BRIDGES & BUSES - 1975

Lately I have been working on volume II of my La Farge history.  I have been reviewing my research of the events that happened during the mid-1970s in this little Kickapoo River town.  It was a crazy time, as the controversy over the La Farge dam project seemed to control everything happening in the village.  One of those strange occurrences in the fall of 1975 put La Farge back in the media bulls-eye once again.  The local protest played out over a couple of weeks and was initiated by the appearance of Senator William Proxmire in the village.

Senator Proxmire spoke to a standing room only crowd at the new La Farge firehouse that Saturday morning, September 5, 1975.  Proxmire announced that he was withdrawing his support of the dam project after being a staunch proponent of the project for years.  The announcement stunned nearly everyone in attendance (including my wife, Carolyn and me) and the discussion after the senator left, was what do we do now?  The pro-dam contingent, a vast majority in the village, wondered what was the next step to take?

That next step occurred on the following Monday evening at a special school board meeting held in the La Farge gym.  One hundred and thirty people were in attendance at the meeting and a petition was read bearing 140 names asking that the school board take appropriate action if the board members felt that area bridges were unsafe for travel by school buses.  A discussion at the meeting brought up that most area bridges recently had weight limits posted on them, some with limits as low as ten tons.  All of the bridges on Highway 131 north of La Farge located in the dam project land had 10-ton limits except for one.  School board president Roger Gabrielson estimated that a full school bus would weigh close to or exceed the 10-ton weight limit.  Gabrielson contended that nine state highway bridges located in the La Farge School District were unsafe for the district’s seven buses.

In a 3-2 vote, the school board decided to close La Farge Schools beginning on the following Thursday due to the weight restricted bridges.  Board members Mac Marshall Jr., David Clift and Marvin Munson voted for the measure, while Gabrielson and Richard Allen voted against it.  Both Gabrielson and Allen voted against the measure because they wanted the school to close the very next day, on Tuesday.

Discussion at the special school board meeting also focused on the fact that there was no money budgeted for repairs or replacements for any of the bridges on Highway 131 north of La Farge.  Those bridges were supposed to be removed when the lake from the dam project was created, but with Senator Proxmire’s withdrawal of support for completion of the dam project, it seemed the bridges would have to remain in use.  Since Governor Patrick Lucey earlier had said that no state funds would be used on the bridge and highway relocations for the La Farge dam project, it could be years before the bridges would be upgraded or replaced.

School board president Gabrielson told the board and attendees that the school would be in contact with the state DOT the next morning about the bridge concerns and the school closing.

Further local protest was in place the next morning as the La Farge school buses crossed the crumbling Highway 82 bridge over the Kickapoo River in La Farge.  On that Tuesday, a dozen protestors, many carrying signs denouncing the conditions of the bridge as well as state and federal politicians, paced warily along the sides of the bridge.  The number of protestors grew during the week and nearly three dozen people picketed on the bridge west of Nuzum’s by week’s end.  A reporter for the LaCrosse Tribune covering the demonstrations took a photograph of Orval Howard standing in one of the holes in the side of the road on the state highway bridge.  In the photo that appeared in the next days’ newspaper, Howard sank over three feet into the hole before his feet found some hanging angle iron beneath the road.  Soon after, the county highway crews placed orange construction barrels over the holes and stretched snow fence along each side of the bridge to keep demonstrators and others away from the holes.

By the end of the week, others who were walking across the bridge over the Kickapoo River in La Farge included school children riding on the buses to and from school.

After the leaders of the La Farge Schools contacted the state DOT about the bridges and scheduled school closing, intense negotiations resulted in a compromise to avoid closing La Farge’s schools.  Representatives from the DOT met with school officials on the afternoon following the special school board meeting.  An inspection was done of the bridge at Nuzum’s (where picketing had begun that morning) and options were discussed.  The next day, the DOT sent a letter to the school with assurances that all the state bridges were safe for school buses to cross.  School bus routes were then altered to avoid crossing the bridges north of La Farge as much as possible, although the new routes took more buses across the Highway 82 Bridge in La Farge.  It was decided by the school leaders that the buses would stop at the bridge approaches and the children would be unloaded.  Then the empty bus with red warning lights flashing would lead the walking students across the bridge.  Once across, the students would return to the bus and the route would continue.  This drastic move of having students walk across the bridges in and around La Farge was continued for several school days reaching into the next week.

During that time, more state bridge inspectors came to La Farge and inspected all nine bridges cited by the school in their report to the Wisconsin DOT.  With new weight restrictions and speed limits placed on the bridges, the La Farge school buses once again began hauling students across the spans instead of having them walk.  The press coverage of the La Farge bridge protest and the students walking across the bridges was massive.  Besides the La Farge area newspapers and radio as well as the LaCrosse newspaper, radio and TV stations, the bridges story merited coverage in the Madison and Milwaukee newspapers, radio and TV stations.  Several Chicago newspapers and one of the Windy City’s TV stations also covered the story of the La Farge bridges and walking students.

