Rack 'Em Up!

Well, either you’re closing your eyes

To a situation you do now wish to acknowledge,

Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated

By the presence of a pool table in your community

Ya got trouble, my friend, right here,

I say, right here in River City,

Trouble with a capital “T”

And that rhymes with “P” and that stands for pool!

When I first heard the actor, Robert Preston, sing those words in the movie adaptation of Meredith Willson’s musical, “The Music Man”, I immediately thought of my hometown of La Farge. Wilson may have been writing about memories from his boyhood hometown of Mason City, Iowa, but that song seemed to fit right in with this Kickapoo River town. Of course, I viewed the movie at the Mars Theater in La Farge back when the movie was first released in 1962, so it was natural I suppose for me to imagine that the mythical River City of Willson’s story was La Farge. I don’t really remember any other songs from that movie, but some of the lyrics of “Ya Got Trouble” have always lingered in my mind. “P” rhymes with “T”, which stands for Trouble, so watch out for those pool tables!

The evil of the pool hall was a moral dilemma played out in many an American town and La Farge was no exception. By the time that I came along as a lad in the 1950s and stood on the sidewalk and stared in at the forbidden tables at Mac’s Pool Hall on La Farge’s Main Street, I think the moral drama had played its course and that type of an establishment was pretty well accepted. It was viewed as a relatively harmless place for boys and men to while away their free hours – playing pool and cards. There were age limits of course, for both playing pool, which I think was 12 or 14 years of age, and the adult card room in the back, which I’m pretty sure required the age of 18 for proper entry to play.

The village of La Farge has always had pool tables. When the village was established in 1899, one of the first pieces of business that the newly elected board had to conduct was giving out licenses for pool tables. Since that first village board decided to give out liquor and beer licenses for saloons and other drinking establishments, the pool table license usually went with it. But pool tables were in other establishments in La Farge besides taverns. There were actual pool halls from the very beginning. A Mr. Bezuchka, of the Hillsboro brewery family, who had many business interests in the village at its inception (including its gold mine), opened a three-table pool hall in La Farge several months before getting his liquor and beer licenses to turn it into one of the first saloons in town. Two of the three hotels in the village also had pool tables for their patrons to use. The “La Farge House” or “Belcher’s Hotel” did not have a pool table, as the family who owned the hotel strictly forbid their guests from any drinking, smoking or chewing in their establishment. So, it would follow that there would not be any pool table there, either. (Those strict rules soon led the Belcher family to close down the hotel, as they had little use of their rooms from business travelers. Mrs. Belcher ran a millenary store in the front of the building for years and a barbershop was also located there.) Both the “Central Hotel” and the “Ward Hotel”, La Farge’s other two hotels at the end of the nineteenth century, had pool tables. As a matter of fact, we have a record of a view of the pool table at the Ward Hotel provided us by Dale Muller in one of his Johnson Gunfrunk articles.

Writing in one of his John Bear Spreader Notes, Gunfrunk (Muller) was regaling about the village’s past in an article titled, “La Farge – Back Then”. In that piece, Muller recalled the busy Saturday nights in the village of his youth, “When a new kid came to town, and the town kids wanted to impress them they would take them down to the Ward Hotel, and peek down in the game room. They had a pool table and some card tables down there, and you could see the drummers playing cards with money on the table and drinking something out of big brown bottles. In one corner of the room, they had a stuffed two-headed calf and that really impressed the country kids.”

WELL – there you have it folks! Trouble with a capital “T”: card games, a pool table, drinking from big brown bottles and a two-headed calf! – Welcome to Sin (River) City!

Regular pool halls were in the village from its start. Besides the previously mentioned Bezuchka establishment, Art Travers had a pool hall early on in his building next to the Central Hotel. There was a pool hall in the Miller building across from the bank and another at one time in the KP Hall building on south State Street. Suffice it to say, many of the buildings that survive from that early era of the incorporation of the village (and there are quite a few of them), probably had a pool hall under roof at one time or another.

