SocialHistory

The information provided here was reprinted from Exploring Wisconsin's Waterways by Margaret Beattie Bogue from the 1989-1990 Wisconsin Blue Book.

Boscobel, Hwys. US 61, Wis. 133
The site of a short-lived logging operation in the mid-1840s, Boscobel originated as the speculative town-site of a railroad civil engineer who in 1854 along with 2 partners bought the land where the city now stands. Surveyed and named Boscobel from bosquet belle, French for "beautiful grove", village lots were ready for sale in 1856 when the railroad arrived late that fall. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the railroad was more important to the community’s well-being than the river. Scarcely a year after Boscobel’s founding, the depression which began in the fall of 1857 temporarily dampened development. The town made real strides during the Civil War and thereafter until the recession of 1873 again stalled the national economy. Boscobel served as a center of trade, commerce, and services for a reasonably wide farming area lying to its south and tributary to the railroad. In the late 1870s a railroad line built to Fennimore and Montfort deflected the highly productive Fennimore prairie area’s output away from the Boscobel market, but the construction of a bridge over the Wisconsin which opened traffic from the north in 1874 helped the community offset the loss.

Needing to issue bonds for bridge construction, Boscobel sought and received approval to incorporate a city in 1873. Boscobel, with a 1988 estimated population of 2,734, continues to be a trade and service center and has acquired several small industries as well. Since World War II the Wisconsin River has exerted a positive influence to the community with the increased utilization of the lower Wisconsin for recreation.
Boscobel has at times exerted an influence on state and national affairs seemingly out of proportion to its size. In 1898 the idea for the Christian Commercial Travelers Association of America, popularly known as the Gideons, originated here when 2 traveling salesmen had to share Room 19 in the Central Hotel. Both were serious Christians and Bible readers. They pondered the idea of forming a society to provide Christian traveling men with Bibles in their hotel rooms. The organizational meeting took place in Janesville on July 1, 1899. Fifty years later the Gideons had distributed 15.5 million Bibles to hotels and elsewhere.
Boscobel is the hometown of a leading Wisconsin Progressive, John James Blaine, who came to Boscobel to practice law in 1897, served as a Progressive Republican in the state senate, 1909-13; as governor, 1921-27; and as US senator, 1927-33. A thoroughgoing Progressive, he had more of a concern for civil liberties than many in that political fold. As governor of Wisconsin, he vehemently denounced the activities and philosophy of the Ku Klux Klan. His views and Klan activities in Wisconsin intersected dramatically at Boscobel when in July 1924 the county Klan held a large public meeting. At least 7,000 people roamed the streets and at day’s end the Klan held a parade. An elderly resident, a watchman by occupation and a Klan-hater by conviction, started unmasking the parading Klansman. He was knocked down and thereafter took a gun and tried to kill the offending Klansman. The gun misfired and the elderly man was arrested. Governor Blaine pardoned him and launched a tirade against the Klan that reached the pages of the New York Times. Blaine’s home, privately owned and undergoing renovation, is located at 307 East Oak.
Boscobel has a National Register site well worth viewing. The Old Rock High School, 207 Buchanan Street, built in 1898, is a beautiful example of Romanesque Revival architecture. It is 3 stories high and constructed of limestone from the Wisconsin River bluffs. It is the only remaining 19th century school in Boscobel, the largest built, and the school with the longest record of service, 1989-1984.
Crossing the river and continuing on Highway 60 the road runs southwest through Wauzeka, a village with an 1988 estimated population of 638, at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Kickapoo Rivers. In its glory in the late 19th century, Wauzeka was larger and a center for river, road and railroad-generated trade. Now in the early fall people often turn north at Wauzeka on State Highway 131 up the Kickapoo Valley and into the apple growing country of Gays Mills to buy the new crop by the bushel. From Wauzeka, a 15-mile drive leads to Wyalusing State Park which offers a magnificent view of the joining of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers.
