Lumberman pioneered way for Old Main By WENDELL NELSON Special to The Gazette The big white house at 1727 Jefferson St., the southwest corner of Jefferson and Wyatt Ave., is fairly nondescript except for its size. It has been re-sided with wide siding, and a large veranda on the front (east) and north is gone. Its two bay windows are almost buried by shrubbery near the walls. And the fact that it is an apartment house is made starkly evident by the large, covered, outside stairway added onto the former front. But this house is the key to an interesting and important story: Nothing less than the founding of both our own University of Wisconsin campus and the city of Rhinelander. It was the home of Edward Dexter Brown. Besides the usual historical sources as tax rolls, deeds, census records and obituaries and other newspaper articles, a major one for this subject is the three-volume series on the history of Rhinelander written by Theodore V. Olsen (1932-1993). He was a 1950s graduate of the Wisconsin State College in Stevens Point, and became a very successful author of both Western novels and historical novels of the Middle West. But after he moved to a lake house outside Rhinelander, he took time to research and write a history of that city. His information is especially valuable, because it is based on letters, business records and memories of Brown family members, friends and business associates- sources more immediate and accurate than later, third-hand accounts. Most of the Olsen material used in this article is taken from "The Rhinelander Country, Volume Two; Birth of a City" (1983). The story begins way back in the 1850s and faraway in upstate New York. There, in Oneida and Madison counties, were born two men who will be its main characters: Edward Dexter Brown in 1824, and Thomas Wesley Andersen in 1828. They both worked on their fathers' farms, and attended the nearest schools when they had time. When they first met is a mystery, but they were probably well-acquainted by the time Brown married Anderson's sister, Helen, in 1849. Olsen found these Browns to be part of an illustrious family. The first to come to America was "Baptist clergyman Chad Brown, who came from England in 1633 and settled in the colony of Massachusetts Bay." Later, he moved to what became Rhode Island, where his descendants founded Brown University. Even actor Spencer Tracy, a Wisconsin native, was related to the Browns. In 1846, three years before his marriage, E.D. Brown felt the urge to go West, and supposedly walked all the way to Wisconsin Territory. There he "bought up 120 acres of federal land (at $1.25 an acre) near...the tiny village of Lake Mills." After a year of backbreaking labor converting virgin forest and prairie into a farm, he discovered that no roads were planned to connect Lake Mills to Madison and Milwaukee, so he couldn't market his crops. Besides, "the bugs and mosquitoes are terrible," he wrote home, so he sold his land and returned to New York, according to Olsen. There he and a brother, Everett, bought a "good farm in ...Madison County, not far south of their former home in Oneida County." They worked hard to make the poor soil of the farm produce, using such advanced methods as crop-rotation, and made the farm prosper. In the spring of 1856, E.D. "sold his interest in the...farm to...Everett for roughly $15,000. This sum, taken with the savings E.D. had realized from nine years of progressive farming, would get the family off to a secure start in their new home. (Though all accounts give the year of Dexter's second westward hegira as 1857, his surviving correspondence proves that he was settled near Stevens Point by late '56)," Olsen writes. The Brown family didn't come directly here, but stopped for about two months at "Newport, a thriving town in Sauk County on the east bank of the Wisconsin River two miles South of Wisconsin Dells." But Brown had been made cautious by his "fiasco" by Lake Mills, so he moved on. His instincts were right; though Newport was projected to eventually boast 10,000 residents, today it "is remembered only as a well-known ghost town..." Olsen says the Browns arrived in Stevens Point on Sept. 27, 1856 (The Stevens Point Journal of May 19, 1894, says Apr. 7, 1857.). "In years to come the family would become almost as strongly identified with this city as with Rhinelander, the town they founded." "Stevens Point was named after George Stevens, a New York lumberman who had built a sawmill on its site in 1839. By 1855 it was a bustling supply center for dozens of logging camps." (Olsen is apparently in error here; according to Malcolm Rosholt's "The Saga of George Stevens," a chapter in "Pioneers of the Pinery" (1980), Stevens only bought and enlarged a cabin to store supplies and sawmill equipment in - and to shelter the workmen who accompanied him - during the four years (1839-1843) he was building and running sawmills at Big Bull Falls (later Wausau). The "point" was a "small peninsula extending into the Wisconsin River (it was later inundated by the dam below the