Wisconsin Hometown Stories

Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Eau Claire

2WEC0000HD_Wisconsin Hometown Stories Eau Claire Transcript

– This program is brought to you by the combined resources of the Wisconsin Historical Society and Wisconsin Public Television.

– On Wisconsin Hometown Stories: a city born at the confluence of two rivers, built up by the bounty of a rich pine forest, and rebuilt after the big trees were gone. A city transformed by eagles, integration, and improvisation. On Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Eau Claire.

[music]

– Major funding for Hometown Stories: Eau Claire is provided in part by Pablo Properties, Dick Cable Family, Ruder Ware, with support from Holiday Vacations, Presto Foundation John E. Kuenzl Foundation, Mark and Emily Blaskey in memory of Cheri Uelmen, Mel and Leann Breed, Sam and Suzy Murty, Trust Point, and additional support from Royal Credit Union, Eau Claire Community Foundation, including support from The Scobie Family Fund, The Daniel and Mary Ann Ogan Educational Fund, The Daniel F. and Margaret J. Brown Memorial Fund, Friends of Wisconsin Public Television, and the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

[music]

– 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.

[music]

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]

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.

[music]

– The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 triggered a series of events that would soon plunge the nation into a civil war.

– Now his election, of course, was the catalyst for the secession of southern states because they saw his election as a threat to the peculiar institution of slavery.

[cannon fires]

– Fire! The Confederates fire on Fort Sumter on April 12th and 13th of 1861. Lincoln comes out shortly after that, and issues a call for 75,000 volunteers.

– We were a young state, and full of people who were eager to, I think, prove their American-ness, prove their patriotism, full of young men because that’s who was coming to Wisconsin to work and coming to Eau Claire to work and this area, the greater Chippewa Valley, had a lot of volunteers.

– But at the same time, on a south fork of the Flambeau River, there’s a nest of eagles, and this is where the story of Old Abe starts.

– Chief Big Sky, of the Lac du Flambeau band of Ojibwa, spotted the nest, and decided that he would capture the eaglets.

– And he spends the better part of half of a day trying to chop this tree down, and he does, but in the process, he kills one of the eaglets. The other survives. He takes it captive as a pet.

– Chief Big Sky took the eaglet on a trading trip down the Chippewa, and near Jim Falls, he met Daniel McCann, who bought the bird to also keep as a pet.

– Eagles don’t make really great pets. We have to feed them rabbits and squirrels, and, of course, they love fish, so you have to feed them a lot of food. So McCann takes it down to Eau Claire and offers it to John Perkins, who later becomes the Captain of Company C. Now, legend has it that McCann pulls out a fiddle and plays “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and the bird sort of dances around and this impresses the men.

– I don’t think that actually happened. Nonetheless, they decided they wanted to acquire the bird as a mascot. What could be a better mascot than the national symbol?

– The volunteers of Company C were called to Camp Randall in Madison for further training, and brought the eagle they named Old Abe.

– It makes a great, very impressive mascot. You can imagine what it looks like at the head of this company as it marches into Camp Randall, band playing Yankee Doodle, the bird at the head of the company, the national colors flying, the regimental colors flying, the flags held great significance for the soldiers, but this goes beyond that. This is a living representation of the United States, and this is what these men are fighting for. They’re fighting to preserve the Union, and this is the physical embodiment of the Union.

– Eau Claire’s Company C joined the 8th Wisconsin Regiment, which moved south, and became known as the “Eagle Regiment.”

– And they spend their entire time during the war in the Western Theater. They go through Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

– The best documentation I’ve heard was that Old Abe saw 34 different battles. A number of smaller actions that are almost too numerous to list both battles at Corinth, Farmington, Iuka, Red River Campaign, Vicksburg, including the assault at Vicksburg, where the 8th Wisconsin came under very heavy fire and had to take refuge in a ravine and had to along with Old Abe. So if you can imagine the sights and sounds of battle, shells bursting overhead, bullets whizzing by, cries of men, and then you add the screeching of an eagle. It’s very martial when you think about it. The eagle for a long time has been used as a symbol of strength, fortitude. The Romans used the eagle as a symbol going into battle. It’s a martial symbol. It provides morale and incentive for the men of the 8th and is a rallying point for them when they saw this magnificent bird.

