The Big Cut

The Historical Atlas of Wisconsin (1878) includes thematic chapters each written by professionals in the field. There is a political history broken into periods: "antiquities," first nations, pre-territory (from Nicolet, Joliet, Marquette and La Salle to the Black Hawk War, survey and land office), territorial and state. There are also county and city histories. This atlas also includes many portraits, engravings and maps.

Another section on "Special Subjects" combines natural/resource survey (climate, geology, plants, animals and minerals) with economic development (to include agriculture, railroads, commerce and banking). "Special Subjects" also includes "Wisconsin Idea" style resources like education, health and the public domain. A few of the modes production featured in this collection--in this case lumbering--provide a quick return on capitalist investment. This quick return is followed by a prolonged, decades long, period of recovery. Today, modern forest management has spread out the boom and bust cycles characteristic of the big cut using tree farming, selective and parcel cutting followed by replanting. This has tempered the earnings potential and destructive capacity of the first lumbering era.

As a result of this short, and profitable, economic cycle there was no reason for old growth lumberjacks to develop immediate infrastructure related to the industry. They were not settlers or colonists. They were a transient westward labor force that built rail roads, mills and company houses that were only valuable while there were trees to lumber. When the trees ran out, the companies and their laborers pulled up the tracks and moved.

The first cut is a one time event in a broader national development. Remove the Indians, survey the land, sell parcels and lumber them. Some of the lumber capital congregated along the Fox, Wisconsin, Chippewa and Mississippi River valleys as factories, mills and company towns. Other lumber capital continued west to the Olympic Peninsula. Wisconsin's river towns were sometimes connected to Great Lakes trading networks at ports like Superior, Ashland, Escanaba and Green Bay. Others fed into the Gulf of Mexico. The trade routes that defined Wisconsin's original lumber boom were the same routes as beaver pelts, copper and iron from the region traveled for hundreds of years.

The abundance of water power and maritime trade meant lumbering existed before and was contemporary with the development of the railroads. When the lumber was exhausted, the lumber barons took the rail, company houses and mills with them and moved west Compare the lumber town to others featured in the Atlas: mining and agriculture. A U.P. copper or Northwoods iron mine's output is determined by labor, demand, capital (machines and land) and the *unknown* amount of ore in the ground. An ore deposit and a tailings pile might be produce more ore as technology and social conditions change. The same thing is true for agriculture. The food production of land is affected by social, technical and market conditions. In mining and agriculture, there is a reason for capitalists to maintain the railroads, ore docks and grain elevators during economic downturns because--to an entrepreneur--there is always more ore and wheat beneath the soil. Beginning with American deindustrialization, the mining towns of Wisconsin's iron, U.P.'s copper and the Minnesota iron range have been depopulated. The later agri-business movement similarly decimated small America's Dairyland style communities. In the clear cut lumbering mode of production the bust part of the cycle isn't as dramatic as farming or mining because the boom times are short and transient.

There were three big cuts that defined the lumbering era of Wisconsin. They roughly correspond to the river systems that transported logs and powered sawmills. These systems were the trade and transportation routes of native peoples and Europeans up to and including the state's territorial period. These routes became more formal as inland and overland trade, surveyors, the military road, logging roads and then the railroad. Today's highway system was built parallel to these railroads. Wisconsin's human geography is defined by these routes. These routes also explain canal projects and rail spurs that connect resources to the network and networks to each other. This capitalist infrastructure's primary purpose is the appropriation of natural resources and transportation of labor.

Under these conditions the Northwoods developed during the lumber era. There are three phases of the big cut which are defined by the watershed and its downstream infrastructure. These three periods also have a east to west momentum which corresponds to similear transportation networks from the Hudson to the Columbia Rivers.

Menominee and Fox Rivers

In Wisconsin, the first was along the Menominee and Fox rivers. To the north, the Menominee Michigamme, Paint, Brule and Pine rivers run through the Menominee Iron Range. To the south, the Fox and Wolf rivers have supported a wood products industry like the Menasha Corporation in the Fox Cities since the 1850s. National and State forest, the Menominee Reservation, lumber towns like Peshtigo and farm towns like Pulaski are the results of this historical development defined by rivers. The Erie Canal connected the Hudson River and Lake Erie in 1825. This connected the Atlantic Ocean to Great Lakes ports like Green Bay, Marinette or Escanaba and as far west as Duluth. Northeastern industry needed relied on copper, iron and lumber that was extracted from the northwoods and shipped out from midwestern ports.