Sam Hook put a pool table in his general store located up in Seelyburg soon after he opened the business. That move did not sit well with the residents of the north end of La Farge. Dempster Seely, Chauncey Lawton and the other leaders of that community had always kept a tight check on drinking, gambling and other sins in Seelyburg over the years, but that group was gone by the time Sam opened his store. More than one correspondent to the La Farge Enterprise reporting on the happenings in Star (Seelyburg) at that time mentioned the sullying affect of Sam’s pool table on the youth of the old river town.

A while back, I received a scan of an old photographic post card from Julie Roberts, who lives down Readstown way, of a pool hall that was located in La Farge over a century ago. The historical society in Readstown had come in possession of the post card, which was dated as being mailed on May 28, 1909. The photograph showed an interior shot of a three-table pool hall owned by a man named Hart. The post card was sent by his daughter, Tacy, who identified the post card’s photo as her Dad’s pool hall in La Farge. Looking at that old photograph postcard, I am reminded of the last pool hall in La Farge – the one where I hung out in my youth. That back window placement and covered sidewall beam on the right side of the photograph remind me of Mac’s Pool Hall as I remember it, but it could be the interior of another building in La Farge as well.

Always 12:51 in La Farge

In the past few years, I have written several local history notebooks during the Yuletide season based on a nostalgic trip down La Farge’s Main Street of the past. Many of the visits down memory lane drew comparisons between the village’s Main Street from previous times and that of today. Although I have received many favorable comments from readers about those notebooks, those trips to nostalgia make me wonder if I am over-doing the concept. After all, all of us involved in this little history project about La Farge have their favorite time to remember about their hometown. In these year-end local history notebooks I have stepped back to the early 1950s, another time to the 1960s and last year composed some doggerel where I time-traveled through decades of Christmas memories on La Farge’s Main Street.

But if one had the gift to do some of that time travel, where would you stop the clock in your memories of La Farge? Would it be some favorite time in your childhood when you were growing up in this village? Would it be that best birthday party ever or that very special 4^th of July Celebration? Where would you stop the clock in your cavalcade of memories about this place?

The reason that I pose this question is because of the clock on the La Farge State Bank. Although the time & temperature sign on the corner of the bank building has been operating in starts and stops for some time, the clock finally locked up, gave up the ghost and has posted the same time (with no accompanying temperature) for the past several weeks. It always reads 12:51. Which is alright in a way because, as we are want to say here in the Kickapoo Valley as we try and look on the brighter side of things, the stopped clock is always correct twice a day. But what time is it stopped on? Is it nine minutes before one in the afternoon, which means that the lunch hour is almost over? Or is it fifty-one minutes past midnight, which might have meant “last call” at La Farge’s watering holes in years gone by. (Do taverns and bars really need to stay open until 2:30 AM? Didn’t our grandmothers always tell us that nothing good ever happens at two in the morning?) So if we’re all locked into 12:51 here at the end of our current year of 2011, where would we like that clock to stop in another year from our past?

I was thinking perhaps that it would be fun to stop the clock at some highlight of the village’s history. Perhaps we could go back to that election in 1899 that ratified the incorporation of La Farge as a village. Or we could stop time nearly a decade later and perhaps could be a passenger on the Kickapoo Stumpdodger as it wound its way back up the Valley after La Farge’s town baseball team had taken on all comers at the Crawford County Fair. The players and fans would be giddy after winning the tournament, which had been set up (rigged might be a better word) to beat La Farge in the first place. A week later, the Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper would declare the La Farge team the best in the state for its exploits. Those would be fun times to be a part of.

How about a time stop in La Farge on November 11, 1918 as the Great War was ending? We could hear the village’s church bells pealing out the news of the armistice being signed in Europe and join in that wonderful parade that spontaneously bloomed on Main Street. Wouldn’t that be a fun place to stop in our time travels?

