Dam The Water

In 1908, the State of Wisconsin published a book titled, The Water Power of Wisconsin.  The book was written by Leonard S. Smith, a civil engineer and was published as part of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey that was being conducted at the time.  The state-funded survey was used to assess where Wisconsin was at the time in regards to water power availability and use, which was an offshoot of the geology and natural history study.  The book was divided up into various chapters based on the different geographic regions of the state.  In the chapter covering southwest Wisconsin or the Driftless Area, a listing of the dams and their water power capacity on the Kickapoo River were charted.  The dam at La Farge was listed as the largest capacity power producer on the Kickapoo.  Harnessing the power of the waters of the Kickapoo River near La Farge had been a constant goal as settlement began in the northern part of the Valley.

            When white settlement first came to the northern Kickapoo Valley in the late 1840’s, the availability of the rushing waters of the river was a prime inducement for the development of dam sites for creation of water power.  Isaac Lawton built the first dam in the area of what would eventually become La Farge in 1848.  Lawton was a lumberman from the state of New York and came west to the brand new state of Wisconsin located between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.  Lawton used the Great Lakes to get to Wisconsin and he and his large family settled in the Genesee area in Waukesha County.  He worked in and co-owned a lumber operation there for a few years before moving to the western part of the state and the Kickapoo Valley.

            Isaac Lawton found some desirable land along the Kickapoo River in what today is section 31 of the Town of Stark.  He was looking for a site to dam up the river and operate a sawmill.  After hiking down to Mineral Point to make his claim and pay his fee to the government for the land, Isaac and some of his oldest sons cleared his newly acquired land and built a cabin.  When that was done, he brought his wife and the rest of the children west from Genesee to live in their new home.  Lawton constructed a brush and log dam on the river where it turned west, installed an “up and down” saw and started milling out lumber.  He and his sons were some of the first in the Valley to raft the lumber down the Kickapoo and out to Midwestern markets.  It was said that a selling price of $7 for the raft of lumber made for a profitable venture in those early days of lumbering on the Kickapoo.

            Isaac Lawton would eventually turn the lumber rafting over to his sons and son-in-laws, as they would operate sawmills in many different locations on the Kickapoo River and its tributaries over the years.  (Indeed, we could call Isaac Lawton the “Father of Lumbering in the Kickapoo”, but that is another story to tell at another time.)  After a few years, the dam located on the Isaac Lawton place was removed.  The next dam built in the immediate La Farge area was a product of the efforts of Thomas DeJean.

            Thomas DeJean, who could be dubbed “The Father of La Farge”, came to the Kickapoo Valley in 1853 and claimed land along the river just to the north of Isaac Lawton.  By 1855, DeJean and his adopted son, Anson, were clearing their land along the Kickapoo River.  At the mouth of Bear Creek, the DeJeans established a brush and log dam for a sawmill operation on the creek in 1857.  The location of the DeJean dam was unfortunate as it was nearly impossible to float the logs on the river to the mill for sawing.  Eventually, Thomas and Anson DeJean built a gristmill upstream on Bear Creek to better utilize the waters from their dam and that gristmill business was a success for many years.  Anson DeJean stayed active in the lumbering business and he owned vast tracts of land in the area for the harvesting of trees for lumber.  He and his crews would use another dam and sawmill built upstream a couple of miles from the DeJean dam, for it would be Dempster Seely who would build the dam that would eventually become the largest in the Valley.

            In 1863, Dempster Seely, another transplanted New Yorker, purchased land from John Anderson that contained a section of the Kickapoo River with a strong flow as it dropped to the west and then south.  Anderson, originally a Scotsman from Glasgow, had come to the Kickapoo Valley in the 1840’s and worked on the first lumber crews, felling trees and rafting the lumber down the river.  He eventually grew too old for that vigorous work and retired to his farm overlooking the river, where he established an apiary and made sweet honey for sale.

            Seely, who had earlier operated successful sawmills in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, built a house and a large barn on his Kickapoo Valley property with lumber sawn at his mill.  Soon he was employing crews of men to harvest lumber for his milling operation, which utilized a circular saw.  Chauncey Lawton, a son of Isaac, operated a general store and law practice nearby and soon plotted the growing river town as Star.  Because nearly everyone worked for Dempster Seely in his expanding lumber operation (they were known as “Seely Men”), the place came to be known as Seelyburg.  Those were boom times for Dempster Seely’s business and by 1870 the mill had added planing and shingle milling capabilities.

