A TROLLEY RIDE THROUGH TIME!

            This year as part of La Farge’s celebration for Independence Day, and in conjunction with the All-School Reunion, there were trolley rides offered on the afternoon of the 4^th of July.  I was on board to provide a little commentary on the history of the sites as we traveled through town – talking about the past, present and not too distant future.  For those of you who  couldn't hop on the trolley, here’s a little purview of the tour.

            Please remember as you read this; the story is being delivered in a trolley car full of folks on July 4^th, 2015.

            As we pull out of the school parking lot, notice the kids playing ball over at Calhoon Park.  It’s seventy-six years and counting for La Farge’s historic ballpark, which was recently featured on LaCrosse’s Channel 8 TV.  Built as a WPA project in the late 1930’s, the iconic ballpark has been home to ball games for kids of all ages for three-quarters of a century.  Don’t forget there’s an Alumni Softball game at five this afternoon and then the Icons vs. Legends game tonight at Calhoon Park.

            As we turn on to Mill Street and head north, view the childcare center and other buildings along this road.  I used to refer to these buildings as “Glennville”, because Glenn Alderman – a man who served La Farge as village president, constructed them back in the day.

            This large industrial building on the left was built in the 1970’s to house the Kickapoo Stoveworks factory.  Paul Bader’s BBR wood-burning stove, one of the best ever built, was constructed here by the thousands  (Paul told me that he wanted to build four of those stoves and ended up making 14,000”).  Organic Valley (OV) now uses the building as a warehouse.

            This area to our left as we turn off the highway used to be called Morgantown.  When there was a railroad in La Farge, the railroad workers lived in small houses here.  The Morgan family always had men working for the old “Kickapoo Stump Dodger”, as the train was called and many of them lived here.  That house, once the home of Jap Morgan, is the only original railroad worker’s shanty that’s left.

            We are heading down Seelyburg Road now and back into La Farge’s beginnings.  Chapel Hill Cemetery on our left is located where the first church in town was – a log chapel that housed the Methodist congregation.  Eventually, the Methodists built a new church a block off Main Street in La Farge and the old log chapel was sold to some Norwegian Lutherans, who moved it from here.  As we descend the hill, we are heading into old Seelyburg, the lumbering river town that has a history stretching back to before the Civil War.  This old river town that is no more is featured in the book, Ghost Towns of Wisconsin.

            The house on our right is the oldest in La Farge.  Originally constructed in 1865, it was the first wood-frame house built in the community.  Ed and Alice Nixon first lived here.  Alice was the daughter of Dempster and Juliette Seely.  Dempster Seely built a sawmill here and a town grew up around it. 

Back in the 19^th century this road was lined with businesses and houses.  Chauncey Lawton was an original founder of this place, which he called Star.  He had a store and law office here on the right, just before we cross the Kickapoo River.  If you look to your left, you can see some of the foundation of the original Seely house.  During the 1935 Kickapoo River flood, there was a dramatic rescue of a family from the second floor of this house.  That amazing story made headlines around the nation and began the federal government attempts to control the floods of the Kickapoo.

            On our right is the Star Cemetery, another of Seelyburg’s burying places.  It was also the site of an Adventist Church, which operated a grade school here until after World War I.

            As we turn here at the former Gale Huston mink ranch (now owned by his nephew Earl Nelson), notice Norris Ridge ahead of us.  This is where the federal government’s Corps of Engineers built the La Farge Dam to create Lake La Farge back in the early 1970’s.  The building with the red roof was to be the Corps maintenance building for the crew working at the dam.  The building with the green roof is the town hall for the Town of Stark.  It was constructed in 2012-13 to replace the old town buildings located on La Farge’s Main Street, that were damaged by the 2008 Kickapoo River flood.

            Notice the sign that identifies this place as once being the home of the Huston’s.  Those signs (This year, there are brand new signs made especially for the day) are put out every 4^th of July, when the Kickapoo Valley Reserve opens old Highway 131 so vehicles can drive along it from here to Rockton and know who used to live along the old river road.  The old river road now serves as a main trail for the Reserve, which is off limits to cars except on special occasions like today.  The road will be open the rest of the afternoon until 4 o’clock.

