USA > Wisconsin > Sauk County > A standard history of Sauk County, Wisconsin, Volume I > Part 33
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"The Wisconsin River Power Company was formed to carry out the Prairie du Sac development. The site chosen was about a mile above the village, where the river contracts somewhat, passing out from behind a high headland on the west bank. Borings in the river bed showed nothing but sand and gravel strata for a depth of over sixty feet. A mile from the east bank stands Black Hawk bluff, composed of rock suitable for concrete work. At its foot are gravel hills. Altogether these offered an unlimited supply of materials for the construction of the great monolith which was to span the river.
"Plans for the structure were drawn up by Mead and Seastone, con- sulting hydraulic engineers of Madison, Wisconsin, and the engineering work was under their guidance and supervision. But the actual work in this, as in similar undertakings, was done by contract. Just as these are contractors who build bridges and office buildings and dig tunnels, so these are men who devote their efforts to the closing up of rivers.
MEASURED HIS STRENGTH AGAINST THE OLD WISCONSIN
"In a Chicago office building overlooking Lake Michigan you will find the man who has measured his strength against the 'Old Wisconsin' -and won. His name is James O. Heyworth. This is not the first river he has tackled, for dams of his building are to be found elsewhere in Wisconsin, across the raging streams in Washington and in the indus- trially awakened South. But in this case he had a real fight on his hands. One is not disappointed by finding in him lack of those pro- verbial characteristics of the fighter-the square jaw overshadowed by the stiffly bristling mustache, and backed up by some two hundred pounds of what appears to be real river man. Commenting one day upon the physical aspects of the problem which was before him, he remarked: 'It isn't the engineering features of the thing which give
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us the trouble. They are planned by engineers who know how the work should go in. Given a certain river to dam, with a certain bottom and known flow of water, the way of going about it is well understood. But it is the getting of the thing accomplished that is the nerve-wracking part. So many tons of concrete must be laid across the river-down so deep. If you could dump it all in at once the matter would be simple. But we have got to start at the two banks and work toward the center of the stream. As the false work progresses the river narrows and deepens and the water gets swifter. It roots and digs and tears. In a night, perhaps, high water comes. Out goes a cofferdam, a section of piling- everything you have been able to accomplish in weeks or months, maybe. And then it all has to be done over again. The disheartening repetition
HIGH WATER ON THE WISCONSIN (1911)
of it gets on the nerves of the men. At such times the personality of the men counts for a lot. Those boys have to hammer and pound and work to hold every inch they have been able to wrest from the river; some- times for forty-eight hours without a wink of sleep.
STEPS IN THE GREAT CONSTRUCTION
"It was in February, 1911, that the work on the dam site was begun. First a spur of railroad had to be built to bring in materials and machin- ery. A temporary office building and sleeping and eating quarters for the men were then erected. and an electric power plant. Electric power is necessary these days to carry on most efficiently great constructive operations and it is significant that in order to build this hydro-electric plant the first thing to be erected was a small electric power plant driven
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by steam engines. This temporary plant is of three hundred horsepower and has been running ever since. Its energy supplies light on both sides of the river, operates great centrifugal pumps and drives the ears which haul the materials for concrete from the distant bluff. Viewed from the heights above, the work as it stands today consists of five elements. At the west bank stands the power house three hundred and thirty feet wide; next to it a log and ice chute thirty-eight feet wide; then a lock thirty-five feet wide, and finally, on the lowland of the eastern bank, an abutment and embankment one thousand seven hundred feet long.
"It might be said that aside from the embankment, the foundations of the various sections, clear across the river, were built in a series of steel boxes, teelmically known as cofferdams. Steel interlocking piles were used in this work, which looked like great I-beams with edges tongued and grooved. to fit one into another. The power house coffer- dam and seetion of the main dam on the west side were attempted first. In building the former, the sections of steel sheet were driven down one after another to a depth of thirty to fifty feet on the upstream side and slightly less on the downstream side, and arranged to form a rectangular box reaching far down into the river bed.
