Timber Boom Town: The Rise and Decline of the Lumber Industry in Fond du Lac, 1845-1922
by Jennifer Stobbe

Moore and Galloway Lumber Mill

A visitor who walked the streets of Fond du Lac along its river during the 1870s and 1880s could see numerous lumber mills, accompanied by the sound of great saws continuously cutting into logs that had been brought to the mills. The sound was a constant hum that droned through the entire day and into the night. Walking among the piles of the sawdust and wood debris, the visitor could see many men, women and children, covered in sawdust and shavings, making their way home after a long shift at the mill. Through the years of the timber boom Fond du Lac newspapers reported on the annoyances that accompanied the mills, including loud late-night comings and goings of the male mill workers. However, toward the end of the century the newspapers ceased to complain about the “lazy loafing, beer guzzling, smoking, chewing loafers . . . that abound in Fond du Lac” and had been sources of irritation. ¹ The once-bustling mills that made Fond du Lac a thriving center of the lumber industry had closed, moved, or burned, and little visible evidence of the previous commercial activity remained.

The city of Fond du Lac, despite its impressive lumber boom of the late nineteenth century, did not remain a major milling town. By 1888 the State of Wisconsin, as a whole, had reached its lumbering peak, but the industry had already been declining in Fond du Lac for more than a decade. ² Reasons for the decline of this industry in Fond du Lac are easy to identify. The city lacked significant advantages that other cities, such as Oshkosh, could offer the business, including a better location on Lake Winnebago closer to the sources of the timber and ample storage facilities for the logs. Over time, water levels in some regional rivers dropped, including the Fond du Lac River, making flotation and storage of logs difficult or impossible. The northward spread of the railroad network in the state eliminated a major competitive advantage that Fond du Lac had enjoyed. Another major blow came in 1876, when the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad removed its car shops from the city. Subsequently, fires destroyed most of the mills, forcing a decision by owners either to rebuild or to move their mills to more economically advantageous areas closer to the source of raw material. Fond du Lac thus quickly lost its initial appeal to the lumbering industry.

The timber industry in Wisconsin was initially connected to the state’s hydrography. Six river systems permitted logs to be moved from the forests to the mills where they were prepared for market. The Menomonee and Wolf Rivers connected the northeastern Wisconsin woods to Green Bay and Lake Michigan, while the Wisconsin River drained Central Wisconsin from the northern borders and flowed to the Mississippi River and Prairie du Chien. The Black, Chippewa, and St. Croix Rivers flowed out of Northwestern Wisconsin and into the Mississippi. ³ Fond du Lac’s natural location on Lake Winnebago initially created an ideal setting for the logging industry. In the city, the natural waterways of Lake Winnebago and the Fond du Lac River provided a good harbor for steamboats and barges as well as storage room for the supply of timber and logs needed by the numerous mills that were constructed there. Fond du Lac was located closer to the eventual destination of the finished timber to the south, and it possessed railroad links by 1851. ⁴

Logging was seasonal in early Wisconsin. Winter conditions and snow made it easier to drag timber from the woods to the waterways. Labor was also more readily available, since many of the farmers who lived in and around Fond du Lac could move north during the winter months when there was little work to be done on the farms. They took advantage of the opportunity to find work cutting the logs that would eventually be processed in the mills along the Fond du Lac River.

The logging camps where they lived were typically small and cozy, but entirely masculine, for no women were allowed in the camps. According to W.A. Holt, sleeping houses were about thirty feet wide, and thirty feet long. ⁵ In many cases a single window and a skylight provided the only ventilation. Kerosene lamps and lanterns provided the lumberjacks with evening light. During the cold winter nights of Wisconsin, the men slept in bedding made from straw or hay and used two to three blankets and a heavy quilt to keep warm. As time passed, more modern camps were roofed with lumber and tarpaper and provided the men with better lighting and ventilation.

