The Saga of Holly the Horse!

To start with, this little story isn’t really about ancient history since it just happened a couple of months ago.  It really is not my story; I’m just the one who gets to tell it.  There has been quite a bit of local interest in this story and folks thought it should be shared with the readers of this blog.  This little tale includes my wife, Carolyn, and our neighbor and a few other people, but in the end, it really is the story of a horse. 

            The horse belonged to our neighbor.  It is a seven-year old mare, a beautiful Paint.  It is broken to ride, has an interesting personality and loves to romp and run in the pastures along Highway 82, across the road from Bear Creek, just east of La Farge.  The horse’s name is Holly.  Holly used to be with two other horses in the pasture looking out over the creek, but by last winter, she was alone.  That is not a good thing for a horse as they are social animals and like to be with other horses.

  Carolyn started to help take care of Holly the horse due to the declining health of our neighbor.  Last winter, Carolyn arranged for a supply of hay to be brought in for Holly and she fed the horse grain and watered it through that cold season.  Carolyn has had an affinity for horses every since she had a horse as a girl growing up on a farm on Camp Creek east of Viola.  She likes being around horses and has a way with them.  She’s not quite a “Horse Whisperer”, but Carolyn has been able to handle some mighty skittish horses that others can’t.

 (I, on the other hand, am generally terrified of the critters.  That terror may stem from my last time on a horse over forty years ago, when while riding sideways in the saddle and perpendicular to the ground (which is really a bad position to be in), that horse misinterpreted my “WHOA” for “GO” and tried to peel me off on the nearest gate post at a high rate of speed.  Alcohol may have been a factor in that episode, but tragedy was averted and my Roy Rogers days were over.)

            Just to the east of Holly’s little pasture and across the driveway, four other horses are on pasture.  Being alone, Holly yearned to be with the other horses.  During this past summer, she started getting out of her pen on a regular basis to go over and see the other horses.  Holly would stand at the pasture fence and some of the other horses would come over to visit.  They would talk horse talk, nuzzle each other and just hang out together like horses do.  Unfortunately, sometimes Holly wandered out onto the highway, which became a problem.  Eventually at the end of September, she was moved over to our pasture east of the house, which had more secure fences.  It was a move that was not popular with Holly.   She was further away from the other horses and would pace along the fence and gaze longingly at her erstwhile horse pals. 

As time went on, our neighbor’s health continued to be an issue and it was decided that Holly should have another home.  So her owner and Carolyn started to look for a buyer.

            Many people driving by on the nearby highway had admired the Paint horse in our pasture and when the word got out that the horse was for sale, people started calling and dropping in to make an offer.  In mid-October, Carolyn made some calls and a family stopped by to look Holly over.  They walked her around and even got her to cross the drainage ditch in the lower end of the pasture that nobody else could get her to cross. They talked with Holly’s owner and a deal was made for them to purchase Holly for their teenage girl to ride.  No money changed hands, but the family assured Holly’s owner that they would be back in a week or so with a check and to pick up the horse.

            In the meantime, Carolyn continued to care for Holly.  She supplemented the sparse pasture grass of the fall season with horse treats for Holly – 12% Sweet Feed, which the horse came to relish on a daily basis.  As October turned to November and then December, Carolyn brought over hay from the neighbors to feed her horse.  Eventually after weeks of waiting, the family who had intended to buy Holly had to back out of the deal.   This was on December 5^th.  Carolyn and our neighbor had a couple of back-up buyers, but all of those potential buyers fell through as well.

Winter was coming fast and Carolyn seemed to have a horse to care for if it could not be sold.  She made many more calls and finally a lady from La Farge bought Holly.  This was on December 15^th.  Money changed hands and on December 22^nd, Holly was walked into town and over to a pasture on the north side of La Farge located in old Seelyburg.  There, Holly had the companionship of two other horses and come the spring season, another teenage girl would be riding her.

It snowed most of the day here in the Kickapoo Valley on Sunday, December 23^rd.  It was after eight o’clock that night when there was a knock on our front door.  A pickup was parked in the driveway and when I answered the door, the man said, “Your horses are out”.  I said, “I don’t have any horses”.  Another man standing in the driveway said, “We were driving out from town following these two horses up the highway and they turned into your driveway”.

Thinking they were two of the four horses on pasture to the east, I told the guys they belonged at the next place down the road.  The men said OK and started back down the snowy driveway.  Down by the barn, we could see two horses running around in the dark, but they soon got in behind the pickup and headed out to the highway and over to the neighbor’s place.

