St. Croix Riverway Time and the River: A History of the Saint Croix

CHAPTER 3:
"The New Land": Settlement and the Development of Agriculture in the St. Croix Valley (continued)

The Farming Frontier Moves Up the Valley

When the Civil War concluded in 1865, Wisconsin still had nearly ten to eleven million acres of unsold land, which amounted to approximately one-third of the entire state. Most of it was considered valuable for its timber rather than its suitability for farming. [140] In 1866 the federal land office opened up the last big tract of land in Wisconsin amounting to nearly 6.5 million acres. Most of it was located in the Chippewa pinery, but the upper St. Croix also went up for sale. When the land was put up for sale, 7.5 million acres in agricultural scrip had been sold. The holders of this scrip came from all over the country, and most buyers bought tracts of land of at least eight hundred acres. Caleb Cushing, the persona non grata of St. Croix Falls, made the largest purchase of 33,000 acres in Polk County. In 1868, Cushing had helped organize the Great European American Emigration Land Company and served as its president. [141] This company was incorporated in New York State with a million dollars of capital from investors in New York, Georgia, Wisconsin, and six other states. Its headquarters was in New York City with branch offices in Stockholm, Hamburg, and Liverpool. Its purpose was, of course, to recruit immigrants directly to their land, not state-held land.

Unfortunately, Cushing's big schemes did not always work out because he often selected incompetent or unscrupulous agents to execute his plans. The general manager of the Emigration Company, Henning A. Taube of Stockholm -- or Count Taube as he was known in the valley, was of the unscrupulous sort. The Stockholm office provided an elaborate prospectus on how to reach St. Croix Falls, the cost of getting there, employment prospects in logging, and the opportunity to buy good farm lands from the company. The first group of 125 Swedes reached the St. Croix in early summer 1869. However, land was not available for purchase until October. Taube then advised Cushing that it would be better to sell title to the land before the immigrants arrived. Count Taube, however, was extravagant and reckless in his use of company money and promises made to emigrants. When colonists found they could not exchange certificates they bought back in Sweden and Prussia for land in the St. Croix, Taube simply referred them to Cushing. Cushing honored the certificates and refunded the settlers' money. They all found land outside St. Croix Falls. Cushing, however, resigned as president and trustee of the Company. All the other trustees did as well and the Great Emigration Company became defunct. [142]

Cushing, however, still owned land in Polk County and, undaunted by his previous failures, continued to buy more. By 1875, he owned 45,000 acres in the county, and he finally found a reliable agent in J. Stannard Baker. Baker took control of the Cushing's Land Agency in 1874 and quickly turned the enterprise around. "His appearance," wrote Alice Smith, "marked the end of thirty years of mismanagement resulting from absentee landlordism, controversial claims, lack of policy, and negligence." Baker put an end to trespassing on Cushing's land for logging, wild hay harvesting, and cranberry picking, and kept Cushing's tax rate low. His agricultural lands, sold to both lumbermen and farmers, finally began to produce a return after thirty-three years of investment. Cushing eventually sold the rest of his land to William J. Star of Eau Claire. These heavily timbered lands were logged off and eventually became farms. [143]

Although Cushing's Emigration Company folded, newspaper articles in Madison lured a colony of Danes to his lands near the town of Luck. West Denmark, as the settlement was called, stretched over three townships. "These hardy Scandinavians were very thrifty and industrious," Harry Baker commented. Their only goal was "to get homes and [were] willing to go into the wilderness and cut down the heavy hardwood timber and build their log houses and clear small patches of land from which to raise crops for the necessities of life. . .They . . .were a wonderful asset in the development of this heavy hardwood timbered country." [144] Like the pioneers of the Chisago Lakes area, Polk County settlers faced the arduous task of clearing the land if they did not buy it from a lumber company who had already logged it. They were far from the St. Croix River, which limited their opportunities to join in the export of agricultural products and isolated their communities until the railroads came through. The virgin soil had the characteristics of the northern end of the tension zone. It was mostly black loam with a subsoil of clay or gravel. While it produced good crops for small grain, vegetables, hay, and corn, farmers found it unreliable. They became dairy farmers much sooner than other settlers further south and claimed to have established the first cooperative creamery in the state of Wisconsin. [145]

In the post-war years the average settler to the frontier and the St. Croix Valley faced stiffer competition for land. While land was still available through the public land office under the Homestead Act or even pre-emption claims, most of the best land went into the hands of speculators. Farmers, however, had to pay more for this land up front. Homestead land not only had the ten-dollar fee and no title to it for five year, but it also might have wet lands that needed to be drained, poorer soil, or it might be off the beaten path with little access to markets before railroads and graded roads were built. If they were lucky, some newcomers were able to purchase farms that were already developed by a previous owner.