            To provide adequate water power for all of these milling operations, Dempster Seely enlarged his dam on several occasions.  He replaced the original brush and log dam with a larger dam made with logs and plank to create more headwater for the milling operations.  Eventually, Seely and his son Charles would expand the milling business to include a gristmill, which required more water power.  The Seely’s moved the dam downriver and anchored it to a sandstone rock wall on the north side.  Here at the new dam site the flow of the river narrowed and turned to the southwest.  The new dam required a more sturdy timber and plank construction to harness the river’s water power.  This was the dam that was in place when the state survey was done and the water power book published in 1908.

            In that book on page 167 in the section, Water Powers of the Kickapoo River, the dam at La Farge was described as, “The La Farge Milling Company maintains an 8 foot dam built on natural rock foundation.  Three turbines 56, 40, and 35 inches in diameter rated at 160 horsepower are used in the day time to run a flour mill, and during the night to run a local light plant.  The owners report that they can count on only 125 horsepower.”  Other dams on the Kickapoo River were listed at Gays Mills, Soldiers Grove, Readstown, Viola, Rockton, and Ontario and north of Ontario.  With its 160 horsepower capacity, the La Farge dam exceeded all others in the Valley.

            By the time the state report on water power was written, Charles Seely was a minority owner of his father’s dam and mill operation.  When the light plant was begun in 1904, a group of investors bought Seely’s La Farge operation, closed down the lumber mill, increased the capacity of the grist mill, improved the timber dam and installed additional power turbines for the light plant.  Most of the investors in the La Farge dam and mill were from Soldiers Grove and included the Wisconsin governor at the time, James Davidson.  With the influx of investment money, the La Farge dam, mill and power plant was a state of the art operation serving a thriving modern community.

Waiting For The Waters - 1972

In 1972, the community of La Farge was in a state of transition as work on the Corps of Engineers’ La Farge Lake and Dam Project continued through the year.  Most of the land needed for the project, located north of La Farge to the Rockton area and beyond, had been purchased by the government agency by that time.  The families who had lived on those farms and in those homes were dispersed.  Some of those people remained in the La Farge area; many did not. 

There seemed to be a constant process of farm auctions stretching up the Kickapoo Valley as the people were displaced from their former homes.  Some of the previous owners rented their own homes back from the Corps on a short-term basis while looking for another place to call home.  Once the people were gone, the Corps listed the buildings on the vacated properties for sale to the highest bidder.  The pieces of the former farmsteads could be moved or razed; it didn’t really matter to the Corps, which simply wanted the land emptied of signs of human occupation.  The Corps continued the lease of agricultural fields on the project lands that summer and many former owners rented their fields back for growing crops of corn and harvesting cuttings of hay.

In the village of La Farge, the changes were also apparent as the town prepared for the coming of the waters of Lake La Farge.  In February, the new La Farge United Methodist Church had been dedicated and consecrated on the site of the previous church.  The old church had been torn down the previous year to make way for the new place of worship.

One block south from the new church, the village’s business district underwent significant changes in 1972.  Perhaps anticipating the affects of the dam project on the town, several new businesses opened in La Farge.  David Mick began a Mutual Services insurance agency that summer with offices over his father’s grocery store on the east end of the business district.  Kickapoo Gifts, a new gift shop featuring work by local artists, opened in the former grocery store building owned by Dick Gabrielson.  Colleen Sullivan operated the shop, which had hundreds of visitors on its first weekend of business.  Don Potter opened a new realty office in town to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding recreational real estate market.  Markee Soft Water, operated by Dick Heckart, opened a business in La Farge that summer as did Bobby Kennedy with his new carpet installation and cleaning service.  In addition to new business operations, several long time La Farge businesses saw changes that year.

A new lawyer came to town that summer as Phil Stittleburg, fresh out of UW Law School, bought Ralph Freeze’s law business and moved into the offices on south State Street on June 1.  Freeze had practiced law in La Farge for forty years, having bought the practice from Alva Drew.  By fall, Ralph and his wife Isabelle had left the village to retire in Arizona.