Lower Wisconsin Scenic Riverway
At Prairie du Sac and Sauk City the hydroelectric dam built in 1914 holds back the natural flow of the Wisconsin River and creates Lake Wisconsin. Below that point, the river breaks from man-made barriers and winds its way uninhibited for 93 miles to the Mississippi. The natural beauty of islands, sandbars, woods, and bluffs gives an impression of unspoiled nature to the uncritical eye, and for the history-minded calls up thoughts of Marquette and Joliet. Remarkably free from commercial and residential use, the river attracts an estimated 400,000 people a year who find it a recreational paradise. In recent years, environmental and conservation groups and the Department of Natural Resources have studied ways this natural beauty can be retained and passed along for the enjoyment of future generations. Their concerns are well justified. As Harold C. Jordahl, Jr. pointed out in the spring of 1988:
The subtle slow changes taking place in the lower Wisconsin River Valley are hardly visible, day to day. The inevitable slow but continuous process of nibbling away is changing forever the intrinsic health, economic vitality and great aesthetic beauty of the valley; another billboard, a stone quarry, a highway cut into a cliff, a home on productive agricultural land, strip development outward along the highway corridors from the small villages, debris used as riprap on a eroding bank, a hunting shack on a scenic riverbend.
For a time, ways of conserving the lower Wisconsin centered on creating a state forest, an idea abandoned in favor of calling the project a scenic riverway, more descriptive of its objectives. Following the DNR’s presentation of a detailed environmental impact statement in July 1987 many meetings with lower Wisconsin River residents, and much testimony, on November 17, 1988, the Natural Resources Board unanimously approved a master plan to preserve the 93-mile stretch of river - "the last free-flowing stretch of major river in the Midwest."
Like most conservation plans requiring legislative approval, it is a compromise. It tries to strike a balance between some River Valley residents fearful of "government interference", and others concerned primarily about conserving the river’s natural beauty who feel that the plan should assign a stronger role to the Department of Natural Resources. It calls for protection of 77,000 acres along the river either by purchase or through application of "scenic performance standards". Included is the area where the Battle of Wisconsin Heights took place in July of 1832, and 250 acres downstream from Prairie du Sac where wintering eagles feed on Wisconsin River fish in the free-flowing water at the Prairie du Sac dam. The plan may undergo revision in the legislative process.
The most scenic drive through the lower Wisconsin River Valley is State Highway 60 from Prairie du Sac and Sauk City to Bridgeport. It follows the north bank of the river.
Muscoda, Hwy. Wis. 80
Muscoda, a Wisconsin River community with an estimated 2013 population of 1,277, plays a significant role as a shopping and service center for the surrounding area, but it also benefits from the lower Wisconsin’s recreational appeal. The river’s influence has always loomed large in this community’s history. With a name apparently drawn from Longfellow’s Hiawatha where there is a reference to "the muscoda, the meadow", the settlement’s beginnings date to the prosperous 1830s when it was known as English Prairie, and relate to the business enterprises of William S. Hamilton. Hamilton, son of Alexander Hamilton, came into the lead fields of southwestern Wisconsin in 1827, having left West Point Military Academy and ventured west as a surveyor. He did very well for himself in the lead fields, an aristocrat in a mining frontier society of tremendously varied nativity, social class, and economic status. After some years of profitable mining, he built a blast furnace in 1835 at English Prairie, and it operated for a few years. Lead hauled from the nearest diggings and smelted into pigs went down the Wisconsin River by steamboat to Galena and thence to St. Louis.
A further boost came to Muscoda in 1841 when James Duane Doty was appointed as territorial governor by the new Whig administration in Washington. In short order there was a general shake up in all of the federal land offices in Wisconsin. Mineral Point, a hot bed of Jacksonian Democrats, lost its land office which was transferred to Muscoda. The need to buy federal land brought some business to the lead smelting site. One year earlier the settlement acquired a ferry to make it more accessible.
