happened.  He said that Vincent Campton did not commit suicide, as was officially cited as the cause of death, but instead was shot by Ted (Buck) Rolfe that night in the trailer park.  

            LaVerne said that Vincent was a heavy drinker and when he got drunk, he would beat his wife, Thelma, who was the daughter of Buck Rolfe.  She would often flee to Buck’s trailer for safety and to get away from her husband. After several of these incidents Buck Rolfe told Vincent that if he ever hurt Thelma again, he would kill Vincent. As LaVerne told me, “Buck Rolfe was a man of his word.”

            In 2010, as I was nearing the publishing of my first volume of La Farge’s history, I interviewed Dick Johannesen at his house in Viola.  We talked about La Farge history for a couple of hours and during the conversation, he brought up the shooting of Vincent Campton.  Dick told me that his Dad, Finn Johannesen, was the village president in La Farge in 1947.  On the night of the shooting, Vernon County Sheriff Morris Moon came to the Johannesen house to ask Finn to go with him to the trailer park.  (I also have learned that several other village leaders, including Ted Roberts, were requested by Sheriff Moon to go with him to the shooting site that night.)

            Dick told me that Sheriff Moon laid out the crime scene for the village leaders and explained how it appeared that Vincent had shot himself.  There were apparently no witnesses to his being shot.  (By this time, both Vincent and Thelma had been transported to the hospital in Viroqua.)  Unfortunately, the suicide attempt didn’t seem to add up for the sheriff. Apparently Vincent was shot in the back and Sheriff Moon could not comprehend how Vincent could physically accomplish that.  

            “He didn’t have long enough arms.”  Sheriff Moon apparently used this quote that night, and I heard it repeated by Dick Johannesen and several others who talked to me about this incident.  Vincent also had no flash burns on his body, which might have occurred if the gun barrel was held near his body, as in a suicide attempt.  

            Although the facts about the shooting did not seem to line up for Sheriff Moon that evening, the death certificate for Vincent Campton, who died the day after the shooting at the Viroqua hospital, lists death from “a lung hemorrhage due to a self-inflicted gun/bullet wound”.  Dr. Frank Gollin, who treated Vincent Campton at the scene of the shooting incident, ruled the death a suicide.  (Another source told me that although Vincent was near death and barely conscious when he was transported to Viroqua to the hospital that night, he did mumble something like, “He shot me” repeatedly.)

            We now know that Thelma, after quarreling with a drunken Vincent, had fled to the trailer park that night because her father lived there. She had her two-year old daughter, Karen with her.  Eventually she went to another trailer nearby where Lloyd and Velma Kellar lived, as Velma and Thelma were friends.  Vincent burst into the Kellar trailer with a gun and started to threaten his baby daughter, Karen.  Velma and Thelma tried to get the gun away from Vincent.  In the struggle the gun went off, grazing and wounding Thelma. Vincent then fled the Kellar trailer and Velma called the police and doctor.  This part of the story was shared by Dennis Kellar and Rhonda (Kellar) Wemmer and had been passed down to them by their mother, Velma.

            A rather amazing coincidence happened about two weeks after the first part of this story was published.  I had a phone conversation and then subsequent e-mails with Sandra Carmichael, who is the daughter of Karen Rolfe.  (She told me in an e-mail that her mother, Carron K. Campton, had passed away in July of 2015.)  She wrote me that she and her aunt, Anne (Connelly) Stoltz, had been doing research on the Vincent Campton death at the same time as my column was published. 

            After the shootings of October 1947, Thelma left La Farge. Her daughter, Karen Rolfe was raised by Mettie and Art Alvord on their Jug Creek farm.  Mettie was Buck Rolfe’s aunt.  Karen graduated from La Farge High School in 1963 and moved away from the town where she was born.

            Sandra had never heard about the story of Vincent Campton’s death being a possible murder.  (Actually, Karen never talked with her family about Vincent’s death.)   Others always had told her that he died in World War II. When Sandra had started an online search for Vincent’s records, she found a LaCrosse Tribune article about the 1947 shootings in La Farge. She was shocked to learn about the shooting, or as Sandra phrased it in the e-mail, “Her great-grandfather had shot and killed her grandfather.” 

