USA > Wisconsin > Sauk County > A standard history of Sauk County, Wisconsin, Volume I > Part 54
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"Here was trouble sure, and the purchase of another expensive cable seemed unavoidable. At this juneture Nathaniel Burgess, an old salt water sailor, modestly suggested that he thought he could splice this ยท cable even if it was wire. He was given permission to try, and suc- ceeded so well that the cable was still in use the last I knew. Mr. Flanders was so overjoyed at this great saving to him that he opened his heart and also his purse and gave Mr. Burgess a quarter, which, I think, proved to be a good one. It would take many pages to write half my memories of happenings in connection with this ferry.
"It was in truth 'the key to the situation' and about all that in any way relieved the stagnation of the little town. The arrival and departure daily of the stage, running from Baraboo to Madison was an event that commanded the attention of every man, woman, child and dog in the place. People who were never known to get a letter arrived ahead of time and watched the postmaster change the mail, inquiring of him if there was anything for them, going away openly doubting his veracity when he said 'No.' This stage carried passengers as well as mail and it was a long, uncomfortable day's ride to Madison, where now the trip can be made in an hour in comfort.
"It comes to my mind how I once crossed on this ferry going to visit a boy friend who lived just across the river. The river was high and the bottom land between where the ferry stopped and the bridge was under
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water. Too bashful to ask to ride I attempted to wade. Finding the water too deep, I mounted an old slab and with a pole undertook to ride there, with the result that my slab slipped from under me and I was dumped in water over my head. I did as most do when supreme aid is wanted, and called on God to help me .. My prayer was answered in the usual way, by my helping and swimming in some way to a stump, which I crawled upon and called lustily for human help, which was soon given me by some men passing in a boat. I was taken to the bridge and went on my visit, although wet to the skin. I couldn't swim for a long time after this and was never noted as a leader in prayer meeting. Nor was it a case of early piety as the ferryman, in answer to my mother's rebuke for allowing me to make the effort, said he told me to stay on the boat and I told him to go to -, as I could take care of myself. He was known as a man of veracity, so I never disputed him.
"Indians were more often seen in those days, and they made regular trips to Madison to draw the annuities and supplies. They could cross without charge when no paying custom was waiting. The time they had to wait was used by the squaws begging from house to house, the bucks lying on the ground smoking and grunting, the boys shooting pennies from split sticks with bows and arrows. The few boy friends I had and myself would study their bows and arrows, how they were made and trimmed, how they held them when shooting, and copying after them as well as we could. When these Indians returned from Madison decked out in their new bright green, red and blue blankets and fresh paint on their faces, they were a sight to be remembered.
"I call to mind the crossing on the ferry of the first volunteers from Baraboo, who enlisted for ninety days expecting the trouble would all be over in that time, the remark of a southern sympathizer that he hoped they would get their heads broken, he having to retire to save his own. I also remember their return after Bull Run had taught its lesson. Again I recall the crossing here of the company from Delton, going to join the Twelfth Wisconsin. They had to wait in crossing and built a bivouac by the river, around which they gathered, and we boys close enough to listen to what their captain, who had seen service, told them of what was in store for them. Many had their wives, and I was old enough to realize the agony they endured in parting, perhaps for- ever. That war was what General Sherman afterwards said it was. I knew them. These are but a few of the many things so firmly impressed on my mind as never to be forgotten."
TOWN OF WESTFIELD AND LOGANVILLE
The first scattered settlers of the Town of Westfield selected their homes only four years before Chauncey P. Logan built his log cabin on the southeast corner of section 8, near Narrows Creek, on the site of the
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village which afterward took his name. That was in February, 1854. R. B. Balcom soon joined Mr. Logan and the two, with their families, lived together for several years. A number of others came in the sum- mer of 1854 and during the season William Palmer erected the first frame house in the village. Mr. Logan and S. N. Kinsley, another of the new arrivals, commenced to build a dam and sawmill, and in the following spring the mill commenced sawing and a postoffice was estab- lished at the settlement called Loganville. As Mr. Logan thereby had enough honor, Mr. Kinsley was appointed postmaster. The two then built a schoolhouse at their own expense, which the district afterward bought and Mr. Kinsley was the first to teach in it.