We could move forward in time and welcome all of the local service men and women back at the end of World War II. That was a time of great change and transition in the village, a time of hope for the future. Maybe we could pinpoint a particular season of one of those great LHS basketball teams in the early 1950s? Wouldn’t that be fun to time travel back to those old gymnasiums in the Kickapoo Valley League and watch the Wildcat boys rack up win after win.

Even though there are mostly forgettable memories of the ill-fated dam project that most of us would not want to relive, there are even a couple of times in that dam story that might warrant a stop. I would like to time stop in the village on that Saturday night in May of 1971 when La Farge dam supporters celebrated the decision by Governor Patrick Lucey to support the dam project. Governor Lucey, in an open letter to the citizens of the Kickapoo Valley (which was really an open letter to La Farge), had said that, “If participatory democracy is to have any meaning whatsoever, we must, I feel, respond to the people most directly affected. With this in mind, I have decided not to stand in opposition to the project.” I missed that Saturday night celebration in La Farge forty years ago, so it would be fun to return to that time to catch the excitement.

Another dam project time stop we might want to make would be for “Proxie’s Funeral” that occurred in January of 1976. Perhaps no village ever put on a more effective and fun form of protest against their elected representatives. Wouldn’t it be fun to return to that time to attend Senator Proxmire’s wake in the Raven Bar or accompany the funeral possession up to the dam site? We could hear “Reverend” Red Alderson’s humorous eulogy again and watch Ward Rose toss the dummy effigy of Senator Proxmire off the unfinished dam into the “Dead Sea”.

Perhaps we won’t even have to travel that far back in our time travel. We could go back to the turn of the new millennium and welcome in the twenty-first century. Maybe we could be in the victory parades as the village welcomed back another champion LHS volleyball team? Wouldn’t it be fun to relive those noisy nights as the team bus was escorted back into town by the fire trucks, sirens wailing and lights flashing, and the Wildcat girls on the team screaming with joy to the town and showing off their latest conference championship trophy or WIAA regional or sectional championship plaque?

So many times to choose from for our stopping of the clock, but I would personally choose a Christmas Eve in 1953. (I’m kind of guesstimating on the year here, buy I think that I’m about at the right time.) My family lived in a ranch house on Highland Street, between Bird and State Streets. We were all still together then as a family and this six year old was stubbornly hanging on to his last beliefs in the magic and wonder of Santa Claus. We walked to the Christmas Eve services at the Methodist Church only a block away. I remember the huge Christmas tree in the front of the church, how the lights were dimmed and the candles provided most of the light. Carols were sung and I joined other children from Sunday School classes with some special songs of the season.

When we returned home, a miracle had happened! While we were in church, St. Nicholas had visited the village, stopped at our house and filled under our Christmas tree with presents, many of them for me. Grandmother, who lived across the street, joined us in opening the presents – what a grand evening it was! The next day, we all packed into Dad’s Buick Roadmaster and it was off to Aunt Alice & Uncle Mike’s house in Cheyenne Valley for Christmas dinner. The house was packed with family and friends. The women worked in the kitchen to help Aunt Alice get the huge dinner ready; the men sat in the living room and talked about their jobs and adult stuff like that. The kids were upstairs regaling each other with news of their wondrous Christmas presents.

Those were special times for me in my memory stop, but they wouldn’t last much longer. Stopping the memory clock at a particular time only can last for so long. The next year, our family’s Christmas Eve was held in a room at the Viroqua Hospital, where my Mother battled against the leukemia that was ravaging her body. That’s one of the disadvantages of stopping the clock on these trips back into our memory – the bad times aren’t necessarily erased as we make the clock stop to visit the good times.

May you all make it home for Christmas.

If you would like me to send you an autographed copy of my new book on the La Farge dam project, please send $19 to me at P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639. If you would like me to mail you a copy of my earlier book on the history of La Farge, send me $25. However if you would like both signed books sent your way, then send me $40. All of the dollar amounts listed will cover all mailing expenses.

