More Travers Building History

(This blog entry is a continuation of a story started last time about a building on La Farge’s Main Street.  Built in 1899, the brick veneer building was originally called the Travers Building after its owner Art Travers.  Travers and others operated a variety of business places in the store building during the first twenty years of its existence.   We continue the story of the Travers Building with some of its more recent uses as a hotel annex and the village’s post office. – BDS)

            In its most recent history, the old brick building next to La Farge’s busy Z-Zip Stop convenience store/gas station has been the home to a real estate office, Hometown & Country Realty.  For a few years before that, it was the home of a restaurant for a while.  Both of those types of businesses were reincarnations of former enterprises carried out in the building’s first-floor retail space.

            For over forty years, from 1950 until 1991, that space was occupied by La Farge’s Post Office.  There is an entire generation or two who grew up in the community who will always remember the brick building as the post office.  For much of that time, Mac Marshall Jr. was the postmaster in La Farge, working in a building that his family owned.  There were usually one or more members of the Green family working at the La Farge Post Office in that building as well.  Lester Green was the postmaster in 1950 when the post office was moved from its former location on south State Street (across from the lawyer’s – Ralph Freeze at that time - office).  Lavern and Willard Green also had rural mail routes and for many years worked out of the post office in the brick building, that previously had been known as the Hotel Annex.

            The brick building became part of Mac Marshall’s hotel in the early 1930’s.  Mac’s Hotel was located on the corner lot, two doors east of the brick building (which was still then known as the Travers Building).  Mac’s became La Farge’s only hotel when the Curry Hotel (the old Hotel Ward located on the corner lot which is currently a parking lot for the La Farge Medical Clinic) burned down in June of 1929.  At that time there was still a strong demand for hotel rooms in La Farge.  Teachers who taught at the school in La Farge would often rent rooms in the hotels in town during the school year.  (Fred Mercer, La Farge’s agriculture teacher and coach, was staying in the Curry Hotel when it burned down in 1929.  Mercer, who still lived in Wauzeka at the time, lost all of his possessions except the clothes on his back in the fire.)  Railroad workers also stayed at the La Farge hotels, indeed it was a man named Cox, who was a conductor on the Kickapoo rail line, who first discovered the fire at the Curry Hotel.  There were ten guests at the Curry Hotel on the night that it burned down.

  Mac Marshall needed more hotel rooms, so he purchased the Travers Building to meet that need.  (One source said that Mac bought the property from C. E. Yeomans, who had purchased the Main Street building from the Travers family.)  They called the new acquisition the Hotel Annex and moved the dining room from the basement of the old hotel building over to the first floor of the Annex building. 

Mac’s Coffee Shoppe, as the dining room/restaurant was called then, was a going place in the community.  Besides offering guests in the hotel hot meals three times a day, the hotel’s dining room was also a bakery with homemade pies, doughnuts, cakes and cookies for sale.  A 1929 advertisement in the La Farge Enterprise for Mac’s restaurant also listed candy bars and box candies; tobacco, cigars and cigarettes; and ice cream, soft drinks and fresh fruits for sale.  The ad finished with “School students and Farmers especially welcomed”.

The Hotel Annex dining room was a very busy place in those days.  Mary Lee Muller shared some memories with me about the hotel’s dining room.  Her mother Anna Norris and Maggie Potter were cooks in the hotel dining room and that dining room would be filled with customers during the busy dinner and supper hours.  (Mary Lee also related an interesting story about another of the cooks at the hotel.  Alphreda Lawton cooked at Mac’s and was also a midwife who helped deliver babies in the La Farge area.  One night, Georgia Evans, who lived on the family farm up on Maple Ridge, had to hook up the horses to the family buggy and race down the hill to Seelyburg and then to La Farge to get Alphreda to come help with Georgia’s mother’s birthing.  Then it was a quick ride back to the Evans’ place where Georgia’s baby brother, Pete, was brought into the world.) 