            As we again cross the river, we are reminded of a prior 4^th of July Celebration when La Farge’s famous “The Human Cork” performed his floating skills here.  That’s right, Bill Claybrook, La Farge High School Class of 1914 and known as “Non-Sinkable William”, gained national fame for his floating prowess.

            Looking up on the hill to our left, we see a new house built last year by Greg Lawton, a descendant of the founder of this forgotten little river town and the 5^th generation of Lawton’s to live here in Star or Seelyburg.  Beyond look at the green roof of the Organic Valley headquarters in the distance.  OV is the largest marketer of organic products in the world and had total sales of $992 million in 2014.  Organic Valley employs 400 people here in La Farge at the present time to help make all those sales happen.

            When Seelyburg was thriving back in the day before the floods washed it away, Dr. Amos Carpenter had his office and apothecary here. Dr. Carpenter was known for using Indian potions and medicines in his practice and each fall, the Winnebago (now Ho-Chunk) would stop and sell their natural medicines to Dr. Amos.

            This is the site of the last store in Seelyburg, owned by Sam Hook.  The popular storeowner died when his store burned down in 1917.  He was found floating in the spring-fed cistern in the store’s basement and that cement vault still lies over there in the weeds.  Everybody who lived in Seelyburg back then claimed that Sam was murdered most foully.  Alas, poor Sam could not call for help on that fateful night in 1917 because he was a deaf mute.

            That is new State Highway 131 to our left.  This road was put in to go around Lake La Farge and replace the old state highway, which we were just on.  When the dam project was stopped in 1975, the community, as a way to protest, held a mock funeral here in town for Senator William Proxmire.  An effigy dummy of the senator, riding in a manure spreader pulled by two jackasses, took the funeral parade up to the dam site where the dummy was thrown down toward the river.  Reverend Red Alderson intoned, “Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.  Lord, give us a senator that we can trust.”  La Farge once again made national headlines. 

            Looking up at the school building, the old two-story 1901 school building is at the center of a current struggle by the people of the school district as to what to do with the ancient structure.  Do we tear it down, since it has outlived its usefulness as a school building, or do we convert, retrofit or restore it for other uses for the community?  That is the question.

            The story of how La Farge got its name is an interesting one.  Because of the names derivation, many people like to make a connection with the early French fur trappers, who plied the Kickapoo trading for furs with the Winnebago.  That would be a good story, and another is that the name was chosen because there is a place to ford the Kickapoo River here.  The French la farge fits with the proximity with the river.  Another great story, but alas, the name La Farge was simply picked out of a book supplied by the U.S. Post Office.  A young girl, blindfolded for the process, ran her finger down the page and stopped at La Farge.  This took place at Sam Green’s place, a mile south of town.  That was the first La Farge post office; now it’s the Green Apple Inn B&B and the owner serves organic breakfasts.  What a connection between the past, present and future of this town.

            As we approach the new VMH medical clinic on our left, it’s important to remember that this is the site of the last sawmill in La Farge.  Schroer’s Hardwood Lumber ceased sawing operations here in July of 2013 marking the first time in the 150-year history of the town that La Farge did not have an operating sawmill.  The new clinic will have three doctors and a pharmacy as well as two birthing rooms.  Dr. Jim Deline has been delivering Amish babies for decades and his renowned research on Amish health issues will continue in the new clinic.  The new clinic is hosting an Open House for the public until three this afternoon. 

The Last Sawmill in La Farge

There is an empty lot now, covered with snow.  The buildings that once housed the workings of the sawmill have been dispersed – scattered with the four winds.  (Actually, one of the buildings was torn down, while the others were trucked off to other sites.)  The cement piers that once supported the conveyor that moved the logs from the trucks towards the debarker are all that remain of the last sawmill in La Farge.

            This past summer, sawmill operations shut down at Schroers Hardwood Lumber on north Mill Street on La Farge’s west end.  Lumber had been produced at the site since the early 1950’s and the Schroer operation had been active there for forty years.  But all things must end, so Russ and Sharon Schroer decided to close the sawmill and sell off the machinery and property.