I have been busy this week sending out the book to people all over Wisconsin, from Phillips to Janesville and from Germantown to Wausau. Books have made their way to Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, California, Washington and Alaska. The book will soon be in the hands of our exchange-student daughters in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Sydney, Australia.

Locally, copies of the book are available at the Episcope office, La Farge State Bank, Kickapoo Valley Reserve Visitor Center, Rockton Bar, Bramble’s Bookstore in Viroqua and Dregne’s Gifts in Westby.

By the way, I am currently working on a local history notebook about pool halls in La Farge. If you have any photographs, memories or stories to tell about the fascinating billiard room culture that once thrived in our village, send them my way. Working together, we can tell the story of this little Kickapoo River town.

THAT DAM HISTORY!

A few weeks ago, I finished reading my new book, “THAT DAM HISTORY – The Story of The La Farge Dam Project”. It’s not a bad read, even if I do have to say so myself. Although I wrote most of the book in the first six months of this year and had spent the last couple of months helping to get the book published and printed, I really hadn’t spent much time in actually reading it. Twenty-two boxes containing copies of the new book arrived from the printer on November 18^th, so since that time I have been looking it over and reading it.

Overall, the dam book looks nice and that is because of the efforts of my co-publisher, Chuck Hatfield. Chuck also helped me with the first book that I wrote on the history of La Farge. How both of these books appear is due to Chuck’s expertise, which includes experience in publishing a variety of other books over the years. For this dam book, I provided Chuck with the text of the dam story and then he put in the photographs, maps and newspaper headlines. Making all of those things fit into the text is quite a trick and Chuck is a pretty good magician at mastering the process. He also fashioned the cover, which is a full-color copy with lots of beautiful blue water (including several little sail boats) of an artist’s drawing of Lake La Farge. The drawing is one of many items in the book from information provided on the dam project from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There are also a number of Corps maps in the book, including a full color two-page map and schematics of the dam itself located inside the back cover.

Through my research, I found many photographs related to the dam project and several of them are included in the book. Some of the photos were sent to me by others interested in my writing project, while I found other photographs, particularly of the dam itself, in area historical repositories. Since the dam project and the controversies that surrounded it were nearly always in the newspapers for seemingly decades, many headlines and articles from area and state newspapers are also used to tell the story. When the dam project at La Farge also ended up as featured stories in The New York Times newspaper and on national television with the CBS Evening News, I had to include those national media citing’s as well. All of that helps to tell the dam story, which is a good one.

The story of the dam project is such a good one in fact that the key for me in trying to tell the dam story was to stay out of the way. In my prelude to the dam book, I mention that I am intending to do that, to stay out of the way and hopefully I have let the dam story pretty much tell itself. Looking back at the story, even with an abundance of first hand knowledge of what transpired, I still find it hard to fathom that the dam project played out the way that it did. In my prelude, I try to explain the cause for the way that the dam project happened, but it almost defies logical explanation. As I said before, it is quite a dam story and I’m glad that I could share it with others.

Right in the middle of the book can be found a timeline relating to the dam project. I first made a timeline for the dam project fifteen years ago when I was teaching about the project to students in my local history classes at La Farge High School. Over the years, the timeline has been changed and edited into many different versions. Visitors to the Kickapoo Valley Reserve have had copies of the timeline available in several forms over the years. My new timeline of the dam project that is included in the book has been expanded greatly and now covers nearly eight pages – it is the great-granddaddy of dam timelines. It is a handy reference to when things were happening during the dam story.