            Sandra Carmichael and Anne Stoltz came to Viroqua in late July to search for information about Vincent Campton’s death at the county courthouse.  They also stopped to visit with Cecil Rolfe, who was the first child of Thelma, born in 1943.  He told his relatives that I had just written an article about the Vincent Campton death that had been published in the Episcope.  That is when Sandra reached out to me about the case.

            In her e-mail, Sandra said that they found Karen Rolfe’s birth certificate of June 1, 1945 and that Vincent Campton was listed as the father.  They also found a marriage record of Vincent and Thelma that occurred on October 25, 1946 at the home of the La Farge Justice of Peace, E.A. Sewell.  Sandra and Anne also stopped at the Vernon County Sheriff’s office to see if there were any records there about the shootings. In her last e-mail to me, Sandra said the sheriff’s office continues to search for any report about the incident.

            “I can’t believe a whole damn town kept this secret for so many years.  Just boggles me on how many people knew about it and did nothing but turn and look away.” This quote from one of Sandra Carmichael’s e-mails does raise an interesting point.

             It does appear that many people in La Farge did think that Buck Rolfe had shot Vincent Campton that October night in 1947.  It also appears that many of those same people thought that a man who beat his wife and threatened to kill his baby daughter probably deserved this fate. More than one person told me, including some members of the Campton family that “He deserved what he got”. “He had it coming”, was another common refrain from many who I talked to.  (In one rather amazing revelation, I learned that one of Vincent Campton’s brothers had been a friend of Buck Rolfe’s over the years after the shooting.) 

            I have been hesitant to write this concluding “Local History Notebook” on the death of Vincent Campton.  In the end, I was encouraged by both Cecil Rolfe and Sandra Carmichael to write it so the story could be told.  It is not a story that adds to the stature of La Farge as a community, but it may be a story better understood with more light shining on it. I suspect many small towns along the Kickapoo have similar tales stored away in dark places.

            Although many have told me that Buck Rolfe shot Vincent Campton that evening so many years ago to protect his daughter and her baby, my writing this column does not prove the fact.  Indeed, the truth of whatever happened to Vince Campton that night probably will never be known.  Instead, this story may shine a little light on a dark chapter in the history of this little Kickapoo River town.  In the end, that may help some. 

            I would like to thank Cecil Rolfe, Deb Rolfe, Beth Larson, Sarah Tunks, Sandra Carmichael, Anne Stoltz, Mike Campton, Dennis Kellar, Rhonda Wemmer, Ron Roberts, Kent Steinmetz, Dick Johannesen, and Winfred Bold for help with information for this article.

            Winfred Bold called me from his home in Janesville after reading the first part of this story back in July.  He shared his memories about that evening and I will end this by sharing some of what Winfred told me.

            He was a senior at La Farge High School in the fall of 1947 and was at a LHS Senior Play practice in the gym on the night of the shooting.  The trailer park was across the parking lot from the school gym where the play practice was being held.  Winfred said the shootings happened sometime between 7 & 8 pm that night.  He said the students heard the ruckus outside and went out to see what was going on.  The police and a large crowd were there, but nobody would say what had happened. He heard later that Buck Rolfe had shot Vince Campton and that Vince deserved it for beating up and shooting Thelma.

            The next week after the shootings, the one-act play contest was held at the LHS gym.  La Farge students performed three plays that evening and the winning play was “The Bad Penny”. 

A MYSTERIOUS DEATH - PART I

As I was preparing to finish up on my first local history book, prior to it being printed in 2010, I received a call from LaVerne Campbell.  He wanted me to stop into the C & S Motors garage building sometime so we could talk about something from the past that had happened in La Farge. Actually, LaVerne really wanted to talk to me about one specific event, a mysterious death that occurred in the village in October of 1947. 

             The conversation with LaVerne took place sometime in 2009 and the following May, I met with Dick Johannesen at his house in Viola to talk about La Farge’s history. During that talk, Dick brought up another recollection of his own about that mysterious death that LaVerne had wanted to talk about.  So, armed with those conversations and the newspaper stories of the day, let’s go back to that time.