Rev. S. A. Dwinnell, a Congregational minister, held the first religious services of the village in Mr. Logan's log cabin, the Baptists and Pres- byterians organized churches within the next five years, and in 1861 Messrs. Palmer and D. J. Mackay added a gristmill to the other useful institutions of Loganville. In the meantime the German Lutherans had organized churches several miles southeast of the village, and the' so- cieties were afterward induced to move their headquarters to Loganville. As the country developed around it in an agricultural way the village was recompensed for the loss of its sawmill by the establishment of other industries. It has now a flour mill, an auto, repair shop, a milk receiving station, four or five good stores, and a bank. The last named -the Loganville State Bank-was founded in November, 1915, and there has been no change in the following management: William Rig- gert, president; C. Koenig, vice president; John Riggert, cashier. Its capital is $10,000; surplus, $2,000; undivided profits, $1,500; average deposits, $140,000.
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CHAPTER XXI
VILLAGES THAT WENT WRONG
INDUSTRIAL COLLAPSE OF DELTON-MADE WAGONS, STOVES AND FARM IMPLEMENTS-HOP BOOM AND TWO FOUNDRIES COLLAPSE-VICTORIA WISCONSIN PECK HAWLEY (LATELY INTERVIEWED)-OLD NEWPORT (BY MRS. MARY MARKHAM JENKINS)-NEWPORT TRANSFERRED TO KILBOURN-STORY OF NEWPORT (BY W. S. MARSHALL)-THE OLD- TIME LUMBER RAFTS-TRADING POINT AT DELL CREEK-NEWPORT CHRISTENED-WISCONSIN HYDRAULIC COMPANY ENTERS-NEWPORT GIVEN THE "GO BY"-COULD NOT BELIEVE THE TOWN DEAD-LAST FLARE OF THE TORCH-THE DESERTED VILLAGE OF TODAY-FADED IRON INDUSTRIES OF IRONTON.
The Town of Delton, as a subject of history, is chiefly noted for "what might have been" in the way of commerce, manufactures and cities. Newport is only a memory and the Village of Delton is so shrunken from its former dimensions as a manufacturing and business town as to be almost a thing of the past. The rise and fall of New- port has been traced in the railroad chapter, and therefore the writer will not repeat a consecutive story of its hopes and their collapse.
INDUSTRIAL COLLAPSE OF DELTON
The accounts of Delton's collapse are hardly less sad, as illustrative of the mutability of human plans and institutions, however solidly they seem to be buttressed by their projectors. The record of that village stretches from the building of the first dam and sawmill on Dell Creek by Fox & Topping in 1850 to the going out of the Sarrington and the Timme dams before the flood of June, 1917. Not only were the own- ers of the flour mills badly crippled by the eatastrophe, but numerous hotel keepers and cottage owners suffered; for the beautiful Mirror Lake region had been transformed from the bustling activity of the factory to the strenuous exertions of pleasure seeking and recreation.
MADE WAGONS, STOVES AND FARM IMPLEMENTS
What Delton once was is told by one who once lived in its noise, stress and excitement. The legend runs in this wise, as recorded in the Baraboo Republic in 1913:
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" 'Manufactured in Delton, Wisconsin.' This is a legend which was once almost a household word throughout central Wisconsin. If you should happen to come across it today you would surely wonder what it means. Time was, fifty years or more ago, when it was regarded as a guarantee of quality. It was then to be found inscribed on good farm wagons, two-seated buggies, great two-wheeled ox carts, fanning mills, cast iron plows, elevated-oven cook stoves, cast iron heating stoves, heavy stoves for hop drying, hop presses, hop pole sharpeners, sorghum grinding mills, cauldron kettles, stove hardware, etc.
"While rummaging among the stowaways on an old Sauk County farm one day last summer I came across the above phrase spread across the hearth of an old, discarded elevated oven stove and it appealed to me, like a call from the long ago, to record, 'lest we forget,' the fact that our little village here on Dell Creek was not always the sleepy little cross-roads burg which it appears to be today. The desire to tell some of these old-time activities of Delton is my excuse for this letter to the 'Republic.'