I have dedicated my new book to Bernice Schroeder, who was so helpful in getting the story of the dam project told. Bernice has been talking to students in my various classes on the dam project for many years. During that time, Bernice has also given me a variety of materials relating to the project that she had saved over the years. When she heard that I was going to write this book on the dam project, Bernice gave me several more boxes of materials that she had collected. Being an avid supporter for completion of the dam project for decades, she had accumulated an amazing treasure of material for my research. There were copies of nearly every study done on the dam project as well as personal correspondence with elected officials at every government level. With the help of this new resource material, I was able to understand the story of the dam project much more fully. At the end of the book, I have included an essay that Bernice wrote about the dam project in 2001. It seemed important to me to include her essay in the book. As I wrote on the dedication page of the book, “Bernice’s voice will always be heard when the story of the dam project at La Farge is told.”

Included in the dam book is a poem written by Libby Brandl. At the time that she wrote the poem, which is titled “The Dam”, Libby was a student at La Farge High School and was in the “Literature & Land Class” taught by Maggie Doherty. The members of that class had spent many days at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve and several class periods with me learning about the dam project. When Libby wrote the poem about the dam for an assignment for that class in 2008, it became an instant hit for many of us connected to the dam story. I felt that the bittersweet tone and quality of Libby’s poem would fit in perfectly to my book on the dam project. Libby, who is currently a student at UW-Whitewater, graciously granted her permission to use her poem in the book. It also helps to tell the dam story.

I will end this local history notebook by sharing with you the last paragraph of my new dam book, “The story of the La Farge dam project is a fascinating one that brings together the forces of national environmental concerns, political processes and financial limitations at a particular time in the history of our country and focuses these forces on this small valley in western Wisconsin. The story of that time in the Kickapoo Valley can provide lessons from which we can all learn.”

I found it to be a dam interesting story, I hope that you enjoy it as well.

If you would like me to send you a signed copy of the dam book, please send a check in the amount of $19, which includes the cost of the book and all mailing costs, to me at P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639. You can contact me via e-mail at bcstein@mwt.net for more information on the ordering of this book or my earlier book on the history of La Farge.

DAM BOOK ORDERS

To order my latest book, "THAT DAM HISTORY! The Story of The La Farge Dam Project", please send your address and $19 per copy to me at P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639. The price is for a signed copy and includes all mailing costs.

Dam Land Acquisition Problems

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rolled out a revised plan in 1967 for a flood control dam on the Kickapoo River to be located north of La Farge, many felt that the project would bring some sort of prosperity to the region. The revised plan, which expanded the size and scope of an earlier 1962 proposal, called for the construction of a much larger dam on the river. The larger dam would create a 1,800-acre lake between La Farge and Ontario, designed to draw tourists and outdoor recreation enthusiasts to the area. Thirteen recreation areas would surround the lake to offer the visitors to Lake La Farge camping, fishing, boating and other recreational opportunities.

In a public information meeting held at La Farge in 1968, the representatives of the Corps of Engineers explained the process for the construction of the dam and the creation of the lake and recreation areas. The process to be used for acquisition of the nearly 9,000 acres of land needed for the dam and lake project was also explained at the meeting, held at the new gymnasium of the local school. At the November 19^th public meeting, representatives from the Corps of Engineers land acquisition office in Rock Island, Illinois were introduced. People at the meeting who had questions about the land acquisition process were referred to a Corps pamphlet, which had been mailed earlier to land owners that would be affected by the project.

The Corps representatives present in La Farge that night assured the local people in attendance that the land acquisition would take place in an orderly fashion starting at the dam site and progressing up the Valley. All of the land for the project would be purchased by 1972, which was also the date for the completion of the dam and the beginning of the process to fill the lake. In 1969, landowners north of La Farge began the process of selling their land to the federal government for the dam project.

In the earliest phase of the project, nearly all of the land purchased for the project was located in the Town of Stark. As the acquisitions by the Corps for the dam project were completed, the tax rolls for the township began to shrink. As more and more people in Stark sold their land to the federal government, the property tax burden for the remaining landowners in the township became greater. As the Corps representatives negotiated the purchases of land in the Town of Stark for the dam project, they were doing more than just acquiring lands. The process was also shifting the resulting loss in property tax revenue over to the remaining landowners in the township. As names like Rush, Shumate, Rankin’s, Anderson, and Trappe disappeared from the tax rolls of the Town of Stark, others would have to assume the lost tax revenue for the township, school district, and county. It was an unintended consequence of the land acquisition process.