            The Post-World War II years were a vibrant time in La Farge.  As the men and women who had served in the armed forces during the war were discharged, most returned to their hometown.  Many were recently married and starting families.  La Farge, like many small towns during that time, was immediately hit with a housing shortage – there were virtually no vacant houses or apartments available.  A housing boom began in the village as new houses were being built along every street, particularly those north of Main Street.  However, due to a nation wide shortage of building materials at the time, building new homes was a slow process.  It took time for those houses to be completed and immediate housing needs still had to be met.

            In January of 1946, La Farge municipal leaders learned that the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) would provide the village with ten temporary housing units (trailers).  The FHA trailers (available from military bases after the war ended) would be loaned to the village with the idea that military veterans would get preference to live in them.  The La Farge village board appointed a committee to purchase land for the new trailer houses.  Soon after, several lots just to the south of the schoolhouse were purchased for the housing project.  (This property is currently the school parking lot just to the south of the gymnasium.)  

            The village was also responsible for providing any rough grading, street access and utility lines to the property.  In March, La Farge Village President Finn Johannesen (Dick’s father) and board member Bill Adams went to Chicago and signed the FHA papers so that La Farge would get the trailers.

            In mid-July the ten trailers arrived in La Farge. Because some of the trailers did not have any water or toilet facilities, the FHA also constructed a building on the grounds that housed showers, bathrooms and a laundry for those who lived in the trailers.  Eight of the trailers were standard models (22 feet long by 7 feet wide), large enough for one or two people.  The other two trailers (double-wide’s at 18 by 20 feet) were expandable and large enough to house a small family.  The FHA set rents for a trailer at $15-20 per month, while the FHA also paid the village for all property taxes and utility fees.  The new trailer camp was filled and operational by the end of August. 

            For the next several years, the trailer camp was usually occupied to capacity.  But as more new houses were built in La Farge in those post-war years, the trailers, because of their size and limited amenities became less desirable.  After a few years, the federal government became less involved in providing housing for WW II veterans as well.  In April of 1949, the FHA gifted all of the buildings at the trailer camp to the village of La Farge.  As more and more of the trailers became vacant, the village decided to sell them.  On October 17, 1950 an auction was held at the site and the ten trailers were sold and soon moved.  The utility building remained on the site.

            The school district bought the trailer park lots after the auction.  The utility building remained on the site and when football was started at LHS in the fall of 1956, the building was used to store the player’s football equipment. The new Wildcat football team also used the shower room and bathroom facilities in the utility building that inaugural year.  

            During the evening of Wednesday, October 22, 1947, an incident occurred in the trailer camp in La Farge.  Two people were shot during the evening and one man died. Here is the front-page story about the incident as printed in the October 30^thissue of the La Farge Enterpriseunder the headline:

Vincent Campton Dies Thursday Night at Viroqua

            Vincent La Verne Campton, 26, passed away at the Viroqua hospital Thursday night, as the result of a self-inflicted wound he suffered Wednesday night.  Campton shot himself through the heart following a quarrel with his wife, Thelma, during which he shot her in the leg.

            Mrs. Campton had gone to the trailer park near the school to visit her father, Ted Rolfe, after quarreling with her husband.  She had left the trailer home of her father to go to a neighboring trailer occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Keller.  Campton followed her there and renewed the quarrel.  After striking her he shot her just above the knee with a .22 rifle.  He then ran a short distance from the trailer and shot himself, the bullet piercing the edge of his heart.  Mrs. Keller was a witness to the shooting of Mrs. Campton.

            Mrs. Kellar called Mervin Erickson, who was on duty as night watchman, and Dr. Gollin.  Sheriff Morris Moon was called to the scene.  The Campton couple was taken to the Viroqua hospital, where Campton died Thursday night.

            Campton was a veteran of World War II.

            Mrs. Campton is expected to recover.

            I need to add some clarification before we continue. Velma Kellar, (last name is misspelled a couple of times in the article), who witnessed the shooting of her friend Thelma that fateful night, called Mike Erickson, who had the night shift as the village policeman (identified in the article as a watchman).  Dr. Frank Gollin, the village’s doctor at the time, was also called to the scene and arranged transportation to the hospital in Viroqua for both people who were shot.  Another article in the next day’s (October 23) LaCrosse Tribunesaid that Vincent “Campton had not regained consciousness at the time he was moved”.