The cook camp of a logging operation was similar in shape to the bunkhouse; however, it was much cleaner and more attractive looking, because it was kept orderly and clean. Long benches and tables lined the walls at which the lumbermen consumed their meals. A universal rule within the lumber camps was that talking was forbidden while the men were eating their meals, and not a single man was allowed to get up and leave until the last man had finished eating. A typical diet included bean or pea soup, salted pork or beef, baked beans, potatoes, cabbage or beets, dried apples or peaches, doughnuts, pies, and tea or coffee. As the railroads reached the camps, so did fresh beef and pork, sausage and bacon, and canned vegetables to supplement the diet of the loggers. ⁶

The men were unable to bathe from fall to spring for two significant reasons. In the winter, when much of the work in the forests was done, all of the waterways were frozen and consequently there was no natural place to bathe. Bathing facilities were not provided, because it was thought to be unhealthy to bathe. Yet hygiene was not completely ignored. Due to infestations of lice, the men boiled their clothing every three to four weeks; many of the men also believed that smoking discouraged the lice.

The almost monastic discipline enforced in the camps was tempered by rough and ready recreation that was available to the men in nearby communities. These small towns lived off the earnings of the men who cut timber in the woods. Many northern Wisconsin towns such as Hayward and Hurley developed unsavory if well-deserved reputations for their bars, gambling dens, and houses of prostitution.

Within the forests, before the railroads made their way northward, white pine was the preferred ‘cut’ of the lumberjacks, because the light softwood held its dimensions well and resisted rot. ⁷ The soft wood was also preferred because it could be worked easily and was straight-grained. The trees were dropped by a ‘faller,’ who then proceeded to slim them down by removing large branches with a crosscut saw. Crosscut saws were composed of a large saw blade about six feet long with a wooden handle on each end that allowed two men to pull the blade back and forth to cut the trees. After the trees were limbed, scaled, and marked with a stamp hammer to identify the owner, they were cut to length by a ‘bucking crew.’ Ox teams, led by a teamster, dragged the logs to the banks of the Wolf River, where they could be rafted downstream in the spring through Lake Poygan and Lake Butte de Morts to Lake Winnebago. From there the logs were pushed across the lake by tugboats into the Fond du Lac River and ended their journey at the mills located along its banks. Both the men who had cut the trees and the logs traveled to Fond du Lac in the spring. Sometimes the men themselves even rode the logs.

Logjams often occurred, sometimes extending several miles along the river. Skilled drivers, known as ‘river pigs,’ worked the logs downstream and were in charge of the dangerous job of breaking up logjams. Often the jams were eliminated by the use of explosives, making the job of the river pig a doubly dangerous one.

A massive logjam occurred on the Chippewa River in 1869. It was estimated that 130,000 feet of logs piled up, twenty to fifty logs deep, two miles back from the obstruction. However, the most famous logjam in Wisconsin occurred along the Thornapple River in northern Wisconsin near Winter. A conflict between John F. Deitz and the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company occurred over a disagreement between Deitz and the company heads over approximately $9,000 in tolls and back wages from October 1900 to April 1905. Deitz believed that the lumber company did not have a right to float logs through the dam on the Thornapple River, which flowed through his property, so long as that bill remained unpaid. In April 1905 he stopped the log drive by closing the dam, preventing any logs from passing down the river. Deitz kept the lumbermen, lawyers, and sheriffs at bay for two years, until July 25, 1906, when shots were exchanged between the Deitz family and the Sawyer County Sheriff. As news of the event spread in newspapers, the entire nation was engaged by the conflict, with many taking sides with one of the two parties. On September 6, 1907, an agreement was reached between the two disputants, and by March 1908 crews from Weyerhaeuser had removed $45,000 worth of logs from the empty flowage basin along the Thornapple River. ⁸

Although water was a cheaper mode of transport than the railroad, many problems arose from use of waterways for transportation for logs. A drive would have to be aborted if there was too little water in the rivers or lakes, for low levels meant an inevitable hang-up of the logs. However, should flooding occur within the rivers and lakes, the logs could easily float in many directions, ending up in farmers’ fields and pastures. Logs also had a tendency to rot and become infested with insects if they were left in the water for long periods of time.