Russell Schroer bought the H & D Lumber sawmill operation in the summer of 1972.  Schroer bought the mill from Clair Russell, who stayed on with the business to buy logs for the new operation known as Schroer Hardwood Lumber Company.  Lee Hiles and Russell Davison had started the H & D lumber mill in 1953.  The Schroer family with two little girls came from Stevens Point and moved into a new mobile home placed on the west end of the Sherrill Huston trailer park next to the sawmill.

One of La Farge’s two remaining grocery stores changed hands in the summer of 1972 when Orval Howard purchased the Cash Store from Toby Funnell and Elmer Huffland.  Orval, with his wife Jan and two young sons, moved back to his hometown and the new grocery store was named Howard’s Village Market.

Lonnie Muller, needing to devote more time to his fledgling newspaper business (the Epitaph), sold his cable television system to Numsen Master Antenna Systems out of La Crosse.  The new cable owners soon upgraded the La Farge antenna system and expanded TV channel offerings to its customers.  More TV choices also meant a higher cost for cable subscribers in La Farge.  Those weren’t the only bills going up in La Farge though.  Vernon Telephone phased out the old party-line phone numbers that summer, and the new single-party system came with a higher price tag each month.  Earlier in the year, water and electricity rates increased in the village as the La Farge Utility Company petitioned for and received the approval to raise its rates. 

In August, the cheese factory business in La Farge changed hands as Warner Creek Cheese Factory owned by Jarry Glick of Hillsboro purchased the operation from Durward and Ethel Burt.  The new owners, who had run the cheese factory near Valley for thirty years added a Grade A market for La Farge area dairy farmers to access, while also keeping the cheese making operations going.  Richard Glick became the manager of the La Farge plant and plans were made to add a retail cheese store to the operation, which was up and running by the end of the year.  Richard, his wife and two little girls moved into the apartment above the cheese factory.

   By the next month, construction had begun on La Farge’s newest business – a motel.  Dick and Bea Gabrielson, with Gary Hall Realty of Viroqua as general contractor, built the new motel one half block south of Main Street just across the street and to the west of the La Farge Enterprise building.  Some delays in construction of the new motel were caused when flowing wells on the property proved difficult to cap, but by early November the new building, which featured a residence for the owners and ten motel units was nearing completion.

The motel became the second new commercial building on Main Street as Cecil Rolfe had opened his new facility for making cabinets earlier that spring.  Rolfe’s Cabinet Shop, a 24’ x 60’ cement block building, was located a block to the west of the new motel on the north side of Main Street between the Ed Muller & Sons Construction property and the welding shop.

Old buildings in La Farge came down that fall as well.  The building that had housed Casey Sanford’s Clothing Store on Main Street was torn down in October.  The 24’ x 40’store building located next to the Band Box Cafe was taken down by Pete and Robert Fish of Bloomingdale.  More demolition was happening less than a block away as the old Odd Fellows Hall, long a fixture in the village on the corner of Bird and Penn Streets was also being torn down.  The new Methodist Church, needing additional parking for their expanding congregation, purchased the old lodge building, located across the street from the new church.  Arnie Widstrand and his children took down the old 24’ x 44’ hall after an auction was held to sell off the old lodge furnishings.

But 1972 was a time for looking forward in La Farge instead of back to the past.  The dam project pointed towards the future.  In August, LaCrosse Concrete Company leased two lots from Art Nelson across Mill Street from Nuzum’s.  The company soon set up a concrete plant on the site to provide cement for the construction beginning on the dam project.  Art Nelson’s dump trucks were busy bringing in sand from Oxford, Wisconsin and crushed rock from Elroy to the La Farge cement plant site.  By November the first cement was poured at the dam site for the construction of the dam’s water intake tower.

Soon the waters of Lake La Farge would be lapping along the shores of the Kickapoo Valley as the community made plans for the future. 

KNOW YOUR TOWN - 1972

Recently I came across an interesting story about La Farge while conducting research focused on the year of 1972. When reading through some copies of the La Farge Enterprise newspaper from that year, I came across an article titled, “Know Your Town”.  The article was a compilation of the attributes of La Farge for growth potential and the list was put together in the spring of that year for a specific purpose.  As with most things happening to La Farge during that era, the list had to do with the dam project.  Back in those days forty years ago, everything that happened in the community seemed to be connected in some way to the dam being built north of town by the Corps of Engineers.