"The water was then pumped from this cofferdam with great pumps going day and night. When it was clear, an excavation was made, twenty-one feet below low water, and piles were driven all over the bottom, seemingly a forest of them. When sawed off level on the tops they formed the bed upon which was laid thousands of enbic yards of concrete and rock. All together this made the foundation of the power house. Upon it was laid the massive concrete work for the gateways, draught tubes, etc., and, above all, the lofty brick building.
"This same method of cofferdam construction was employed on the other seetions of the work-progressing from each bank toward the middle of the stream. A total of over eleven thousand piles-were driven in the bottom of the river.
THE FIGHT AGAINST FLOOD AND ICE
"But this hasty summary of the methods of construction gives no idea of the difficulties actually encountered. In October, 1912, less than a year after construction had begun, the water commenced to rise. It went on up until it attained a stage six inches above the highest stage ever recorded. This was the first disheartening blow. The sheet piling for the power house was in place and part of the foundation piles driven. The river being considerably narrowed thereby, the depth and velocity of the water around the east end of the cofferdam became enormous. All the trestle work and two hundred linear feet of steel pil- ing went out, the steel sections of the latter being twisted and bent like reeds. Then the water subsided. However, there was but a short respite
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in which to view the damage. The water rose again, undermining the southeast end of the offerdam, which promptly slid off into fifty-eight feet of water. Then gorge ice began to run, adding to the damage, until the river finally choked up and froze over entirely, settling down to a normal stage. In succeeding years other floods occurred, but not as disastrous as the first. In one period of twelve months there were but eighty-five working days. Ice was a constant menace in the spring months. In the spring of 1913 it went out with a rise of water five or six feet above normal. Before it broke, for a mile above the dam, great bergs and blocks rose high above the water. This all let go within the space of five minutes, taking with it elusters of protective piling, together with a trestle of forty-foot I-beams and a sand pump on a barge. These were all deposited on the bottom of the river some distance down.
"As many as three hundred and ninety men have been employed at one time upon the work. They were largely foreigners-those who did the purely manual labor of excavating, laying the concrete and handling materials. There were men from Italy, Russia, Servia and Poland. For the most part they lived in their own camp, on the east side of the river. They bought their own foodstuffs, constituted themselves into little groups or messes, with one man in each group hired to do the cooking and the camp work. In this way they were able to live with the characteristic economy of their class-not more than thirty-five or forty cents a day for board and lodging. On the other side of the river were the more preten- tious quarters of the American element, with frame bunk houses, large dining rooms and screened doors and windows. Over there they paid four dollars and a half a week for board and room, and if a man desired the luxury of sheets he paid extra for the privilege.
"To the visitor, nothing, perhaps, was of more fascinating interest than to watch the little ears on the miniature railway as they shuttled back and forth over the line. They passed and repassed each other at the turn-outs, putting on brakes, stopping and starting-all without a sign of human agency, for there were no men upon them. This was an example of the Woodford system of electric haulage, used before in other classes of work, but here seen for the first time in the construction of a dam. A total of four and one-half miles of track was laid from the quarry on the bluff and the gravel pits and on across the trestle work to the yards on the west side. The cars were electrically operated by current taken from a third rail. The motors on the ears were started and stopped and reversed and brakes were applied by a system of electrical 'remote' con- trol. Four men in little towers had complete control of the system, through switching mechanism therein. For months these ears trundled back and forth, bringing rock from the bluff and sand and gravel from the pits to an immense storage pile at the conerete mixing plant. After it was mixed the concrete was transported by other ears out over the trestle and dumped in its final resting place.
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"In the small space of five years last past, hydro-electric develop- ment methods have been greatly perfected. The efficiency of such plants has in that time been raised fifteen per cent. The difference in the mean low water flow and the flood flow of a river had never been given its due consideration until within the last few years. The lack of sufficient spill- ways and adequate machinery to operate, properly and quickly, flood outlets has heretofore endangered water power developments. This im- portant provision is now being taken care of, so that, as at the Prairie du Sac plant, where the mean low water flow of the river is five thousand feet per second, and the high flood flow has reached seventy-six thousand second feet, this big difference is adequately taken care of by the installa- tion of forty-one gates, fourteen feet high and twenty feet wide, placed upon the top of the spillway section of the dam. This permits of control, for the best interest of the power, all stages of floods from small to large.