Once pushed into the Wolf River, the logs floated south until they reached Lake Poygan, where steam-powered tug boats pulled them through Lake Poygan, Lake Butte de Morts, and Lake Winnebago into the Fond du Lac River, a distance totaling about forty-five miles. By 1853 David Hume of Omro, Wisconsin, had designed a steam-powered boat engineered with a ‘grouser pole,’ a long vertical wooden pole that ran through the forward deck of the boat and could be driven into the riverbed. ⁹ This pole held the boat in place while it hauled the log rafts through the lakes by means of a winch. Once in the Fond du Lac River, the logs were floated to the mills, where they were extracted from the water by the mill workers. It was a difficult and expensive task to get the logs downstream, sorted according to owner, and ready to be milled. A.T. Glaze describes the process well in Fond du Lac County Wisconsin Past and Present, “Persons without experience have little idea of the expense and difficulties of getting logs down the small streams on which they were banked from the woods, running them on the river to the boom, getting them through the sorting race and rafting them ready for the mills.” ¹⁰ It was clearly a dangerous and complex process.

Fond du Lac lumber mills were simple in their structure. A shed, typically over 100 feet in length, contained the saw, and there might be offices and storage facilities that made up the rest of the yard. Early mills were powered by a water wheel; later, a boiler house with a characteristic tall brick chimney contained the steam engine that powered the saw and winches that could move the heavy logs. A ramp from the river permitted logs to be dragged or hoisted through the shed onto a trolley where the saw or saws were located. Passes of the trolley through the blade were repeated until the log had been transformed into rough-cut planks of various sizes. The circular saw was the saw of choice for many of the mill owners in Fond du Lac to cut the logs into marketable planks. A Chicago journalist reported that on July 25, 1866, out of the eleven mills that were in operation in Fond du Lac, nine ran using one circular saw apiece, while two of the mills possessed two circular saws. ¹¹ Boards were planed, sorted, and stored in racks or piles on the premises until they were ready to be shipped by boat, wagon, or rail.

In 1888, a mature white pine tree cut into four or five logs, each sixteen feet long, produced one hundred forty to two hundred board feet of lumber. Five to seven logs were needed to make 1000 board feet. By 1897, as the mature forests became less plentiful along the Wolf, it took ten smaller logs to obtain 1000 board feet of marketable lumber.

After the lumber had been cut and readied for market, it was typically loaded on Chicago & Northwestern Railroad cars and shipped, in most cases without reloading, throughout the United States to places such as Tennessee, West Virginia, and Iowa. The manufactured lumber was utilized in building houses, factories, and other buildings, as well as for manufacture of furniture such as tables, chairs, and beds. ¹²

Much of the economic life of early Fond du Lac revolved around its lumber mills. Lumber mills constituted one of the first industries in Fond du Lac. In the city, as with other areas of early settlement, the need for finished lumber was immediate. Dr. Mason C. Darling was responsible for the erection of the first sawmill in Fond du Lac in 1845. ¹³ Darling agreed that John J. Driggs and Warren Morley could have the opportunity to purchase one of his lots providing that they constructed a mill on the property. ¹⁴ After the mill was completed, the men would obtain full ownership of the land. This mill building was twenty-four by thirty-six feet. Located on the north side of Western Avenue in Fond du Lac, the mill utilized an old-fashioned sash saw, with its large blades that cut in a reciprocating vertical motion instead of a circular rotational motion.

The legal change of possession for the Darling property took place on July 11, 1846, when the mill was erected; Darling received one-hundred-sixty-five dollars for his parcel of land. ¹⁵ Shortly after the contract became final, Driggs sold his share of the mill to Truman Wheeler, and the mill became known as the Wheeler Morley Mill. ¹⁶ Wheeler’s death in 1847 led to a temporary halt of work at the mill. In August 1849, Horace Seymour took it over and planned improvements. In September 1849, Herman Bissell tried to purchase the mill, but a flaw in the title of the land prevented him from acquiring the entire mill. Herman Bissell’s son, L.C. Bissell, ran the operation. Bissell’s mill was able to turn out 2,500 board feet of lumber per day. ¹⁷ Bissell continued to run the mill until 1855, when the firm ceased to operate as a result of damage to the dam that powered the mill. ¹⁸

A.G. Ruggles and Cornelius Davis proposed building Fond du Lac’s first steam-powered lumber mill in 1845. ¹⁹ By 1847 the mill was in operation, using timber that was logged along the Wolf River and rafted to Fond du Lac. By 1866 Fond du Lac had fifteen sawmills that cut about 90 million board feet annually. The lumber industry reached its peak in Fond du Lac in 1873, with eighteen lumber and shingle mills occupying the banks of the Fond du Lac River. Among the eighteen mills engaged in finishing and manufacturing lumber and wood products in Fond du Lac, the September 14, 1874 Fond du Lac Journal identified nine that were handling and processing felled trees:

The number of employees gives some indication of the relative size of each enterprise, but operation tended to be seasonal, with spring and summer being the main periods of work. During 1874, these nine mills collectively manufactured 67,000,000 feet of lumber, valued at $1 million.