            In September an auction was held to disperse the sawmill buildings, machinery and vehicles.  A large crowd was on hand and the bidding was lively.  An out-of-state buyer bidding on the Internet bought most of the mill’s machinery.  More local buyers purchased the other equipment and buildings.  Within a few weeks, the inner workings of the mill had been disassembled, loaded onto semi trailers and hauled away from the Kickapoo Valley for good.  The buildings were all gone by the end of October.  One of the buildings was torn down by the Amish, the materials salvaged for future use.  The main building did not go far and is now used for storage at its location in the southern part of the village.  The lumber mill’s office building resides on Weister Creek for now. 

            And so it was that the rich history of saw mills in La Farge perhaps came to an end in 2013.  The village has had at least one working sawmill in operation since its very beginning in the 19^th century.  La Farge actually became a thriving town because of the sawmill operations and the lumber that was produced from them.  Perhaps we should pause and look back at that illustrious history of when the sawmills and lumber businesses made La Farge the most dynamic town on the Kickapoo.

            When the railroad line built along the Kickapoo River reached La Farge in late 1897, it created an immediate boom in the small town’s economy.  As the northern terminal of the branch line that connected to the main railroad lines at Wauzeka, La Farge became a very busy place as various products came and went on the railroad.  Lumber was one of the chief products that were leaving La Farge on the new railroad.

             There was already one sawmill, the Seely mill operating on the Kickapoo on the northern end of the hamlet, when the railroad reached La Farge.  Charles Seely, the son of founder Dempster (who had passed away in 1895), built a new dam on the Kickapoo River during that time (downriver from the site of the previous dam) to provide better power for both the gristmill and sawmill that he owned.

 Dempster Seely had built the first dam and mill at the site on the river in the 1860’s.  His lumber mill flourished for the next thirty years as the abundant stands of white pine were felled and sawn into lumber.  The Kickapoo River was used extensively in Dempster Seely’s lumber operation, which was one of the largest in the Kickapoo Valley.  The logs were floated to the mill at Seelyburg, where waterpower from the river ran the sawmill.  Much of the sawn lumber was used locally, but some was floated down the river in long rafts to other markets.  By the 1890’s, most of the northern Kickapoo’s pine trees were gone.  With the new railroad extending the line to his mill in Seelyburg, Charles Seely had new markets for hardwood lumber, which was still abundant in the area.

  In 1897, the same year that the railroad arrived, the Hammer brothers from Hillsboro opened up a second sawmill in La Farge.  Located along Mill Street to the south of the railroad terminal, the Hammer Brothers’ mill specialized in the making of heading bolts.  Later the mill was expanded to include both a stave and heading production factory.  In the winter, which was the best time to harvest lumber from area farms, it was not uncommon for sixty or seventy wagonloads of lumber to come into La Farge on a good day.  In the winter of 1897-98 over 2,500 cords were delivered for heading bolts at $1.25 per cord.  The mill also bought white oak heading bolts in 15-22 inch lengths for eight cents per cord foot.  The heading mill produced 236,000 pieces in one two-week period in April of 1898.

In February of that year, the Hammer Brothers’ mill and factory had gone to around-the-clock operations to meet the production demands for finished lumber.  They used a whistle to signal the start and finish of the 12-hour shifts and lunch hours for workers.  It is believed that the present whistle (siren) times used in La Farge originated from that early lumber factory whistle schedule.

With the two mills in La Farge operating at peak efficiency, the demand for buyers for lumber soon was needed.  Lumber brokers came to the new railroad village to purchase products to ship out to various markets in the Midwest.  Lumber brokers would travel to the rural areas around La Farge, purchasing sawn lumber from mills operating at Dell, Weister Creek, Warner Creek, Buckeye Ridge, North Bear Creek, South Bear Creek and other locations.