– As members of the Eagle Regiment neared the end of their three-year commitment, they decided they didn’t want Old Abe to re-enlist.

– They felt the bird had survived a number of battles, done its duty, and perhaps it was time to retire the bird from active service. The State receives it, Governor Lewis declares it an official war relic. They give it an apartment in the Capitol basement. Two rooms, and, I believe, a pool as well and a handler. Old Abe then embarks on his second career as sort of a morale booster. He appears at what are called “Sanitary Fairs.” Those are expositions to raise money for orphans of the war, wounded soldiers.

– And as the bloody devastation of the war, finally came to an end, Old Abe became a national symbol of the victory of Union forces.

– There were lots and lots of celebrations of the war that went on for many years and Old Abe was a featured attraction at many of these, so as more and more of these took place in more and more parts of the country then Old Abe got to be a bigger and bigger celebrity.

– Old Abe appeared at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, attended by millions of people.

– As far as I can tell, Old Abe thrived on public attention.

– The bird would thrill cheering crowds, by flapping its wings and calling. Handlers also taught it tricks, like autographing photos.

– He would peck it with his beak, and pierce it and that would be his autograph.

– But in 1881, tragedy struck, when a fire broke out in the basement of the State Capitol, and Old Abe died of smoke inhalation.

– He’s so beloved, so important to the people of Wisconsin, to this country, that they have him preserved. A taxidermist makes a relative likeness of the bird and that remains in the Capitol and is venerated as a relic of the war. Unfortunately, there is another fire in 1904 which totally engulfs the Capitol and destroys Old Abe once and for all.

– As the years went by, the story of Old Abe grew to become a legend. In Eau Claire, the eagle, and all that it stood for, remains a part of the city’s identity. Memorial High School’s sports teams are known as the “Old Abes.” The police department’s logo also features a likeness of the war eagle.

– The fact that the War is looked on as this defining moment for America creates this perfect storm, which means that Old Abe is a remembered bird. [music]

– In the 1880s, the lumber industry began to wind down, and Eau Claire’s dream of becoming Wisconsin’s second-largest city started to fade away.

– In the 1880s, you can already sense that the timber is not going to last forever. People start moving out of Eau Claire. And so, you get a very rapid decline in the population of Eau Claire.

– Between 1885 and 1890, a quarter of Eau Claire’s population left. So if you think of that in today’s context, you’d have 15,000 people leaving Eau Claire in a five-year period. So, I mean, that would really change the nature of the town.

– Despite the population drop, Eau Claire remained large enough to carry on as a regional service and retail center. And Eau Claire still had great railroad connections– with several lines, and as many as 75 freight and passenger trains a day passing through town. But it wasn’t enough to stop the economic decline.

– City leadership begins to realize that they are going to have to diversify. And that means Eau Claire has to become more of an industrial manufacturing city. People don’t think of anything other than that.

– Then we slowly reinvent ourselves, and we reinvent ourselves with small companies, generally.

– The rebirth began with the companies that Eau Claire already had: Like the McDonough Manufacturing Company, which continued to make equipment for sawmills. The Drummond Meat-Packing Company, originally started to supply the lumber camps, continued to expand, processing the livestock brought in by nearby farmers. The Phoenix Manufacturing Company, located near the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers, also made the equipment needed for sawmills, from the band saws to the steam engines and all the machinery and parts in between. Phoenix met great success building their own version of the Lombard Log Hauler, now noted as the first commercial vehicle to run on continuous tracks. Powered by a steam engine, and fitted with sleigh runners, the hauler was a kind of giant snowmobile, powerful enough to pull long loads of the remaining logs out of the forest. The taxpayers of Eau Claire subsidized some of the new industries, like the Eau Claire Pulp and Paper Mill, and a linen factory on the Eau Claire River.

– Various other companies start to develop that use wood as a product. There’s a number of box factories, which, prior to the cardboard age, is the way you ship things.

– Northwestern Steel & Iron Works began by making cement mixers, and the gasoline engines to power them. They expanded into making steel molds for casting concrete pipes.

– Ironworks that you cast concrete in, but they also cast concrete block, cinder block, and so, they made the forms to do that. They actually cast blocks to build their own new factory, and then built it with blocks they cast. They would make the form that you would then cast a funeral planter in. You know, so all of these sort of eccentric things. What do you do after the lumber industry collapses? Well, you do something inventive, and you hope that it survives. And maybe it branches out and makes other companies that then do become a big part of the economy.

