June 5, 2013, Page 10, Clark County Press, Neillsville, WI, July 24, 2013 Page 9

Neillsville: O’Neill House, John W. Carhart, Proprietor; Supplied with all conveniences, best of table fare, large rooms and elegantly furnished. Stable accommodations first class!

Greenwood: Begley House, W. H. Begley, Proprietor; Largest and best equipped hotel in the village. Excellent stable conditions! Terms, moderate. This hotel has every convenience. Rooms commodious; table exceptionally provided.

Thorp: Boardman House, J. S. Boardman, Proprietor; good hotel and stable conditions

Loyal House: G. W. Allen, Proprietor, has recently fitted up in the best style for the accommodation of the traveling public. Good table, first class; charges reasonable.

Reddan House: Third Street, Neillsville, Mrs. M. W. Reddan, proprietor; Board by the day or week; Sample rooms in connection, for the accommodation of commercial travelers. Good stables and attentive hostlers in attendance.

Central House: Neillsville, W. R. Cornick, Proprietor; Thoroughly renovated and put in first-class shape to accommodate the public. Buses to and from the train

A few days ago a gentleman put up over night with landlord Carhart, of the O’Neill House. As he registered, he asked that his worthy host keep a small common looking oblong pasteboard box, such as cutlery is shipped in. Carhart laid it aside on the counter near the register, thinking it of little or no value. The next morning after breakfast the guest settled up and asked for his box in an unconcerned way. Imagine Carhart’s surprise when the box was opened and he saw before him $3,000 in gold double eagles, packed in a box that had lain all night on the counter, in a position to be taken by any of the dozens of persons who had transacted business at the counter while he was there. Carhart was dumbfounded by the coolness of his guest’s manner and isn’t yet entirely recovered.

We learn from Silas Wilcox that 90 percent of last season’s cut logs on O’Neill Creek have been run into Black River. The creek will be flooded tomorrow.

The store building moved from Staffordville to Neillsville is now in place and gives the North Side a changed appearance. It entirely shuts off the view of the North Side Hotel from the south. The cost of the removal of the building was $500.

An Eau Claire syndicate has purchased all the pine stumpage west of Winnebago and embraced in what is known as the Bow River country, containing over 500 square miles. The amount of stumpage the syndicate has secured is difficult to state, for no accurate estimate has been made. Those having some knowledge of the matter say it will run all the way from 500,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 feet.

E. Peet, N. P. Nilsson and J. R. Richmond, of Shortville, visited the woolen mill below Black River Falls last week, where they sold their wool.

Saturday, Mrs. Reddan drove to her farm north of town and wishing to take an extra buggy up had it attached to the one she used. Having a surplus of lady passengers, one of them volunteered to ride in the rear buggy. In the middle of Main Street, the fastening gave way and Mrs. Reddan drove some distance unconscious of her lady friend’s grotesque and embarrassing situation. Her attention was called to it shortly however and she returned to “catch on” to the second buggy again.

Everett Bacon’s new residence on the corner of Fourth Street and Grand Avenue is rapidly taking shape, the frame is all up and work is far enough advanced to enable us to see that the house when done is going to be very graceful and commodious.

Sol Jaseph will have, when his residence is finished, and the painting is finished, no further need of a rainbow. He will have all the colors right at home. We advocate variety and Sol’s departure from the old one-color idea of paining is hereby endorsed. It is our hope that the modern spirit of innovation will strike our builders as well as painters and that residences will find their way into existence that are less wearisome to the sense of sight than most houses now are.

Men are so fearful of wounding a woman’s vanity that they rarely remember that she may by some possibility possess a grain of common sense.

Eight cords of stone are being delivered at the schoolhouse site in this city. A shortage of brick has delayed buildings going up in the city this season.

The federal soils program for Clark County for 1938 will begin next week when all farm reporters in the townships will be called to Neillsville for final instructions and to get their maps. Nearly every township in the county has three mappers who were elected by the farmers and they will be paid out of his soils program money up to ten per cent of the total, the remainder to be paid by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

The mappers will go to each farm to take field measurements and to note what crops are being grown, so that there will be a check on eligibility for soils benefits.