By 1898, the partnership of Knutson & Johnson was the biggest lumber broker in La Farge.  They had followed the railroad line north from Soldiers Grove in 1897.  Buying the property to the east of the railroad depot on the corner of Mill and Main Streets (the present site of Nuzum’s), Knutson & Johnson had a lumberyard that often took in 25,000 board feet of lumber in a week’s time.  The lumber brokers averaged a boxcar shipped out every week on the nearby railroad and in June of 1898 sent out a train with thirty carloads of lumber.

The demand for suitable hardwood lumber gave the farmers in the La Farge area a ready market for most of the timber they were clearing to create fields for crops.  Hauling of the logs had to be done in the winter when bobsleds could be used to glide over the frozen, snow covered roads.  Winter cuts of timber also made for the best lumber because of the absence of sap in the logs.  As the wagonloads of logs were coming into La Farge, the timber delivered to the mills was called “Kickapoo wheat”.  Each spring, the lumberyards of La Farge would be piled high with logs ready for the spring and summer cut of lumber.

La Farge’s retail lumber business changed in May of 1899, when John E. Nuzum returned to town.  Nuzum, owner of a successful lumberyard in Viroqua, had first opened a yard in La Farge located north of Belcher’s Hotel on State Street in 1897.  The following year he sold the La Farge lumberyard to Levi Millison and left the village.  Returning in 1899, Nuzum in partnership with M.D. Chase purchased Millison’s business and bought out the other retail lumber business in town owned by the Minor brothers.  Nuzum combined both businesses into the La Farge Lumber Company, which opened on the western end of Main Street, near the Hammer Brothers mill and the railroad depot.  Levi Millison was made manager of Nuzum’s new La Farge operation.

In October of 1899, August Kriigel bought out the La Farge lumber business of Knutson & Johnson.  Kriigel was well known in the lumber trade in the northern Kickapoo Valley.  Living in the Rockton area, Kriigel had earlier worked for Van Bennett at the Rockton mill and for Dempster Seely.  By the time that he purchased the La Farge business, he was the largest lumber broker in the area.  In August and September of 1899 he shipped forty-two carloads of lumber out of La Farge.  Within a year of his purchase of the La Farge business, Kriigel would expand his operation by becoming the Kickapoo Valley representative for the Brittingham & Young Hardwood Lumber Company.

Kickapoo Floodplain History

It seems so simple.  If you live in a house that occasionally has floodwaters running through it, you have two options.  You can move from that house with its flood prone location or you can move the house away from the floodwaters.  In either option, you are relocating away from the floodwaters.  It seems like a clear-cut solution to the problem, but here in the Kickapoo Valley it has not always been so simple to achieve.

            “The last rescue proved to be one of the most dangerous.  The family of Cora Henry was stranded in their home, the original Dempster Seely house, on the northern end of the village in Seelyburg.  The house stood several hundred feet out in the still raging floodwater.  Dave Elliot, who had been rescuing people for nearly twelve hours, decided to get to the Henry house.  Four times he flung his boat into the raging torrent, but was washed downstream before getting to the house.  Finally he launched his boat far up shore from the house and negotiated the torrents to land at the front porch of the Henry house.  Mrs. Henry and her four children were quickly loaded into the boat for the long haul back to shore.  A tired Elliot started to row through the swirling muddy waters.  It was a terrific pull and when he was still many yards from the shore, Elliot was unable to row farther and called for help.  Five youths on shore, Royal Donovan, Si Paul, Cedric Neefe, Francis Moon, and Furley Hodge, some of the same young lads who had begun the original rescue the night before, plunged into the water and pulled the loaded boat to safety.  Miraculously, none of La Farge’s residents were seriously injured or killed in the mammoth flood.”

            This harrowing account from the 1935 Kickapoo River flood, which I excerpted from Chapter 5 of Volume I of my history of La Farge book, describes the terror and danger inherent in the great floods of the Kickapoo.  Again, it seems so simple; move the people and the houses away from the path of the river’s floodwaters. Relocate out of the flood’s path.  Easier said than done in the Kickapoo Valley.

            To understand why “relocation” was such an unpopular concept for much of the history of flood control efforts in the Valley, perhaps we need to go back to the beginning as to why people settled so close to the Kickapoo River in the first place.  Why does someone build a house in a river’s floodway?

