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)

Railroads: Regional Rivalry and Growth

In the post-Civil War period railroads became the main avenues for a vast expansion of opportunity for entrepreneurs, businessmen, and farmers. It was clear by the 1870s that the waterways had reached their limit for development. The Upper Mississippi River was not always navigable around the Rock Island rapids. Its tributaries in Wisconsin were also undependable. The Wisconsin River had constantly shifting shallows. Logs and lumber rafts choked the St. Croix and other rivers limiting navigation up or down river for others. In an era of horse or oxen drawn vehicles, public roads were not a viable access to a national or even international market. The railroads represented the most modern and efficient mode of transportation. [154]

Between 1868 and 1873, railroad construction in Wisconsin and Minnesota boomed. Before the war the main thrust of building rail lines was from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. In the postwar period the goal was to penetrate into the northern frontier. The coming of the railroad was the next critical development needed to advance settlement, logging, and agriculture along the river. The railroad released the St. Croix Valley from its dependency upon the river for its sole source of transportation. The log-choked river often times hindered access up and down the river, and when it froze in the winter, the valley was isolated for months from the outside world. [155]

In 1856 and 1864, Congress had set aside nearly four million acres of the public domain in Wisconsin for railroad construction. The railroad companies that were granted land under the 1856 act had abandoned projects after the Panic of 1857 and much of the land was forfeited. In the 1864 Railroad Act Congress renewed and enlarged the land grants. One of the three grants was for a northwest route from the St. Croix River or St. Croix Lake to Bayfield on Lake Superior. Another route was to connect the St. Croix to Tomah approximately forty miles east of La Crosse. The third was to take a north central route. Congress had stipulated that the first two railroads must be completed in five years and the last within ten years. By 1869, however, the St. Croix and Lake Superior Railroad Company had not laid any track along its proposed route from Hudson to Bayfield. It, thereby, forfeited all of its claims. Congress proceeded to select the North Wisconsin Railway Company to build the line with the assumption that the same land would be granted to it. However, once the issue was reopened in Congress, Minnesota and Wisconsin citizens fought over the route to Lake Superior. Once again the old decision to divide the state of Wisconsin from Minnesota at the St. Croix turned the respective sides into competitors rather than cooperators. [156]

Citizens of Minnesota had envisioned a railroad route from St. Paul to Duluth that would give the Twin Cities access to Great Lakes shipping without having to pass through Wisconsin or Illinois. During the Civil War Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey argued the line was essential to national defense. A line to the North Country where the lumber industry was expanding was also no small incentive to Minnesota to get the line on their side of the St. Croix. In 1864, Congress had passed the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad grant, and the Minnesota legislature allocated the remaining land necessary. The line, however, was not immediately built. When the St. Croix and Lake Superior Railroad Company folded and the grant dispute reached Congress, Minnesotans rallied to defeat the plans for a rival railroad in Wisconsin. The people of Duluth were adamantly opposed to Bayfield becoming a rival port and railroad terminus. They argued before Congress that they had a better harbor than Bayfield, and the surrounding area around Duluth was better suited for a larger city. The Minnesota contingent also enlisted the support of Jay Cooke, the leading investment banker of Philadelphia. Cooke had an interest in the Minnesota line, but he also had some controlling influence over the North Wisconsin. Although he was supposed to represent both companies equally, he used his influence to favor the Minnesota line. The North Wisconsin Company had only been able to lay seventeen miles of track northeast of Hudson in four years before Congress discontinued its grant. By 1871, however, the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad opened for business. Duluth became the third largest city in Minnesota behind the Twin Cities and the reigning city on Lake Superior, not Bayfield, Wisconsin. The development of the Upper St. Croix north of St. Croix Falls was put on hold. [157]

As the Twin Cities became the dominant metropolis in the North Country, much of the thrust of national railroad building was to the west of the St. Croix. In 1867, Chicago and Milwaukee interests purchased the Minnesota Central and built a connecting line from McGregor, Iowa, linking St. Paul with Chicago. Another railroad line was constructed in 1871 on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi from St. Paul to Winona and then down to Hastings, which was across the river from La Crosse where there were connections to Milwaukee. With these connections northern Minnesota was the obvious starting point for the Northern Pacific route of the Transcontinental Railroad built in the 1870s. [158]