La Farge Epitaph editor Lonnie Muller concluded his “WHAT NOW ???” editorial in the September 10^th issue by writing, “I support the board 100% even though I figured a Tuesday closing was even better.  The day has come when La Farge can quit taking a back seat to everything in the state.  It’s damn time our side of the story got out to Lucey and his conniving bunch of pigheads in Madison.  We are sick and tired of being the pawns in the chess game of life.  We just checkmated you Lucey and from now on you are playing a losing game with the people of the Kickapoo Valley, if not the entire state.  You figured that you could put us down forever, but it just didn’t work out that way did it?  I think that now, more than ever, the La Farge people are starting to really work together.  I was damn disgusted Saturday when Proxmire made his speech pulling his support from the project, but by Tuesday evening when I write this, I can say that I’m damn proud of these people in this community who are going to fight this together to the finish.  I think a new chapter just started for La Farge, and probably a pretty good one at that.”

In the following week’s Epitaph (9-17-1975), reporter Pete Beckstrand wrote an interesting article on the DOT bridge inspections.  The recent state inspections had found that all of the bridges in the Kickapoo Valley were structurally safe.  However, much of the article provided contrary evidence of the sorry state of most of the bridges around La Farge.  Beckstrand noted that many of the state highway bridges in the La Farge area were “used” bridges – having been originally built at other sites.  He wrote that Bridge 18 (the Bacon Bridge just north of Seelyburg and the dam project site) was originally a span over the Wisconsin River at Spring Green.  After the bad Kickapoo River flood of 1951 damaged the Bacon Bridge, the state highway department hauled an old Spring Green span out of storage and put it across the Kickapoo River as a replacement.  Beckstrand also detailed that there were a total of 92 bridges in Wisconsin that had weight restrictions and 15 of them were located in the northern Kickapoo Valley.  In the article, he quoted Lee Schneider, chief engineer of the DOT’s LaCrosse office, as saying in a phone interview that the La Farge area bridges were in need of “massive maintenance and repair”, and there was no state money budgeted to pay for it.

Within a week after the state bridge inspections, Bridges 16, 17, and 18 on Highway 131 north of La Farge were posted with speed limits and 10-ton weight limits.  The Highway 82 Bridge across Otter Creek west of La Farge was made one-way for traffic.  The Highway 82 Bridge over the Kickapoo River at Nuzum’s was already one-way due to the placement of barrels and snow fence along both sides.

Beckstrand also reported in the article that a La Farge school bus loaded with mostly small children was weighed on the scale at Nuzum’s.  The bus weighed 16,900 pounds and the Episcope reporter wondered if a bus loaded with high school age students might exceed the 10-ton limit placed on most area bridges.

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.

INTENSIVE DAM REVIEW

We continue to look at a time in the early 1970’s when the community of La Farge was grappling with the emerging realities of whether a dam to be built north of town on the Kickapoo River was going to create Lake La Farge.  This isn’t the point in the story about the end of that federal project, but it just might be the beginning of the end.

            I was recently taking a hike around the Visitor Center of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve with a group of students from Malcolm Shabazz City High School in Madison.  We were sitting in the pine trees above the Kickapoo and looking out across the valley at the water intake tower of that still unfinished dam.  One of the students asked why the dam wasn’t completed and I gave my standard “short-story” answer that it was stopped because of political, financial and environmental reasons.

            In this entry, we look back at a time when those three dynamics – politics, finances and environmental concerns – were first introduced and delineated to the people of the Kickapoo Valley.

Governor Patrick Lucey’s  “Intensive Review” of the La Farge Dam & Lake Project was held on Tuesday, April 27, 1971 in a packed conference room at the state capital building in Madison.  The Governor did not attend the conference, citing previous commitments.  Colonel Charles McGinnis, district engineer from the Corps of Engineers St. Paul office, was named chairman of the meeting by Governor Lucey and moderated the review session.

            Another engineer from the Corps’ St Paul office, Richard Colton, explained at the outset of the review session that the Corps had looked at fourteen different alternative proposals to the “big dam” option chosen for the Kickapoo River at La Farge.  The Corps had studied some of the alternatives in the initial planning phase of the Kickapoo River project, while other proposals that had more recently been brought forward had also been analyzed in the previous few months.  Colton stated that for maximum flood protection at the most efficient cost, the present planned construction of a dam at La Farge remained the best option.  It was evident from his comments on the alternative proposals that Colton was addressing the opposition to the project.