Carolyn got on the phone to contact the people who rented the pasture and owned the other horses.  Soon after, our neighbor called to say that Holly had returned and had brought a friend with her!  It was a Christmas miracle or perhaps a Christmas headache or maybe something in between!  By this time the owner of the other horses, who were in their pasture, came and put Holly and friend into our pasture.  Carolyn called the lady who owned the horses – the second one was a buckskin gelding that went by the name of Buck – and she went up to Seelyburg to check on her third horse.  She found the hole in the fence where Holly and Buck made their escape, fixed the fence and then followed their trail in the snow down Mill Street.  The horses had checked out the sheds at Nuzum’s but found nothing open, so then headed up La Farge’s Main Street and followed Highway 82 out to our place on Bear Creek.  The next morning Holly was at the pasture fence, noodling with Carolyn for some of that 12% Sweet Feed.  Buck the tagalong gelding, a true annoyance to Holly by this time, lined up at the food trough as well.

The horses spent the week of Christmas at our place.  Carolyn had to make another hay run to keep the two horses fed properly.  On December 27^th, Holly and a very reluctant Buck made the walk back into La Farge and over to their digs at Seelyburg, where, I am happy to say, they still reside.

I drive by that Seelyburg pasture occasionally to make sure that Holly is staying put.  My pickup putts a little loud due to a needed muffler and I think Holly might recognize the truck.  There is still a bale of hay in the back of the pickup and as I drove away, it seemed that Holly the horse was paying serious attention to my departure route.

When Lumber Was King!

In 1899, La Farge was incorporated as a village.  Since the arrival of the railroad two years earlier, the town had become a center of frenetic commercial activity.  The production and sale of lumber was the economic leader in this activity.  As the little river town welcomed in a new century, the lumbering boom in La Farge continued to expand.

            In December of 1899, word came from West Lima that the Clark & James Company, a wagon stock production and mill partnership, would be relocating to La Farge.  The move was made to secure a better mill site and be closer to the rail connection to ship products.  The new Clark & James mill operation was located south of Main Street, along Mill Street and the railroad tracks.  By June of 1900, the Clark & James mill was running at full capacity.  The company purchased an electric dynamo to provide power for lights so the factory could run around the clock.  When electrical wires were strung to a few other businesses on La Farge’s west end, the town had their first electric light system.

            In January 1900, news traveled up the river from Wauzeka that the excelsior plant located there was moving to La Farge.  Excelsior was a product comprised of wood shavings that was used as a packing material, which was much in demand at the time.  The new excelsior production line would be added to the newly renovated mill at Seelyburg.  Tosen Sine operated the sawmill business at Seelyburg.  He had come north from Readstown shortly after the railroad had reached La Farge and rented the sawmill from Charles Seely.    Although Sime’s sawmill operation had been shut down for several months after the great Kickapoo River flood of June 1899, the mill was up and running again by the time the new year began.  Sime went into partnership with O. P. Vaughn of Wauzeka on the excelsior plant, with Vaughn moving his excelsior cutting equipment to Sime’s Seelyburg site.

            When the new excelsior cutting equipment was installed at Sime’s sawmill in November 1900 another new product would join the lumber production output.  Shortly thereafter bales of excelsior shaved from basswood was being loaded onto rail cars sitting on the branch line of the railroad that ran to the Seelyburg mill.  By February of 1901, Sime was running a weekly advertisement in the La Farge Enterprise newspaper wanting to buy excelsior bolts for his mill.  In March, Clark & James announced that they were adding twelve excelsior cutters to their mill in La Farge, further increasing demand on area farmers and landowners to provide material for the product.  In May 1901 Clark & James added a second shift to the excelsior line and ran the mill day and night.  At the height of the excelsior production in 1901, the two La Farge mills were producing 600 bales of excelsior each week.

            In September 1901 August Kriigel had one million board feet of lumber at his La Farge yard and lamented the lack of available railroad cars to ship out his product.  The railroad company, now called the Western Wisconsin Railroad Company, trying to meet the demand of La Farge’s lumber output, put down sidetracks along Mill Street to the Clark & James Mill, Kriigel’s lumberyard and the Hammer Brothers’ stave mill and factory.  Empty railroad cars could be dropped at each of those locations when the need arose.  Even with the improvements to the La Farge operations, the railroad still could not keep up with the demand for freight shipments; especially lumber shipments being shipped down the line.  In January 1903, the railroad company announced the purchase of a second steam engine locomotive and the adding of another train each day on the Kickapoo line.  Two trains would come into La Farge and depart the village each day, Monday through Saturday.  One train would carry passengers and mail as well as pull freight when needed, while a second train would be reserved solely for freight shipments.