However they were able to obtain land, the St. Croix Valley continued to attract settlers and immigrants. Between 1865 and 1873, newcomers to Wisconsin arrived and followed the paths of settlement that were laid out by the first wave of settlers. Virtually the same ethnic groups continued to migrate to the state. The difference in settlement from the antebellum years was that large tracts of public lands were often bought up before anyone took up residence. These newcomers were also not solely dependent upon the waterways to reach their destinations. They were assisted by the growth of railroads that penetrated further north. By 1870, the population of Wisconsin increased to over a million inhabitants, and it kept its status of having one of the largest immigrant and foreign-born populations in the country. [146]

With the anti-immigrant, Know Nothing years behind it, Wisconsin renewed its efforts to recruit foreign emigrants. In 1867, Wisconsin established another board of immigration, this time, however, the commissioners received no pay. Its main strategy was to distribute a thirty two-page pamphlet written by Increase A. Lapham that described every facet of the state from its location, resources, educational institutions, churches, its system of government, the rights of citizens, the Homestead Law, and routes to the state. The cheapness of land in Wisconsin relative to other areas was particularly stressed. Besides its English version, this pamphlet was translated into German, French, Welsh, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch. The governor appointed a three-person committee in each county to compile a list of names of family and friends in the old country to mail the pamphlet to. The state of Wisconsin, thereby, institutionalized the pattern of chain migration that had begun in the 1850s. Pierce, St. Croix, and Polk Counties continued to attract the Irish, the Swedes and Norwegians, some Germans and English, and a few Danes, along with the native-born Americans from eastern states. [147]

When complaints arose that the immigration commission's budget and reach was too limited, the Wisconsin legislature passed an act in 1871 that created an elective commission with a full-time office in Milwaukee and a part-time agent in Chicago. The first elected commissioner, the Norwegian-born Ole C. Johnson, distributed the pamphlet more widely sending them directly to government and emigration agencies in Europe, such as England, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway. Johnson also provided the extra perk of free travel for women, children, and elderly men on the Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad to their Wisconsin destinations if they were unable to continue once they arrived in Wisconsin. [148]

Minnesota did not stand idly by in the recruitment of immigrants. In 1867, the state established its own Board of Immigration. Its secretary was Hans Mattson, a Swedish immigrant and pioneer. He also served as a land agent for the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. Mattson took a journey himself to his homeland to recruit prospective settlers for the Minnesota frontier. "He was a modern Marco Polo returning from fabulous lands beyond known horizons," wrote historian Theodore Blegen, "and he never ceased to describe his chosen state as a land of milk and honey." Minnesota's Immigration Board also sent out pamphlets in Norwegian, Swedish, German, Welsh, and English along with other recruiting agents back east and to Europe. Railroads, who stood to benefit from increased population, provided cheap fares for immigrant families, and provided temporary shelter for them when they arrived. Ever sensitive to its reputation for cold weather, Minnesota made more exaggerated claims of its health benefits for ailments such as ague and consumption than it had in the 1850s and minimized other sicknesses common on the frontier, such as diphtheria and typhus. [149] This strategy worked well. In 1879, the Rush City Post wrote, the night train brought in nearly "three-hundred Swedes who were on the way to locate in this and Burnett counties. . .Mr. [Charles] Anderson went over to Sweden sometime early in the spring for the purpose of bringing over a ship load and he succeeded well." These Swedish immigrants made an enthusiastic impression on the Post. "A better more healthy and well dressed lot of foreigners never landed in Rush City before. . .They make the best of citizens." [150]

By 1870, the wheat frontier began to shift further from eastern to western states with St. Croix farmers in the middle of this agricultural transition. In most of Wisconsin wheat production began to decline while Minnesota experienced its wheat boom. This shift occurred because of soil exhaustion and over-specialization in one crop also encouraged the proliferation of pests and blight. In the 1860s and 1870s, the southern half of Wisconsin battled cinch bugs and rust in addition to the usual cycles of drought that caused unpredictable yields of wheat. Railroad transportation moved into the central portion of the state that had hitherto been remote from water transportation and national and even international markets. Railroad building had also extended further west into the prairies and plains of Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, which increased competition in agricultural production. While Wisconsin on the whole produced respectable crops of wheat, individual farmers could not match the yields per acre coming out of the fresh, virgin soils to the west. Many farmers in the southern and central sections of the state finally began to heed the advice coming from the University of Wisconsin's Agricultural School to diversify. [151]

The St. Croix Valley, however, continued to experience a wheat boom. In 1876, Stillwater boasted that it "ranks next to any market in the State — Minneapolis being first." [152] The town had a right to boast its importance to agriculture in the region. In 1875, its Seymour, Sabin Company began manufacturing a thresher called the "Minnesota Chief." [153]