TRANSITION

If you look closely, you can imagine the old road as it wound around the boggy bottom of Jordan Flat.  (For you youngsters reading along; that’s pronounced Jerdin Flat and not Jordan as in Michael Jordan.)  There still a few clues left to direct you along the way of the old road.  There next to the highway, you can see the crumbling remains of an old bridge support that crossed the rill leading down to Bear Creek.  Further along, the old road bends around a sandstone outcropping where some of the original rock base of the road is visible.  There is a cut in a little hillock as the road rises up the hill and to the east, another one where the old road curved over toward the Baptist Church and then descended back to the present highway.

            For the most part, the land has taken away any visual clues of where the old road went to avoid the morass of Jordan Flat.  (It was said that the best time to cross that stretch of road leading from the east into La Farge was in the winter.  During that season, the swamp would freeze up so that sleighs and drays could negotiate the flat without becoming mired down in the muck.  Any other season would be tough slogging through the boggy bottomland next to Bear Creek.  Ruts were worn so deep in the road’s muck that the axles of wagons and eventually cars would hang up and become stuck.  Whoever lived on the Jordan farm had a steady job of using their team of horses to pull people across the flat during the wet stretches.)  The transition to farming fields and pastures has erased most of the features of the former use as a road.  The old road that avoided the swampy lowland one hundred and twenty years ago has nearly disappeared.

            Around that same time so many years ago, another road branched off this old road and meandered up a little valley before ascending on a steep climb up to Maple Ridge located to the north.  I remember as a youngster walking along this old road as it rose toward the ridge top.  I was looking for mushrooms and spent most of my time looking down instead of up toward where the old road was leading me.  The climb became steeper and steeper and I remember turning to look down the valley, back to where I had been.  This was nearly sixty years ago, so the old road was still quite evident, since it was still being used as a farm road at the time.  But it hadn’t been used as a regular road for wagons and buggies for probably fifty years.  The steep ascent up to the ridge on nearby French Hill Road had apparently won out as a preferable road from valley to ridge fifty years before my walk.  So this old road was abandoned as a thoroughfare of sorts, but was still evident on my mushroom walk back in the 1950s.  Most of that area has transitioned back to forest today.  Down in the valley, where the springs bubble up, you can still see where the old road leading to the ridge cut through the end of a little hill.

            They were called “Lucey’s Trees”.  The pine trees were planted by the state DNR back in the early 1970s as part of Governor Patrick Lucey’s approval process for the federal dam and lake project at La Farge.  If you remember, after the Corps of Engineer’s La Farge project was well underway, Lucey ordered a “comprehensive study” of the project shortly after being elected Wisconsin’s governor in 1970.  The “study” was actually a way for the new governor to stop the project, but after a series of contentious meetings and hearings, Lucey reluctantly approved the continuation of the project.  Along with the approval, the governor attached some caveats aimed at ensuring that the water quality of the lake was of the best quality possible.

            One aspect of that improvement of the proposed lake’s water quality was to control runoff from adjacent farmlands by planting pine trees along the proposed shores of the lake.  The planting of the nearly quarter of a million of pine trees along the shores of proposed Lake La Farge was largely accomplished by the time the project was stopped in 1975.  “Lucey’s Trees” flourished on land formerly used for pastures and farm fields.  By the mid-1980s “Lucey’s Trees” had reached a height that they might be used for a Christmas tree by area residents who were so inclined to take a little hike out on the “government land” with a handsaw under their coat. 

            By the time the Kickapoo Valley Reserve was created in the mid-1990s those pine trees had grown to considerable height and the plantation-like stands of pines dominated nearly every hillside that led down to the Kickapoo River.  The new management board of the Reserve created a plan to thin “Lucey’s Trees” to further the growth of the remaining pine trees.  The forest management plan implemented selected cuttings that thinned the pine plantations of “Lucey’s Trees” on a near yearly schedule every since.  The plan was also designed to foster the pine plantations back to a pine-oak mix type of forest that was more common before the DNR project. 

The DNR was using the pine plantings to create a lakeshore similar to the lakes of northern Wisconsin.  When you look at those pine trees scattered throughout the hills of the Reserve today, you can imagine where the waters of the lake might have been.    You can almost see the waters of the lake lapping along the shoreline below the pine trees.

            What is virtually impossible to see though, are those former fields and pastures that once were on the farms along the river.  The transition back to this pine wilderness of sorts takes us right past the time of most of the 20^th century when that land was where people actually lived.  “Lucey’s Trees” are the signposts of the transition from the present back to a time before settlement in the Kickapoo Valley.