– Northwestern Steel & Iron Works branched off from concrete machinery into making pressure cookers and canners. They got a boost when the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared pressure canning the only safe way to preserve non-acidic foods. And the coming of World War I made preserving food a patriotic duty.

– By the time you get to World War I, the National Pressure Cooker Company is producing 80% of all pressure cookers sold in the world.

– In the 1930s, the company designed a small pressure cooker with a twist-lock lid, sealed by a rubber gasket. Much easier to open and close, it was called “Presto,” and was the first stovetop pressure cooker convenient enough for everyday use.

– A part of the diversification of the city dealt with getting into industries that are often not seen as industry.

– The expansion of Sacred Heart Hospital, and the construction of Luther Hospital, signaled the start of a new age in medicine.

– The other industry that’s very important is the industry of higher education.

– The future UW-Eau Claire opened its doors in 1916, the last site chosen by the state for a teachers college, then called a Normal School.

– As in the case of most of these Normal Schools, the students were almost entirely women training to become teachers in one-room schools. But it got Eau Claire’s foot in the door of higher education.

– And as the automobile began to replace horses on America’s streets, a new industry began in Eau Claire. The Gillette Safety Tire Company chose to locate in the city, after a chance visit by one of the company officers.

– And he met with the Civic Association in Eau Claire, and they impressed him enough with the fact that Eau Claire had ample and cheap electricity. They had a good and reliable workforce, and there was no other tire industry within the area. All I can say was just a good chance, good fortune on Eau Claire’s part that it landed here.

– Raymond Gillette, a former sawmill manager from Michigan, formed the company to make a new, blowout-resistant tire.

– His brother, Herbert, who was more inventive than Raymond Gillette, came up with an inner liner for the tire, and they developed it into the Gillette Safety Tire.

– In 1917, company officers and local leaders looked on, as the plant manager ceremonially built the first tire.

– That got Eau Claire going because they had a different tire.

– Marketed with an old lumberjack expression– “a bear for wear”-

– Gillette’s tires lasted longer than other tires.

– Which was important because in the early years, if you got 500 miles on a tire, that was starting to push the maximum.

– The working conditions in the early Eau Claire tire plant and all of the tire industry, for that matter, was dirty. It was hard. It was unsafe. There was a lot of asbestos and dust and chemicals that nobody knew anything about. Sometimes, in the hot weather, if it was 90 degrees outside, it would be 110, 115 in some parts of the plant. There were people that were carried out and laid outside until they recovered and then would have to go back to work. It took many years for that to get better, but it, it eventually did.

– As Gillette began to merge with the U.S. Rubber Company, it won a contract to produce Riverside brand tires for retailer Montgomery Ward, followed by another to produce Atlas tires for the Standard Oil Company. They also began to supply up to a third of the tires put on General Motors’ new cars. The company also became the country’s biggest producer of bicycle tires.

– They used to advertise by comics, showing how their tires were so much better than everybody else’s.

– During World War II, U.S. Rubber sold the plant to the U.S. government, which converted it to make 30-caliber ammunition. When the government sold the plant back, U.S. Rubber began a massive re-conversion and expansion project. And after christening the new plant, the company declared it to be “the most modern tire plant in the world.” Now doubled in size, Eau Claire’s tire plant was ready for a post-war boom in tire sales that would last for decades. [music]

– Ski jumping came here in the late 1800’s, 1880s by Norwegian immigrants. And some of them settled here and started the-

– They called it the Dovre Ski Club in 1886. And that grew, was called the Eau Claire Ski Club in 1908.

– The next year, the National Ski Association picked Eau Claire to host the national championships.

– Barney Riley, an Irishman, won the junior class and he was famous because he was non-Scandinavian. And so everybody got involved in it, everybody took it up.

– Eau Claire’s La Moine Batson took it up to the highest levels, competing in the first Winter Olympics, held in Chamonix, France in 1924.