Stillwater, however, now a city of seven thousand, was not about to be bypassed by these transportation developments. In 1867, many prominent men of Stillwater, Taylors Falls, Marine, and Baytown organized the Stillwater and St. Paul Railroad. Within a few years they had raised enough capital to begin building. By December 1870, the line was completed. Stillwater's economy boomed as a result of this connection and settlers were lured to the area by the 63,850 acres of government land grants available for sale. By 1878 the Stillwater & St. Paul line became part of the Northern Pacific Transcontinental system. [159] Since it was at the head of deep-water navigation on the Mississippi and it had rail access to the Twin Cities, Stillwater fully expected to "be more than ever a prominent wheat market. . .This city is the only point favorable for the transshipment by rail to Lake Superior at Duluth, of the large quantities of wheat that are already coming from several hundred miles down the river to take this route to the East." [160]

Railroad building in northern Wisconsin suffered from Minnesota's transportation expansion and from its restrictive constitution that prohibited public funds for internal improvements. Investors in northern Wisconsin were only interested in timber. Most farmers preferred prairie land, or at least wooded areas with oak openings to the dense forests of the North Country — at least until they were cleared. Railroads had a tough time raising capital to build lines in northern Wisconsin. Land-grant railroad companies had to build the line first before they got title to the land. Therefore, financing for railroads in the north woods was difficult to obtain. In 1868 and 1869, railroad lobbyists tried to get a constitutional amendment passed that would allow the state to give financial support for railroad construction. However, the more populous southern counties who already had access to railroads defeated it. Local railroad promoters also had bad luck with eastern capitalists who preferred to invest in the less risky consolidation of railroads and the more profitable business of monopoly building than in new construction into Wisconsin's deep woods frontier. [161] Nonetheless, the West Wisconsin Railway reached Hudson by 1873, where a bridge was built across the St. Croix to the Minnesota side. [162] Mail delivery, however, could not depend upon railroads. In 1876, a mail route was established from Marine Mills across the St. Croix by ferry to Farmington, Wisconsin and then northward to Osceola and St. Croix Falls. [163]

It would take a great deal of maneuvering to get a railroad built in the St. Croix Valley north from Hudson to Lake Superior. Once railroad monopolies had solidified their interests in the state, they showed little interest in penetrating into the densely wooded, sparsely populated northwest. While lumber companies in northwest Wisconsin began to show some interest in extending railroads further into the north woods by the late 1860s, they found they had little influence in Madison and on railroad companies. Since no money was forthcoming from the state, local counties were often forced to put up bonds to finance the venture. Since the northern St. Croix River Valley was so sparsely populated, timber and sawmill owners feared it would be their property pledged to finance the bonds. While railroad transport could facilitate timber extraction, the lumber companies were still able to make use of the superb waterways well into the 1870s and 1880s. Absentee timber owners and the more mobile lumbermen had a difficult time turning out enough votes to defeat railroad promoters and developers in the towns and villages who planned to finance their ventures at the expense of the lumber interests. Even if the lumber companies managed to defeat railroad bonds at the county level, railroad lobbyist generally found a sympathetic ear in Madison to outmaneuver the lumbermen. While the Wisconsin legislature could not grant money, it could carve out another county to eliminate the resisting timber factions on the frontier fringe. Northern Wisconsin's counties above an east-west line from Marinette on Lake Michigan to New Richmond on the west were all created with less than five thousand people by 1880. Burnett County had been set off from Polk County in 1856, but was not organized until 1865. Bayfield County was created in 1868. [164]

By 1873, the Northern Wisconsin Railroad Company won the right to build a line from Hudson to Lake Superior. The West Wisconsin line, however, also coveted the route and ensured that the legislature put so many conditions on it that Alexander Mitchell, the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul [which owned the NWR] and Milwaukee banker, rejected it. Before the West Wisconsin could celebrate its coup, the Panic of 1873 and the ensuing depression of the seventies put an end to the railroad boom. The St. Croix to Bayfield line, which started in Hudson and split at Spooner with a branch going to Superior and another headed to Bayfield, was not completed until 1883. Construction of this line to Superior, of course, required a bridge to cross the Namekagon River at Trego. The line was eventually brought into the Chicago and Northwestern system. [165]