            There is another side to this story, actually an almost completly different version that was told to me by both LaVerne Campbell and Dick Johannesen.  Next time in the “Local History Notebook” we will look at the other version of what happened that evening in the La Farge trailer park.

ROTTEN ROADS!

Throughout the history of La Farge, there seems to have been a near constant complaint about the state of the roads leading into the village.  I’m sure this is true for other small towns in the state, but it is interesting to note how this little town on the Kickapoo seems to be seeking better roads throughout much of its existence.           

            As you watch the employees of Organic Valley drive into La Farge each morning, you wonder what they think of their commute on some really bad roads.  Perhaps we should adopt a rating system for our local roads leading into the village. Since we have so many bad roads leading into La Farge, we should start our rating system on that end.  

            Let’s start with the worst rating, which we can title “Worse Than Awful” (WTA).  Most of Highway 131 going north from La Farge would fall in this WTA category, although there have been some recent patches here and there along the road to Rockton. Those nice patches only accentuate how most of the rest of the road is worse than awful.  Which is rather surprising since this section of Hwy 131 is a relatively new road, being constructed in the mid-1970s to carry traffic around lovely Lake La Farge.  It appears that some of that original road is now in play in some of the deep and cavernous ruts in the present state highway.

            Our next rating could be “Awful”, and Highway 82 going towards Viroqua can easily fall into this category.  The road is generally in poor condition from the Kickapoo Valley to the county seat, with some parts worse than others.  The Vernon County Highway Department probably recognizes the condition of the state highway because they have turned pretty much the whole route into a double-yellow No Passing Zone.  Recent flood damage along this route has led to some minor patching in places, but for the most part, Hwy 82 heading west is just plain awful.

            That same highway leading east towards Hillsboro is a little better, so it can be put into the “Poor” category.  Of course, I live on this road, so I drive it every day. It’s a short hop for me to La Farge, where Hwy 82 really gets “Awful” or maybe even WTA as the village’s Main Street. The village’s elected leaders are formulating a plan to fix up La Farge’s Main Street, but it has been a long time in the making and a finished product still does not appear in the immediate future.

            Highway 131, leading south out of La Farge towards Viola is the best state highway serving the community and deserves an “OK” rating. Flood repairs at Lawton’s seems to be a constant on this road lately and the recent washouts along the highway as it gets to Viola seem to create a constant disappearing shoulder act.  The stretch of this state road from La Farge to the county line at Tunnelville is the newest of our local highways, as it was constructed in the early 1980s.

            The best road leading into La Farge, one that would definitely be rated in the “Good” category isn’t a state highway or even a county road.  Yes, the town of Stark’s Plum Run Road is a good road, mainly because it was reconstructed using Ho-Chunk Nation funds and is not a decade old.  Good planning and use of quality materials by the Ho-Chunk make this a dandy road coming into the village.

            Problems with the roads leading into the village have always seemed to be a problem.  A few Local History Notebook’s back, I wrote about how the businesses in La Farge had paid for the dragging and grading of Otter Creek Road (now Hwy 82) in the spring of 1915.  That stretch of road was a notorious bad spot, but heading out La Farge the other way back then would have produced a worse one – Jordan’s Flat.  This section of road leading in from the east (again, now Hwy 82) was a swampy quagmire that was barely passable at any time except the winter when it would freeze up.

            The stories about getting stuck on Jordan’s Flat are too numerous to mention, but a couple can be mentioned here.  If you farmed at the Jordan place, you needed a spare set of draft horses or a good tractor, because you would constantly be helping to pull mired down vehicles out of mud holes.  One time, a circus that was traveling to La Farge had all of the wagons become stuck in the mud there on Jordan’s Flat.  Using an elephant to pull all of the wagons out seemed like the sensible thing to do for the circus owner.  However, the animal pulled too much and the pachyderm had to be pulled out numerous times when it got stuck.  (They probably had to use all the circus horses to get the elephant out of the mud.)  In the end, the elephant did not survive the ordeal!  That’s right, the road at Jordan’s Flat was so bad it killed an elephant! 