– And the Flying Eagles formed a junior club in 1932, I believe it was. And the janitor at the Mount Washington or Fourth Ward School at the time was Jimmy Ellingson, and he was a ski jumper. He got them together, and they formed a club– president, vice president, boys and girls, 10-11 years old, and they basically ran the show. In Eau Claire, it was the thing to do in the ’30s, during the Depression, it was a very cheap way to take part in sports. Skis were cheap, and that’s about all you needed. A Norwegian, Ole Gently, he made skis and he made skis for most of us.

– In 1936, hometown champion Jimmy Hendrickson, traveled with the U.S. Ski Jumping Team, and took part in the Winter Olympics, held in Bavaria, Germany. And during the Great Depression, the federal Works Progress Administration, or WPA, built a ski jump next to Eau Claire’s 4th Ward School.

– The need for a ski jump next to the school was mandatory almost because these kids wanted to ski. So they built a scaffold probably 40-, 50-feet high. And that was the first junior jump in town. That was the base of operations. The kids jumped before school, at noon they’d go out and jump, and then they got the lights the second year, I think, and skied all night ’til 9 o’clock or whatever. Nobody got hurt. It was a small hill, but it was a thrill to go down and fly through the air. I don’t think you’d see it today, probably from a safety aspect. The sport picked up because it became so popular. Hills were built on all sides of town-

– I think there were seven junior jumps in the town during the thirties. The Flying Eagles at that time became so famous they were called upon to go to major hills around the Midwest to perform, and they put on quite a show– these little kids, on the bigger hills. The two best skiers caught the name of the King and the Queen. The King was Oscar Severson. He was about three-feet ten, but he was just-

– His skiing was impeccable. And then the girl, she was Geraldine Hovland at the time, she was in a class of her own among girls.

– Some of the Flying Eagles grew to compete on Eau Claire’s bigger ski jumps, and would inspire a new generation of skiers in the years after World War II. Billy Olson, a Flying Eagle from the 1930s, would go on to compete internationally in the Olympic Games of 1952 and 1956.

– It was the breeding ground for champions, there was no doubt about it.

– With the steady development of junior champions, Eau Claire continued to fly with the best at events like the Nationals, held in Westby, Wisconsin in 1956.

– Newsreel: “The Nationals are off and away, down and out into space, and down again, as top competitors get away in zero weather before 10,000 fans at Westby, Wisconsin. Once in a while, a ski gets loose and goes on the warpath. Look out! Only man to exceed the 200 foot mark is the winner, Keith Zuehlke, of Eau Claire, the new national champ.

– In 1970, the Eau Claire Ski Club once again hosted the national championships on a new hill location called Silver Mine.

– Announcer: I might remind you also that this is the first time a national tournament has been held in Eau Claire, Wisconsin since 1909.

[crowd cheers and applauds]

With me today is Don Larson, President of the Eau Claire Ski Club. Don, how long have you worked on setting up this national tournament?

– Don Larson: Well, it’s taken about two years, Aldi, and…

– Over the decades, ski jumping survived through the efforts of a community of skilled volunteers-

– building the slides, and preparing the jumps for practices and events.

– With their backing, the Flying Eagles Ski Club encouraged the next generation of ski jumpers, like Reed Zuehlke, who visited Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in the White House and competed in the Olympic Games of 1984 and 1988.

– The Flying Eagles Ski Club, let’s hear it! The kid’s got talent. He’s going to go to the show. Ben Loomis.

– The tradition continued with Eau Claire Olympian Ben Loomis, who competed in the 2018 Nordic Combined event, pairing ski jumping with cross country racing. And like many kids growing up in Eau Claire, Blair Tomten learned to ski jump on the local hills. Her dad, former U.S. Ski Team jumper, Dave Tomten, taught Blair and her sister Berit the basics of the sport. As teenagers, they would pioneer a new movement, to open up ski jumping competitions to women. In 1995, Flying Eagles Berit and Blair Tomten and Kathy Mauch, jumped in a demonstration event at the world championships-

– the first step in a twenty-year quest to bring women’s ski jumping into the Olympic Games. Flying Eagle Elisabeth Anderson built on their efforts, joining the U.S. Ski Team, and competing in many international events. And after the Olympic Committee finally approved the sport for women, Elisabeth’s sister, Emilee Anderson, competed in the newly-sanctioned event, in the Youth Olympics of 2012– making Eau Claire and American history.

[bat clinks against ball]

– Announcer: And there it goes. Hammerin’ Hank hits a home run. And this one is special.