Since the St. Croix railroad line skirted the eastern side of the valley, many towns along the river complained they were left out of the new prosperity that was developing in the railroad towns eastward. "We are shut out from the world of travel and business, by not being on the line of an important railroad," lamented the Polk County Press. "Our river is of great benefit to us, but that serves us not more than one half of the year, and some years not as much as that, -- especially when the logs blockade us for two months of the best part of the season." [166] The St. Croix River, which had been so essential to the development of the region, limited the development of the valley's full potential. The key to agricultural and related economic development was access to a railroad. So despite the linkage of the St. Croix River at Hudson to Lake Superior, many towns further up river were convinced more railroads were needed. In 1884, the Polk County Press asked, "Will a Railroad Pay?" Its answer was definitively "yes." The paper pointed out that two-thirds of the wheat produced in the county was hauled to Stillwater because farmers could get a better price there. "Why? Because in Stillwater there is a competition in the market, more buyers and a higher price is paid." The reason for more buyers was because "the town had the shipping facilities of three railroads, and will soon have a fourth or fifth. These facilities give that city mills to grind the wheat, and a demand for it...With a railroad there would be a demand for Osceola wheat in Stillwater, St. Paul and Minneapolis." Osceola's mills would expand and farmers could get the same price for it in town as they would in hauling it the nearly twenty miles to Stillwater. [167]

In the early 1880s a new era of cooperation in railroad building began between Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad, which ran from St. Paul to Duluth and skirted the western edge of the St. Croix River Valley, did not fulfill all expectations. The Port of Duluth did not readily give the Twin Cities the access to national markets. In winter ice hampered lake traffic out of Duluth to eastern markets. There were also complaints that subsequent summer freight rates were too high, having to make up for winter losses. By the 1880s the Twin Cities had become a major milling center with enough economic and political clout to consider running a line from Minneapolis-St. Paul across northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula to Sault Ste. Marie — the entrepot between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, as well as the proposed terminus for a Michigan railroad. "It is imperative to all our interests," wrote the Minneapolis Journal, "that a railroad system be constructed which will place us at least on an equality, both summer and winter, with all other shipping points in this vast region." [168]

This proposal created great excitement in the St. Croix Valley and was closely followed in the newspapers of the St. Croix. "It will be an entirely new road, crossing the river somewhere between Stillwater and St. Croix Falls," the Polk County Press enthusiastically exclaimed. [169] Wisconsin was, of course, eager to have the line built since it would travel through the heart of its hard and softwood northern forests, as well as penetrate into its iron regions. However, financing the road through Wisconsin was fraught with the usual fiscal problems and local aid was needed. The Polk County Press was undaunted by this prospect and encouraged its readers to support the project which was expected to come down the Apple River, then cross the St. Croix River, and proceed down to Stillwater. "This great public improvement presents itself in close relationship to the people of Polk County," the paper wrote. "It is proposed by its incorporators to cross the territory of this county, and our people, if they are true now to their own interests, will give the matter close and careful consideration. . .They propose to develop this section with a great trunk railroad: they will ask in return but a small amount of assistance from us, when compared to the benefits the road will bring to us." [170] The Press proved prophetic as the line was determined to go from the head of Osceola prairie into Osceola itself with a branch line up to St. Croix Falls. From there it was to run down river to the mouth of the Apple River where it was to cross the St. Croix and proceed to Stillwater. [171]

By 1886, work began on the Soo Line as the Minneapolis–Sault Ste. Marie Line was known. By January of 1887, the line had reached Franconia bringing with it a real estate boom. By February it was Osceola's turn. "The coming of the railroad has nearly doubled the price of land," rejoiced the Polk County Press, "and those who wish to buy should do so soon, as property in Polk county will never be worth less than it is to-day." [172] By August Osceola rejoiced with the completion of the railroad. "We are in the world," proclaimed the Polk County Press. "Connected with business and commercial life." After thirty-five to forty years of waiting for a railroad, the people of Osceola were giddy with excitement. Their winter hibernations were over as was their exclusion from growing national market both as sellers and consumers. "Old men and old women leaped for joy; young men and maidens gaily tripped the streets," an observer noted when the track was completed. "Everybody was happy. . .even the sick smiled, and those who did not smile must have been nearly dead." [173] The arrival of the railroad to Osceola brought with it the building of a "fine new depot" and a thirty-foot high water tower as well as a new grain elevator and warehouse in anticipation of bountiful harvests of wheat grown on the prairies of Osceola. [174] With the arrival of the Soo Line, mail delivery shifted to the railroad and the mail route from Marine Mills via ferry to Wisconsin was discontinued in 1887. Residents were please by the greater dependability of mail delivery from the iron horse rather than boats on the river. [175]