Kayak Kraze on the Kickapoo!

It would be mighty unusual if you drove down Main Street of La Farge on any of these late summer days without seeing a kayak.  Now I realize there has been a kayak hanging in an advertising display at the Z-Zip Stop for several weeks of these summery September days of 2015.  But not counting that red kayak hanging above the gas pumps, you still would probably see a kayak hanging on top of a vacationer’s car or plopped in the bed of a pickup.  All of those kayaks are headed for the Kickapoo River for a summer c(k)ruise.  (Pardon the alliteration in use here. I just can’t help myself when it comes to this kooky Kickapoo kayak kruise kraze.  Again, I apologize.)

            It appears to me that the kayak has really caught on this summer as the new aquatic vehicle of choice for floating on the Kickapoo.  The kayak has been seen more and more frequently here in the Kickapoo Valley in recent years, to the point that now it seems to rival the canoe as the conveyance of choice for maneuvering on the waters of the Kickapoo.

            Maneuvering might be the key to the kayak’s upsurge in usage on our “Crooked River”, the Kickapoo.  The river is notorious for sharp turns, bottom-scraping shallow water, snags of all descriptions, fallen trees to twist around and numerous sand and gravel bars to traverse over and/or around.  This makes for difficult going for even the most experienced tandem paddlers in a canoe.  Indeed many a friendship or family fondness has been shattered by the cursing and screaming of “No, No, you idiot, paddle the other way!” and “Back up you imbecile, we’re now hung up on this snag!” 

With a kayak, it’s a simple right stroke here, back some water here, bring the rear around this way and one glides past the troubles in those roiling waters of the Kickapoo.  Beaming kayakers gliding gleefully past the marooned cursing canoeists, stuck on the snarling snags.  Life is good in an easily maneuvered kayak.

Cost is also a factor here in comparing the kayak’s continuing climb in popularity for use on the Kickapoo.  A brand new beauty of a kayak can be had for a couple of hundred dollars at area purveyors of plastic aquatic conveyances.  If you want to go top-end on your kayak purchase, doubling that amount will bring you a craft with all the bells and whistles like AM/FM radio, power windows and electro-magnetic depth finder plum-bob. 

So, canoes are less maneuverable and more expensive than kayaks.  Since canoes are larger than kayaks and generally need two to paddle, that’s a given, I guess.  But let us not too soon trumpet the ultimate demise of the canoe as the conveyance of choice on the Kickapoo.  After all, you must remember that kayaks have very little if any storage capability.  Since some groups of people who canoe the Kickapoo are very interested in floating along with the current while consuming adult beverages and snarling down salty snacks, the canoe’s ability to safely store coolers and such will probably always be needed. 

After all, fifty years ago, very few would have thought that the canoe could adequately navigate the tortured torrents and stupefying snags of the muddy river.  Indeed, native Kickapoogians avoided navigating on their river at all costs.  (I’m reminded of a story that Roy Stone told me years back of when he and a friend tried to float down the Kickapoo.  Then boys in their teens, the two set out from Rockton in a flat-bottomed duck boat to catch some trout.  When I asked Roy how the fishing had been on that trip, he guffawed and said there never was any time to fish.  The two lads had to spend all their time keeping the boat from going aground and getting caught up on snags.  As they were trying to float down the river, they had to portage around several huge blockages in the river caused by fallen trees and accumulated flood trash.  By the time that the weary boys climbed out of the river at Bacon’s Bridge just above La Farge several hours later, they had HAD IT with any thoughts of floating on the Kickapoo.  Years later, Roy related this story to me as we sat and consumed adult beverages in the Rockton Bar one Saturday afternoon and watched as a couple of dozen folks were heading out to canoe the Kickapoo.)

In May 1962, two canoes containing three men and three boys floated down the Kickapoo River from Rockton to Tunnelville south of La Farge.  The group of canoeists was from Pewaukee, Wisconsin and had canoed on many different rivers and streams in the state.  “They said they especially enjoyed the scenery in this part of the state and that it was one of the most beautiful trips they had made.”  The quoted sentence is from a front-page article in the May 31, 1962 issue of the La Farge Enterprise newspaper.  That’s right; for anybody to canoe the Kickapoo was so rare that it made front-page headlines in the local paper.

Later that year, Congress passed the bill authorizing the La Farge Dam Project and soon professors and students from Madison were canoeing the Kickapoo looking for rare plant species and archeological wonders.  Everyone enjoyed those voyages so much, they returned for more.  The word got out that a canoe trip on the Kickapoo could be a pretty neat thing.  Soon canoes were being rented out at the Beauti-View Resort in Wildcat Park near Ontario and at Smith’s Landing south of La Farge.  The canoe craze on the Kickapoo had begun.

Now all the main canoe livery businesses on the northern Kickapoo rent out kayaks as well as canoes.  The Kickapoo Yacht Club based out of Rockton has rented kayaks for a few years now and most weekends has them all rented out, as do most of the rental outfits at Ontario.  As the demand for the one-person float craft increases, more kayaks will need to be purchased as the Kickapoo Kayak Kraze Kontinues!