After the lumber boom, agriculture became a regional export. The canal system and the rail roads brought the lumber industry west from upstate New York to Northern Michigan to the Upper Peninsula to the Fox River Valley. These Yankees were joined by European immigrants following the railroad to the Pacific Northwest. When Wisconsin's northwoods ran out the lumbering industry moved west. The remaining landscape was filled in by more Yankees and Europeans who farmed it.

To Yankee speculators, an Erie style canal connecting the Fox River to the Wisconsin River at Portage was the next logical step. State contracted private companies and the Army Corps of Engineers tried to make it happen until the 1880s. The canal system was only practical before the railroad infrastructure matured. The Fox River lock and dam system facilitated commercial traffic on the river until 1959. Navigation and power from the lock and dam, the developing railroad and the northwoods lumber were crucial to the Fox Valley paper industry starting in the 1870s. But the dream of a Green Bay to Prairie du Chien never materilized.

The Fox River was developed in shipping speculation which never panned out. The resulting economic and geographic conditions promoted the lumber and paper industries which followed. When the canal didn't connect, the state contractors went bankrupt in 1866. The Corps of Engineers maintained commercial navigation but stopped dredging the in 1922. Maintenance also lapsed and the Corps recommended dismantling the system. The Upper Fox River became a recreational waterway in 1951. The Lower Fox Lock and Dam system was put on the National Register of Historic places in 1993 and is still operational under State navigational authority. The process of rewilding started when the canal system was abandoned. The rewilding process and the paper industry period are in tension today. The tension between nature and industry is mediated by recreational users who curb the excesses of industry and nature.

Wisconsin River

The Wisconsin starts at Lac Vieux Desert a few miles west of the Brule River headwaters. They are on either side of the St. Lawrence continental divide. This hydrological distinction is why the Fox drains into Green Bay and the Wisconsin into the Gulf of Mexico. To the lumber barons this meant that new lumber infrastructure had to be built for the Wisconsin river valley from Land O' Lakes to Wausau along the upper Wisconsin River. First, the river was dammed to create sorting ponds and power sawmills. The dams at Big Bull and Jenny Bull Falls became the towns of Wausau and Merrill. Bourchard's Station was transformed from a frontier tavern into Bradley's city of Tomahawk through the industrial capitalist magic of a boom company and a dam. Rhinelander's boom lake still powers the town paper mill. Grandfather Bull Falls, once a one-mile 89-foot drop in the river, is now a Wisconsin Public Service hydroelectric dam. According to the Wisconsin Valley Improvement Company there are twenty-five plants on the river which provide residential power for 300,000 customers.

These Upper Wisconsin dams didn't have commercial locks for Great Lakes vessels like the Fox did. Instead of state or Corps of Engineers oversight, the lumber towns which formed along the river were separate corporations run by lumber barons. Unlike the Fox River development of a single connected waterway the Wisconsin was individual competing enterprises. A more coordinated control of the Wisconsin River Valley dams started in 1907 with Bob La Follette's Wisconsin Valley Improvement Company. This Progressive Era program was a state coordination of private dams. The flood of 1912, which destroyed dams between Merrill, Brokaw and Rothschild, was an early test of the system which failed. Mitigating floods, drinking water and hydropower were the WVIC mandates after the lumber era.

Mill Towns: Brokaw

The Wausau Boom Company dammed the river between 1880-81. Originally, it slowed the Wisconsin river flow above Wausau to "facilitate the dividing of logs..." Sorting ponds like this were created with impoundments known locally as flowages. Impoundments were later harnessed for power. Just like the Fox Locks, in Brokaw hydroelectric power was a secondary task. In Brokaw, the Wausau Paper Mill company built a power plant in 1899. A town of laborers grew up around the sorting pond and power mill. The town was incorporated by Norman Brokaw in 1903. The workers who lived in Wausau were serviced by a special CM&SP train nicknamed the "Scud."

At the start of the twenty-first century the dam was removed under the supervision of the WVIC. The mill was shut down by Wausau Paper and sold for parts to Starboard Value in 2013. Starboard Value is a venture capitalist group described by "Industry analysts" as "an activist Manhattan hedge fund with a record of pushing boards to change directors." Brokaw was absorbed by the neighboring town of Maine in October 2018.