The men who worked for the railroad always ate at the hotel, as did many men who operated businesses on Main Street.  Mary Lee could remember Tony Novy, the village’s blacksmith and Dr. Frank Gollin sitting at the same table each day for lunch.  There were no lunches served at the school at that time, so teachers and students alike would hustle down to the hotel during their noon hour (which really was a full hour back in those days) to eat their lunch.  The hotel’s cook stove was usually going before five in the morning, as the baking had to be done before breakfast was served.  Besides the hotel guests, many people coming into La Farge for work would catch breakfast in the hotel dining room.

 The apartments on the second floor of the Annex building were converted into hotel rooms.  Maxine Shird, who grew up in her folk’s hotel on Main Street, said that the rooms in the Annex were usually reserved for the railroad workers who needed a place to stay.  She said there were usually three or four railroad men staying at the hotel during the week.  When the Kickapoo Stump Dodger made its last run on August 15, 1939 and the railroad buildings and tracks were pulled out of La Farge later that fall, Mac’s Hotel lost some steady customers.

Mac’s Hotel building burned down in 1942 – it was the last hotel in the village.  The Major’s Feed Store building, which was just to the west of the hotel, was burned out at the same time by the hotel fire, but the Annex building survived.  Although the hotel business would not be revived, Mac Marshall continued to rent out the upstairs rooms in the Annex, which were later reconverted back to apartments.  The dining facilities were also rented out and a restaurant remained in the first floor space throughout the 1940’s.  In September of 1950 when that space in the Annex was converted for use as a post office, the Bluebird Café, which had been operating there, moved across the street to the Tony Novy building, located on the northwest corner of Main and Silver Streets.

At a meeting of the La Farge village board held on April 22, 2013, it was decided to order that the old Travers Building be razed and the demolition material from the building moved off the property.  Negotiations are under way for that order to be executed, but neither the building’s current owner, who is in bankruptcy proceedings, nor the lien holder on the building want to incur the responsibility and costs of the demolition.  The village has issued a “Notice And Order To Raze And Remove” and wants the building taken down within a week of the notice.  Regardless of how it happens, the end of an old building in La Farge is near.  The last of the five buildings on the old Central Hotel block will be gone.

Gassing Up In La Farge

One of the manifestations of the corporate merger movement of the American oil and gas industry in the latter half of the twentieth century was the gradual disappearance of places to buy gas in small towns like La Farge.  I was thinking about this the other day as I was filling up my pickup with petrol at the Z-Zip Stop, the village’s one and only gas station.  We used to have lots of gas stations in town, but those days are long gone. 

Awhile back, Mark Phillips encouraged me to write about all of the old gas stations in La Farge; seems his Dad, Blaine, who used to be in the gas station business in the village, thought it would be a good local history topic.  Recently Gary Hagen showed me a newspaper clipping from the early 1970’s.  It told about Carson Lawrence retiring after operating a gas station in town for nearly forty years.  Putting all of that together, it seems we may have an interesting story here.

  That term, gas station, is a term from the past, for today La Fargians buy their gasoline locally at a convenience store – the Z-Zip Stop.  It used to be that a gas station could pretty much run on its own in a small town like La Farge.  They were also called “service stations” back then and full service was how they all operated when the customer drove up to the pumps.  Gas would be pumped, oil level checked, windows washed and change made while the customer sat in the car – that was the service of that time.  There might be some candy and Cokes behind the counter for sale and some car maintenance services like oil changes were available to customers as well, but gasoline sales paid most of the bills for gas station operators back then. 

Today, the Z-Zip Stop operates a mini-general store, a propane outlet, a fast food restaurant, a mini-beer depot, and a mini-bank (ATM) for its customers besides offering gasoline for sale on La Farge’s Main Street.  It is a one-stop shopping place in the village for a business that operates seven days a week and sixteen hours each day.  In many ways, the multiple items for sale, being open every day and for long hours is an old fashioned model for a business in small towns like La Farge.  Since its’ beginning, La Farge has had many successful combination-type businesses offering multiple goods and services to its customers.  The convenience store model, like the Z-Zip Stop, is almost a throwback to those earlier times.  However, having only one place to buy gas in La Farge is a relatively new phenomenon in the town’s history.