            Many of the first people to settle in the area around La Farge were drawn to the region because of the potential of waterpower provided by the Kickapoo River.  In the narratives of the original land surveys done in 1846 and conducted by the federal government surveying team, it was noted the potential for waterpower by damming up the Kickapoo River near La Farge.  In describing waterpower potential, the surveyor’s narrative mentions in particular a site in section 20 (what would become Seelyburg) and another in section 28 (in the area where Bear and Otter Creeks join the Kickapoo) that would be excellent places for dams and mills.

            Thomas and Anson DeJean and Dempster Seely would soon follow and construct the dams and mills at those places on the Kickapoo.  They also built houses right next to the river, close by their mill sites.  As the lumbering boom followed in the northern Kickapoo Valley, many of those who worked at the mills also built houses along the river.  Soon villages bloomed along the banks of the Kickapoo from Ontario to Steuben.  And those villages, being constructed in the later half of the 19^th century, flourished during those early years of existence.  Were they hit with catastrophic floods in those early years, like they would be in the following 20^th century? 

Evidence would suggest these early settlements were not in peril from the Kickapoo’s mighty floods, so common after 1900.  Those early settlers were not stupid people, who would establish their entire towns in harms way.  Prudent men would not build houses in areas where the safety of their family might be in jeopardy because of rushing floodwater, would they?  What happened to a river where it was once safe to build communities along its banks?

The very nature of the watershed that supported the river changed drastically in those early years of settlement along the Kickapoo.  The change in the watershed caused the river to undergo drastic changes as well.  It is not to say that the river did not flood during those early years of settlement, because all rivers have floods and the Kickapoo was not an exception.  But those early floods must have been tolerable for the people who lived near the Kickapoo River, because the riverside settlements continued to grow and prosper.  It was the river that changed; by the end of the nineteenth century, the Kickapoo River became a flooding machine.

Dam The Water

In 1908, the State of Wisconsin published a book titled, The Water Power of Wisconsin.  The book was written by Leonard S. Smith, a civil engineer and was published as part of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey that was being conducted at the time.  The state-funded survey was used to assess where Wisconsin was at the time in regards to water power availability and use, which was an offshoot of the geology and natural history study.  The book was divided up into various chapters based on the different geographic regions of the state.  In the chapter covering southwest Wisconsin or the Driftless Area, a listing of the dams and their water power capacity on the Kickapoo River were charted.  The dam at La Farge was listed as the largest capacity power producer on the Kickapoo.  Harnessing the power of the waters of the Kickapoo River near La Farge had been a constant goal as settlement began in the northern part of the Valley.

            When white settlement first came to the northern Kickapoo Valley in the late 1840’s, the availability of the rushing waters of the river was a prime inducement for the development of dam sites for creation of water power.  Isaac Lawton built the first dam in the area of what would eventually become La Farge in 1848.  Lawton was a lumberman from the state of New York and came west to the brand new state of Wisconsin located between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.  Lawton used the Great Lakes to get to Wisconsin and he and his large family settled in the Genesee area in Waukesha County.  He worked in and co-owned a lumber operation there for a few years before moving to the western part of the state and the Kickapoo Valley.

            Isaac Lawton found some desirable land along the Kickapoo River in what today is section 31 of the Town of Stark.  He was looking for a site to dam up the river and operate a sawmill.  After hiking down to Mineral Point to make his claim and pay his fee to the government for the land, Isaac and some of his oldest sons cleared his newly acquired land and built a cabin.  When that was done, he brought his wife and the rest of the children west from Genesee to live in their new home.  Lawton constructed a brush and log dam on the river where it turned west, installed an “up and down” saw and started milling out lumber.  He and his sons were some of the first in the Valley to raft the lumber down the Kickapoo and out to Midwestern markets.  It was said that a selling price of $7 for the raft of lumber made for a profitable venture in those early days of lumbering on the Kickapoo.