The Moore & Galloway mill, located on Packer Street near McWilliams Street, was the last lumber mill to remain in operation in Fond du Lac. The mill began operations in 1864 when M.D Moore, a dry goods merchant, invested in a sawmill built by Charles Crane. ²⁰ Charles Crane had erected the mill in 1863, but he soon became financially dependent upon Moore. The two men ran the mill through an unusual partnership; one week Moore ran the mill and the next week Crane took over. Each man worked with the same crew; however, the lumber that was cut each week was kept separate from that belonging to the other partner. In 1866, Moore bought out Crane’s share of the business, and Edwin H. Galloway became Moore’s partner. ²¹ E.H. Galloway was already in the lumber business; he was part owner of the Galloway Hunter Mill. When Galloway retired from the business later in 1866, his brother, C.A. Galloway, took over his shares in both businesses. The two companies merged, and the firm became known as Moore, Galloway, and Baker. W.E Baker was a partner in the business for three years from 1870 to 1873, at which time the enterprise employed between eighty and one hundred-fifty men. ²² By 1884, the company was known as the Moore and Galloway Lumber Company, the name it carried until its demise in 1922. Despite the fact that in 1887 C.A. Galloway left the company to become the first president of First National Bank, the firm continued to bear his name. ²³

Throughout the years leading up to its closing, the Moore and Galloway Lumber Company continued to grow in size, labor force and productivity. In 1867 M.D. Moore’s one-saw mill cut two million board feet of lumber. ²⁴ Through most of the first decade of the mill’s operation, the mill operated with only a single circular saw. Ten years later, Hollands Fond du Lac City Directory for 1875-1876 reported that the Moore, Galloway, and Baker Company had the ability to cut seven million board feet of lumber per season. Contributing to this great accomplishment of productive capacity was the company’s unique pioneering use of the gang saw in place of the then-typical circular saw. The gang saw was made up of several blades moving up and down in a frame, so that a log could be sliced into several boards at once. By 1880, the company employed between eighty and one hundred-fifty men seasonally, and had the capability to put out 5-8 ½ million board feet of lumber per season. In 1912 the mill employed 260 men and had annual sales of $614,000. ²⁵

Success did not come without adversity. The Moore and Galloway lumber mill suffered from three major fires during its years of operation. The first occurred on the night of June 28, 1888. This fire caused a total loss of $20-25,000. ²⁶ According to published accounts, the fire began in the mill’s boiler room, and within a short period the entire mill was in flames. The night watchman might have contained the fire with pails of water, force pumps, and hoses, possibly lessening the loss, but in the excitement he panicked. According to the June 29, 1888 Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth, at the time of the fire the mill had the capacity to produce 70,000 board feet of lumber per day, and the loss came during the heart of the season. Company owners debated whether to rebuild the mill in Fond du Lac or to cease operations.

Due to the fact that the firm had enough felled timber still in the upper Wolf River to stay in business eight to ten years, the stock holders decided that their firm should continue operations, but they decided not to rebuild the Fond du Lac plant in its old location. To rebuild their business, in October 1888, Moore, Galloway, and the other company stockholders decided to purchase the site of the C.J.L. Meyer Mill, located on Doty Street. ²⁷ This factory, too, had burned on September 22, 1888. Plans to rebuild on the old mill site, utilizing six million board feet of lumber that was on hand from the company, were immediately put into action. The new mill was equipped to produce 40,000 board feet of lumber per day. The building itself measured 30 by 120 feet. ²⁸

Moore and Galloway faced its greatest challenge on September 22, 1895, when another massive fire destroyed this new mill. Though fires were rather commonplace in sawmills, this conflagration was the most destructive in the history of the Moore and Galloway Lumber Company. When the fire finally burned out, it had destroyed all of the lumber in the Moore and Galloway Lumber Company mill, the two buildings comprising the Fond du Lac Iron Company plant, two freight cars, and eight stock cars owned by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. ²⁹ The fire, which was thought to have been started by a cigar, moved swiftly along its path of destruction, despite the best efforts of the fire department. Extremely windy conditions and lack of an efficient water supply sealed the facility’s fate.