When I was growing up in La Farge in the early 1950s, I believe there were eight or perhaps ten places where you could buy gas in the village.  There were five gas stations and four or five other places where you could stop to fill up if you needed to, all located on La Farge’s Main Street.  If you would care to join me, let’s go back to those times of sixty years ago and take a look at those gas peddlers from yesteryear.  (I hope to hear from blog readers on this trip back in time – let me know if you have any memories of the old gas stations and other places that sold gas.)  Let us begin our little gas station survey from the ‘50s by starting on the village’s west end, down by Nuzum’s.

At that intersection of Main & Mill Streets there were two gas stations.  Carson Lawrence’s Sinclair station was on the southeast corner (where the car wash building is today).  Carson ran a gas station there on that corner across from the cheese factory for over thirty years.  Across the street on the northeast corner (a vehicle lot for the truck center today) was a Cities Service station, which featured an outside car hoist for oil and tire changes.  Gene Campton may have been running the station at that time although there were lots of operators, Dave Burocher and Don Nida to name a few, at that location over the years.

Moving east up Main Street, there were gas pumps at the Clarks Brothers Garage on the southwest corner of Silver & Main (across the street from the present Z-Zip Stop).  Leo & Clanus Clark sold Chryslers, Dodges, and Plymouths from the garage, so pumps were needed to fill up all of those new cars. (There may have been gas pumps at the Ed Muller & Sons Construction building back down the street a half a block, where Jeff Kennedy now changes tires now for the truck center, but I’m not sure the public could buy there.)  At this intersection of Silver & Main Streets, I think there was once a gas station on the northwest corner (the present apartment building owned by George Wilbur), but I cannot remember one there in the early 50s.  Across the street at the Major’s Feed & Equipment Store (Now Penny’s thrift store and Potter’s Realty), I think they had gas pumps as well, but again, I’m a little fuzzy as to when they took them out.  The La Farge Oil Co-op gas station was to the east of Major’s where Heartland-Cenex Co-op store is now located.  (I think the gas pumps there were taken out after Cenex purchased the local co-op business.)  Now let’s continue our tour as we move east up Main Street.

On the southeast corner of State & Main Streets was the Mobil gas station.  This station was built at the end of World War II and was the newest facility in town.  Jack Dempsey may have been running the station at that time, but there were a number of operators, Floyd Stoleson, Pete Evans, Alvie Sandmire were some, at that location over the years.  There also were gas pumps next door at the garage that housed the Chevy-Buick dealership.  Ed Deibig was the owner of the garage then, which is now owned by LaVerne Campbell.

 Continuing to move east, Neil Donaldson had gas pumps in front of his hardware store located on the northwest corner of Maple & Main Streets (the current location of Bergum’s Food Mart).  Neil’s gas pumps were probably the oldest in the village.  They were tall pumps with clear glass tanks and they were run by manpower.  Neil cranked a handle that pumped the gas into the glass tank so one could see and measure the gas being purchased.  When the glass tank was full, the hose drained the gas by gravity down from the pump into the car’s gas tank.  If you were buying more gas than the tank on the pump could hold, the whole procedure had to be repeated.

Kitty-corner from Donaldson’s Hardware will be our last stop for gas at Leo Smith’s Sinclair station (now Irv Gudgeon’s woodworking shop).  (Another feature of the gas business in those earlier times was multiple stations in the village selling the same brand, like Sinclair.  At one time in the 1930s, there were three Skelly stations in La Farge.)    Leo’s building had been one of the original blacksmith shops in the village, which was converted to a gas station as horsepower overtook “horse power”.  The conversion provided a bay for service work on cars where the blacksmith shop had been.     

That concludes our little gas pump tour through La Farge’s Main Street from yesteryear.  In those four blocks on the village’s main thoroughfare there were lots of places for gassing up back then.

Looking back, it is hard to understand how all of those places of businesses in La Farge could make it selling gas during that time.  But it was a different time – a time when two hundred more people lived in the village.  In addition, nearly every farm around La Farge was in production back then and those rural folks did most of their shopping in La Farge.  That shopping trip to town, usually on a Wednesday or Saturday night, often included topping off the tank on the family sedan before heading home.  Many of those farmers also brought their grain to the two mills in La Farge to be ground into feed.  Those trucks and pickups loaded with sacks of feed for the farm animals were gassed up in town as well.  More customers created a demand for more gas stations to provide the service to the people of the community.