Stark's history of the WVIC explains how the towns on the Wisconsin river came to use hydropower for private industry while maintaining the river for public use. The WVIC oversaw the transition from lumber float ponds to factories ("such as paper mills"). The factories needed to control the "fluctuation of the river flow" in both the Wisconsin and Tomahawk rivers. The charter provides reservoirs that "improve the usefulness of the rivers for all public purposes and to reduce flood damage." In 1988 the WVIC had 21 reservoirs on Tomahawk and the Wisconsin. The WVIC is "truly surprising" because a "liberal politician [La Follette] fostered this company which is privately owned and yet is steward of vast acreages of public terrain." This is the inverse of contemporary Cooperative populism which featured publicly owned entities (like grain elevators) on private terrain (like railroads).

A 1982 WHS roadside marker near Lyndon Station describes the river in length, drop and "electrical energy." The WVIC regulates "reservoir dams in the upper valley designed to store water during high flow periods for use in the downstream power dams during periods of low flow." The control of the river is for power, flood control and public recreational use. According to the marker, Mixed "private development and management under state regulation...is unique..." La Follette and the State Legislature were regulating the river for public and private use and in the common good. This is different than the Fox Valley example where Dodge and the Territorial Legislature encouraged development of a commercial transportation canal. Dodge was the territorial governor who negotiated the Indian cession terms of the upper Wisconsin in the 1837 treaty of St. Peters. This land acquisition outside of the proposed lock system. The upper Wisconsin was not settled by shipping speculators. Any territory above Portage on the river was first settled by lumber.

Stark describes Brokaw: "incorporated in 1906. The town's importance centered around a dam built across the Wisconsin in 1880 [the] purpose of the dam was to produce slack water that would facilitate the dividing of logs for the Wausau mills." The paper company built "a church and clubhouse for the use of its employees." The first white residents were immigrants from Germany that arrived in the 1870s.

Marchetti's history describes Brokaw's secession from the town of Texas in 1906. F.J. Edmonds was the first county board member. To Marchetti, "[Brokaw] owes its existence to the building of the Wausau Paper Mill Company's plant at that place." The Boom Company built the dam between 1880-81. It was twenty years before the power it produced was used by the paper company. The Wausau Paper Mill Company was formed in 1899 by "some foreign business men represented by the brothers Edmonds, and with some business men from Wausau..." the mill had two hundred and seventy five employees. The "Scud" is a "special train on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railraoad..." that brings workers five miles from the city of Wausau to the village of Brokaw. The buildings: a workmen's "clubhouse" and Methodist church. The board 1913: Walter Alexander, CC Yawkey, WL Edmonds, EA Edmonds.

Yawkey (along with WH Bradley) is a major name from the region's lumber baron period. Yawkey identified and claimed a forest near Hazelhurst which he lumbered and followed down the river to Wausau. Bradley did the same at Tomahawk. Bill Hart wrote a biography of Yawkey which was hosted by Marathon County Historical Society. Yawkey was a big time lumberman born in Chicago educated in Saginaw whose first sawmill was in Hazelhurst. He became a town board member there and was a state Republican representative from 1895-96. In 1899 he moved to Wausau. Hart describes the "liberal education" Yawkey got in East Saginaw. He then wen to military school in Orchard Lake. He signed on to his uncle's business in Saginaw. They both sold out in 1888 and went west to Hazelhurst where they bought timberlands and a "promising mill site." They, along with George W. Lee, founded a lumber company. CC moved to Hazelhurst to "oversee the construction of a mill on their site." The company became "manufacturers of lumber, lath and shingles." CC's business interests expanded from Hazelhurst to Wausau, Arkansas and Alabama.

WH Bradley has a park named in his honor in Tomahawk. This park has one of the last stretches of untouched timber in the state called the "Hogs Back." The Tomahawk Chamber of Commerce describes the situation:"Tomahawk was incorporated in 1891, during the height of the lumbering boom in Wisconsin, with approximately 2,000 inhabitants, when 60-75 million feet of lumber were produced every year. William Bradley died in 1903 at the age of 64. Bradley Park was once called “Hog’s Back.” It includes 105 picturesque acres of virgin pine, all within the city. It was purchased from the Bradley Company in 1910..."

Carrie Rasmussen wrote about the Yawkey Forest Reserve in 2019. This is Hazelhurst's version of Bradley Park. The Yawkee Lumber Company, its "shareholders and representatives" donated the land back to the town in 2019 after 125 years "under the same ownership." Industrialists give back the land when it is no longer profitable. But they don't give back the capital, labor or nature that they have extracted and sent down river. The Yawkey corporation moved out of state in 1975 and registered as a foreign for profit corporation in Florida.