            Jordan’s Flat was so bad that an alternate route along the hillsides to the north operated most of the time.  The alternate upper route started just out of La Farge, skirted the north side of the swampy section, ascended to where our house is currently located, crossed to the east at that elevation going above the Baptist Cemetery and Church (today, the Bear Creek Cemetery), before rejoining the road just past the Gold Mine.  Eventually enough rock, gravel and logs were poured into Jordan’s Flat that it became mostly passable for the entire year.      As a matter of fact, the section of Hwy 82 from La Farge to Hillsboro was the first state road completed to La Farge, opening for traffic in 1939.  The new state highway was graveled at the time, but that section also became La Farge’s first paved highway in 1946.

            Here is how I described that momentous event in Volume I of my La Farge history:  A milestone occurred in the village at the end of July.  State Highway 82 running east from Hillsboro was paved to La Farge, making it the first “treated surface road” to ever enter the village.  As one old-timer was quoted in the village newspaper, “This is the first time in 70 years that a person could get into La Farge over a surface treated road in my 70 years of residence in this village.”  Much of the credit for getting the paving project done was credited to Lester Wood, La Farge’s county supervisor, who lobbied for the new road to his hometown.  Editor Widstrand then went on to call for cement surfacing of Highway 82 to Viroqua and paving of County M running north and south out of La Farge.  In March of the following year, Arnott Widstrand would join Lester Wood as representatives from La Farge to appear at a hearing in Madison to petition the state highway department to pave Highway 131 (former Vernon County road M) from Ontario to Readstown.  Eventually extensive graveling work was done on the old river road by the end of 1947.)

            Now, if you think a protest is in order to try to get some new roads, we have had plenty of that in La Farge’s history as well.  From the 1939 protests for better state roads to replace the railroad that was being pulled out of La Farge to the 1975 bridge protests that stopped the school buses from running, there has been plenty of organized complaints.  (Shoot, there was even a local protest movement to NOT build a new Hwy 131 south of La Farge back in the mid-1970s)  But those are stories for another time.  Watch those potholes and deep ruts in the roads, you never know where they may take you.

SOME LA FARGE BAR HISTORY

Recently a rather momentous occurrence happened in the sleepy little Kickapoo River town of La Farge. On August 28^th, the Town Tap, the village’s only bar, offered twenty-cent hot dogs and chili dogs for lunch. Although the chili dogs were delicious, the significance of the event was that it marked the 20^thanniversary for Phil & Deb’s Town Tap.  That is a rather long time for a bar or tavern to remain under the same ownership in these parts.

            Phil & Deb Campbell purchased the business in 1999 from Bob & Charlotte Hysel, who had operated the bar from 1976 until 1988 and again from 1994 until selling it to the Campbell’s.  Deb Campbell passed away in 2012, but her name remains on the business to this day.  

            When I was at the Town Tap munching on my chili dogs, I shared some information with Phil about some previous owners of the bar.  I had been investigating who had owned the bar some seventy years before due to a conversation that I had at a family reunion back in June.

            There was a Melvin family reunion on June 15^that the Methodist Church on Salem Ridge.  Ruth Clark organized the reunion and a nice crowd attended the event that included a tasty potluck lunch, lots of visiting and looking at family scrapbooks, and walking around the Salem Ridge Cemetery to look at family graves. I was at the reunion because I am the grandson of Isa Melvin Campbell, who was the daughter of Scott and Lucy Melvin. At one time, Scott Melvin owned pretty much all of Salem Ridge, so there are lots of family connections to that place.

            At the reunion, I met Susan Krause, who lives in Potosi.  (Susan makes a living by growing organic worms – isn’t that wild!)  She is the daughter of Charlene (Melvin) Krause and the granddaughter of M.P. Melvin, who ran a grocery store in La Farge for several years.  (Another family connection is that M.P. Melvin rented the store from my parents, who had operated a grocery store there in the early 1950s – more on that Steinmetz Grocery operation later in this piece.)