The interior of the Winnebago Indian School here will be repainted in the near future and for this job over 300 gallons of paint have been purchased.

Any team playing independent baseball and desiring games please contact Martin Kirn, Willard, Wis., for open dates.

Sheriff Mats Madsen is on the trail of one or more fellows who traded a car to Arthur Gress for another one which was found in Cunningham Creek along Highway 73 Sunday and recovered by Mr. Gress. The car traded to Gress was claimed by a Shawano dealer.

The fellows tried to make a deal with the Welsh Chevrolet, Co but didn’t succeed and later one of the Welsh cars was found to be stolen.

Miss Agnes Hed of Crandon has been engaged to take charge of the Home Economics department of the Neillsville High School, arriving here July 1 to take up her work. (Miss Hed later became the wife of Kenneth Olson, remembered by many as Augie Olson. DZ)

A Stevens Point taxi driver last Thursday drove a beautiful dark-eyed blond to a greenhouse where she told him to go in and buy a large bouquet of flowers. When the taxi driver came out with the flowers the pretty blond and the car were gone. The car was later found near Neillsville, without the blond in sight.

The 30 x 70 ft. barn on the George Poppe farm, 11 miles northwest of Greenwood, burned to the ground Tuesday after being struck by lightning.

Mr. and Mrs. Dale Eunson and their 4-year-old daughter, Joan Katherine, stopped here Sunday to call on Attorney and Mrs. C. R. Sturdevant. They were on their way home to Connecticut after a visit with relatives in Los Angeles. Dale was born in Neillsville in 1904 and attended the grade schools, later going to Montana with his parents. He has become quite famous as a short-story writer. Mrs. Eunson is also a writer for Liberty Magazine and for many of the movie magazine.

Grasshoppers were so thick in Washburn County that they stopped a train at Earl, north of Spooner. The train was unable to start on the slippery tracks without assistance. From the Dakotas come reports of entire crops in counties eaten to the ground by hoppers.

(In 1938, our family was farming in South Dakota. As the corn on a 25-acre field was starting to tassel, a cloud of grasshoppers descended upon the field about four o’clock in the afternoon. We could hear the grasshoppers chewing through the night. The next morning they lifted off, having eaten all but a few stalks left in one corner of the field. DZ)

Entering a plea of guilty to a charge of improper use of license plates on his car, Willie of Levis was sentenced to six months in the county jail Monday by Municipal Judge A. E. Dudley. Willie admitted taking the plates from Art Pflughoeft of Pine Valley after his arrest at Sturgeon Bay by Sheriff Mats Madsen and Undersheriff Ray Kutsche. Willie had gone to pick cherries near Sturgeon Bay and claimed he could not drive his car that far without license plates.

Walter Hagen, the famous golf player, and his son, Walter, Jr., stopped in Neillsville for lunch and car service while on their way to the St. Paul open golf tournament last week. The son is quite an expert player.

Clark County, with the largest forest cropland in central and western Wisconsin, is the first of 15 counties in the area to use state funds for improving or developing county forest land. During the past 30 days six men from Clark and Jackson counties have been using bulldozers, power-shovels and dump trucks to build dikes and spillways at Dams N. 14 and 15 in Foster, and to construct 4.5 miles of road in Butler.

The project is a long-range development program with wild life management and forest development as a goal.

The project also included repairs to the roads to the two dams and the improvement or building of 4.5 miles of road in the most densely wooded area of the Town of Butler. When the new road is completed in Butler, it will join Highway “H” 14 miles north of Fairchild and 11 miles south of Stanley.

Mr. and Mrs. Otto J. Warren, who were married July 30, 1908, will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary Saturday evening at the home of their son and daughter-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Neil Warren, and with an open house in the dining room of the Neillsville Congregational Church, Sunday 2 to 5 p.m.

The wedding was performed by Rev. Mr. McNamara in the home of the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Emery Newell, at Trevor. The groom had been employed as a truck gardener and later as a maintenance man for Knickerbocker Ice Company at 25 cents per hour. He remembers the going wage at the time was $1.25 per day.