By December of 1970 when the property tax rolls were published by the local government units, the property owners in the Town of Stark would see firsthand the unintended consequences of the La Farge Dam Project. Most landowners in the township saw their taxes increase by more than 25%. Property taxes for Virgil Thomas, who lived along Bear Creek, increased from $413 in 1969 to $537 in 1970, an increase of 30%. Thomas’ neighbor Don Potter saw his taxes go up 24%, while up the road, Ralph Steinmetz’ property taxes increased 28%. It was the same throughout the township. Van Aumuck’s property taxes rose 37% and Dale Fish’s went up 26%. The largest percentage increase in the township for the 1970 tax year was felt by Howard Anderson, whose taxes rose from $348 to $652 – a whopping increase of 87%. Ironically, Anderson’s negotiations with the Corps of Engineers for the sale of his property probably figured into the huge increase.

Anderson owned the farm where most of the eastern end of the flood control dam would be located. In the process of negotiating with the Corps Rock Island land acquisition office, Anderson had improved the value of his property, which had probably been under assessed previously. By whitewashing several farm buildings and making repairs to others, Anderson not only increased the value of his farm for purchase by the government for the dam project, but also for tax assessment. Anderson paid the tax increase for one year, but by the following year had sold most of his farm to the federal government and saw his property taxes decrease to only $97 – a drop of over 85% from the previous year. Other taxpayers in the township would have to make up the loss. The shift of the tax burden weighed heavily on the community.

In the February 11, 1971 issue of the La Farge Enterprise, editor Arnie Widstrand addressed the local property tax problems in a front page editorial titled “Construction and Acquisition”. The editorial was prompted by an announcement from Washington D C a week earlier that $1.73 million was to be included in the proposed federal budget for the La Farge Dam Project. The announcement said that the money would be used for construction of the dam and further land acquisitions. In response, editor Widstrand wrote, “That this money NOT be used to purchase any more land to the north of the project. We do not need any more land taken off the tax rolls in this area. It is too much of a burden on the remaining taxpayers. (Every taxpayer in the Town of Stark knows of what we speak as their taxes soared this year.)

At previous meetings the Corps made it known that the plan was to buy some land, then build the dam, and continue buying land northward as the dam progressed. It is estimated that 47% of the land needed for the project has been purchased. That is plenty. Now start the dam. If all the land were bought it would be very easy to lose the project through, inefficiency of our bureaucracies, public apathy, lack of interest of public representatives, change of public interest in and attitude toward the project, or just plain difficulty in getting money for it through the Congress.

At any rate, if the $1.7 million goes through and is used to acquire land, it will do us more harm than good. What we need now is more employment in the area, not more land taken off the tax roll.”

By March the federal budget had been approved by Congress and signed into law by President Nixon. The nearly $2-million appropriation for the La Farge project was included. In April 1971 the Corps of Engineers announced that 1,646 acres of agricultural land in the Kickapoo Valley purchased for the dam project was available for lease. In addition, the Corps Rock Island land acquisition office released a list of buildings and personal property available for purchase on the lands purchased for the dam project. Included in the list of items for sale were 12,500 mink pens. All of the listed property, buildings and items had once been assessed for payment of property taxes in the township. Eventually, the federal government would own over twenty per cent of the land in the Town of Stark, over eight sections of land on which no property taxes were paid.

Dam Book Release!