            Colonel McGinnis also took time to explain the method used by the Corps to estimate the cost of the La Farge project.  He said that the interest rate used to calculate the feasibility of the project was frozen under Congressional rules at a 3.125% rate that had been adopted in 1968.  If the Chief of Army Engineers had to put the La Farge project on his deferred list, which could happen if the project was delayed any further, the interest rate would be unfrozen and the project would have to be refigured.  With a higher interest rate that was in place in 1971, the project would not be feasible due to not meeting the benefit/cost ratio used on such federal projects.

            McGinnis went on to say that with the 3.125% interest rate used by the federal government to borrow money for the dam project, the benefit/cost ratio was 1.3 ($1.30 in value returned after the project was completed for every dollar spent to build it).  However, if 1971 interest rates were used for the project due to any kind of a delay, then the benefit/cost ratio would be cut to 0.8, which would make the federal project economically unjustified.  This explanation by Colonel McGinnis clearly showed that any delay could possibly stop the dam project at La Farge.

            McGinnis asked all of the speakers at the review session to “separate fact from opinion” when presenting testimony to better enable the Governor and his staff to decide if the state still wanted the federal project.  Professor Robert Lord presented the most compelling information against the proposed dam project that day at the review session.

            Robert Lord was a highly respected member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin.  He was a Professor of Agricultural Economics and Forestry at UW and was the Director of the Resource Policy Studies and Programs at the university.  From 1965 to 1967, Lord had worked as an economic advisor for the Corps of Engineers on various water resource programs.  The UW professor would base most of his testimony in opposition to the La Farge dam project on a study done by four UW water resource management graduate students.  The graduate study project, completed in August 1970, looked at the Kickapoo River project in the areas of flood control, economics, recreation and landscape.

            The Lord Report (as the graduate student’s study came to be known) attacked the La Farge dam project on all fronts.  The study contested the cost/benefit ratio analysis of the project used by the Corps.  The report also disputed the flood control aspects of the dam project as well as the recreational benefits of the lake to be created behind the dam.  Lastly, the study raised serious concerns about the environmental impact of the project, both relating to the effect of the lake on the natural environment of the Kickapoo Valley and the perceived future water quality problems in the lake itself.

            In his concluding remarks, Professor Lord called on the Governor and the Corps of Engineers to take a pause in the construction of the dam to reexamine the potential problems with the project.  He asked the Governor to set up a task force group composed of state and federal agencies to look at the perceived problems with the project.  Lord thought that the task force group should pay particular attention to the creation of a Kickapoo River State Forest, using the lands purchased for the La Farge dam project reservoir and neighboring Wildcat Mountain State Park land for the creation of a Kickapoo River Parkway and Bikeway with trails, interpretive facilities and scientific reserves.

            Professor Lord’s presentation and the information brought forward in the study done by the UW graduate students was the foundation for all of the other anti-dam advocates who spoke at the intensive review session that day.  Robert Smith, speaking on behalf of the Madison-based John Muir Chapter of the Sierra Club and Ronald Rich both relied on information gathered by Professor Lord and his students.  Both Smith and Rich described the Kickapoo River as a natural wild treasure that would be destroyed and lost by the creation of the La Farge dam’s reservoir.

            Ronald Rich added a personal note in the conclusion to his presentation as to the difficulty in opposing the La Farge project for those who lived in the Kickapoo Valley.  He said, ”I would like to add that opposing this project has been made most difficult by a radical element of the proponents who have constantly, through the past year, intimidated, harassed, and threatened anyone who dared speak against this project.  As recently as Monday, April 19, 1971, I was told personally by a project proponent that if the dam is not built he would hate to have his name on the list of people who opposed the dam.  If our voices have appeared to be few in number, this is the reason for it.”

            Next time we will look at those dam project proponents and what they had to say that day at Governor Lucey’s intensive review session.

La Farge Organizes To Back Dam Project

“Emotions and tempers ran as high as a Kickapoo flash flood when it was learned here last week that Governor Lucey had set the date of April 27 for an intensive review of the Kickapoo Lake Project.” 

Thus began the coverage of the La Farge dam project controversy in the April 22, 1971 issue of the La Farge Enterprise newspaper.  The local weekly was full of news on how the people in the village and surrounding area were organizing to show support for the dam project.  Editor Arnie Widstrand wrote an excellent editorial listing several reasons to support the embattled project.  Jackie Thelen, the Senior Editor of the LHS student newspaper, The Windjammer (published each week in the Enterprise), wrote an editorial also supporting the dam project.  The village newspaper contained a press release from the Kickapoo Valley Association calling on all people in the Valley to support the dam project.  A huge ad in the newspaper shouted out, “SHOW YOUR CONCERN ABOUT THE KICKAPOO LAKE PROJECT”.  A group called “The Citizens For The Kickapoo Area” paid for the advertisement, which called for people to write letters to Governor Patrick Lucey to show support for the dam project.