            La Farge’s lumber industry continued to grow.  New businesses continued to relocate to La Farge and the competition in the lumber business was fierce during these times.  The Hammer Brothers’ stave mill, still running around the clock in the peak spring and summer cutting season, was combined with the Clark & James mill and moved the stave cutting operations to that site.  The Keogh Excelsior Company moved its operations to La Farge and began production in the old Hammer Brothers’ site.  Keogh’s new excelsior plant would need 4,000 cords of basswood annually, further increasing the demand for the bolts from area farmers and rural mills.  The Seelyburg excelsior production had been curtailed by this time as Vaughn left La Farge and Sime devoted more time to the new gristmill operation there.

            Perhaps feeling the effects of the increased competition for products and services, the Clark & James partnership disbanded.  Clark took the wagon production part of the business to Stoughton, Wisconsin, while James remained in the village and continued to operate his sawmill at a diminished capacity.  By the following summer, the James mill was closed and all of the machinery sold.

            The Smith & Johnson Lumber Company began operations in La Farge in September 1902.  Besides operating a sawmill in town, the new company also bought and sold lumber from rural mills.  By the spring of 1903, the company was operating at full capacity when it was confronted with labor troubles at the mill.  In March 1903, eight workers at the mill went on strike for higher wages.  The mill was closed for one day, but reopened the next with eight new workers.  (So much for labor negotiations at a busy Kickapoo lumber mill.)

            In July 1903 the largest trainload of lumber ever assembled on the Kickapoo line made its way south from La Farge.  August Kriigel, acting as the representative for American Hardwood Lumber of Madison, had assembled the rush order for oak and basswood lumber in only seven days.  The order filled thirty railroad cars and it was surmised at the time that no town in southern Wisconsin besides La Farge probably could have made the shipment.

            An article in an Enterprise issue of the time of the great lumber train extolled the La Farge lumber business, “The lumber manufactured here is from oak, maple, basswood, butternut, ash, elm and hickory.  The Kickapoo Valley timber is recognized as the very highest grade for the manufacture of fine furniture, wagons, etc., being valued for its fine even grain.  There were about twenty mills last winter engaged in sawing lumber for the dealers.”  The article then goes on to list the sawmills including four in La Farge.

            The principal La Farge buyers of native lumber at that time were August Kriigel, Smith & Johnson and the Thayer Brothers.  Kriigel operated several mills besides his large lumber yard in La Farge, while Smith & Johnson bought mostly standing timber and then sawed it up at their La Farge sawmill.  The Thayer Brothers operation bought most of their lumber from rural mills.  Total timber purchases for the La Farge lumber operations in 1903 had exceeded $120,000 for the year.  It was estimated that there were 180 men working in the lumber production industry in the La Farge area then.  The economy of the town was booming at that time when lumber was king! 

The Last Sawmill in La Farge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kickapoo Slough Skating

I attended the Winter Fest at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve recently and I noticed a boatload of youngsters frolicking on the skating rink there.  Watching the kids careening around on the ice triggered some wintertime memories of my youthful days growing up in La Farge.  That skating scene took me back to a time in the late 1950s and to memories of skating on the village’s rink and the sloughs of the Kickapoo River.

            At that time, when I was growing up in La Farge, the village’s ice skating rink was on the corner lot just south of the present Z-Zip Stop, next to the present motel.  Nothing is on the lot at this time, although it has been filled in (probably when the motel was constructed in the 1970s).  Back in those days it was a low-laying expanse with dikes of dirt piled around the boundaries to keep the water in the rink area.  We played baseball on the lot in the summertime and it was a home run if you hit it over one of those weed covered dirt dikes that rimmed the outfield.

            When it started getting cold, Ray Young, who worked for the village then, would start to fill the lot with water to freeze for a skating rink.  Some members of the fire department, which was located close by, would bring hoses to hook to the hydrant on the corner and help with the creating of the rink.  This work was usually done in the evening after super and several layers were added to make for a good ice surface.  When the ice was ready, the kids flocked to the glistening rink, especially on Saturday’s when there was no school.

            I was never much of a skater.  I could stand on the teetering edges of my skates and move forward in a relatively straight, forward manner at a very slow speed.  Tricky stuff like turning and stopping were beyond my limited skill set.  Often my skating experience would be to sit by the warming stove or fire and watch everyone else skate by.  When little kids who were just learning to skate were being helped around the rink, I would be lumped in with that bunch of novices.  The little ones would soon catch on to the skating skills and go careening off on their own.  I would continue to be pulled behind a big stick until being eventually dropped off back by the fire to sit and watch. 

I did like to play hockey. When the boys chose sides for a hockey game, I was always the last kid picked. I was usually allowed to be the goalie since standing in one place in front of a goal matched my skating skills quite well.  Sometimes the guys would even let me be goalie with no skates.  I was quite adept at being a goalie in my winter boots.