FALLING BRICKS

Time ages all things, sparing nothing in its relentless path.  Age provides the sag to once straight rooflines, corners and edges.  Buildings, once constructed to last forever, start to bend and twist with the passage of time.  A couple of weeks ago, the last of the buildings which occupied the Main Street block in La Farge where Mac Marshall’s Hotel once stood started to come down.  On a Saturday afternoon an avalanche of falling bricks cascaded off the west wall of the building into the parking lot at the neighboring Z-Zip Stop.  The gaping hole in the wall stretched from halfway up the windows on the second floor down to the ground level.  The pile of fallen bricks and mortar spread out in a delta of debris at the side of the old building.

            After a quick inspection by local and state officials, the building was condemned and deemed unfit for human habitation.  Two upstairs apartments, rented and occupied when the bricks fell, would be quickly emptied out.  The business housed on the first floor, Hometown & Country Realty, was moved out within days after the bricks fell and a new site in La Farge’s business district is being sought.  The old brick building, sagging with time and twisted and bent with age, awaits the wrecking ball.  (Actually, a big excavator’s bucket and claw will probably pull down the old building, as it’s not quite tall enough to merit a wrecking ball.)

            The old brick building is the last of five two-story buildings used for business purposes on the south side of that block on La Farge’s Main Street.  All of those buildings were constructed in the late 1890’s to meet the demand for commercial spaces needed in the village after the railroad came to La Farge in the fall of 1897. The building was known in those early years of its existence as the Travers Building because Art Travers owned it.

            A.W. Travers came to La Farge from the Woodstock-Bloom City region in 1897, following the railroad into town. A businessman, Travers first rented retail space in a La Farge building located on the village’s busy Main Street.  In the January 7, 1898 edition of the La Farge Enterprise, Travers’ advertisement described his business as a “jobber in hosiery, fancy goods, notions and cigars”.  In May of 1899, Travers teamed with Anson Cowee (who was probably helping with finances) to build a new brick-veneer building.  The 24’ x 44’ two-story structure was located “two doors to the west of the Klondyke Hotel”.  Bricks for the building probably came from the Van Miller brickyard, which was located on the east end of La Farge on Bear Creek.  Travers moved his notions business into the new store building that fall.  The building was large enough for multiple businesses and in September of 1900, the Randall Jewelry Store was relocated to the Travers Building.  The jewelry business changed hands frequently in the next couple of years; it was owned by a McCarty who moved up river from Soldiers Grove and later by Bob O’Neil.

            In December of 1901, a saloon was started in the Travers Building (probably in the space where Travers had his notions store) and operated by John Trappe.  Trappe, who had just returned to his hometown after serving eight years in the Army, ran the saloon on and off for the next three years.  The businesses in the building must have been successful because Travers built a large wooden addition onto the back of the building in July of 1902.  In September of that year, Travers opened a pool and billiard parlor on the second floor of the building.  Joining with Trappe’s saloon and O’Neil’s jewelry store, the brick building then housed three businesses.

            John Trappe’s saloon ran into trouble in 1903.  In February, Trappe was fined $22 for having his saloon open after hours.  Times worsened for saloon trade in La Farge when the village’s citizens voted to go “Dry” in the April, 1903 elections.  All four of La Farge’s saloons were closed the week after the 4^th of July - sort of.  In late September, Trappe and three other “former” saloon operators were arrested for operating “Blind Pigs” in their establishments.  Blind Pigs were illegal no-license saloons operated behind shuttered windows in the evenings.  The village apparently turned a blind eye to the Blind Pigs for a couple of months before cracking down.  Trappe paid his $40 fine and was done with the saloon business.  (The others kept at it, being arrested again later in the fall.  C. E. Yeomans, the drug store owner in La Farge, who was selling liquor illegally out of his store, was arrested two more times before leaving town at the end of the year.)  Art Travers opened a notions & confectionaries store in his building in time for Christmas of 1903.

            When La Farge put in new curb and gutter along Main Street in 1906, Travers had a cement sidewalk put in front of his building in October of that year.  La Farge voted to go “Wet” in the spring of 1907 and in June, five saloon licenses were applied for, one of which was to be located in the Travers Building.  That didn’t last long though as La Farge was back to “Dry” after the 4^th of July in 1908.  Earlier that year, the village had granted Travers a poolroom license for his building and that business, sometimes operated by Anson Cowee, remained there for many years to follow.  In December of that year, S.E. Strait opened a blacksmith shop, the fourth in the village at the time, in the back of the Travers Building.

            Art Travers was involved in many ventures in the village over the years.  He ran a poultry buying business in La Farge beginning in 1908 and often had ads in the Enterprise telling of having railroad cars at the depot on certain dates ready for loading birds.  In November of that year, Travers reported doing $1000 in business that month as a poultry dealer and sending several loaded railroad cars of birds down the line.  Travers was also the village assessor for several years.  Eventually he teamed with a series of partners to run a real estate business from his brick building.  By 1914, Travers was traveling to Sawyer County and other places in northern Wisconsin, buying land for La Farge speculators.  Travers would lead carloads of investors and land buyers to the North to look at land at that time.  He also traveled to the Dakotas and Montana to negotiate land deals in the American West.  Many contracts for purchasing land were signed in Travers’ real estate office in his brick building on La Farge’s Main Street.

            Next time, we will continue to look at the history of the Travers Building including its times as part of Mac Marshall’s Hotel and the home of La Farge’s post office for forty years.  

            If you have memories or photos of the Travers Building or other stories about La Farge to share, contact me at bcstein@mwt.net or P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639.  Working together we can tell the story of this little Kickapoo River town. 

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.