[cheers and applause]

– In 1994, Henry Aaron, member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the man who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record visited Eau Claire. He came to unveil a sculpture of himself as an 18-year-old ballplayer, just starting his climb to the Major Leagues, at Carson Park in Eau Claire. Like many cities, Eau Claire, has a long-time love of baseball.

– Some of the Civil War veterans returned, having seen the game being played on the East Coast, came back and brought the game back to Eau Claire, which was typical of around the Midwest at that time. And probably you could say Eau Claire has had a town team from mid-1860s until present day. So that’s a continuous run of 100 and [chuckles] almost 50 years of town baseball.

– With the help of the federal government, Eau Claire built a new stadium during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

– It really was a ray of hope for the city and this whole area to have this ballpark go up and say “Hey, we’ve got something beyond the Depression. We’re going to get through this and we’re going to have a beautiful place to watch baseball for years to come here.”

– Carson Park, in the middle of the old log-holding pond, became the home of the Eau Claire Bears, a minor league team that eventually became affiliated with the major league Milwaukee Braves.

– Dozens of players from our town teams or our minor league teams made it to the major leagues.

– But in 1950, the leadership of the Bears faced a crisis, when word spread that the Braves were about to send black ballplayers to play in Eau Claire. Just three years earlier, Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in the major leagues.

– Once Jackie successfully integrates Major League Baseball this now opens the door for other young African-American baseball players to move into the Major Leagues.

– In Eau Claire, the local Toastmasters club, debating whether or not black players should be brought in, touched off a firestorm on the editorial pages of the newspaper.

– But what was interesting about that is even though some people opposed it, what happened was is there was a bigger push against those people, saying, “No, Eau Claire is just like any other American city. We should be accepting of black ballplayers here and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to come here. So it was a controversy for a little while, but the first year there were two black players who came.

– They were having a little trouble finding a place for the players to live. One thing I read said that it just kind of disappeared before their eyes. And the team was trying to find a place. Well, they remembered that my dad had a rooming house.

– Marty Crowe, the coach of the Catholic High School, owned a large house and rented out rooms to help pay the bills.

– They said, “We’ve got four players “that need a place to stay. Do you have any rooms there?”

– “Yeah, send them over.”

– “Well, two of them are black.”

– “Send them over.”

– So, over they came. And one was Billy Bruton, who went on to play for the Milwaukee Braves, and then, there was another fella named Roy White.

– Billy Bruton and Roy White had broken the color barrier in Eau Claire, following the lead of Jackie Robinson.

– We wholeheartedly believe that Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier wasn’t just a part of the civil rights movement. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement. That is before Brown vs. the Board of Education. That is before Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a sophomore at Morehouse College when Jackie signed his contract to join the Brooklyn Dodgers organization. And so for all intents and purposes, this is what started the ball of social progress rolling in our country– baseball. And our country literally jumped on the coattail of baseball. So even though baseball had been vilified for not allowing blacks to play, when it opened its door, our country followed suit.

– Robinson began his professional career playing in the Negro leagues, for the Kansas City Monarchs.

– The Negro leagues were professional baseball for African-American, Hispanic baseball players. During that era of American segregation, African-American players were shunned from the Major Leagues, and so they formed their own league, right here in Kansas City in 1920. These leagues were created so that these great baseball players would have an opportunity to showcase their world-class baseball abilities.

– When Henry Aaron left Mobile, Alabama, he began his career in the Negro leagues, playing for the Indianapolis Clowns.

– And so, here’s a young Henry Aaron. By the time Robinson breaks the color barrier in 1947, he can dream of going to the major leagues. You know that dream is now planted, although his route to the Major Leagues came through the Negro Leagues.

– Impressed with his hitting for Indianapolis, the Braves signed Henry Aaron, and sent him to the Eau Claire Bears to see what he could do.

– He had never really been around white people in his life. He had lived in a black neighborhood. He had gone to black schools, lived in segregated society. And now he takes the first airplane ride of his life, ends up in Eau Claire, a city of 36,000 people that maybe has three black people at the most. It’s virtually an all-white city, and they say, “Okay, Henry, play baseball.” He said, “I was scared.” If people of Eau Claire hadn’t treated him well that summer, and he went back home, there would not have been the Henry Aaron that we know of who broke Babe Ruth’s record. I just truly believe that.