Clark Street bridge)," says Rosholt. And the cabin was not a sawmill, and not even a trading post that other later people have said it was, but only a "staging area or halfway house" and shelter. Stevens went bankrupt in 1843, sold out, and left the area, according to Rosholt.) Olsen continues, "On the Plover River about two miles east of Stevens Point, Dexter Brown built or purchased a small sawmill on which he would make considerable improvements over the years. He erected a dike to create a flood basin whereon logs could be floated to the mill. He began to buy up extensive tracts of timber in the district, investing $7000.00 in timberlands during the first year. He hired crews of Irish loggers from the nearby (T)own of Stockton to log these tracts and fill out his mill crew." Malcolm Rosholt says "Edward D. Brown bought land here in 1856 and built a sawmill...." The mill "was located about two rods (32 feet) north of the present highway bridge at Iverson Park." (A deed recording one of the several transactions giving Brown ownership of those timberlands - most of them in the town of Hull - is Vol. M, page 23, dated Oct. 4, 1861.) Matthew Stapleton and his father, Patrick, were among those Irish loggers from Stockton. Matt remembered the Plover River operation. "The mill house was a large white house, two story, with a wing where the cooking and meals were served. We men had separate houses. These comfortable quarters were some 150 feet north of the large house. Mr. Dexter did not stay with us. He drove home evenings (to a newer residence in Stevens Point) and out in the morning." "The 'large white house' mentioned by Stapleton was a dwelling that E.D. Brown erected for his family on high ground east of the marshy millsite, probably in 1857. North of the house was a 'sandy hill' where Webster Brown would remember playing 'when a boy of six, a happy place for a little boy to play; there was lots of sand and much shade nearby under the pines and oaks and maples.'" The place would hold pleasant memories for many people of the area. In a 1928 issue of the Stevens Point (Daily) Journal, Tap Snilloc (pseudonym of Pat Collins, an old-time lumberman and native of Stevens Point) wrote that "Brown's mill had a tender significance for the older generation of this city. The old swimming hole, familiar to all kids of my time, was located near this old mill. And in the stream below the mill, we fished for 'shiners' and 'horned ace' (horndace)." "Of key importance to the Browns' operation was the big earthen dam at the site. Matt Stapleton described it as being 'all sand and close to 400 feet long east and west. There was one large gate to let lumber rafts pass downstream from Jordon (sic) and a small gate about six feet wide to drive all upper river logs through. There was a gate on the canal that furnished water to the waterwheel, as the first sawmills were run by water power.'" "Apparently...Brown and his family made their quarters in the mill itself that first year and through the winter of 1856-57, during which E.D. logged in the vicinity. His first woods operation was a small one. Equipped with three skidding teams, his eight-man crew worked the pine stands a mile and a half from his mill. By spring he had about 550,000 feet of logs stacked on the riverbank. Weighing the cost (about $25 per day) of men, teams, provisions and tools, plus such 'incidental expenses' as repairs and building camp shanties, Dexter felt a tired discouragement." When his brother Everett's letters expressed an interest in quitting farming in New York and coming West to log, E.D. tried hard to dissuade him. "Dexter spoke disappointedly of his four-month operation just concluded. He could sell his logs for '$4.00 per thousand on the bank or $10.00 per thousand in Stevens Point.' He could market it for 'from $15.00 to $25.00 per thousand' at St. Louis, but couldn't ascertain the cost of rafting it that distance." But eventually, Brown would send many rafts of his lumber down the river--he "always accompanied the raft drives in those early years"--and his four sons began their business careers by riding and guiding some of those rafts. Brown and his wife eventually had a total of 10 children. Anderson Wesley, Webster Everett, Frank, and Emma were all born in New York State. Edward Othniel (his middle name was E.D.'s father's first name), Walter Dexter, Florence, Hannah, Helen and Ada were born in Wisconsin. Frank died in Stevens Point in 1858 at the age of 4, and Emma died in 1869 at 14. "E.D. Brown paid off his men at the end of each work stint, hiring fresh crews for each separate (stage) of his operations. Such considerations earned him generous dividends. Since men wanted to work for him, he could choose the best and most reliable to fill out his crews. High morale improved efficiency and output. Brown won the steadfast loyalty of his Irish crewmen who, for years to come, would work in logging camps, mills and lumber yards established by E.D. and his sons," according to Olsen. (First in a series) -Copyright 1999 by Wendell Nelson