UNITY HISTORY AND RECOLLECTIONS OF ITS PEOPLE

Contact: stan@wiclarkcountyhistory.org

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Unity, Wisconsin

Trials and Tribulations of an Old Pioneer Settler

By Edmund Creed

I will have to take you back to the year of 1871, the time that F. H. Darling and I started out from Amherst, Wisconsin, to explore this country with our blankets and about forty cents worth of crackers and cheese and an old shot gun. That was our bill of fare for six or eight days.

The first day we got as far as Stevens Point and I remarked to Mr. Darling that I thought we had better go to the land office and get some plats of this territory about here. So we got plats of towns 26, 27, 28, and 29, Range 3 East. In looking over the plats, I noticed that there was plenty of land in 28 and 29 vacant and subject to Homestead entry, but scarcely any in 26 and 27 except a few fractions on the west side of the towns.

I asked Mr. Eaton, the registrar, how this was, and he said he could tell me that very quickly as he had been registrar of the land office a number of years. In 1855 and 1856 there was a great rush for land in northern Wisconsin and towns 28 and 29 were not on the market then. They had not been surveyed and towns 26 and 27 had nearly all been bought by speculators. The Cornell Company had made their selections and the Fox River Improvement Company had taken the best around Marshfield. He told us that an Eastern company had sent them a bundle of land warrants to locate for them anywhere there was any government land. So he located them here in town 27 as he thought that would be out of the way of everybody. The railroad was not thought of then. This is the reason that Colby and vicinity got the start of Unity in population. In 1862 I think the Homestead bill passed Congress, that cut off speculators from buying government lands.

Mr. Darling and I started out from the point up the line to look for a location. We wandered around until we came to where the Little Eau Pleine River crossed the railroad line. Here was some vacant fractions so we looked them over and liked the locations. There was the creek and a good place for a dam and pond. I thought there would be something doing here some day so I took the South fraction and Darling the next two. The north fraction was marked for the old man Spencer and that is where the Allain farm is now. There were a number of them up for homestead so we went over in town 28 and located Oliver Yerks on 160 acres across the road from where the Lamont mill used to be. Then a mile north, 160 acres for Bill Wicker and a few other pieces for others and then went back home. This was the time that Chicago and Peshtigo were burning and the fires were running in the woods here some. We had to dog around a bit to get away from the smoke.

The next January Bill Wicker and I came up with a yoke of cattle and built my log house. We camped down by the creek as there was a stack of hay that someone had put up that came in handy for our oxen besides a bed for ourselves. We intended to build a house for Wicker also but the snow was so deep we decided to wait till spring. It took us 6 or 8 days to build mine then we went back home.

I made a number of trips that winter hauling up lumber and supplies and on April 1, I moved here, bag and baggage with 3 horses and 3 cows. The next day Fitzgerald came along as he had a contract to do the grading for the railroad from Spencer to Colby. He asked me to board a crew of his men and he would furnish the supplies, I decided to take them. I built an addition to my cabin for a dining room. In a few days the crew came and went to work so we had plenty of company and lots of work. After a while my feed for the horses and cows got so low I turned them out to browse and they would come up nights to get their feed. One night they failed to come home, all except a pony mare and my wife called her. I hunted for them off and on for a week but could not find them. One of the horses I never found and the others the Indians found for me near Marshfield. The cows I found next winter at Grand Rapids. We had quite a job to keep track of our two kids, Charley, 4 years old and Will, 2 years. They would stray off in the woods picking flowers. One day I thought we had lost them for sure. We called to them and found them in a hollow stump of a tree where they had crawled and couldn’t get out. We were afraid they would run onto a porcupine as they were quite thick around here then. They used to come around the house nights and gnaw the pork barrels to get salt. I frequently had to get up in the night and slaughter 2 or 3. One morning my wife and the hired girl got up to get breakfast for the crew and when they opened the dining room door they found one old “porky” on the dining table among the dishes. I was called on to dispatch him. There was trouble in the camp that morning as every dish had to be washed. I told the women folks to just wipe them off a little for that old “porky” was cleaner than some of their boarders, but no, every dish had to be washed, so breakfast was a little late that morning.