[bat clinks against ball]

– Henry Aaron: If I had not had the initiative to come here, and the people here in Eau Claire didn’t open their arms up to me and accept me, I don’t know what I would have done in baseball, even though I had the talent to play it. I just don’t know what would have happened to me in those next 23 years.

– He went from this guy who had never hit a white pitcher to hitting .336, being named Rookie of the Year… and being on the All-Star team, all in three months… So, he left Eau Claire with a lot of confidence, both personally and professionally. And I think that was the springboard to his entire career, really.

– I really feel just humble, appreciative that I had the pleasure of playing in Eau Claire, and playing here for people that, that appreciated me for my talent and that’s all I wanted them to do, was just appreciate my talent.

[music]

– In the decades after World War II, Eau Claire’s vibrant downtown steadily declined, as shoppers were drawn to new developments, like the London Square Mall of the 1970s.

– It seemed like such a big deal at the time. It was a high concept mall. Had a fountain in it. It had a little scale model of Big Ben. It had a record store and they had a bookstore. And you didn’t have to go outside in the winter to go between these various shops.

– Which really led to the decline of the downtown. That, that really hurt.

– In the late 1970s, a group of downtown leaders met to come up with new ideas, as they faced a new threat: a much bigger mall to be built on the outskirts of town. Based on the suggestions of local citizens, the group developed a survey for the general public and local business owners. The results of the survey were devastating.

– Good evening. Downtown Eau Claire is facing serious problems, and business leaders were made painfully aware of them today. The message from the Eau Claire consumer is clear. Downtown Eau Claire needs plenty of improvement before he’ll shop there more often. The survey lists consumer reasons for not shopping downtown and parking was on top of the list.

[marching band plays, cheers and applause]

– Balloons went up, confetti came down, and the North High School Band marched to the festive opening of Oakwood. Before the ribbon was cut…

– In 1986, the Oakwood Mall opened its doors, and downtown business owners found it even harder to compete. And five years later, adding to the woes of the historic downtown area, came a shocking announcement.

– I regret to inform you that the company announced today its plans to close the Eau Claire tire plant.

– The closing of Uniroyal / Goodrich, Eau Claire largest employer, would displace 1,350 workers, and end its $43 million payroll.

– In my position, I have to go up there and try and tell the people that there is a tomorrow. We’re going to get up in the morning. And, uh…

[purses lips]

– The downtown area was deserted.

– Bleak. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It was bleak. People threw their hands up. They didn’t want downtown to die, but they didn’t really know what the answer was.

– One answer came about with the renovation of the old State Movie Theater.

– And it was in the 1990s. I was part of the effort. I don’t think these are from roof leaks. To revitalize that building because we had created an Arts Council. We were looking for a performance venue. It was vital in helping to generate the increased interest in arts that we now have together with having the University of Wisconsin

– Eau Claire, which has a strong theater and a strong music department.

– The UW-Eau Claire music department began a jazz studies program in the mid-1960s.

– And then in 1968, Dominic Spera came [trumpet solo] and he was a professional trumpet player from New York. And holy mackerel! Things just went crazy after that. He turned them from a pretty good college band into a nationally-recognized jazz ensemble. They had tremendous need to win and prove themselves. In addition, I should mention The Joynt, which is a bar on Water Street and the owner, Bill Nolte, would hire traveling musicians.

– It was very exciting. We thought if we could do these shows and just break even, not try to make any money– only we never broke even, ever.

[chuckles]

So for whatever, from ’74 to ’91 I spent about every dime this place took in on music. And so Dizzy Gillespie played here and Charles Mingus played here. And that’s Phil Woods and that’s Gerry Mulligan, Freddie Hubbard, Ernie Watts, Bobby Hutcherson, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Jack McDuff and then Dave Holland, and Sam Rivers and Ndugu, Sheila Jordan, McCoy Tyner.

– And my students would just go crazy because they get to hear all these big-time people right in Eau Claire and that affected a lot of our progress. It really was a positive thing. [music]

– The study of jazz– combining the intense discipline of Classical music with the jazz form, and adding the art of spontaneous creation, or improvisation– resulted in many remarkable benefits for the city.