The Federal Writers Project has a similar economic history of the region. The Wisconsin River valley paper mills developed between 1874 ("the first railroad") and 1906 ("the timber was gone"). During these thirty years "Wausau had grown wealthy." The town developed suburbs like Brokaw a town of "[w]oodwoorking and veneer plants, two shoe factories, an abrasive factory, a cheese plant, an electric motor works, feed and flour mills..." The factory and the dam are gone now sold for parts.

Lumber Towns: Star Lake

A 1988 article from by Mary McCauley describes what they were trying to recover from. "The forests of northern Wisconsin are haunted by the remains of hundreds of little towns that sprang up in the last century to support a thriving lumber industry...Most of the towns perished when the sawmills ran out of timber. But a careful observer can find traces of civilization, such as a grassy clearing, a vague outline of a street pattern or the crumbled foundation of a building."

McCauley quotes from Rohe--then a professor of geography at Wisconsin-Waukesha County Center about a couple of towns and traditions from his work. To Rohe the towns are interesting because they had individual traditions and social norms that everybody knew were only temporary. The speed and scale of this wave of lumbering is described by McCauley, "[h]undreds of lumber towns in the northern two-thirds of the state were founded between 1860 and 1920 as the lumber line moved north and sawmills sprang up along riverbanks. Between 1899 and 1904, Wisconsin led the nation in lumber production." These towns were owned by the company and built by workers in exchange for free rent over a period of time. A typical town had a sawmill, row houses, temporary housing and a store that used town money. The companies preferred married men, they outlawed vice and provided family friendly recreation to the employees.

On the surface Star Lake was one of these towns. But according to McCauley "a small island in Star Lake had a blind pig, or dumb waiter. Men rowed to the island and placed their money in the dumb waiter. As it revolved, a bottle of liquor appeared." Stories of dry and viceless lumber towns are probably more company propaganda than actual fact.

Rohe also holds degrees in Geography and Historical Archaeology. He compares historical photos to today, studies newspapers and state reports. His description of Star Lake, WI is broken into three different settlements over two different states. The Star Lake location was purchased in 1893. They built a sawmill and the railroad came from Minocqua. A town formed around the developing mill and lake starting in 1895. Logging camps surrounded the town. A hotel and company houses were built. There was a telegraph line, train to Minocqua, general store, barber shop, doctor. The town was electrified by a "dynamo in the mill." The hotel was for workers, train employees and a new class of recreation outdoors people. It is still there. The whole operation was staffed by workers from the previous company mill in McKenna, Wisconsin who arrived in a "special train..." of people and stuff on 28 August 1895. Star Lake is the same as any other lumber town. It was built in 1895 and the "last log was cut" in 1906 and "most of the houses had been razed" by 1911. Now it is a summer resort town described by novelist Sara Rath.

Chippewa River

A WHS roadside marker describes the town of Fifield "on the South fork of the Flambeau River" as the location of a massive lumber "sorting pond where logs were separated by logging company brand marks..." The timber was sent south to "mills [on the Flambeau] and along the Chippewa and Mississippi rivers." After the Fifield fire of 1893 the lumber barons moved west. The Chippewa River and its tributaries are the third waterway that was lumbered in Wisconsin. After the lumber boom came homesteading farmers who "were generally unsuccessful at farming due to poor soil, short growing season, and the distance to markets."

This is not part of the WVIC but there are still dams between the Flambeau headwaters and the Chippewa River. The first dam creates the Turtle-Flambeau flowage. The next is the Upper Dam Hydroelectric plant. Then comes the Lower Dam Hydroelectric plant. Then the Pixley Dam. The Crowley Dam hydroelectric plant is the last on the north branch of the Flambeau. There were five more dams built on the main branch of the Flambeau: Big Falls, Rural Electric Agency (Dairyland Reservoir), Ladysmith Papermill Dam, the Port Arthur Dam and the Thornapple Dam.

Aldo Leopold wrote about the Flambeau River when he described the tension between forest and farm. He provides a third method of development after the lumber era. Unlike the milltowns and ghost towns of the lumber era. Unlike the industrial highway from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien. Leopold finds value in a continuous natural corridor along the river. He described it in 1947's "The Flambeau Raid." The essay starts with a short history of the land as a wild mecca from "hard-bitten fur traders of the freebooting 1700s" which by the 1930s had diminished to "only one 50-mile stretch of river" without a dam and only a "few sections of original timber." Then conservationists of the 1930s "started to build a state forest on the Flambeau, using these remnants of wild woods and wild river as starting points." This conservation movement "bought land, removed cottages, fended off unnecessary roads, and in general started the long slow job of re-creating a stretch of wild river."