By 1847 the population had risen to 50 persons "pretty thickly stowed in a few log houses". The village was surveyed and platted in 1850. The first real growth came with the building of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad in 1856, unfortunately about a mile from the original site of the village. Nevertheless Muscoda expected great things and planned accordingly. A local paper boasted, "Muscoda will be, we think, the machine-shop and lumber-yard of Grant County." Stores, hotels, blacksmith shops, wagon shops and a variety of other establishments went into business, but high prices for lots tended to hold down development, and in the late 1850s efforts at milling businesses failed during the general depression.
Attempts to bridge the Wisconsin finally met with success in 1868, thus making Muscoda’s railroad connection available to people living on the north side of the river. That development plus good times in the late 1860s ushered in prosperous years of building and growth and a gradual transfer of much of the older town to the area surrounding the railroad depot where another village had been platted. Competing with Boscobel and Avoca for trade and commerce, Muscoda grew modestly, reaching a population of 733 in 1895, primarily German in ethnic origin. Modest growth seems to have been a forgone conclusion once the dream of becoming a port town on a heavily used Wisconsin River faded.
Prairie du Sac and Sauk City, Highways 12, 60 & 78
Prairie du Sac, with an estimated 2013 population of 3,972, and Sauk City, with 3,472, are both named for the Sac Indians who once lived in the area, and they serve as shopping and service centers for the surrounding farming area. They are quite similar in their long-term pattern of economic development to the smaller towns in the rural upper Fox River region. Historically they developed as rival communities, each with a different ethnic base. The Prairie du Sac area acquired its first sprinkling of settlers in 1839, 2 years after the Winnebagos agreed to removal beyond the Mississippi and ceded the last of their land west of the Wisconsin River. Over the next 2 decades settlers filtered into Prairie du Sac from the East, many of them from the New England area. Sauk City’s origins date from the same period with early growth spurred by an influx of German-speaking immigrants.
Most noted of Sauk City’s early entrepreneurs was a Hungarian, Count Agoston Haraszthy, who hired laborers and mechanics to develop the village in 1841. He also ventured into hop and grape culture. He named his settlement Haraszthy, later renamed Sauk City, and for 7 years pushed its development. When his European grape varieties failed to stand up to Wisconsin winters and he had lost much of his venture capital on the banks of the Wisconsin River, he left for California and there tried grape growing again – this time very successfully. He became known as "the father of modern California viticulture" according to Leon D. Adams, author of The Wines of America.
From a rather exotic beginning, Sauk City, like its rival neighbor, developed as a more traditional farming village. Its German character clearly showed in the early 1850s when a Mr. Leinenkugel was already brewing beer and the village boasted a German-language newspaper, Pioneer am Wisconsin. The Pioneer am Wisconsin summarized Sauk City progress in 1854 this way: "There are two sawmills here, one saw and planing mill and one saw and grist mill, besides a distillery, a brickyard, a printing office, ten stores, hotels and saloons. There is a Humanist society, and one Catholic, one Lutheran and one Methodist Episcopal Church; a singing society, a theatrical society and a military company." The people are principally German and most are farmers, it noted in conclusion.
The population was then about 650 persons. Over the next 25 years a variety of businesses were started. In 1880, the town’s assets included 4 breweries, a sash, door and blind factory, a planing mill, hotels, stores, lawyers, and doctors, a school, a fire department. Organizations included a German singing society; a benevolent society; a brass band; a secret workingman’s lodge; a German Free Thinkers congregation; a German Evangelical Association; and Catholic, Lutheran, and German Reformed churches.