"Early in the '50s Thompson & Holmes were extensively (for that period) engaged in the manufacture of wagons, buggies and carts in Delton. The product of their factory found a ready sale among the early settlers of Sauk county and of the counties north of Sauk. They manufactured good, honest articles and of a class which seemed to out- last the same kind of goods we get today. But as the country grew older, and the iron horse began to bring this country into closer touch with the outside world, handmade goods had to give way before the in- roads of machine made. Holmes moved his portion of the wagon works to Rushford, Minnesota, and there built a larger factory, and after a few years again moved to Winona, Minnesota, where the Rushford Wagon, once the Thompson and Holmes wagon, of Delton, is now manu- factured by the Rushford Wagon Works, a corporation of national reputation. Their wagons are on sale from Canada to Texas, all over the south and west. What is left of the old shop is now Delton's one blacksmith shop with one forge, one small wagon repair shop, one bench and one and sometimes two, men as the whole working force.
"In the '50s the business of manufacturing grain cleaning machines, or fanning mills, was carried on in Delton. Sidney Ayres invented an improvement in this kind of machinery, making what was called a vibrator machine. As wheat growing was then the main business of all this portion of the state, where farms were opened, the wagons sell- ing the Delton Fanning Mills canvassed the surrounding counties and sales were quite extensive. The writer has in early days driven as far away as Wonewoc, Spring Green, Sauk, and in fact over the country for fifty miles around, selling Delton Fanning Mills. But time went, the cinch bug came, wheat growing became unprofitable, and the fanning mill factory faded away.
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"Along the northern border of the village, through the deep ever- green bordered ravine, runs Spring brook. In the middle '50s Clement & Adams built a dam across this brook at a point about midway between where the iron bridge now spans the ravine and where the new fill for the state and county macadam road has been thrown across it. The dam was built of logs and the ravine at the site of the dam was narrow enough for the logs used for the cross-ties to reach clear across from bank to bank. This dam was about twenty-two feet high, making a head of water something like twenty-four feet. Below the dam they installed an old-fashioned wooden water wheel, just such a wheel as you have seen in the engravings of 'The Old Mill.' On the south bank of the ravine they built a machine shop and higher up, on the bank, a foundry. The Delton Foundry & Machine Shop was installed. The writer well remem- bers the evening when the first heat of melted iron was drawn off the melting furnace, or cupola. It was a red-letter night for Delton. Nearly all the inhabitants were down there to see the beginning of what all thought was to grow into a great industry for the village. Among the products of the new foundry was a eook stove, the first in Sauk county and the first, I think, north of Milwaukee in Wisconsin. From the first the business was a success. Wagon plates, sleigh shoes, heating and cook stoves, sorghum grinding mills, castings for farming mill machin- ery, foot lathes, iron turning lathes, finally water wheels, and, when the hop boom struck Sauk County, hop stoves, pole sharpeners, prods for setting hop poles, and many other things were manufactured at the Delton Foundry. They even manufactured a six-pounder cannon, mounted it like an army field piece and with it we used to celebrate the victories of the Civil war and awaken the echoes on the morning of the national birthday.
HOP BOOM AND TWO FOUNDRIES COLLAPSE
"Along in the early '60s another foundry and machine shop was added to the industries of Delton. This was located at the old gristmill. It is now the Sarrington mill. The hop boom ended in 1869. With it died both of the Delton foundry enterprises. The most of the machinery from the first foundry was moved to Rushford, Minnesota. The other foundry continued to be run in a perfunctory manner for a few years but was finally shut down. A few years ago a high water on the Spring brook took out the foundry dam and at this time there is hardly a vestige of the old building left. Time has erased nearly every trace of the second foundry. A few stones of the walls of the moulding room can still be seen, marking the site, and one of the old buildings is used for a store shed at the Sarrington mill.
"Now an old resident has almost to hold up his right hand and take oath to any statement made to a stranger that Delton was ever a manu- facturing village and one of considerable note."
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VICTORIA WISCONSIN PECK HAWLEY (LATELY INTERVIEWED)
In the chapter on Baraboo the participation of Victoria Wisconsin Peck in the founding of the place and the opening of the valley to family settlement is told at some length. The sequel to the narrative is found in the subdued Village of Delton; for there the lady, now vener- able and ready to be born into another state, resides, and was visited
MRS. S. A. HAWLEY AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY First white child born in Madison, Wisconsin
by O. D. Brandenburg, editor of the Madison Democrat, in August, 1917. The result of this interview is reproduced :
"The first white child born in Madison now lives in a humble little one-story frame house, like a thin summer cottage, on a sand knoll, some few hundred feet from beautiful Mirror lake, in the village of Delton, a dozen miles north of Baraboo. Justiee R. D. Marshall of the supreme court has a mammoth farm a mile or so away. She is Victoria Wiscon- sin Peck Hawley. Her first husband was Nelson W. Wheeler, a lawyer. She has been married to S. A. Hawley eighteen years.
