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Standing in Place, Moving in Time
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.
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.
Wisconsin’s Christmas Past
A century ago, the city of Appleton, Wisconsin, celebrated Christmas on a grand scale. It was 1908, and for the first time, the city had decorated its streets with electric lights for the holiday. The occasion was not unlike our observance of Christmas today: bright, extravagant, and unrelentingly commercial. Summing up the event on December 31, the Appleton Post boasted that "The illumination of College Avenue by the Appleton merchants, together with the notoriety given to the town by the possession of the biggest Christmas tree in the world, and not only the biggest, but the prettiest, put the merchants of nearby towns to their wits' end to keep their trade from drifting over to Appleton."1
Christmas in Wisconsin wasn't always such a colossal affair. Indeed, the holiday hasn't always been celebrated here. The American Indians who first occupied the land had their own traditions, beliefs, and ceremonies. The first people who celebrated Christmas in what became Wisconsin were French and British traders who arrived after the seventeenth century. Few of these first Christian arrivals were especially devout. "We sometimes kept Sundays; but whether on the right day was doubtful," recalled Thomas Gummersall Anderson, a British trader who traveled Wisconsin widely in the early 1800s.2 Despite their relaxed attitude towards religion, Anderson and others like him tried to retain their Christmas traditions as best as they could in an unfamiliar land. Anderson's memoir, written just a few years before his death in 1875, records two Christmas feasts gone terribly awry on the Wisconsin frontier.