Wisconsin Hometown Stories

At the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers, the site of the city of Eau Claire, the waters flow through a confluence of two ecosystems. To the north and the east, the hardwood trees mix with the beginnings of a vast pine forest. To the south and west, a prairie landscape once supported large numbers of elk and herds of buffalo. And so that makes it a rich place, and a place that people want to be. In 1767, explorer Jonathan Carver noted yet another confluence. Two Native American tribes-- the Sioux and the Ojibwe-- both claimed the land, and Carver noted that the contested border was known as the "Road of War." They contested this area as much as anything for the control of the various wild rice fields, and warfare between these two Native American peoples lasted well into the 19th century. By that time, Europeans had begun to move into this area. In 1852, my great-grandfather, Thomas Barland, came up through Eau Claire, or what is now Eau Claire, where there was a confluence of two rivers, and he was quite impressed with that and the beauty of the setting that he thought that Eau Claire was going to be a large city, and so, he decided to have his farm here. There was some logging that was just beginning. "This village is new. "Almost all of the houses that are here "were built in the last year. "It is expected there will be 200 houses built this year. This is a fast place, and everything is fast in it." Lucy Hastings, 1857. 1855, there's a hundred people here, 1860, there's about 2,500 here. 1870, there are 10,000 people here. 1880, there are 20,000 people here. Fueling the explosive growth of Eau Claire was the lumber business-- harvesting the vast pine forest to the north, and especially the white pine. And the best estimates are that at least one-sixth of all white pine in the United States was located in the Chippewa River Valley. And its wood was particularly valuable for several reasons. First of all, like other softwoods, it floats, and because the primary transportation routes are rivers or shorelines, it was helpful to have a product that could just float itself to market. Eau Claire becomes very important in this because of geography. The Chippewa is a very wild river. In fact, it was often referred to as the "wild Chippewa." And it's navigable only as far as Eau Claire coming up the Mississippi. A few ships could get as far as Chippewa Falls, but they were very few in number. The rapids at Eau Claire made Eau Claire an obvious place to mill lumber because you could then create the rafts and so on that would go down to the Mississippi. But that wouldn't have been enough to make Eau Claire important, had it not been for the fact that Eau Claire is the area that has the best holding facilities for logs. Eau Claire has Half Moon Lake, which used to be part of the Chippewa River, but many thousands of years ago was separated from the River into a crescent-shaped pond that it only required a 1000-foot canal to be dug from the Chippewa River so that you could use it as a holding pond so that the logs could be saved there. The other thing that helped Eau Claire was that Eau Claire is at the very southern end of the white pine area and going south from Eau Claire and then crossing the Mississippi River, you have this large prairie area. And there is an incredible demand for the timber. Lumber mills lined the banks of the Eau Claire River. Mills were also scattered along the Chippewa River and also Half Moon Lake. Almost all of the mill owners of Eau Claire came from New England with perhaps a stop in New York. What we call "Yankees" or "Yorkers." Much of that area had been logged off so it wasn't nearly as plentiful, but that created a big group of people who had know-how, who had skills, who knew how to get the pine out of the woods, get the pine down the rivers, get the pine down the shorelines, and get the pine milled and to market. In 1856, Daniel Shaw shut down his mill in upstate New York, and moved machinery, horses, and logging equipment to Eau Claire. He purchased 10,000 acres of pinelands along the Chippewa River and began sawing lumber. On the other extreme, you have large numbers of very migratory labor that come into Eau Claire, often staying for only a year or two. My great-grandfather was one of those people. He came to Eau Claire in the 1880s, staying for a number of years and then went back to Illinois. But these are the people who would work in the lumber camps in the winter time and very often they would then migrate to Eau Claire and work in the mills during the summer months. Very often these people were single, they were also usually recent immigrants,

primarily from

Germany, Norway, you also have large numbers of Irish and the Canadians. And those young men were disorderly. They got arrested at the rate of about 200 per year or about one or two or three per night during the summers for drinking and disorderly conduct. And as the industry grew, the mills needed another reservoir to hold the logs. In the 1870s, they build a dam in what was then being called North Eau Claire and created Dell's Pond. And that then became the holding area for all of the mills of Eau Claire and to get logs from there into Half Moon Lake, they built a flume, which was kind of an above ground canal. Log drivers pushed logs out of Dell's Pond, and into structures that would funnel them to the dam, and into the wooden flume. Traveling down the flume, the logs dropped into a canal and turned the corner into a tunnel, that would then drop them into Half Moon Lake. With this elaborate system in place, Eau Claire would reach its peak of lumber production, sawing 250 million board feet of lumber in a year. The lumber industry rapidly built the young city of Eau Claire. What started off as three separate hamlets, divided by two rivers, slowly joined together to become one city. During that time, the steamboat era would come to an end, with the arrival of the railroads, which in turn, opened up new and distant markets. The fiddle music of the immigrant lumberjacks would take hold in dance parties in the city.

violin music

primarily from

While Ole Bull, a virtuoso as famous as any rock star, performed in Eau Claire's music hall. The lumber boom lasted only a few decades but gave Eau Claire a distinct and continuing identity. Everybody always remembers-- even though it's been a hundred years or more since lumber played a major role in Eau Claire's economy. I think every school kid in town knows that that was the start of it somehow. You're in the bunkhouse, and these are authentic bunks from the actual logging camp. They know about Paul Bunyan out there in Carson Park, and they know about lumberjacks. They may not know that much about the mills, all of the machinery is taken away, but everybody knows that the beginning of Eau Claire was lumber.