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"Mrs. Hawley was born about 200 feet distant from the East Madi- son depot of the Milwaukee railway, on September 14, 1837, five months after her parents came, therefore will be eighty years of age next month. She is in good health physically, but it was difficult to get from her, when I saw her last Sunday, a coherent story of any nature. Conducted to the little screened-in front porch by her husband from the one room which the house contains, she hesitated to emerge and actually drew away out of sight, not timidly, but rather defiantly. Her husband finally persuaded her to come out. For perhaps three minutes she sat opposite me talking-by no means intelligently-then rose and abruptly disappeared, her husband coming to take her place; but in a minute more she popped into the doorway again, thumping the floor forcefully with her eane.
"I had asked her something pertaining to her childhood.
" 'The records were all in a trunk,' she broke forth. 'When we were galavanting round, Hawley and me, we lost the trunk. I took the key to Ruggles (a Baraboo attorney) and told him to get the trunk, but it had gone to Omaha and so all maw's books and papers were lost,' and she whirled and walked swiftly back from the door.
" 'We didn't lose any books,' said Mr. Hawley calmly. 'We have them in the bottom of a trunk in there now,' and he inelined his head toward the room, but he had scarcely finished when his wife again appeared and repeated the same statement; and this she did many times during the hour that I was there.
"I asked her when her mother died.
" 'I swan, I forget?' Then she burst out again. 'I shall be glad when it is all over and I am gone too. Maw and I onee went down to the Madison state fair and an old Irishwoman came out of a house and said: "I was the first white ehild born in Madison," and maw said "You were, were you?" ha-ha,' and Mrs. Hawley turned and again dis- appeared.
"Soon she came to the door. 'Hawley there,' she said 'is a late set- tler. He don't know anything,' and she vanished, and again reappeared. 'Abe Wood had a daughter Maggie born in Madison and they elaimed that she was the first white child born there, but she wasn't. Abe Wood's wife was a squaw, a Winnebago Indian. I was the first white ehild born there and I wasn't very white either. Abe Wood was an awful fighter but good hearted. He would give away anything he had, but when he got drunk he was awful. My maw was born in Vermont and paw in New York. Everybody comes round here picking up things. Even some schoolgirls were here and they got it that maw was a squaw, but she wasn't. The papers have had a lot of stuff about us, but all the reporters know is what they are told by those who know nothing.' Mrs. Hawley is in error about her father's birthplace. It was at Shoreham, Vermont, the date 1804, but he was taken to New York in childhood.
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"Mr. Hawley, who is twenty years younger than his wife, amiably explained that Wood's daughter was named Maggie and that she was born at Squaw Point on the eastern shore of Lake Monona and that she was indeed the daughter of a Winnebago woman. She was married twice, the first time to Charles A. Perry, whom she divorced, and then to a man named Gardner of Nebraska; and there she died a very few years ago.
"Maggie's mother was married twice also, the first time to a French- man and they had a daughter Sarah. According to Mr. Hawley, Wood became ashamed of his Indian wife and her daughter Sarah, a French- Indian halfbreed, and took them north to the Indian reservation, how- ever leaving Maggie at Baraboo to be educated like white girls are. He was very sensitive in defending Maggie and in early days at Baraboo had violent quarrels with his neighbors over what he regarded as social slights to his daughter. Wood long years ago fell backward from a wagon and broke his neck.
"The Hawleys visited Maggie some years ago and Maggie later vis- ited them.
"The interview, however, was not without at least one significant feature. Mrs. Roseline Peck, the first white woman in Madison and the mother of Mrs. Hawley, in a paper which she wrote more than fifty years ago, stating that her husband, Eben Peck, deserted her in 1844 and that she never directly heard from him afterward. Mr. Hawley said, however, that many years ago Mr. Peck wrote to his wife from California and wanted to come back, but that she would not have him. He had run away, she said, and left her to bring up the two children and now he could stay away.
" 'He wrote at least three letters,' added Hawley. 'He was in the honey business in California and wanted to sell honey to his son Victor, who was then running the eating house at the West Madison depot in Madison. The children would not allow him to come back either.'