Meanwhile the adjacent Yankee town, Prairie du Sac, had developed its own set of institutions and its distinct identity often in acrimonious confrontation with its neighbor. Its initial claim to superiority, aside form its proclaimed Yankee virtues of Protestantism, was as seat of government for Sauk County. Prairie du Sac’s reign as county seat was a short one, however, for 2 years later an alliance of Sauk City and Baraboo residents succeeded in having the county seat relocated at Baraboo. Akin to the county seat fight, the two villages battled over the location of the post office. Originally it was at Prairie du Sac, but when a Sauk City resident was appointed postmaster in 1851, the post office was physically removed to his place of business. Ultimately both villages secured post offices. Prairie du Sac got a bridge first, in 1852, and Sauk City followed in 1860. Later the villages battled over the issue of one or 2 high schools, where the US highway should be routed, and so on and on. Differences remained in the 20th century, still obvious in the 1930s, but over time the old rivalries have lost their meaning.
Prairie du Sac, at the end of the 1850s, seemed to be primarily a center for trade with one small-scale plowmaking business. In the 1860s, it acquired a flour mill, a large grain warehouse, and a sizable stockyard. In the next decade a reaper factory was built. The construction of the railroad to the north and west of the twin villages subsequently changed their fortunes and they remained basically trade and service centers. The village institutions of Prairie du Sac in 1880 were the school, 2 lodges, the Sauk Prairie Bible Society, a Presbyterian church, and a Union Unitarian and Universalist church.
The most well-known resident of Sauk City was August Derleth, the Wisconsin author who prodigiously wrote over a hundred books and thousands of smaller pieces, lectured at the University of Wisconsin, and for years was literary editor of The Capital Times in Madison. He knew life in the twin villages and in Wisconsin very well and portrayed and interpreted that knowledge for a wide readership. Appropriately he was chosen to write the volume on the Wisconsin River in the Rivers of America series. It reflects the most colorful parts of Wisconsin River history.
While in the twin villages, here are some locations to visit. In winter, a major natural attraction at the twin towns are the eagles soaring and diving for fish at the Prairie du Sac dam.
Battle of Wisconsin Heights Site, Junction Hwy. US 12 and County Trunk Y, 1.5 miles southeast of Sauk City
An official Wisconsin Historical marker makes note of one of the major events in the Black Hawk War of 1832. Near here on July 21, 1832, Black Hawk and his band of Sauk and Fox Indians, exhausted and hungry, while on their way to attempt a Mississippi crossing, were overtaken by US troops. Black Hawk and some of his warriors fought a holding action to allow the balance of his people to cross the Wisconsin River. The culmination of the war came at the Battle of Bad Axe, August 1-2.
Kehl Winery, (Wollersheim Winery) Hwy. Wis. 188, .5 mile south of Hwy. Wis. 60, Prairie du Sac
Overlooking the Wisconsin River and Prairie du Sac and Sauk City, the Kehl Winery structures include a hillside cave used first as a residence and later as a wine cellar, a 2-story limestone home built in 1858, and a larger winery building on which construction began in 1859. Taken together these buildings are important for a number of reasons. They represent the successful efforts of Peter Kehl, a German immigrant from a wine-making family with several generations of experience, to establish a winery on a protected, south-facing slope of the Wisconsin River bank.
Using native American grape varieties, he developed a business by selling his wines to Catholic churches and to Milwaukee hotels. Peter Kehl knew his grapes. They took first prize at the State Agricultural Fair in 1860. After his death in 1870, his son continued the business and made brandy until 1899 when a severe season killed the vines. The site is also significant because Count Agoston Haraszthy owned it earlier. The stonework of the buildings represents a fine quality of craftsmanship by the German masons in the Sauk City area. Today the winery is operated as the Wollersheim Winery which welcomes visitors to tour the vineyards and buildings and to taste the wines.
Spring Green, Hwy. US 14 and Wis. 60
Spring Green originated as a railroad village in 1856 with the building of the Milwaukee and Mississippi rail line. Construction workers built log cabins to live in which soon afterward became the homes of the village’s first settlers. Platted during the spring of 1857, Spring Green and the surrounding countryside languished until the prosperity brought by the Civil War years encouraged agricultural development. Then Spring Green began to flourish as a village where farmers brought their crops for sale, storage, and shipment, and as a center supplying their needs for goods and services. Originally incorporated as a village in 1869 largely to facilitate taxation and make street and sidewalk improvements possible, it was reincorporated with a revision in governmental structure in 1878. The village grew very modestly during the late 19th century and numbered about 800 at the time of World War I. Its 2013 estimated population is 1,647.