I might say that it's the best dam book that I've ever written, while others might contend that it isn't that good of a dam book after all! Regardless of the reviews, you're invited to the grand official release of THAT DAM HISTORY! The Story of The La Farge Dam Project. The author, Brad Steinmetz, will read selections from the new book and take questions from the audience. Copies of the book will be for sale and for the author to sign. Refreshments & socializing begin at 6:30 PM on Friday, December 2 at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve Visitor Center, Highway 131, two miles north of La Farge

The Ottevale Railroad

I was interested in reading the recent story about the reincarnation of the Ottervale Store taken on by the Alderson’s living up Husker Hollow way. There was a nice little article on the history of the store that was put together by Patsy and Kevin Alderson included in that issue of La Farge’s local newspaper. Reading the articles and looking at the many photos of the moving of the store building stirred memories of the story of the ill-fated railroad line from La Farge to Ottervale. As with many a tale told on the Kickapoo, it started with the best of intentions.

It was the winter of 1901-02 and by January the snow was piled so high as to scrape the telegraph wires running along side the Kickapoo Railroad line. In those days, when the snow was piled that high, folks stayed indoors more and gathered to talk at the stores on La Farge’s bustling Main Street. Sitting around the pot-bellied stoves at Chase Brothers Mercantile, Millard’s Store and Post Office or Pott’s Hardware Store, the local wags would pontificate on the latest news and gossip.

A story of interest all that fall and running into the winter was the decision by the Kickapoo Railroad officials to not extend the line north beyond La Farge. Original plans had called for the railroad line to continue north towards Rockton and Ontario, then on up the Valley and over the hill at Briggsville to Tomah. There it would connect with the main east-west rail line running to La Crosse. Good intentions indeed, but the Kickapoo railroad line was always short of funds and did not have the money to pursue expansion beyond La Farge, so the plan for extending the railroad line north to Tomah was scuttled. Although that decision left La Farge in the envious and financially lucrative position of being the northern terminus of the railroad line, some in the community saw a need for more connections to the outside world. Soon the idea of a branch line to bustling Ottervale was being bandied about.

With tongue firmly in cheek, the La Farge Enterprise newspaper came out strongly for the Ottervale branch line in its January 31, 1902 edition. An article on the front page of that issue, Railroad To Ottervale, outlined the positive benefits of the plan:

What is the matter with having a railroad from La Farge to Ottervale? For our part we can’t see anything of importance to hinder, and what little obstacles there may be in the way are not of enough account to prevent the carrying out of such an important project as this. The benefits to be received from such a road are too many and great to be enumerated here, but we will mention a few which we think will set at rest any doubts in the mind of the reader as to the advisability of the plan.

· 1^st It would make La Farge the junction of two of the most important railroads in Vernon County.

· 2^nd If Ottervale should ever happen to grow to be a large city like Milwaukee or Chicago it would be a great advantage to this town to have direct railroad connections.

· 3^rd If a gold mine should ever happen to be discovered over at Ottervale our citizens could go over there to dig and come back on the evening special and in this manner we could get rich without depopulating the village any.

· 4^th It would be of great advantage to La Farge to be the junction of two important railroads and might induce some large manufacturing establishments to locate here and help build up the town.

· 5^th If the railroad was successful we could build other roads out to West Lima, Muncie, Rockton and other points and make La Farge a great railroad center.

· 6^th The Enterprise could be carried to Ottervale by mail without taking it a whole week for it to get there as it does now.

We trust that there are none of our readers who do not yet see clearly the advantages of this road and we will go on to explain why we think the road can be built just as well as not. There is nothing as we can see lacking to build the road with except the money, but there is no use in getting discouraged for the lack of that when everything else necessary for railroad building can be found right in the village. A good set of officials can be picked out here and we would suggest the following persons as being, according to our best judgment, in every way capable and competent to serve as a good set of railroad officials:

Jonathan Gift President

M.O. Morris V. President

Dr. Butt Sect.

Dr. Gaines Treas.

G.E. Tate Train Master

J.H. Potts Engineer

H.C. Plimpton Fireman

R.P. Dalton Brakesman

D. H. Bean, Mike Ward, and Sam Hook could furnish the money. To show that we are in earnest and are willing to do our part we will agree to furnish the hot air for the airbrakes. If there is anything else necessary for building a railroad just let us know and we will find some way to get it. We hope that all those who wish to take stock in the road will get together soon and get the work started as soon as possible so that we can have it completed before all the snow melts away.