– A lot of our students then taught in local schools. [music]

– As the jazz program filtered down into Eau Claire high schools, Justin Vernon and some of his jazz band-mates decided to start their own band called Mount Vernon. Vernon would eventually bring acclaim to Eau Claire, becoming the leader of the highly successful band, Bon Iver.

[music]

A few years later, Zach Halmstad, who studied jazz piano at UW-Eau Claire, created a software company called Jamf to help organizations manage their Apple computers. He eventually set up shop in a storefront in downtown Eau Claire, and as the use of Apple products grew, so did Jamf. And as city leaders attempted once again to revive the downtown, they set their sights on Eau Claire’s point of origin– the confluence of the two rivers. But the place where they hoped to build a park suffered from decades of industrial use. Abandoned buildings and heavily-contaminated soil made development difficult and expensive.

– So the initial attempts were to just cap it to protect our citizens. And then, as we started looking at the future of downtown and what we could do to make it better, we started realizing that taking advantage of those two rivers might make sense. So at that point, we started investing in amenities like bike trails and parks and things like that.

– Throughout Eau Claire, we have just an amazing network of trails that run along the rivers throughout this community but that’s due to really a couple of decade’s worth of investment. But where they really become the most beautiful is when they are downtown. And so you see a growing number of trail segments being developed and new rail bridges being converted high, high above the Chippewa or the Eau Claire Rivers.

– A big break came when the Royal Credit Union decided to build a new headquarters building at the confluence, bringing in new tax dollars, and providing a reason to build Phoenix Park.

– We decided that we had to move forward. We had to try and do something that would attract new development back there. So, investing in that infrastructure was the key to doing that. As we were building the park, we also partnered with the local farmer’s market and they went and built a beautiful pavilion that we have thousands and thousands of people come downtown. So it was really infrastructure that generated people gathering and just is the focal point of downtown right now that people have adopted and feel so proud of.

-[singing]

• Oh, oh

– In addition to attracting the development of new housing across from the park, Jamf software built a new building for over 200 employees. The success in developing one side of the Eau Claire River led to a movement to build a performing arts center on the other. After a contentious debate, city and county voters passed referenda to fund the construction.

– This has been a matter of great debate, largely over who should fund it, but I think symbolically this is creating a new, almost-unknown Eau Claire at the juncture of the two rivers.

– That project helped catapult a number of other investments in downtown and it gave people the confidence that we were indeed, yes, moving very strongly in a new direction.

– Eau Claire’s growing identity as a music and arts destination rose to new heights when Bon Iver took home two Grammy awards in 2012.

– And then, when you have somebody who’s also so interested in continuing to support his community by putting effort into things and staying here and building a studio here and making this kind of a known destination. And then most importantly perhaps, is leveraging that success into the creating the Eau Claire Music Festival which immediately propelled us to just international awareness over the Eau Claire community in that it had this amazing festival here. The creativity and the collaborative nature of that festival, it just makes it a very interesting festival to cover for national music media and mainstream media as well. And so that story of Eau Claire and the “new Eau Claire” is starting to be told in some really exciting ways.

– And so it really has changed the economy here in some pretty drastic ways. We’re seeing people moving in to be able to be part of that art scene and part of that music scene, to have their opportunity. We’re compared to a young Austin where you can still get in and have an audience.

– Eau Claire went through three stages in its history reflected in the physical appearance of what we call ‘the confluence.’ I think that today the new development of the facilities in downtown Eau Claire in which the college, as well as the city and government and private initiative, have all contributed is remaking Eau Claire.

[music]

– To purchase a DVD of Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Eau Claire, call 1-800-422-9707 or visit the Wisconsin Public Television online store at the address on the screen.

– Major funding for Hometown Stories: Eau Claire is provided in part by Pablo Properties, Dick Cable Family, Ruder Ware, with support from Holiday Vacations, Presto Foundation John E. Kuenzl Foundation, Mark and Emily Blaskey in memory of Cheri Uelmen, Mel and Leann Breed, Sam and Suzy Murty, Trust Point, and additional support from Royal Credit Union, Eau Claire Community Foundation, including support from The Scobie Family Fund, The Daniel and Mary Ann Ogan Educational Fund, The Daniel F. and Margaret J. Brown Memorial Fund, Friends of Wisconsin Public Television, and the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.