Snowy Railroad Crossing at Rolette & Water Streets

I stand at a quiet intersection on a cold winter morning. This is the corner of Rolette & Water Streets on St. Feriole Island in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. In front of me lie the half-abandoned tracks of the Wisconsin & Southern Railroad. Behind me sits the frozen Mississippi River. Around me are snow-filled parks and a few isolated buildings. I am the only person in sight.

There are more people here in summer. Tourists come to the riverside then, and so do the locals. They come to boat or to fish, to picnic or to stroll, to see the sights or to escape the city. They aren't here now. It's too cold, too early, too distant, too quiet. What would one do, except shiver? The tavern on the opposite corner opens in the afternoon, a few might come then. Mostly, though, this is a place of icy silence.

A hundred or more years ago, it would have bustled with commotion.

The street where I stand now was then a railyard, the scene before me would have held homes and businesses, the river behind me would have been obscured from sight by docks and warehouses. This place was then a hub of motion, especially in the summer, when it saw not just trains and carriages, but ferries and barges, and eventually even the town's first airplane landing.

Detail of an 1870 Bird's Eye Illustration of Prairie du Chien. The spot where I now stand is shown near the center of this view, where Rolette Street intersects what was then a railyard. Buildings shown include the Dousman House Hotel, lower left; the Diamond Jo Warehouse on the waterfront; and the Railroad Grain Elevator, upper right.

The railroad was first completed to Prairie du Chien in 1857, connecting the Mississippi River here to Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. Fittingly, the rail company was called the Milwaukee & Mississippi. It's tracks originally ended at Lowertown—roughly that section of Prairie du Chien south of Wells Street—but in the early 1860s, the railroad moved its facilities north to this site, where the river was deeper and shipping easier. So began a rush of construction as the railroad company built a rail-yard, a depot, a large grain elevator, and a crowning luxury hotel called the Railroad House—renamed the Dousman House Hotel after 1868.

The Diamond Jo steamboat line also built here in the 1860s. It's new facility, a riverfront warehouse, permitted boats to load and unload cargo directly between the river and the rails.

With the onset of such commerce, the quiet village that had existed at Prairie du Chien since the 1780s also burst into a rapid expansion. New homes and businesses sprung up around the depot, and the neighborhood thrived. For decades this would be a hub of transportation. Goods and livestock were sent up and down the river. Grain poured in from the plains of Iowa and Minnesota on its way to feed eastern cities. Settlers came in the other direction, rushing towards new homes in the west. Everything here was about moving, about going places, about technology and speed. The sound was of steam engines and jostling crowds, the smell was of burning coal.

Today, the only sound is the wind, and the only smell is the snow.

View of the Upper Mississippi River in January

Change came gradually. The steamboats disappeared first, and when they went, the riverfront Diamond Jo Warehouse was sold to the railroad. Transformed into a facility to hold unclaimed and damaged rail freight, the warehouse would sometimes draw great crowds in summer. Each year, the railroad company held a massive three-day auction here to dispose of the lost or defective cargo stored within. Eventually, the warehouse crumbled, and today nothing is left but a foundation.

The railroad chugged on farther into the twentieth century. Godfrey "Lou" Cardine, born in 1892, lived in this vicinity most of his life and spent years working for the railroad. In the 1970s, Cardine recalled some of his experiences on tape to local historian Griff Williams.¹ "We had five passenger trains each way in those days," he recalled of the early twentieth century. The Dousman House Hotel, he indicates, was a particular center of activity. Its fifty-some rooms were full "pretty well all the time," according to Cardine, who elaborated that travelers from towns "thirty miles away, say Boscobel, Woodman, and all them different places, would come into Prairie du Chien for Sundays. Then they'd get out on the early train." These guests were often attracted by the hotel's live entertainment, offered every night. Musician Charlie Wacouta, also interviewed by Williams, performed at the hotel as a young man. "I played violin for their cabarets," he says. "They had cabaret girls that came from the twin cities and from Milwaukee and Chicago, and they changed off. I played violin, and there was a pianist, as well as a clarinet, a coronetist, and we played there between six and seven o'clock for the guests that were in the dining room."