            Susan wondered if I knew anything about a bar that her grandparents on the Krause side had operated in La Farge.  I did not have any information, but I started digging through my research notes to see if I could find anything.  Sure enough, I did.

            In some of my research notes, I found where August Krause has applied for a tavern license on June 1, 1950.  The tavern was then called the La Farge Tap Room and at the time was the east side of the first floor of the old Opera House building. (The west side of the building was a hardware store at that time operated by Vern and Vivian Heckart.)  

            After a gymnasium was built at the school in 1936, the La Farge Opera House was used less and less for community events.  Herman Abelt purchased the building in the early 1940s and converted it from the original design, which had a huge, open two-story space for the Opera House.  The roof was lowered and several offices were formed on the “new” second floor space. (Eventually those offices were converted to several apartments.)  The street level floor was divided into two places for businesses to operate.  Soon after, taverns started occupying the east side space.   

            In my research on the tavern owners of that era, I found that in 1944, the bar was known as Heckart’s Tavern and was operated by Vern and Vivian Heckart.  A year later, there was another Christmas ad for Heckart’s Tavern, but by 1946, the bar was called the “La Farge Tap Room” and was operated by Bill and Madelyn Cottrill. The bar remained under that name until the Krause’s took over the business in 1950.

            August and Alice Krause renamed the bar the “Tumbler Tavern”.  I found that name for the bar when the Krause’s helped sponsor an ad in the La Farge newspaper for the championship LHS basketball team in March of 1951.  There was also a Christmas/New Year’s ad for the Tumbler Tavern in an issue of the La Farge Enterprise in December of 1950.

            But the Krause’s didn’t stay very long as the bar was called the “Club La Farge” by December of 1951.  That name remained with the bar for most of the next decade of the 1950s with several different owners.  Ray Merwin was one of those owners and he added a back room to the building when he owned the tavern.

            By the 1970s, Jerry and Marie Brickl owned the bar, which they called “Jerry & Marie’s Place”.  They also began a supper club, “The Matador”, in the space on the west side, converting an apartment that had been there.  Brickl’s also renovated a kitchen space between the bar and supper club to serve both businesses.  Bob & Charlotte Hysel bought the business from Brickl’s in 1976 and opened up the supper club to be part of the bar, renovated the kitchen and put in new restrooms. Hysel’s also named their bar, the “Town Tap”, a name that remains today.

            The name of the Club La Farge tavern brought back a memory of a story that Rex Bufton told me many years ago.  It seems that Rex was a bartender at the Club La Farge in the early 1950s.  This was also a time when my parents, Earl and Hope Steinmetz, were running a grocery store in La Farge (at the current site of the La Farge Episcope newspaper office).

            Rex told me that my parents would like to stop in for a drink or two at the Club La Farge after closing the grocery store on Saturday nights. During that time, Saturday nights were crazy busy for La Farge stores and sometimes it would be nearly midnight by the time that my parents got the grocery store closed and locked up.

            Although the bars in La Farge were open until 1 am at that time, there was a village ordinance that no drinks could be served after midnight. Rex told me that sometimes my parents didn’t get to the bar until after midnight.  In order for them to get a drink, Rex would pour out the contents of their drinks into glasses and set them under the bar before the midnight hour struck.  So, they were technically poured before the cutoff hour.  Then when my parents arrived, he would take the drinks out, add some ice and serve them.  It was kind of a “No harm, No foul” kind of thing, I guess.

            By 1954, my Dad had joined LaVerne Campbell in the C&S Motors garage business in La Farge so the late Saturday nights at the grocery store for my parents ended.  They rented the grocery store to my Mom’s cousin, M.P. Melvin, who operated Melvin’s Super IGA Market at the location through much of the next decade.  (And we are once again connected to Susan Krause, the granddaughter of M.P. Melvin.) 

            That post-WW II era was a time of growth for bars in La Farge.  In 1946, Ray Hollenbeck and Doug Gabrielson had wedged a bar into the space between the theater building and Ned’s Pool Hall right across the street from the Club La Farge.  Stan Hollenbeck joined his brother in operating the bar, called the G.I. Tavern, by 1947 and they continued operating the bar through the early 1950s.  But that’s another bar story for another time in this little history of La Farge.