A substantial effort was made to save the mill by using fire hoses, which sprayed as much water as was available on the buildings, and by transporting barrels of water that were then dumped on the roofs of buildings. Despite these efforts to contain the fire, two buildings were completely destroyed. One of the destroyed buildings was a warehouse for sashes, doors, and blinds, while the other was a small office. Moore was reported as saying that the mill itself could not be replaced for less than $30,000, but that only eight million feet of lumber had burned, due to the fact that most of it had been quickly hauled
to other yards. When questioned as to whether or not he was planning on rebuilding he replied, “It is doubtful, I don‘t know if Fond du Lac wants another sawmill…. Twenty years ago there were a score of saw mills in this city, and the one that burned yesterday was the last.” ³⁰ The total damage of the fire for the Moore and Galloway Lumber Company was estimated to be $165,000. ³¹

Despite Moore’s reservations, Moore and Galloway Lumber Company did rebuild after the 1895 fire. The new mill was constructed at the original C.E. Crane Mill site, the location where the fire of 1888 occurred. According to Ed Halle, a man whose hobby was to collect information on the sawmills in Fond du Lac, a third fire occurred in 1904 or 1905, and the company again rebuilt the mill in 1905.

Another successful lumber mill in Fond du Lac was the C.J.L. Meyer mill, which was erected in 1868 and had become the largest manufacturing mill in Fond du Lac in 1874. C.J.L. Meyer retained possession of his mill until 1888, when it was sold to Moore and Galloway Lumber Company. Meyer constructed this sawmill with the intentions of using the finished lumber it produced in his already established manufacturing shops. The mill had the capacity to produce 80,000 board feet of lumber per day. ³² The 1880-1884 Holland’s Directory states that the company employed 900 men.

A portion of C.J.L. Meyer’s success can be attributed to the Chicago Fire of 1871. Meyer was fortunate that his planing mill and lumberyard, already established in Chicago, were not touched by that fire. By enlarging his manufacturing operation in Fond du Lac as well as utilizing his surviving resources in Chicago, Meyer, with his ample supply of finished lumber, was able to capitalize on the opportunity provided by the need to rebuild the city of Chicago.

Meyer’s company in Chicago was a success. Another of his greatly admired accomplishments was the establishment of the town of Hermansville. Meyer purchased 50,000 acres of timberland in Michigan, just north of Menomonee, Michigan, due to his concern over the depletion of available timber along the Wolf River. By 1879 the first saw mill was in operation in this area, with the finished lumber sent to Fond du Lac for use at Meyer‘s sash, door, and blind factories. By 1880, Meyer had over 900 people on his payroll, 300 in the Chicago shops, over 200 in Hermansville, and 400 in Fond du Lac. ³³

Meyer is also attributed with creating the largest sawmill in the state in 1888. According to the Fond du Lac Journal, the entire investment amounted to over $50,000. Constructing the mill required that a new channel be dredged from Lake Winnebago to the mill site, measuring 900 feet long, 60 feet wide, and seven feet deep, allowing ample room to float the logs. It took over 300,000 feet of lumber to construct the mill’s building. The mill measured 130 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 50 feet high. It contained a 100 horse power engine, three boilers, and a brick smoke stack that was larger than that of any other mill in Fond du Lac. ³⁴

The Meyer enterprise’s demise came at the hand of his son, Julius P. Meyer. In December 1889, Meyer went bankrupt on his investments, including his Chicago company, his various businesses in Fond du Lac, and his interests in Hermansville. Julius P. Meyer had been placed in charge of his father’s business affairs in Chicago. Though it appeared as though the company was prospering, Meyer found out in a December 8, 1889 letter from Julius that his son had been “willfully misrepresenting conditions, and misappropriating funds” from the company, resulting in a loss of over $200,000. The Chicago business was initially the only one that was scheduled for termination, but eventually Meyer’s interests in Chicago, Fond du Lac, and Hermansville were all liquidated. ³⁵

