When the White Pine Was King by Jerry Apps

Author:Jerry Apps
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Not many miles to the south on the Wisconsin River, lumber companies built sawmills as early as the 1820s in what are now Mosinee, Wausau, and Stevens Point. Grandfather Bull Falls, sixteen miles north of Wausau on the Wisconsin River, presented a formidable barrier for log driving. At these falls, the river dropped 105 feet in less than a mile. Even though the land north of that point was rich in red and white pine, early loggers avoided working north of these treacherous falls. More than 150 sawmills had been established from Wisconsin Dells to Grandfather Bull Falls in twenty-five years beginning in the 1820s. But none were located north of the falls until, in 1855, a Mr. Helms of Stevens Point and his business partner, Joshua Fox, hewed out a track wide enough for an ox cart and then, during the winter of 1857–1858, built a logging camp north of Grandfather Bull Falls. The following spring, the loggers successfully drove their logs to a sawmill at Mosinee, the first logs to pass what is now Rhinelander. When the Economic Panic of 1857 caused a downturn in the lumber industry, some of the lumberjacks in the Rhinelander-area camp decided to try new lines of work and started taverns, trading posts, and other businesses along the river. One of them was John Curran, who had been foreman of Helms and Fox’s first logging crew. In 1858 or 1859, Curran built what he called the Half Way House on a former American Indian camping ground and thus became the first settler on the site that would become Rhinelander.

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