Farmers were the opponents to rewilding the river. They "wanted cheaper electric power than that offered by local power companies" and turned to hydroelectricity on the Flambeau. The "bitter political fight" which followed made county commissioners "arbiters of conflict between power values and recreational values." This role was taken, in Leopold's view, from the conservationists and given to the developers during this period.

Recreation as a conservationist value and economics as a developmental value is ironic. Leopold "does not dwell" on the irony. Instead he makes a prescient statement about the relationship between recreation and development, "a semi-honest doctrine" which balances the economic value of fish from wild rivers against the butterfat from impounded rivers. To Leopold "a little gain in butterfat is less important to the state than a large loss in opportunity for a distinctive form of outdoor recreation." This is different than Martin's canal or La Follette's hardest working river. Leopold's wild rivers don't have room for either of these previous models. Leopold is parts conservationist, socialist and progressive, "[t]he farmers' raid on our last wild river is just like any other raid on any other public wealth; the only defense is a widespread public awareness of the values at stake." Protecting the river failed because, "[t]here was none."

Leopold's Sketches Here and There also has a "Flambeau" essay. In this story Leopold meets some "college boys" on the river who were "thrill[ed]" to be without a watch and in nature. The Flambeau represented a brief moment of wilderness "between two regimentations" between the campus and the army. There are few places in regimented America where someone can learn from their mistakes.

Leopold describes the era that inspired his conservationist ethic through the river. The river was great but the "wilderness...was on its last legs." It was being cut into "shorter and shorter segments" by buildings and roads. As soon as you thought you were in the wild you were confronted by "some cottager's peonies" or a "synthetic log cabin." The forest was special because it supported a mixed hardwood and pine forest. The soil produced massive pine trees that were close enough to a "good log-driving stream." These were some of the first to be lumbered. The hardwoods were cut "much later" and the towns and railroads were moved west in the 1930s. What was left was a "land office in [a] ghost town, selling off its cutovers to hopeful settlers." This period called "the epoch of cut out and get out." Leopold describes the "post-logging economy" of the Flambeau as "the offal of a deserted camp" where pulp cutters and dredges look for trees that the lumber company missed. "Everybody and everything subsists on leavings."

The Wisconsin Conservation Department began to rebuild this wasteland in 1943. The goal is to recreate a wilderness. This section also ends with the rural hydroelectrification movement spurred by dairy farmers. The dam was built in 1947 and the Conservation Commission lost "any future voice in the remaining disposition of power sites."

So what?

In a Wisconsin history narrative it is tempting to frame the three phases of the state's lumbering history like Frederick Jackson Turner would have: each river valley further west is a new frontier that tests and transforms the generation that encounters it. This would imply the Fox Valley, Wisconsin Valley and Chippewa Valley are somehow different than the belt of lumber towns from Hoquiam, WA to Buffalo, NY. Another version of this story might emphasize the industrial development of the country alongside the capitalist ethos of lumber barons you know: like Weyerhaeuser and those you don't: like CC Yawkey. This would distinguish the capitalist ethos and industrial mode of production at the expense of indigenous, transcendental, socialist, Progressive or conservationist critiques. This would also be a story that left out the laboring lumberjacks, their families and communities. The lumber industry was a national movement of like minded capitalists and laborers that fueled part of the broader American economy and then went bust. In that way it is like most of America's lasseiz faire excesses like the buffalo, dust bowl and mountain top mining. This could also be a story about the historical futility of planned development. The Fox Valley paper industry is a product of the Portage Canal. The 1912 flood overpowered any coordinated response by the dams. The rewilding of the rivers leads to more use by people. There is a coherent idea concerning the commodification of trees into lumber for a growing economy which served more markets as transportation trade routes expanded. The lumber markets expanded past the supply of trees and the extraction moved on to the next closest supply of trees until they reached the Pacific Ocean. The farmland, towns, railroads, factories and dams that are left after the trees are gone replace the previous way of life. Today this infrastructure doesn't work and it is sold and moved elsewhere.

As a declension narrative Wisconsin's lumber industry provides models of what happens when the capitalists leave. Nostalgia like the Fox Locks, wild recreation like the Flambeau, recapitalization like Brokaw or tourism like Star Lake are all options in the post-industrial northwoods. The current conflict between industrialization and rewilding is still parts of Martin's promotion of commerce, La Follette's regulation of use and Leopold's contiguous wilderness. In Park Falls the mill, the dam and the future of the town are defined by a mix of state and private, economic and social interests.