In 1911, while the hotel still prospered and the trains still ran, aviator Hugh Robinson arrived in Prairie du Chien with a preview of one machine that would eventually help bring rail's decline. Robinson came to town in the pilot's seat of a Hydro-Aeroplane built by Glenn Curtis. Fitted with pontoons, the plane was able to land in the Mississippi River outside the Dousman House. It was the first airplane landing in Prairie du Chien, and it delivered the town's first air-mail. The Wisconsin Historical Society has pictures of the landing at its website.

Eventually, airplanes and automobiles would sound the death knell for rail traffic and the grand hotel. Trains still run in Prairie du Chien, of course, but most are traveling on the BNSF line a few miles across town. The tracks at this spot have become a little used spur of the Wisconsin & Southern Railroad, and while a freight train occasionally rolls through to receive cargo from the river, the passenger trains are long gone. Empty of guests, the commodious hotel was remodeled into a slaughterhouse during the 1930s. Its evening strains of violin and cabaret gave way to the shrieking of hogs and calves.

Then, in 1965, the flood came. The Mississippi River crested nine feet above flood stage, and this neighborhood—the fourth ward, the old center of town—was completely submerged. Twenty to twenty-five percent of the city's population was made homeless while the water lingered, although some, like Lou Cardine, braved the flood. "I had a ladder going up on top there and I had that window open and I'd go in that window there...I know they all kind of made fun of me staying up there; they said, 'that thing is going to float away with you, and let 'er go!' I said if that's my time, then that's my time."

Buildings along Water Street, including the former Dousman House Hotel, left; and The Depot, now a bar, advertising ice somewhat unnecessarily.

When the floodwaters receded, residents fixed up their riparian neighborhood for a time, but their return was short-lived. The Mississippi would rise again, and in 1971 the city restricted development here. Then, in 1974, Congress authorized a relocation program that would move residents from the fourth ward to higher ground over the following decade. Not everyone who lived here was eager to see their historic and unique community fade.

Lou Cardine shared his thoughts about the relocation plans on tape with Griffith Williams:

"I think they ought to leave the people who want to stay, stay, and them that want to go, go. That's what I think. I don't think they ought to—if a fellow's been here, say, eighty years—I don't think they ought to take his home away from him, or take his privileges away. Myself, I ain't been like some of them, I never asked them for nothing...[They want] to make a park out of it! My god, they've got a park down here already and they don't take care of that, how can they do it? They can hardly afford to take care of the park down there...and here's another thing, now when they bought that building, and they bought that building, and they bought his place, and they bought here, and little places, the city ain't getting any taxes, that's tax free. Does that even make good sense? If they've got something there and they can't take care of it, how are they going to take care of this?...You know, the federal government is eventually, like Proxmire says, eventually going to get fed up on giving money away all the time."

The once thriving fourth ward is a park today. It's wide lawns offer space for ballgames and concerts, its trees make for shady picnic spots, and expansive gardens and a sculpture park are beginning to take shape. But remnants of the old neighborhood linger. Its streets still cut across the new park, which is cut into city blocks over a grid. The strip of land along the river, Lawler Park, is named for the railroad station agent who arrived with one of the first trains in 1857. Some buildings from his time remain too, frozen in the snow, but not frozen in time. They are altered or abandoned, they have changed. This is their place, they have stood here longer than one hundred years, winter after winter after winter—and yet they look almost as if they don't belong, these big cold buildings on otherwise empty streets. Is this really a city park, or more truly a ghost town?

There are some signs of life. An old rail depot has now become a bar and grill, the Wisconsin Historical Society maintains a few historic houses nicely, and even the grand old hotel is undergoing a slow redevelopment, so that perhaps eventually it will once again be able to welcome guests and musicians. The river buzzes with speedboats and jet-skis in summer, when the ice has cleared away. Will it ever again become a corridor for travelers, moving by boat across the continent? Will the rails ever bring passengers again, people who forsake their automobiles for train tickets in some future era of environmental concern and too-expensive fuel? This place has changed immensely in the past hundred and fifty years, even in just the past fifty years, and it will continue to change. What will time bring? We can only wait here to see.

Note:

1. The Griffith Williams interviews of Godfrey Louis Cardine, Charles Wacouta, and several others are available for listening at both the Fort Crawford Museum in Prairie du Chien and the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives in Madison.