            When Governor Patrick Lucey had given his reluctant blessing to the dam project after his “Intensive Review” conducted a year earlier in 1971, some conditions were laid down by the governor in order for the project to move forward.  One of those conditions was that land planning, which would include zoning, should be implemented for all of the land around Lake La Farge.  This decree for zoning to control development around the lake included the townships of Stark and Whitestown, where nearly all of the lake’s shore land would be located, but also encompassed the village of La Farge, located to the south of the proposed lake’s waters.  To help with the zoning plans, the governor directed the Mississippi River Regional Planning Commission (MRRPC) to assist the village and townships in the process.  Working with the planning commission of Vernon County, the MRRPC staff and a consultant hired by the governor’s planning office, La Farge formed a local planning board to develop a plan to initiate the required zoning.  As part of that plan, the local planning board did an assessment of the village’s businesses, organizations, housing, school, demographics and other aspects of the town.  From that work by the local planning board had come the material for the “Know Your Town” article.

            Darlene McNatt, wife of Paul McNatt, the president of the village board at the time, had written the article.  The information from the report was going to be used for another purpose in La Farge besides drawing up a zoning plan.  In 1972, La Farge had been without a doctor for over a year and the village owned a nice new medical clinic building but had no doctor to practice there.  After trying unsuccessfully to recruit a doctor to town on their own, the community leaders were looking at other ways to possibly meet La Farge’s medical needs.

            The medical building had been without a doctor since Dr. Connie Lee had left La Farge a year earlier.  Eventually the building was used to house the village’s library and a new Head Start program.  After having no success at recruiting a replacement for Dr. Lee, La Farge turned to a federal government program for help.

            The National Health Service (NSA) Corporation was created to assist rural communities like La Farge recruit medical personnel such as doctors and dentists.  The federal NSA program would place the doctors in a community, pay their salaries, and provide equipment and staff for the practice for a period of two years.  Hopefully after that two-year time of NSA service, the doctor would have established a practice and would stay in the community.

            As part of a Kickapoo Valley application for the NSA program in April 1972, La Farge requested the services of two doctors and a dentist.  At a public meeting held in the village that month, over three hundred people attended to hear more about the NSA programs and show support for the village’s application.  Actually, La Farge was much better off than many communities applying for the medical personnel because of the community’s new clinic building.  That clinic could adequately house the practices of the two doctors sought in the application.  The village owned the clinic building and a rent-free option was available for the proposed NSA team of doctors.  This kind of community support was crucial in successful bids for NSA doctors.     Another public meeting was held at Soldiers Grove, which was also seeking a NSA doctor for their community.  In May, Congressman Vernon Thomson announced that the Kickapoo Valley NSA application had been approved for funding and that a doctor would soon be coming to La Farge.

            Within a month after Thomson’s announcement, two NSA physicians, Dr. Doug Collins and Dr. John Weiler, were in La Farge looking for housing for their families and at equipment needs to start their practices at the La Farge clinic.  Dr. Collins settled on property on Otter Creek, while Dr. Weiler and his wife, Kay, moved into a new house built by Art Nelson on the hill in the eastern part of the village.  The Weiler’s received a rather rude welcome to the Kickapoo Valley when the house where they lived was hit by lightning during a violent August thunderstorm.  The doctor and his wife survived the resulting fire unharmed, but most of the interior of the house was ruined and they had to camp out in the clinic for temporary housing.  Eventually things settled down and Dr. Weiler opened his practice in the La Farge Clinic on September 5.  Kay Weiler worked as a nurse in the practice and four other people were hired to staff the practice.  All of the salaries of the personnel were paid by the NSA grant until the practice could generate enough business to operate financially.

            Lots of things were happening in La Farge in that summer of ’72.  The village hosted the Vernon County June Dairy Days on the first weekend of the month.  The sponsor and host for the dairy days celebration was the Citizens For Kickapoo group.  The “pro-dam project” organization had been formed in 1971 to fight for completion of the dam project.  The group needed funds to continue to lobby for the project and the Dairy Days provided over $5,000 for the cause.

Serious construction on the dam structure would begin in that summer of 1972 and over 6,000 acres of land located north of La Farge had already been purchased for the project.  Soon the waters of the Kickapoo River would be backed up and form Lake La Farge.