In 1910, Mr. and Mrs. Warren moved to Neillsville with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. E. L. Warner, the women coming by train via Eland and Marshfield, the men coming by freight car, via Merrillan. In the freight car were two horses, Lady and Dot; two cows; a dog by the name of “Squeak”; “Blossom” the family cat; and their household goods.

“At Merrillan” said Mrs. Warren, “We opened the freight car door and as we traveled toward Neillsville, the nearer we came to less civilization. Then we drew up to the railroad station to see only the ruins of the furniture factory. On that particular day, if we had had enough money to pay the return freight, we never would have unloaded. But we didn’t and we have never regretted locating in Clark County.

They spent their first night at the O’Neill House, Neillsville’s finest hotel of the day.

The year of 1910 was one of severe drought. The Warrens and Warners farming 80 acres just east of the present golf course sold butterfat for 21 cents per pound, but had to pay $20 per ton for hay. The following year, 1911, was the year of the Black River flood, when nearly everything washed away, including the dam at the Popple River, Dells Dam, Hatfield Dam and the downtown area of Black River Falls.

“In the spring of 1911, and again in 1912,” continued Mr. Warren, “I planted corn on the land now occupied by the Nelson Muffler Factory. The first year, the neighbor’s cows got into the field one night in the early summer and ate off most of the stalks. But it came up again and we harvested a fair crop. We also had lots of tomatoes in the garden that wet year; but we lost our grain in the shocks, the oats growing six to eight inches tall as we waited for the bundles to get dry enough to thresh.”

In the fall of 1911 Mr. Warren sold 14 dressed out hogs at the John Wolff meat market, then located in the building now occupied by Kearns Drug Store, for five and one-half cents per pound. He says he made money on them. He purchased buttermilk for feed from Vint Lee, who then operated the Pleasant Ridge Cheese and Butter Factory, and was able to grow enough rye to bring the hogs to maturity.

Mrs. Warren recalled as they made their first trip to the farm, the stopped their wagon on Division Street, to enjoy the scenery to the north, and especially the view of the mound. Mr. Warren remembers getting stuck with six sacks of grain on his high wheeled wagon in front of the armory of having the late Herman Yankee, drayman, pull him out with a big team of horses. Mr. Yankee did not charge him a cent.

The only meat they had in the house the first winter was raccoon meat, trapped by Mrs. Warren’s father. There was no work available, and if the men took a job cutting wood, they were paid in wood, getting only 50 cents per cord. Mr. Warren assisted his brother-in-law, Ed Warner, in cutting some basswood that they sold at Kemmeter’s heading mill at Granton, and was thereby able to bring home some groceries. At that time, if one had money he could take his pick of cows for $25 to $40. They sold 200 gallons of maple syrup at $1.10 per gallon in 1911.

Mrs. Warren said, “When folks ask my recipe for successful living, I tell them: A sense of humor.”

In 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Warren rented the 80-acre John Wildish farm, south of the fairgrounds. In 1917, they purchased an 80-acre farm in York of the late William Radtke. In 1918, they added 80 acres to the west, which they purchased from the late William Imig; and in 1946, 80 acres across the road in the Town of Grant from Mrs. Ben Brown. In 1948, their son and daughter-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Neil Warren, Jr., returned from Alaska and lives with them on the farm until 1951 when they moved into Neillsville, now living on West 5th Street.

Besides their son Neil, they have a daughter, Mrs. Rex (Ruth) Beach, who with her husband and four children lives in Stillwater, Minn.

A mid-1930s view of O’Neill Creek, east of the Hewett Street Bridge: O’Neill Creek has a lot of history, starting with the late 1800s when pine logs were floated down its waterway to the Black River. Eventually the logs arrived in the La Crosse holding ponds, being sold to lumber mills. In the 1930s through 1940s years, as shown in the photo, the city’s children swam in the pond with a springboard provided on the south shore. In the winter months, ice skating was a popular sport with many children and adults participating. Ice was taken from the creek in the earlier years to be used for refrigeration - ice boxes. Now the creek has very little attention, with all the earlier events absent.

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