The failure of Meyer’s business in Fond du Lac had a great impact on the citizens of the city, where the economic consequences of the various closures were felt deeply. The December 26, 1889 issue of the Fond du Lac Journal reported that the payroll of various Meyer industries in Fond du Lac amounted to over $2,000 per week. When the mill was forced to close for a short time while the legal issues were worked out, the result was a significant blow to many. Meyer’s firm’s demise also created sympathy for him from local citizens. Various articles in Fond du Lac newspapers describe citizens’ concern for Meyer’s plight. The Fond du Lac Commonwealth reported that “wherever he (Meyer) is known he has friends who will hope that he may find a happy issue out of his financial distress.” ³⁶ The Fond du Lac Journal also noted that “he certainly has the confidence, sympathy, and good will of every citizen in his efforts to bring his affairs to order.” ³⁷ Unfortunately, Meyer never recovered from the collapse of his business.

As has been noted, sawmill fires were a constant threat to life and property in the city of Fond du Lac during the booming days of the lumber industry. The fires were quite costly to the mill owners, and as the city became further removed from the source of timber, it became less and less economically sound to rebuild burned sawmills in Fond du Lac.

Changes in the city itself also diminished Fond du Lac’s ability to support the industry. The large logs used by sawmills needed a considerable amount of water to float them to the mills. Gradually, sediment in the rivers made rafting the timber more and more difficult. As the rivers began to fill up with silt from area farms, deforested slopes and with wood particles from the mills themselves, the logs could no longer be floated via rivers to the mills. For example, thousands of feet of sunken, water saturated logs now lie at the bottom of Lake Poygan as the result of the log runs. The small tributaries of the Wolf River that had once carried large logs without a problem became so constricted that, during the later nineteenth century, they could no longer be used for the log runs, because the logs repeatedly became hung up on shallow bars that appeared in the rivers. River water levels in the southern Lake Winnebago area became so low that waterways that once had carried “daily traffic of steamboats could barely float a log.” ³⁸

Already in 1863, there was discussion about widening the channel of the Fond du Lac River from its mouth as far south as Scott Street, because its capacity had become reduced to only half what was required to handle the needs of the local lumber industry. As a result of this blockage, many of the logs used by the mills had to be stored in the Fox River near Oshkosh and were only brought down to Fond du Lac when the mills were ready to process them. The engineering plan was to dredge out the banks of the river to widen it to 60 feet and increase its depth to about four feet. Again, in 1886, the Fond du Lac Journal made reference to the river channel being unusually low and to the difficulty experienced in floating logs through it.

The spread of rail transport in Wisconsin was an additional factor in diminishing Fond du Lac’s competitive standing in the timber industry. By the 1880s, the penetration of the railroads into the northern forests of Wisconsin brought a much-desired end to the use of waterways for the transportation of logs. While some water transportation of timber continued until the end of the century, the sawmill industry largely moved from Fond du Lac northward. Much time and money was saved by the ability to cut logs in the woods, load them on railroad cars, and have the railroad ship the raw materials to the mills to be processed. The railroads allowed the industry to move north into the forests themselves.

Even after the handling of logs in the city’s industry became a thing of the past, for a time Fond du Lac continued to be a center for the manufacture of wood products, especially sashes, doors, and blinds, but by the end of the nineteenth century, it was no longer economically feasible to keep mills that processed rough logs into boards in operation in Fond du Lac. The raw materials were located far away and increasingly difficult to get to Fond du Lac. Railroads were available to carry the finished products to market from more remote mills. The first mill to leave Fond du Lac and move north was the Labelle Wagon Works, which was sold for $180,000 and was shipped to Superior, where it was eventually abandoned. ³⁹ All the mills in Fond du Lac that did not burn or simply cease operations were eventually sold and relocated north. The last mill in Fond du Lac, Moore and Galloway Lumber Company, stayed in full operation until 1922, when it was completely abandoned. ⁴⁰ The abandoned mill structure remained intact until Moore and Galloway Lumber Company sold it to Henry Nickel, a local contractor. The mill buildings were destroyed in 1935. ⁴¹ With this, the last remnants of the sawmill industry, once paramount Fond du Lac, disappeared.