Spring Green has a dual character, on the one hand as a very attractive rural Wisconsin town, and on the other as the place near where internationally respected architect Frank Lloyd Wright built his home, Taliesin, in 1911 and where he trained architects of the Taliesin Fellowship. More recently Spring Green has gained national recognition for good classical summer theater. The American Players Theater performs in an open-air theater located on a 70-acre woodland site near the banks of the Wisconsin River. Now securely established as part of Spring Green, the theater is but one in an apparent series of changes developing in the community. The Wisconsin Taliesin Commission is working on plans to restore the badly-deteriorated Taliesin and to make it available to the public as a significant historic landmark in American architecture. This mammoth project will require possibly $16.4 million according to preliminary estimates prepared by the Governor’s commission. Another possible change for the community may emanate from recently announced commercial plans to construct a combined recreational and housing development. According to its advocates, the project will complement the Wright tradition and the natural beauty of the Wisconsin River Valley.
Currently there are a number of places of historic interest to see in the Spring Green area. The Wright-related ones include:
Taliesin, Hwy. Wis. 23, 2 miles south of Spring Green
Named for a 3rd century Welsh poet and meaning "shining brow", Taliesin is beautifully sited on a low hill overlooking the Wisconsin River Valley. It includes 3 major groups of buildings. In one group near the intersection of Hwy. 23 and County Trunk C are the Wright home and offices, originally built in 1911, twice rebuilt after fires and many times expanded and changed over the years. The Hillside Home School is farther south off Highway 23. Wright built it in 1902 for the use of his aunts, Jane Lloyd Jones and Helen Lloyd Jones. They had founded the experimental home school in 1887 to teach students in an atmosphere combining classroom, garden, farmyard, and workshop with a well-rounded course of study. Remodeled and expanded in 1933, the Hillside School became work-study space for the Taliesin Fellowship. The third component of Taliesin is the farm building complex built in 1938 and standing between the school and the home-office group. One other structure built much earlier by Wright is quite well-known, the Romeo and Juliet Windmill built in 1896. Henry-Russell Hitchcock considers it "still one of the conspicuous landmarks" of Wright’s career. Sixty feet tall, the wind causes it to sway several inches at the top.
Wright, born at Richland Center in 1869, internationally-known as the proponent of "organic architecture" – structures designed in harmony with users and environment – has always been controversial. With the passage of time, he has gown in stature as a critic, reformer, and pioneer in architecture. He returned to his native Wyoming Valley in 1911 at the age of 44 after his Chicago and Oak Park years at a period of both personal and professional turbulence in his life. In characterizing Taliesin, the National Register nomination papers note: "Taliesin was the home, workshop, laboratory, and retreat for one of the world’s most renowned architects and certainly one of Wisconsin’s most significant historical personalities." He died in 1959 and was buried in the cemetery of Unity Chapel, a short distance from Taliesin. His remains were carried to the gravesite by horse and wagon. In March of 1985 his grave was opened, the contents cremated, and the ashes taken to Taliesin West at Scottsdale, Arizona in accordance with the wishes expressed in his widow’s will. The only building in the Taliesin group open to the public at the present time is the School which is open during the summer months when the Taliesin Fellowship is in residence.