I kept on boarding the railroad men that summer and winter. The next spring Fitzgerald began to get discouraged. He was losing money. He was an old railroad builder who had built road on the Union Pacific and got rich at it but when he got here among the stumps, it was a different kind of proposition. He got two men by the name of Alexander and Seymour to take his job off his hands, but they did not last long. By this time the road was graded and the iron laid as far up as Flink’s Corners, half a mile south of Unity. The train, an engine, box car and caboose, used to come up from the Point every morning and go back in the afternoon. There was a short siding where they would run in and unload what they brought up.

Then there was dissatisfaction among the men that were doing the grading – they could not get their pay, so the men struck and would not let the work go on. They even felled a big pine across the track one morning. The train came up as usual and switched in on their little siding. The strikers thought they would capture the train and hold it there but they missed their calculations. The conductor was a big six foot man and just ended two or three of the men’s heels upwards and motioned to his engineer to go ahead. He got his train started and went back to the Point. After that they didn’t come up any farther than Spencer for some time.

Previous to that time my wife went down to Plover on a visit. When she started for home, she had not heard of the strike. When she got to Spencer, there she was six miles from home and no way to get here except by Foot & Walker’s line. But as luck would have it, a man came along with an ox team and wagon and gave her a ride home. He was going to Colby. A few days after this the men got their pay and the work went on.

By this time Spaulding came here and commenced to build his sawmill and there got to be quite a settlement here. Now we must have a town organization so I was commissioned to go to Wausau with a petition for a new town. I started off on horseback through the woods one morning but when I got to the Big Eau Pleine River about a mile south of Cherokee where they used to ford the stream, the river bank was full as there had been a heavy rain a day or two before. I was up against it now, but I had crossed worse places than that before, so I got my little mare down to the waters edge and headed her for the other shore. She had not gone many steps before we had to swim but she was game. She breasted the breakers and we got across the river pretty wet but the weather was warm and we soon dried off.

I got to Wausau the next day. I did not accomplish anything then as Colby was ahead of me and had set off Townships 26, 27, 28, and 29 and called it the town of Hull. That did not satisfy us but it had to go for that year. I went again the next spring and petitioned for townships 26 and 27, Range 2 and 3. The board was in session. When the petition was read, John Weed from the town of Bergen and Kronenwetter from Mosinee jumped up  and said they didn’t propose to have their towns cut up in that shape. They said we had one town already and that was enough for our little mushroom settlements. At that time their towns ran from the Wisconsin River clear across the county and as the Frenchmen say, it was 40 miles wide and 6 miles long. Nice little strip to collect taxes from, but it didn’t stay that way very long. The Northwestern was building from Wausau to Marshfield with villages springing up and they all wanted a town, so now Mr. Bergen and Mr. Mosinee had to be satisfied with their little towns like the rest of us.

Well, we had a town and a railroad, but no wagon road, only trails cut through the woods. I used to feel sorry for old Doc Stewart. He was the only doctor there was this side of Stevens Point. Many times I have seen him traveling through the woods walking on a pole to get over the water holes and going four or five miles to see a sick person. Sometimes he would get his pay and sometimes nix, but as they had a couple pipefulls of smoking tobacco, he was willing to wait until they could get the money.

We had to go to work making corduroy roads as they were better than no roads at all. There were miles of that kind of road in Clark and Marathon counties, but they cost three times as much as a good turnpike road would cost. At that time we did not know how to make a turnpike, any more than Fitzgerald knew how to build a railroad through those pine woods. We had no dynamite – I don’t think it was made then. The first turnpike that was made was from Flink’s Corners south a mile and a half and was let for $3 per rod. We had a sawdust road through the village after the sawmill was built. Joe Greenwood has built miles of turnpike for a dollar a rod and sometimes less, but Uncle Joe had a way of getting rid of the stumps quicker than some of us. If they weren’t too large he would cut them off close to the ground, then cover them up with dirt. That was the easiest way to get rid of stumps and it would work – sometimes.

Either Cook or Salter were always the head of the town board. At the spring election it would be Cook against Salter, the next year Salter vs. Cook, but year after year. I think the Deacon (Cook) had a little leverage as he would furnish the most lager and bologna and that cut quite a figure at the spring election. Well, no matter, they were both good men for the job and our taxes were not near as high then as now by about 300 percent.