UNITS OF A GREAT SYSTEM
"Today (November, 1914), the work stands practically completed. It has taken a year longer than was at first estimated-all on account of a series of conditions in the river flow almost unparalleled in the history of the white man. Above the dam lics beautiful Lake Swenson *- named after Magnus Swenson, president of the power company. Through the power house are rushing the waters which will soon be turning the great hydraulic turbines of three thousand horsepower each, which will drive the electric generators. Four of these units are now being installed and are to be delivering current by the first of December. Transformers will step the pressure up to sixty thousand volts for transmission over a duplicate, three-phase line carried on steel towers. This line runs up the river to the city of Portage, some twenty-five miles. Here it unites with another similar line from the Kilbourn plant, situated just below the famous Dells of the Wisconsin. The combined transmission line then runs east and north from Portage to a point near Milwaukee, where junetion is made with the system of the Milwaukee Electrie Railway and Light Com- pany, which will be a large user of the power."
In 1915-16 a transmission line was built from Prairie du Sac to Madi- son and in 1917 another line was extended from the dam to Baraboo and on to Portage. This auxilliary line to Portage partly supplies Baraboo and provides against loss of power in case one of the lines should be damaged. Many farmers are provided with power.
PASSING OF THE STAGE LINES
As Sauk County-or the region now known by that name-was right in the well-beaten path of travel between the Great Lakes and the Missis-
"The name of the lake by a vote of the people in the immediate neighborhood, was afterward changed to Lake Wisconsin.
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sippi River; was an important sector in the system of great Indian trails which networked this region of Interior America, so before the coming of the railroads, the stage lines which passed through its terri- tory were widely known as necessary links in these chains of primitive travel, especially between Milwaukee and Chicago, Prairie du Chien and the lead fields of Southwestern Wisconsin and Northwestern Illinois.
The railroads gradually displaced the old stage lines, although there was a bitter fight for several years, and for some time after the steamears commenced to run on their fixed rails the old-timers preferred the slower accommodations of what became quite luxurious vehicles of travel. Several of the shorter lines, entirely within the limits of Sauk County, refused to permanently expire until they had tried the reviving effects of automobile equipment and in a few places, where the old-time mail routes were still in the hands of drivers, and the rural mail deliveries had not penetrated the territory, complete annihilation was deferred, at least.
TAVERNS AND STAGES
The taverns of the early days in Sauk County somewhat corresponded to the railway stations of the later period. Where they were and the names of their proprietors, with other related information, has been well told by J. H. A. Lacher, of Waukesha, in the 1914 Proceedings of the Wisconsin Historical Society. "Sauk County," he says, "was tavern territory until a late date, for the Chicago & Northwestern Railway did not cross it till 1872. The American House, at Baraboo, was con- dueted by J. Q. Adams in 1855, P. Van Wendell in 1856, and W. C. Warner in 1859; the Baraboo House, by Lyman Clark in 1855-56, and Hiram T. Mason in 1857. The Western Hotel, at the northeast corner of the public square, built and formerly managed by Col. E. Summer, was kept by W. Wallace in 1856-58; the Exchange House by Volney Moore in 1857-59. At Reedsburg the Mansion House, built in 1855 by Dr. Mackey, was conducted from 1856 to 1859 by J. and A. Smith, who also owned the stage line to Baraboo. The Alba House, built in 1856 by Alba B. Smith, was bought in 1857 by Reuben Green, who also had the stage line to Kilbourn. At the Baxter House, Prairie du Sac, D. K. Baxter in 1857, and for years thereafter, maintained the good name established by Steinmetz & Fife. O. Elmer ran the Chicago Inn at Delton, and J. Q. Adams, previously of Baraboo, the Dell Creek House at Newport."