Unity Chapel, County Trunk T, .2 miles east of Hwy. Wis. 23
This charming Unitarian Church, built in 1886 following the design of Joseph Lyman Silsbee, was part of Jenkin Lloyd Jones’ plan to develop a summer vacation-retreat for ministers and at the same time to establish a church and burial place for the many Lloyd-Joneses of the Wyoming Valley. In the perspective of America architectural history, the chapel is significant for its relation to Silsbee, a major Midwestern architect and to Frank Lloyd Wright, who moved to Chicago to work for Silsbee soon after the chapel was built. For years the chapel suffered from very poor maintenance. Renewed family interest in the early 1980s led to the establishment of Unity Chapel, Inc., to restore and maintain the cemetery and the sanctuary. In 1984, when the restoration had been completed, the chapel graveyard contained the burial sites of Frank Lloyd Wright and 84 members of the Lloyd-Jones family. Thus in another historical perspective, the chapel is a monument to Wyoming Valley’s creative, independent Welsh.
Wyoming Valley School, Hwy. 23
In 1957 Frank Lloyd Wright designed this public school for the children of Wyoming Valley, donating both the architectural plans and the land to the community.
Riverview Terrace Restaurant, Hwy. 23
Planned by Wright as a teahouse for Taliesin guests in the late 1940s, the Spring Green, as it is now called, is the only restaurant he designed. The plans for it and the land became part of a larger project for a hotel, homes, and golf shop as well as the restaurant, which was undertaken in the 1960s by the president of the Johnson Wax Company. The Taliesin Fellowship drew up a master plan but only the restaurant was completed. It opened in 1967 at a gala affair with First Lady Ladybird Johnson as the special guest. This beautiful 300-foot-long structure overlooking the Wisconsin River affords diners an opportunity to see a local Wright structure in detail inside and out.
Bank of Spring Green, Spring Green
In the shopping area of the village of Spring Green stands an unusually beautiful stone bank, built in 1972 and designed by William Wesley Peters, chief architect, and the Taliesin Associated Architects of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Tower Hill State Park, County Trunk C off Hwy. US 14
Beautifully sited above the Wisconsin River, 77-acre Tower Hill State Park provides campsites, nature and hiking trails, and picnicking facilities. The upland forests, a wide variety of plants, shrubs, birds, and animals, and a 175-foot Cambrian sandstone cliff make the park attractive for those who enjoy natural settings.
The location has special significance in Wisconsin history as the site of the lead region village of Helena and the place where Green Bay entrepreneur, Daniel Whitney, and his partners built a tower to make lead shot, hence the park name. An energetic Yankee entrepreneur who had come to Green Bay in the 1820s, Whitney delved into a wide variety of potentially profitable ventures – lumbering on the upper Wisconsin (long before Indian title had been extinguished), fur trading, and town-site speculation. He formed a business partnership to manufacture lead shot in 1830 at a time when Wisconsin had no shot tower and he hoped to market lead in the East. Construction began in 1831 and was completed in 1833, having been interrupted by the Black Hawk War.
The Shot Tower.
The shot tower operated intermittently under various owners from 1833 until 1861. Shot making involved a smelting house, the shot tower itself at the top of the sandstone cliff, a 120-foot shaft cut through the rock beneath the tower, and a 90-foot access tunnel leading to a finishing house beside the Wisconsin River. Molten lead poured into a perforated ladle, dropped 180 feet, and formed shot as it fell, landing in a pool of water at the bottom of the shaft. Cooled shot was loaded into horse-drawn railcars and drawn through the tunnel to the finishing house for drying and polishing. Then it was loaded aboard boats on the Wisconsin River which at that time flowed past the base of the bluff. Helena was a sufficiently prosperous mining community in 1836 to make a serious bid for the territorial capital. When in 1856 Spring Green secured the railroad connection and Helena was bypassed, it began to wither in the ensuing depression of the late 1850s. Foundations of the Helena buildings still remain in the park.
In 1889 Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a Unitarian minister in Chicago and uncle of Frank Lloyd Wright, bought the property and established a summer resort for ministers. The Tower Hill Pleasure Company functioned until his death, and in 1922 Edith L. Jones donated the land and buildings to Wisconsin to be used as a park. In 1970-71 the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the Department of Natural Resources reconstructed the tower and smelter house. The Old Helena Cemetery is across the road from the park. The Helena Marsh Wildlife Area lies adjacent to the park.