            Isaac Lawton would eventually turn the lumber rafting over to his sons and son-in-laws, as they would operate sawmills in many different locations on the Kickapoo River and its tributaries over the years.  (Indeed, we could call Isaac Lawton the “Father of Lumbering in the Kickapoo”, but that is another story to tell at another time.)  After a few years, the dam located on the Isaac Lawton place was removed.  The next dam built in the immediate La Farge area was a product of the efforts of Thomas DeJean.

            Thomas DeJean, who could be dubbed “The Father of La Farge”, came to the Kickapoo Valley in 1853 and claimed land along the river just to the north of Isaac Lawton.  By 1855, DeJean and his adopted son, Anson, were clearing their land along the Kickapoo River.  At the mouth of Bear Creek, the DeJeans established a brush and log dam for a sawmill operation on the creek in 1857.  The location of the DeJean dam was unfortunate as it was nearly impossible to float the logs on the river to the mill for sawing.  Eventually, Thomas and Anson DeJean built a gristmill upstream on Bear Creek to better utilize the waters from their dam and that gristmill business was a success for many years.  Anson DeJean stayed active in the lumbering business and he owned vast tracts of land in the area for the harvesting of trees for lumber.  He and his crews would use another dam and sawmill built upstream a couple of miles from the DeJean dam, for it would be Dempster Seely who would build the dam that would eventually become the largest in the Valley.

            In 1863, Dempster Seely, another transplanted New Yorker, purchased land from John Anderson that contained a section of the Kickapoo River with a strong flow as it dropped to the west and then south.  Anderson, originally a Scotsman from Glasgow, had come to the Kickapoo Valley in the 1840’s and worked on the first lumber crews, felling trees and rafting the lumber down the river.  He eventually grew too old for that vigorous work and retired to his farm overlooking the river, where he established an apiary and made sweet honey for sale.

            Seely, who had earlier operated successful sawmills in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, built a house and a large barn on his Kickapoo Valley property with lumber sawn at his mill.  Soon he was employing crews of men to harvest lumber for his milling operation, which utilized a circular saw.  Chauncey Lawton, a son of Isaac, operated a general store and law practice nearby and soon plotted the growing river town as Star.  Because nearly everyone worked for Dempster Seely in his expanding lumber operation (they were known as “Seely Men”), the place came to be known as Seelyburg.  Those were boom times for Dempster Seely’s business and by 1870 the mill had added planing and shingle milling capabilities.

            To provide adequate water power for all of these milling operations, Dempster Seely enlarged his dam on several occasions.  He replaced the original brush and log dam with a larger dam made with logs and plank to create more headwater for the milling operations.  Eventually, Seely and his son Charles would expand the milling business to include a gristmill, which required more water power.  The Seely’s moved the dam downriver and anchored it to a sandstone rock wall on the north side.  Here at the new dam site the flow of the river narrowed and turned to the southwest.  The new dam required a more sturdy timber and plank construction to harness the river’s water power.  This was the dam that was in place when the state survey was done and the water power book published in 1908.

            In that book on page 167 in the section, Water Powers of the Kickapoo River, the dam at La Farge was described as, “The La Farge Milling Company maintains an 8 foot dam built on natural rock foundation.  Three turbines 56, 40, and 35 inches in diameter rated at 160 horsepower are used in the day time to run a flour mill, and during the night to run a local light plant.  The owners report that they can count on only 125 horsepower.”  Other dams on the Kickapoo River were listed at Gays Mills, Soldiers Grove, Readstown, Viola, Rockton, and Ontario and north of Ontario.  With its 160 horsepower capacity, the La Farge dam exceeded all others in the Valley.

            By the time the state report on water power was written, Charles Seely was a minority owner of his father’s dam and mill operation.  When the light plant was begun in 1904, a group of investors bought Seely’s La Farge operation, closed down the lumber mill, increased the capacity of the grist mill, improved the timber dam and installed additional power turbines for the light plant.  Most of the investors in the La Farge dam and mill were from Soldiers Grove and included the Wisconsin governor at the time, James Davidson.  With the influx of investment money, the La Farge dam, mill and power plant was a state of the art operation serving a thriving modern community.