Workers at Moore and Galloway Lumber Mill with Circular Saw Blade

1 - Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, November 2, 1955. return

2 - Robert. C. Nesbit, The History of Wisconsin, v. III: Urbanization and Industrialization, 1873-1893 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 48. return

3 - Walker D. Wyman, The Lumberjack Frontier: The Life of a Logger in the Early Days on the Chippeway Retold Recollections of Louie Blanchard (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 8. return

4 - Fond du Lac Journal, July 17, 1851. return

5 - William A. Holt. A Wisconsin Lumberman Looks Backwards, (Unpublished manuscript State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1948), 34. return

6 - Holt, 35. return

7 - Nesbit, 47. return

8 - Dave Carlson, “Now It’s All Peaceful At Cameron Dam” in Our Story: The Chippewa Valley and Beyond. (Eau Claire Leader Telegram, 1976). return

9 - Tim Casiana, “Down the Not-So Lazy River: Commercial Steamboats in the Fox River Valley, 1843-1900,” in Clarence B. Davis, ed., Source of the Lake: 150 Years of History in Fond du Lac (Fond du Lac: Action Printing, 2002), 191. return

10 - Maurice McKenna, Fond du Lac County Wisconsin Past and Present, (Chicago: the S.J. Clarke Publishing, 1912), 110. return

11 - Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth, July 25, 1866. return

12 - Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth, March 22, 1867. return

13 - Dr. Mason Darling was the man responsible for creating the village of what was to become the city of Fond du Lac. Darling was also the city’s first mayor. return

14 - Biographical information is lacking for Driggs and Morley in the Fond du Lac Historical Society Collection. return

15 - History of Fond du Lac County Wisconsin (1880), (Chicago: Western Historical Company, 1880), 641-642. return

16 - Truman Wheeler arrived in Fond du Lac in 1844 by way of an old Indian trail. return

17 - History of Fond du Lac County Wisconsin, 640. return

18 - Biological data for Herman Bissell and L.C. Bissell are lacking in the Fond du Lac Historical Society collection. return

19 - A.G. Ruggles was born in 1822. He arrived in Fond du Lac in 1846. In 1848 he left the lumber business for real estate, then banking. Cornelius Davis arrived in Fond du Lac around 1844. return

20 - M.D. Moore was born in 1825. He arrived in Fond du Lac in 1864, and he was soon regarded as among the most successful businessmen of Wisconsin. He died in either 1902 or 1903; histories of the county differ on the date. Biographical information on Charles Crane is lacking. return

21 - E.H. Galloway was born in 1831. He came to Fond du Lac from the state of New York in 1848 to engage in the lumbering business, which he quit in 1866. return

22 - The History of Fond du Lac County Wisconsin, 646. return

23 - Fond du Lac Times, October 5 1977. return

24 - Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth, March 22, 1867. return

25 - McKenna, 267. return

26 - Fond du Lac Weekly Commonwealth, October 25, 1895. return

27 - C.J.L Meyer was born in 1831. He arrived in Fond du Lac in either 1855 or 1856 where he served as a lumberman and manufacturer as well as a city alderman, supervisor, and mayor. return

28 - Fond du Lac Weekly Commonwealth, October 25, 1895. return

29 - Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth, September 23, 1895. return

30 - Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth, September 23, 1895. return

31 - Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, November 1, 1955. return

32 - The History of Fond du Lac County Wisconsin (1880), 648. return

33 - The History of Fond du Lac County Wisconsin, 648. return

34 - Fond du Lac Journal, June 25, 1888. return

35 - Fond du Lac Commonwealth, December 20, 1889. return

36 - Fond du Lac Commonwealth, December 20, 1889. return

37 - Fond du Lac Journal, December 26, 1889. return

38 - Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, November 2, 1955. return

39 - Commonwealth Reporter, November 2, 1955. return

40 - Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, October 31, 1955. return

41 - Fond du Lac Commonwealth Reporter, April 7, 1935. return

Copyright Clarence B. Davis 2005. Marian College Press, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin 2005.
Electronic publication by Fond du Lac Public Library has been approved by Clarence B. Davis.

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