The problem with having hockey games at the village rink was that there was never enough room, especially on those busy weekends when everyone came out to skate.  If the rink was crowded with skaters of all ages, then playing a hockey game was just about impossible.  On several of those winters from the past, we decided to head to the Kickapoo for our hockey playing. 

Slough skating is a whole different experience than being on the village rink.  We would head up to Seelyburg and use the ice on the slough there next to the Kickapoo River.  The slough was part of the Darrell Hollenbeck farm back then, so it was also known as the Hollenbeck Slough.  You don’t hear the word “slough” much anymore as swamp, marsh and wetlands are more commonly used terms now.  A slough is a big swamp or area of wetland and the Kickapoo, being a meandering stream, has plenty of them along its course.  The Seelyburg Slough was always full of water back then because the river was dammed up for the power plant at Seelyburg.  A bank-full Kickapoo also meant a high water level in the nearby slough.  When the winter’s cold temperatures came the waters of the slough would freeze over and a great hockey rink was there for the taking - well, sort of. 

First of all, someone had to check and see if the ice was good and thick enough for skating.  Someone had to check out where the snags from fallen trees and branches were in the ice and mark then off for others to see.  Then we had to get the snow off from the ice to set up our hockey rink.  As you trudged up old Highway 131 to the slough, you would have your hockey stick and skates tied together over one shoulder and a snow shovel over the other.  A dozen boys on skates with snow shovels can soon have a hockey rink sized area cleared for a game.  Since I couldn’t really skate, often my job in this process was to clear out the goal areas on each end and set up the goals.

The goals were usually made up of tree branches found around the slough.  Constructing the goals was an inexact science, depending what kind of wooden debris one could find in the area.  Often, one goal would be quite different from the other located at the other end of the icy expanse.  Being a perpetual goalie, I had a natural propensity to make the goalmouths tidy little areas, which a practically non-skating goalie could easily cover in somewhat all-star form.

The dimensions of the slough rink was also an always changing shape and form.  One year, Hank Trappe brought his tractor and blade over from his farm and cleared the entire slough for skating.  That winter we had one of the largest rinks in the history of Kickapoo slough hockey.  The rink probably stretched for a quarter-mile in length or longer and actually bent around the hill.  Because of that bend in the rink, the goal on one end wasn’t visible to the goal on the other.

  I was playing goalie in the south goal one sunny Saturday afternoon on that huge curving slough hockey rink.  I actually was wearing my skates on that day (used hockey skates and a size or two too big for my feet, even with extra socks), but I didn’t have a stick.  I found a branch that had a lower part that pretty much stretched across the small goalmouth and had a short piece going upward that served as a handle.  When I managed to stay upright on my skates and handled the branch-goalie stick with moderate skill, I kept that crumpled-up tin beer can that we always used for a puck out of the goal pretty successfully.

Eventually, the two teams of skaters would head off towards the other goal around the bend to the north.  Since this trek to the far off north goal often took quite awhile and the time became longer if there was spirited action around the other goal, I had plenty of time on my hands with nothing to do.  Sometimes it would be almost ten minutes before the two teams came sliding back my way.  Since I couldn’t even see the action on the other end, my attention would often flag a bit.

One time during one of these long absences from any hockey action, I noticed a mink darting along the river’s edge to my right.  I watched it from my goal perch for a while and then decided to check it out closer.  Leaving my massive branch-goalie stick in the goalmouth, I glided slowly over to the slough edge to get a closer look at the mink.  While I was absent from the goal, the other players suddenly appeared around the bend heading for my unmanned goal.  My teammates screamed at me to get back on duty.

Skating frantically towards my unguarded goal, I soon started to loose my balance as the tin can puck was batted southward.  The faster that I tried to skate, the more that the forces of gravity pulled me down to the icy surface.  As I neared my goal, I was starting to loose any type of control over my skates, but I did arrive at the goalmouth shortly before the rest of the players.  Unfortunately I could not stop, but instead went hopelessly down in a sliding clump directly into the goalmouth.  I continued on through the goal, completely wiping out the flimsily constructed edifice in the process.  Interestingly, since there was no longer any kind of a goal in place, I did stop the other team from scoring.

Of course, some players on the other side called me a cheat.  Most skaters on both sides were laughing at my mad dash across the ice and destruction of my own goal.  Trying to retrieve some form of athletic dignity, I was still trying to get back to my wobbly feet with little success.  Eventually, the skaters all returned to the north goal and commenced to play a half-rink game, leaving me to myself on the distant far end of the slough.  I returned to my research on the wintry exploits of the wayward mink and perfecting my straight, forward, no-stop skating style.

There is nothing like slough skating on a sunny Saturday afternoon.