History's Hit Parade

            1970 – the beginning of a new decade and the end of an old one. 

1970 – a time of transition for the little Kickapoo River town of La Farge, Wisconsin. 

1970 – Change was in the air for La Farge, forces from afar were about to pull and tug at the essence of the community. 

1970 – Some people were leaving; people who had to sell their homes and farms to the federal government for the dam project.  Other people were coming to the Valley; people with new personal values and life styles. 

Crank up the jukebox of life as the times for La Farge, “They were achangin”.

The #1 hit song for the year 1970 was B.J. Thomas’ “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”.  With the soggy, wet months of May and June that we have here in the Kickapoo Valley, could we have a more appropriate song title?  But it was also a somewhat appropriate tune for La Farge in 1970 as the federal Kickapoo Valley flood control project with its projected dam to be constructed just north of the village prepared to get going.  With the dam built and holding back the flood waters of the Kickapoo River, folks in La Farge, Viola and downriver wouldn’t have to be so concerned about raindrops falling on their heads.

“Let It Be” by the Beatles was #2 on that 1970 hit parade list and that classic by the Fab Four fits right in to what was happening to the dam project at La Farge.  When Governor Patrick Lucey ordered an “Intensive Review” of the Kickapoo Valley flood control project with intentions of stopping the dam construction at La Farge, pro-dam Kickapoogians howled for the governor to let it be.  Eventually Lucey provided measured support of the La Farge dam and commended the citizens of the Valley for their support of the project.  The Village of La Farge, led by the local dam-backers organization, threw a big celebration party on a Saturday night.  Some say that night and those festivities was La Farge’s finest hour.  So it appeared that the dam project was “Signed, Sealed & Delivered” – the #9 hit of that year sung by Stevie Wonder.

But soon after the governor’s endorsement of the project came forth, the John Muir Chapter of the Sierra Club filed an injunction in federal court to stop the construction of the dam.  It appeared that we had a “Ball of Confusion”; the Temptations #8 hit song in 1970.  (I must confess here that I could not remember anything about this song.  I know that I was busy in 1970 as I graduated from college, was married to the lovely Carolyn Kinsey and started on my first teaching job that year.  But I was not totally out of the loop for that year, so how could I not have any memories of a song from one of my favorite groups.  I even went on the Internet to look up the lyrics to the song and listen to the Temptations sing it on a YouTube spot.  Nothing!  Nada recognition!  Every other song in the top twenty from that year was recognized, but I drew a blank on that one.  I did find an interesting line from the song though – “Hippies moving to the hills” – but that’s another Kickapoo Valley story from the 70’s to get into at another time.) 

The Madison-based chapter of the Sierra Club claimed that the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to adequately answer environmental concerns in the Impact Statement that had earlier been submitted.  (Looking back, one has to agree with the Sierra Club on the Corps’ first EIP on the dam project at La Farge.  The report was very brief and basically said that the Corps was going to build a dam and lots of acres were soon going to be under water, lots of water.  At the same time that the Corps’ Environmental Impact Statement was submitted, all nine pages of it, the Corps released a three hundred plus page report on the recreational and economic benefits of the dam project.  Kind of shows where the Corps’ interest was at the time.)  Eventually in due process, Judge James Doyle rejected the Sierra Club’s request and let the dam project proceed.

Another celebration was called for and La Farge obliged with gusto.  A groundbreaking ceremony was held at the dam site north of La Farge in August.  Over five hundred people were in attendance with a legion of politicos fawning over the new project to bring flood control to the Valley and economic salvation to La Farge.  The golden shovel sprang forth and scoops of dirt were hoisted into the air signaling the official start of the construction of the dam.  (Work on the dam had actually begun several weeks earlier after the injunction case in federal court had been settled.)

Supporters of the dam project were happy once again and perhaps felt like singing a line or two from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” (#7 on the 1970 hit parade).  Perhaps, with the dam construction actually moving forward and the opposition to the project defeated in court, the musical lines, “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind” fit the mood of the dam-backer crowd.        

            Yet, let’s not suppose that the folks against the project didn’t have a theme song as well in the summer of 1970.  Maybe they could use the #16 hit of the year for their anthem; sung by The Carpenters, “We’ve Only Just Begun” to describe the determination to stop the dam at La Farge.  For another year would bring other injunction attempts from the Sierra Club to stop the project.  Water quality studies would begin on the proposed waters of beautiful Lake La Farge that would prove devastating to the completion of the project.  Senator Gaylord Nelson began to voice political concern over the project’s perceived environmental problems.

            In the end, Edwin Starr’s one-hit wonder from that year of 1970 probably foreshadowed what lay ahead for the two sides of the dam project at La Farge.  Yes, Starr’s #10 hit for that year, “WAR”, might have set the tone for what lay ahead.  As the conflict between the two sides over the dam project escalated; as tensions between the two sides ended friendships that had lasted a lifetime; as the fabric of the community of La Farge was ripped apart, some lines from Starr’s anthem seem almost prophetic.

War, huh, yeah

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing

Say it again.