That mention of snow in the last line of the article was probably a key to the idea of the fictitious branch railroad running up Otter Creek. In an earlier issue of the Enterprise that winter, the correspondent from Ottervale had mentioned that the snowdrifts were packed so hard on the road leading to La Farge that you could drive a train over them. At around the same time, there was some grumbling about the deep piles of snow on La Farge’s Main Street, which made it hard to maneuver around with horse & sleigh or on foot. Somebody mentioned that they should haul the huge piles of snow out of town, so why not use them for a firm bed for the proposed new line running to Ottervale? The idea was hatched to lay the track of the proposed line across the firmly packed snow and within a week of the original article, a notation was made in the local newspaper that “stock for the Ottervale railroad was going as fast as pancakes & honey” and that William Riley would run the new railroad eating house.

Two weeks later in the February 21 issue of the Enterprise another article appeared titled Our Railroad. The article read:

“We found the following article with no signature attached in front of our office door one day the first of the week. As we first read it over a suspicion crossed our mind that the writer was trying to make fun of “our” railroad, but upon sober reflection we deemed it incredible that anyone could be so trifling and frivolous with the serious things of this life and so we concluded that the writer must have ment (sic) it all for the best but was probably not as well posted on railroad building as we are. Following is the epistle:

Mr. Editor: The Enterprise seems very enthusiastic over the R.R. to Ottervale, as the stock is nearly all sold and the balance will be well watered and the new road will be christened the U.C.& L.C.R.R. The grade stakes will be set as soon as the first train passes over the line. The tickets will be good on all divisions of the drop in and catch on line. The conductor will take up all passes by anyone not holding the same and the lucky person who holds a pass will be entitled to ride on foot or horseback from any place in the whole wide world clear up to Ottervale.”

The railroad to Ottervale wasn’t the only fanciful proposal circulating as winter turned to spring in the Kickapoo Valley in 1902. In the March 14 issue of the Enterprise, the following piece of local news appeared, “This is the time of the year when railroad building takes its usual boom. On of the latest railroad projects is to run an electric line from Union Center to La Farge, taking in the towns of Rockton, Valley, Hillsboro and Dilly. Hillsboro has long been wanting a railroad but the present scheme of running an electric line clear through to here originated with some of the men over at Valley who would also like a road for their town. It is said that all the businessmen in the towns along the line are in favor of it and they claim to be able to raise $100,000 among themselves toward carrying out the project.”

Alas, the electric line through Dilly was never to be (But at least we know where the idea for those postcards that showed a train line running down that little ghost town’s main street came from.), and alack, the line to Ottervale met the same fate. In the April 11, 1902 issue of the Enterprise a brief mention was made of the demise of the phantom line when it was noted that the Ottervale RR was abandoned due to not enough snow. Hot air will do that some times to even the best of ideas.

Although the idea of the mythical Ottervale Railroad had drifted away like the cigar smoke from whence it was hatched, the Kickapoo Railroad made plans to expand in La Farge. By later in April, the real railroad company was building side tracks to facilitate easier loading and shipping from the La Farge mills and stockyard, further positioning the village as a main transportation center in the Valley.

Later in the spring, Ottervale was dealt another blow when the U.S. Postal Department announced that the Ottervale Post Office. (probably housed in the store there) was being discontinued as of June 30. Mail would be hauled out to Otter Creek on a new rural mail route from La Farge after that date. It must have seemed as if the whole world was shrinking away from Ottervale, what with the loss of their post office and mythical train line. But good news arrived that November when Alex Hill, the owner of the La Farge Telephone Company revealed plans to string telephone lines out Otter Creek and up to Salem Ridge. By the following spring, Ottervale was connected to the outside world with the latest telephone communication devices. You win some and you lose some.