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.