            

Memorial Day in La Farge - 1929

It must have been a nice day on Thursday, May 30, 1929.  It was Memorial Day in La Farge and as it was reported, “With attending pleasant weather and perfect roads, the Memorial Day ceremonies in the village were carried out with a complete and nicely executed program.”  That assessment of the day’s activities was the lead sentence in the front-page article that started with the headline, “Memorial Program Was Great Event”, in the June 6, 1929 La Farge Enterprise.  So let’s take a look at how this little Kickapoo River town celebrated on that day nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

            The Memorial Day activities began at nine in the morning with a caravan of cars leaving the K.P. Hall, which is where the local American Legion post met at that time.  The cars drove out to the “Baptist Cemetery on Bear Creek” (today the Bear Creek Cemetery) where the Fife & Drum Corps played patriotic songs and the graves of veterans were properly decorated.  The “perfect roads” that were mentioned earlier were a must for this trip out to the Bear Creek Cemetery as the stretch of road between there and the village was often a boggy quagmire and nearly impassable if it had been a wet spring season.

            At ten o’clock, the Memorial Day Parade began on the east end of La Farge’s Main Street business district near O.B. Kennedy’s Store (today the Episcope office).  Leading the procession was the La Farge Brass Band followed by the World War veterans marching with the colors.  These were the men from La Farge who had served in the 1914-18 conflict known then as the Great War or the World War.  Today we know of that conflict as World War I, but the Second World War hadn’t been fought yet in 1929, so there was no need to tag the World War with a number. 

            Following the color guard of the World War veterans were cars carrying the few remaining local veterans of the Civil War.  These men had probably been members of the local GAR post, originally started in Seelyburg then later moved to La Farge.  When most of the Civil War vets passed on, the GAR post in town was discontinued.  However, the auxiliary of the GAR was still active in town and those ladies as well as the Women’s Relief Corp were the next part of the parade.  Bringing up the rear were all of the school children from La Farge Schools – “from kindergarten through the Senior Class” as the article mentioned.  The parade proceeded west down Main Street and then north to the Chapel Hill and Star Cemeteries.

At those two cemeteries located on either end of old Seelyburg, veterans’ graves were decorated, the band and the Fife & Drum Corps played more patriotic music and a salute by the Legion rifle squad was fired.  The rifle salute held at Chapel Hill Cemetery turned out badly according to an accompanying article titled, “Gets Shot In Eye At Grave Volley”.

   According to the article, an accidental discharge from a shotgun as the rifle squad was preparing to shoot a volley over a veteran’s grave hit a grave monument and splattered shot into the faces of four members of the rifle squad.  Dick Trappe, Emory Thayer, Orville (Casey) Sanford and Ivan Major were hit with the discharged shot, “all of whom had their faces more or less stippled with the deflected shot”.  A lead pellet pierced the eye of Ivan Major and he was immediately taken to one of the local doctors to have it removed.  From there, Major was taken to Viroqua for x-rays and later saw an eye specialist in LaCrosse.  Fortunately, Major received no permanent injury to the eye.  The other three “stippled” members of the squad were also taken to the doctor’s office in the village to have the pellets removed from their faces.  The newspaper account said those three with the flesh wounds were completely recovered.  The Memorial Day procession continued on to Star Cemetery on the north side of the Kickapoo River, perhaps without a rifle squad for the rest of the ceremonies.

 There was also a ceremony held at the Seelyburg Bridge over the Kickapoo.  The ladies of the Women’s Relief Corps honored those lost in the Civil War, Spanish-American War and World War and threw garlands of flowers into the river water.  Usually a rifle volley was fired from the Star Cemetery above during this riverside ceremony, but I’m not sure if it was that day after the earlier accident with the rifle squad.  After all the ceremonies were concluded at Seelyburg, the veterans of the three wars and their families were treated to a dinner held at the K.P. Hall.

In the afternoon of that Memorial Day from La Farge’s past, a track and field meet was held on the school grounds.  It was called the “Free For All Track and Field Meet” and La Farge athlete Cy Yeomans stole the show that day by winning three events.  Yeomans won the pole vault by soaring to a top height of 10 feet, captured the discus title with a throw of 109 feet and took the top spot in the shot put at 43 feet.  Dick Husker won both the sprint races at 100 and 220 yards while Theron Green took first place in the half-mile run.  Rounding out the track and field meet events, Bob Lawton won the broad jump and Paul Harris took first in the high jump.

 Later a baseball game was played on the field south of town before a “fair-sized crowd”.  The La Farge and Viola “city teams” met on the baseball diamond for an exhibition game, with the downriver visitors securing a 7-5 win.  According to the newspaper account of the game, “Due to the tardiness in getting the game going, it was decided to call the game at the end of the seventh.  The score might have been different if the game had went over the ninth hole.”  The La Farge-Viola baseball rivalry would heat up even more, later in the season. 

But, all in all, Memorial Day in 1929 turned out to be quite a nice day in La Farge.  Times were good in the little river town, but they were soon to turn.  The 20’s would continue to roar for several more months until October, when Black Tuesday and the stock market crash would plunge the nation into the Great Depression and hard times would follow. 

More Travers Building History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FALLING BRICKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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