 The dam project remained controversial as the construction season began that spring.  In May, the Corps of Engineers announced that nearly $1.2 million in contracts for the construction of the dam’s intake tower, water conduits and stilling basin had been let.  Construction on the dam structures began soon after the announcement of the federal funding and soon after that, the Madison-based John Muir Chapter of the Sierra Club announced another legal challenge to stop the dam’s construction.  It was the second attempt by the environmental preservation group to stop the Corps of Engineers dam project on the Kickapoo River at La Farge.

A year earlier, the Sierra Club had tried to stop the La Farge Dam Project by asking for an injunction in federal district court in Madison, but was unsuccessful in their bid.  Undaunted, the Madison-based environmental group filed another injunction in May of 1972 to stop the La Farge project.  The second injunction asked the U.S. District Court to stop the La Farge project because the Corps of Engineers had not properly prepared an Environmental Impact Statement according to federal law.  As he had done the previous year, Judge James Doyle denied the injunction to stop the project and allowed the construction on the dam at La Farge to continue.  

And La Farge continued to prepare for the completion of the project and the coming of the waters of Lake La Farge.

Pearls of Wisdom

Recently, I read an entertaining article in the Spring-2012 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History, which is published by the Wisconsin Historical Society.  The article, written by George Johnson, was titled, “The American Pearl Rush – Its Wisconsin Beginnings”.  Johnson writes about the pearl rush that began in this country during the Gilded Age of the 1890’s and how its origins were spurred by the beautiful pearls first found in the Sugar River near the small Wisconsin town of Albany.  The craze and search for pearls then spread to other waters in southern Wisconsin such as the Pecatonica and Rock Rivers and Lakes Monona and Mendota.  As the demand and prices for Wisconsin pearls grew, the hunt expanded to the waters of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers.  As I was reading this fascinating account, I started to wonder if the pearl craze had ever reached the Kickapoo Valley.

            Since most crazes and fads eventually settle into these parts and La Farge and the upper Kickapoo are as susceptible as anywhere for getting in on the latest action for making a quick buck or two, (the Bear Creek Gold Mine is a great local example of this get-rich-quick phenomena) I assumed some pearling has been done on our local river and tributary creeks.  That led me to thinking about the Kickapoo Pearls, those wonderful tabloids of local lore and legend published in 1979 as part of the Kickapoo Valley History Project.  As it turns out, the name of the newspaper published by the history project was derived from a beautiful cluster pearl found in the Kickapoo River.  A drawing of that famous pearl always appeared at the top of the cover page and again on the masthead of each of the Kickapoo Pearls publications.

            In the initial Kickapoo Pearls published in June 1979, reference is made to the magnificent pearl found in the Kickapoo.  In the lead article of that issue found on page 2, the cluster pearl, which is on a ring, looks like three shiny white pearls and is the size of a quarter carat diamond. Barbara Larson Wentz, who owned the pearl ring, related this story about the pearl’s past, “My great aunt lived in Soldiers Grove and was married to John Stelzman who ran a store with Ole Davidson.  My Uncle John got the pearl from a man around there and it was supposed to have been found in the Kickapoo River. Uncle John gave it to my Aunt Hattie in a ring.”  The article goes on to discuss how the famous pearl ring and its history passed through the family and concludes with, “The story that was always told was that it came from the Kickapoo”.

            The article on the Kickapoo pearl then goes on to relate a story told by a La Farge man in an oral history interview done as part of the history project.  It reads, “Fred Morgan of La Farge doesn’t remember pearls on the Kickapoo but he does remember the clams.  They were maybe four to six inches long, he says, and he and his cousin used to have a good time getting them.  They made a boat and they’d put it in the river and let it drift maybe two or three river miles in a day.  They drug a mesh of wire along the bottom of the river and some days they had quite a few clams raked up.  Fred remembers that he never ate many of those clams but his cousin did and as far as he knows his cousin never found any pearls in his supper.”

            Of course, when one reads about the clamming done by the Morgan cousins, you are reminded that the harvesting of clams was also a result of the pearl craze.  Initially those in the search for the prized pearls discarded the clamshells.  This waste was documented in George Johnson’s article as mounds of discarded and decaying clamshells littered the shores of the Sugar River and other streams.  Perhaps seizing on the waste of the shells in the pearling process, an ancillary business was developed where the luminescent nacre of the clamshells were used for the making of buttons.  Markets for Kickapoo clamshells were soon realized as a button factory was established at Richland Center and Prairie du Chien became a center for the clamming industry.  One can imagine the Morgan boys plying the shallows of the Pine River for clamshells to sell in Richland Center before the family moved to La Farge.  Later when they clammed on the Kickapoo, the boys could sell their shells to buyers who made regular pickups along the Valley’s railway line.  