The reaction to the announcement of the Governor’s “intensive review” of the La Farge dam project created immediate concerns in La Farge, especially among the pro-dam majority.  Within days after the announcement, a group called “The Citizens For The Kickapoo River” (later called “The Citizens For The Kickapoo Area” and eventually shortened to a more manageable “Citizens For The Kickapoo”) was formed to counter the opposition to the La Farge dam and lake project.  Arlen Johnson, who ran the funeral parlor in town, was chosen as the spokesman for the group and Robert Vosen, who sold insurance out of his home office on Bird Street in La Farge, was selected as the chairman of the group.

The new pro-dam group began by organizing an immediate letter-writing campaign that reached out to dam supporters in the Kickapoo Valley and throughout the state and beyond.  Everyone was asked to write a letter to Governor Lucey asking for his support for the project at La Farge.  Within weeks hundreds of pro-dam letters had poured into the Governor’s offices in Madison.  The new group also started to solicit donations for the public relations effort and $1,500 was raised in a matter of days to support the cause.  With the funds, radio and newspaper advertisements were purchased, spreading the message to support the dam project at La Farge.  Organizational meetings were held daily in the village as the pro-dam forces in La Farge continued to mobilize.  Letter writing sessions were held each day and evening to help with people getting the word out to support the dam and lake project.  A lady’s church group held a prayer vigil asking for guidance for elected leaders so they could support the dam and lake project.  School children made signs supporting the project as part of their class assignments and then carried the signs that read “Save The Dam” and “Save Lake La Farge” along La Farge’s Main Street after school.

At one of the first meetings of the La Farge pro-dam group, a surprise visitor was Congressman Vernon Thomson, who restated his firm support for the dam project at La Farge.  Thomson, a Republican from Richland Center, also castigated Governor Lucey for interfering with the project and said it was “callous of the Governor to deny rural America of benefits”.

The La Farge pro-dam group wanted more information from the Governor’s office about the review meeting scheduled for later in the month.  Blake Kellogg, Governor Lucey’s press secretary, spoke to the leaders of the La Farge group several times by telephone and then came to La Farge to meet with them.  He was faced with an angry group of fifty people at the meeting held in the basement community meeting room of the La Farge State Bank.  Kellogg tried to assure the people gathered there, which included all the leaders of the pro-dam group, that the review session would be a fair and open process and all sides would be heard.  He vowed that the review would not be conducted like a “kangaroo court”, that all sides and voices would be heard and that the purpose of the review was to “put the full issues out on the table, so Governor Lucey can see the pros and cons on either side”.  Kellogg, a professional at public relations, smoothed some ruffled feathers in the crowd that day, and left with a much greater appreciation of how important the dam project was to many people in La Farge.

On Saturday night, April 24^th, over 500 people gathered at the school gym in La Farge for a public meeting on the dam project.  Sponsored by the local pro-dam group, the attendees at the meeting were overwhelming in favor of completion of the dam and lake at La Farge.  Fifteen proponents of the dam spoke that night at the meeting and the rhetoric and emotion was heated.  The merits of the dam and lake were praised and the Governor’s interference was condemned.  “Professional panic-peddlers who call themselves ecologists” were vilified for stirring up the controversy.  Another speaker called for a “David and Goliath battle” as the Citizens For The Kickapoo took on the potent nationally financed conservation and environmental groups.  “These so-called environmentalists who don’t have to scratch a living out of these hills have no right to determine the future of these people”, said Arlen Johnson in referring to the anti-dam groups.  As the meeting wound down after several hours, more donations were collected to help finance the pro-dam cause, signatures were collected on petitions and instructions and addresses for writing letters of support for the dam project were distributed.

During that April of 1971, in the few weeks before the Governor’s review meeting, La Farge was a hubbub of various activities to show support for the dam project.  Posters appeared in most of the storefront windows on Main Street businesses.  School children continued to walk the streets of La Farge (sometimes during recess and noon hour of the school day) carrying signs of support and marching for the dam project.  The daily planning meetings often drew representatives from the Corps’ St. Paul office to further explain the merits of the dam and lake project.  After much agitation by the Citizens For The Kickapoo with the Governor’s office, Robert Vosen’s name was added to the list of those allowed to speak at the Governor’s review meeting.  Finally, a La Farge leader would now be able to relate a local perspective at the “intensive review”.

Next time, we will look at how that review session, held in Madison at the state capital, brought together the two opposing sides on the La Farge dam issue.  For the first time, the dam and lake project would be measured with the newly defined parameters of the emerging national environmental movement.  For the pro-dam backers from the Kickapoo Valley, the review session illuminated the landscape of the debate over the federal project.