W. W. Warner of Madison, a resident of Baraboo in his youth, sends the following: "W. C. Warner, my father, kept the American House in Baraboo in 1859. While I am not sure, it is my recollection, that I mentioned this fact in my reminiscences of Baraboo days some time ago and which was indulgently published by you in the News. I think
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I did not give the date, however, in fact I was not quite certain as to that. In '59 I was just nine years of age and naturally had a vivid recollection of important events at about that time when they make such a lasting impress on one's memory. The writer of the excellent article in the 'Proceedings' might have mentioned a large hotel that was eondueted by some one whose name I cannot reeall on the south side of the river, not far from the old Red Bridge which was comfortably covered, by the way, and a good loitering place for boys. This hotel stood on the present site of the brewery at the northwest corner of Walnut and Lynn streets. There was still another hotel which very many of the older residents of Baraboo will still remember as the Wis- consin House, or Tobler's Hotel, and which surely as far baek as '56 was conducted by the Frenchman particularly known as French Pete. If memory serves me correetly, Mr. Tobler succeeded to the business after the death of the Frenchman. Still later, I believe, one Mueller, a German, conducted the hotel. There was also along in the fifties and late sixties, for that matter, a well patronized hotel, or tavern, at Lyons. Right well I remember that it had a very considerable run of business before the advent of the railroad at Baraboo. The word 'hotel,' at least at the present time, refers to something quite unlike its veteran pre- decessor, the tavern, which good old English word was quite good enough and expressive enough for the taverns or inns in the villages and smaller cities and along the various country highways of relatively ancient days in the United States, and for centuries, of course, in Eng- land; or rather let me correct myself by adding that 'inn' is the more correet English word, as all know from frequent allusion to the popular tarrying places mentioned by Shakespeare, e. g., the Tabard Inn. The word inn has its exact counterpart in the German 'Hof' or 'Gasthof,' Hof meaning literally courtyard or enelosure, and goes back naturally to the time when travelers, whether horseback or by animal-drawn vehicle, literally corralled their animals and conveyanees in the 'hof.'
"Of course, tavern comes from the French, taverene, and from the older Latin word, taberna, which means a hut, booth or tavern. The Latin word, taberna, a word or sign which probably referred to the en- seigne, or ensign, or board containing the sign of a boar's head, per- haps, or something else calculated to stimulate the gastronomie imagina- tion of the passer-by.
"But I am straying far away from my subject. I thought it might in some small degree interest you to have your attention drawn to this item from fifty-six years ago in the history of beautiful and interesting Baraboo."
No RESPECTERS OF OLD AGE
A few years before the railway was due to reach Baraboo, Reedsburg and other centers of importance in Sauk County, the lively up-to-date
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boys at the county seat decided to have some sport at the expense of those faithful old friends of their forefathers, the Concord stage coaches. W. W. Warner, who was one of the cut-ups, tells the story: "This was," I should say, "about 1868-69. Who, among the boys who par- tieipated in that famous escapade, may ever forget! Be it known, there were some fifteen or twenty antique, superannuated Concord stage coaches which, had been one after another placed, so to speak, in dry- dock and out of commission, having outlived their further transporta- tional usefulness, and thus they were housed in a rambling series of sheds, just back of the present city hall. We young chaps, the day after . a Fourth of July celebration, conceived the idea of decorating Oak Street with the dilapidated vehicles. Some of the chariots, I remember, bore euphonious names such as Argosy, Prairie Queen, Western Monarch, etc. Those who remember the one-time resplendent coaches, gorgeous beyond the dreams of a Ringling-circus creation, will recall that they were integers connecting Baraboo with relatively near-by points of the outside world, such as Madison, Mazomanie, Portage, Kilbourn City, etc., as the St. Paul Road was pushed further northwestward on the La Crosse Division, or westward on the Mississippi River Division. Of still more ancient history, Janesville was a point of departure, and I remember right well taking passage thence by coach with my parents en route from Pennsylvania; as also, on another occasion, from Portage, and yet later on from Kilbourn. Distinctly I recall the beautiful flower- strewn, virgin prairie, extending almost from Janesville to Madison.