"This is new information about Eben Peck. It had been reported that he was killed by Indians on the plains, but Mrs. Peck in her remin- iscences of 1860 said that 'the last reliable information, but once, that I got from him was by a letter received from him by a citizen of Madison, some six or seven years after he left, stating that he had a wife and five or six children in Texas.'
"The Hawleys resided in Baraboo many years. They have lived at Delton for one year.
" "Are you here permanently ?' I asked.
" 'No,' said Mr. Hawley, 'we won't remain here this winter,' but he did not appear to know where they would go.
"He is a cement contractor. Mrs. Hawley is a little woman, short of stature, and very slender. 'She has weighed 110 pounds,' said Mr. Hawley, 'but now she weighs only 97.' But she didn't have the appear- Vol. 1-34
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ance of weighing even 90. Her figure is straight and she was gowned in a simple blue wrapper, buttoned from neck to floor behind with a safety pin occasionally where buttons used to be.
"She is quite deaf and very nervous. Her hair is gray and sparse, eyes blue, almost gray.
" 'She reads without glasses, and eats well,' said Mr. Hawley, 'more than you or I, and sleeps three-quarters of the time.'
" 'Mrs. Hawley broke her ankle some seven years ago. I gave her a diamond ring,' said Mr. Hawley, 'and she had a habit of tying it up in a handkerchief, getting on top of a stepladder and putting it through a trapdoor into the attic. One day while she was doing this the step- ladder doubled up and she fell, fracturing her ankle. We never found the diamond. The rats must have carried it off and the handkerchief too.'
"I called at this humble abode hoping to obtain an interview late in life from the first white child born in Madison, but I had come too late!
"Mrs. Roseline Peck, the mother, rode a pony into Madison, from Blue Mounds, arriving April 15, 1837, five months lacking one day be- fore Victoria was born. She was the first white woman here. The fam- ily moved to Baraboo in 1840. A son, Victor, was four years old when the Pecks reached Madison. He died here February 29, 1916, and Mrs. Peck at Baraboo October 20, 1899. She was born February 24, 1808, at Middleton, Vermont."
OLD NEWPORT By Mrs. Mary Markham Jenkins
To one who has never experienced it, the conditions of pioneer life must be as difficult to imagine, as for one who has never known the necessity of saving, to understand what poverty means; and I think in both cases something valuable has been lost out of life for each.
In the early '50s-in 1851-we came to Newport. There was no railroad west of Milwaukee. Coming from Delavan in October, we used our own fine team and thoroughly enjoyed the journey. In the summer previous, father had been taken in-in more senses than one- by a local promoter who had as rose-colored visions of what Newport was to be as any boom town in these days; and he left the lovely Town of Delavan for an imaginary city on the Wisconsin River. Father then rented Doctor Jones' house, now on Broadway, and was to have posses- sion in October. When we arrived Doctor Jones and his wife were calmly eating their supper, with no appearance of ever vacating their house, but they let us into the upright part of it. There was no door for the front doorway, but a blanket did as well for that, as for all the other doorways inside. If portieres had only been thought of then, we would not have minded the blankets so much. However, we soon had an outside door.
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Houses were so scarce that every family had to take boarders or let another family live with them. We lived there till our house was built, which is now the one where Henry Van Alstine lives. At first our parlor was upstairs on account of the unfinished state of the lower part, and we had a stove in it, with the pipe out of one of the windows. When the wind would change, my brother would carry the stove across the room and put the pipe out the other window. Don't think we felt the least unpleasant concern on any such account. Every one lived in some unusual way and "hope sprang eternal" in every breast.
There was not a sidewalk in town, and in the main street the sand was so deep that we always had to empty our shoes when we came home after going down town. There were many young men in Newport, at- traeted by the promise of a big town-speculators and professional men -bright and promising; and the sand in your shoes was forgotten when you stopped to chat in the street. Everyone was social and cheerful. Parties were generally held in the old hotel now standing. Everyone danced that knew how. There were no class lines; every one that was respectable was welcome. But that does not mean that intelligence was not recognized, and that there was not an inner circle quite as ready for the best things as now. We had a reading club-Van Steenwick, then consul for the Netherlands, a bachelor, whose house was the one Mr. Coon lives in now, was the chairman. We took the best foreign magazines, and the best of our country.
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