            Fred Morgan is one of the main contributors to that first edition of the Kickapoo Pearls.  Later in the newspaper there is a featured seven-page article on the Kickapoo Valley Railroad.  Morgan, who came from a family of railroad workers, was the main source for much of the material in the articles.  The lead story called “Working on the Railroad” featured Fred Morgan’s recollections of the old Kickapoo railroad from the time in 1911 when the family first came to live in La Farge when his father took a job as a section hand on the railroad.  Fred’s father was killed in 1914 when he drowned while working on clearing flood trash from the railroad bridge south of La Farge near the tunnel. 

Later both Fred and his brother went to work for the Kickapoo line.  Both of the brothers and their cousin worked with the railroad right up to the end when it was taken out in 1939.  In another section of the railroading article, Fred told about the experience of working on the railroad including the bathing rituals in the Kickapoo for the railroad workers.  Morgan related about those earlier days, “After I got big enough to work on the railroad I worked in the summer and then, in the fall, I’d get laid off.  Then my brother got on as section foreman.  Well, I worked steady for him - me and my cousin both.  We worked an eight-hour day and we got $49.92 every two weeks.

“On Saturdays we’d only work half a day and all of us on the section crew quit at noon, see.  And we come down here by the second railroad bridge out of La Farge, my brothers, my cousin and all of us, and we’d strip off and get out in that water.  Always had some soap along and we’d take a bath.  Ted Fields was along, too, but he wouldn’t go swimming.

‘Come on Ted, take a bath’, we’d say.  ‘Aw, naw,’ he’d say, ‘I haven’t taken a bath in so long I don’t want to get that water dirty before it gets run into Violey’.

“He was a comical old guy, anyway.  But every Saturday we took ourselves a splash.  Where we went swimming, that was the same place my Dad drowned.  I used to think about that when I was down there in that water.”

            When the history project started looking for people to interview about the old Kickapoo railroad, Morris Moon, long time Vernon County Sheriff and Clerk of Court said, “If you’re interested in stories about the old Kickapoo railroad, go talk to Fred Morgan of La Farge”.  At the time that Morgan was interviewed as part of the oral history project, Morgan and his wife lived in a little white house on the north end of La Farge.  It was in a part of town where the train tracks used to be close by and many of the railroad workers and their families lived.  So many of the Morgan family lived in that section of little houses that it was often referred to as “Morgantown”.

            When they built the new baseball park next to the schoolhouse in 1937, Fred’s little house was right across Mill Street from the new field.  Being an avid ball fan, Fred went to many ball games across the street from his house.  Around the time that Fred was interviewed for the local history project in the late 1970’s, softball was flourishing in La Farge.  Every Tuesday and Thursday night when the men’s league played, Fred (who also went by the nickname of “Jap”) could be found sitting in the lower seats between the dugout and grandstand along the first base line.  He would join Gordon Waddell, Ray Young, Boob Sandmire and others who sat in that section to watch the ballgames, cheer on the proceedings and offer free advice and concern to the teams playing. 

As he watched those ball games on warm summer evenings, Fred could gaze out beyond right field and see the Kickapoo River beyond the highway and perhaps remember some of the pearls of his life spent around that old stream.

If you would like to contribute to this little history project on a Kickapoo River town, contact me at bcstein@mwt.net or P.O. Box 202, La Farge 54639.  Working together we can continue to tell the story of La Farge.

If you are interested in getting a copy of the Kickapoo Pearls, a republication of these gems of local history is available for sale at the Visitor Center gift shop at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve.  Published in 2009 by the Friends of the Reserve, this Kickapoo Pearls Rediscovered edition includes all of the original four-plus volumes of the Pearls plus a foreword and prologue by Dail Murray and Dana Strobel Van Hoesen, who both worked on the original project.  If you cannot drop into the Reserve for your copy of this classic collection of local history, call 608 625-2960 or check the Reserve’s website for more information.