"But to return to those Concord stage coaches! It was long after midnight when we scamps, as expeditiously and as quietly as possible, hauled forth a score of the nondescript vehicles from their moorings, to the Western Hotel street corner, and thence made an imposing string of them, reaching almost to the present postoffice site and a fine spectacle they presented early next morning! Not many of the citizens of Bara- boo were aware that such antideluvian chariots were in existence, much less that they were right here in Baraboo. The general astonishment, therefore, may well be imagined. What opportunities were lost in their destruction, shortly after this, their last public appearance, for securing matchless museum antiques! But soon trouble-our trouble-began. Somehow the city officials and many of the older and more staid, law- abiding citizens, did not take kindly to such deviltry, and public resent- ment was quite general, while diligent efforts were at once put forth to apprehend the several juvenile malefactors involved in the disgraceful escapade."
MADISON TO BARABOO LINE
One of the most popular old stage routes was the one which ran from Madison to Baraboo, and one who much patronized it and thoroughly enjoyed it, was the late Peters Richards, of Lodi. The venerable gentle-
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man was glad to write about it, several years ago, as is evidenced by the following communication, originally published in the Baraboo News: "Old men, like the writer, are much inclined to live in the past and find in retrospection fully as much pleasure as in the events going on around them every day, but of which they do not feel that they are a part- that younger men have crowded them out and taken their places, and they are mere spectators-'not in it,' as the saying goes. This feeling among men and women who have reached the age of four-score is, I think, pretty general. It is more pronounced in my case, perhaps, by the physi- cal infirmity that shuts me out so completely from familiar intercourse with the men I see about me daily, and with whom I would be glad to sit on the benches in the park and talk over old times and events, as I judge they often do.
"From all this you will readily understand that I was glad when I received your letter inviting me to write what I know of the old stage line between Madison and Baraboo away back in the '60s, and of which the late James Cowles was the proprietor. It was my pleasure to ride with him many times between Madison and Baraboo before and during war times, and I knew his ways and customs, perhaps, as well as any man who was not in his employ or a regular passenger over his route.
"You ask what sort of a stage he drove and I reply that if you take the present Kilbourn stage and paint it red, put a pair of bay horses, or perhaps occasionally a sorrel, before it, and you have as good an illus- tration of his rig as I could give you. Mr. Cowles' route, however, was a much rougher one than I judge the Kilbourn one to be and three or four times as long, and the vehicle he drove suffered correspondingly from the roughness of the roads. Mr. Cowles was a careful driver, however, and it is not surprising that his stage lived so long and served its purpose so well.
JAMES COWLES AND HIS ROUTE
!
"Mr. Cowles' route led him first, going south to Merrimack where his mail was first changed at the postoffice and where he crossed the river thence to Okee, and then to Lodi, where he usually arrived a little before twelve o'clock, fed his horses and took dinner. He had to put up with considerable fault-finding from the proprietors of both hotels, the Mills House and the Northwestern, both of whom occasionally accused him of running in the interest of the other house. He professed the strictest neutrality and I believe he was perfectly honest in that, as in all other matters. His first stop after dinner was at Harvey postoffice at what was then called Hundred Mile Grove and may be today for aught I know; but Dane postoffice has taken the place of Harvey. Next came Lester postoffice, about three-quarters of a mile from where Waunakee now is. This latter place was then an extensive wheat field. Then came
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the Westport postoffice near the catfish bridge. The postmaster, a Mr. Hinrichs, I have seen recently-within a year or two-in Lodi, where he visits a brother occasionally. Madison came next, where his route ended and was usually reached about seven o'clock, in time for a late supper, after a drive of about twelve hours.
THE OLD MATT'S FERRY
"The price paid for his ride was $2.50, cheap enough for twelve hours' ride, though we can go now in the cars for less than half that sum, but the ride is only about one hour, so you can see Mr. Cowles' passengers had the best of it. You mentioned the ferry in your letter and wished to know how we crossed the river and how long it took us.
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