This script was originally written for the 2018 Crandon Drama Club Walk & Talk. Historical research was conducted by members of the Crandon Area Historical Society and student researchers Nolan Wilson, Tucker Krause, and Rachelle Cappel. Members of the Crandon Band to perform at the event were Ceara McCarthy and Allyson Stepper.
Source: The Forest Echo. 09 OCT 1906. p1. Retrieved from http://crandonpublicwi.advantage-preservation.com
The first community band in Crandon was organized in 1905 and a band stand was built the following summer in 1906 and according to the newspaper at a considerable cost. The band stand was moved from the courthouse grounds to the fair grounds in 1910 with the Fair Board taking control of it. In 1912, citizens proposed that the county replace the bands stand but the board rejected that proposition by unanimous vote, instead voting to put a drinking fountain for the public on this spot, as well as a water trough for horses. Nevertheless, the Crandon Band continued to provide musical entertainment for Crandon at weddings, community celebrations and at our very own opera house.
Back before there were phonographs, radio, television, tape recorders, iphones, and streaming music, the people of Crandon listened to their Saturday night concerts from the band shell located here at the northwest corner of the courthouse square with grateful and uncritical ears. Residents spent their warm summer evenings listening to the band playing the favorite tunes of the day, undoubtedly ending with a rousing rendition of Semper Fidelis as the crowd gathered up their blankets and chairs and prepared to return down darkened streets to their homes.
The Crandon Area Historical Society is pleased to announce its Monday, December 3rd “History on Tap” program will feature Wisconsin author and naturalist John Bates beginning at 7:00 p.m. at the historic Hotel Crandon restaurant and bar. The program will feature John’s newest book titled Our Living Ancestors: the History and Ecology of Old-growth Forests in Wisconsin and Where to Find Them.
Old-growth forests touch the soul of many people. Some hear the echoes of Native Americans or the first settlers. Some feel the great age of the trees and revere them, while others feel they are in the presence of an overwhelmingly rare beauty. Still others understand the profound scientific value of old-growth forests as reference systems for what forests can be.
Despite the remarkable emotional appeal and scientific value of old-growth forests, they are rare in Wisconsin. Only 0.3% of Wisconsin’s old-growth forests remain, but these scattered, small parcels still retain their ability to amaze hikers with their size, beauty, and elegance.
Bates, the author of nine books and a contributor to seven others, has worked as a naturalist in Wisconsin’s Northwoods for 29 years. Copies of his book will be on sale after the program and will make the perfect Christmas for many people on your list!
History on Tap is free of charge and is open to all ages. Complimentary snacks will be provided. Alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages for sale. History on Tap is sponsored by the Crandon Area Historical Society and the Hotel Crandon. For more information, please contact Michelle at 715-478-7797.
On Friday, October 26th approximately 120 peopleattended the Crandon Area Historical Society Walk and Talk featuring members of the Crandon School District’s drama team and Crandon High School band. The weather was perfect for a night on the town, and attendees heard stories researched and written by historical society members and student researchers. A few of the stories got a few laughs, but mostly participants enjoyed listening to the history of our city’s main street including the 1903, 1905 and 1912 fires that destroyed portions of Lake avenue. A good reminder as to why we support our city fire department!
Mrs. Alicia Bradley, Drama club adviser, and Mrs. Amy Buckovic, assistant, also dressed the part and encouraged the actors and actresses to speak up as main street traffic was a little nosier than expected. It is anticipated that the funds raised at the event will be used to purchase portable microphones for future tours.
Our tour guides for the evening were community members Jill Krueger and Tammy Stroik, dressed as classical 1940’s Crandon Women’s Club members.
For those of you who may have had a difficult time hearing the stories, or missed the event altogether, will be excited to know that the scripts for the event will be available online soon and printed copies of the scripts will be available at the Crandon Public Library. Photos of downtown Crandon, including the Opera House fire, can be seen in the windows of the Pioneer Express. Thanks Mike for sharing these!
Overall, the event was a great success with our youth and
community members actively learning about what makes Crandon a unique
hometown. For more information about the
Crandon Area Historical Society, please contact Michelle Gobert at
715-478-7797.
The biographical sketch below was part of the Crandon Public Library’s 2016 Cemetery Tour featuring WW1 soldiers laid to rest in the Crandon Lakeside cemetery. Research for the sketch was conducted by Library staff using original documents and newspaper resources found within our Local History room. We welcome any additional historic information on our soldiers, including photos. Please contact us at forestctyhistory@gmail.com to submit this information. –Thank you.
Hello, my name is Lynn Paul. I
was born on December 2, 1893, in Lincoln County, Wisconsin. When I was a
few years old, my parents, James and Agnes Paul, moved my sisters and I to the
town of Prentice, in Price County. My father was a traveling insurance
agent and in 1910 he traveled to Crandon. He must have liked it here an
awful lot because he decided to stay here and raise us kids in Crandon.
United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm.
I was 23 years old when I registered
for the draft. I was working in Karlberg’s grocery store in Crandon at that
time and was a member of the Wisconsin National Guard. After I was
drafted and trained in the Army I was sent to an artillery camp in
France. While I was at the camp I saw a lot of German
prisoners. They were real young fellows. Some of them were actually
Hamburg University students who really didn’t seem to side with the Kaiser as
much as other prisoners did. I talked to a few prisoners who had lived in
the States for awhile but unfortunately our superiors gave us the order
forbidding us to talk to them so I never found out if they liked living in
Wisconsin.
My buddy “Sloppy Weather George
Gifford” came to my camp before his trip to Paris. I wish George could
have been in the artillery unit with Ben Ferguson and I as he was a blame good
scout. We were all proud and glad to fight for Uncle Sam especially after
seeing the conditions of France and the Germans. We were sure the
Americans would bring home the bacon because us Sammies showed more pep in a
minute than those Germans did in a week. In fact, I told Art Carpenter in a
letter I wrote to him that was published in the Forest Republican that if “all
the Germans and French are as slow as the ones I seen, it is no wonder that the
war was lasting so long. It takes the German prisoners longer to fix a bath
house or dig a sewer than it took Forest county to build the court house”
When I got back from the War, I
married my girl Adah Moe and become a brother-in-law to Colonel Himes.
Ada and I had three children: two daughters and one son, Mary, Ellen and James.
Many of you might recall that I was the owner and operator of Paul’s Grocery
Store in town for 43 ½ years. My family and I lived above the store that is now
the chiropractor’s office on Main street. I always had candy to give to
kids who came in my store, as well as candy to throw to kids at parades.
People said I was a very nice guy, highly thought of in the community. During
the great depression I gave two bags of groceries to 7-year-old Homer Rosa at
no charge shortly after his family moved to Crandon and had very little
money. After that, Homer’s mother never shopped for groceries anywhere
else.
Crandon Street Scene. Crandon Area Historical Society Archives. Crandon Community Building Collection. 2013.1.1.138-2
I guess my patriotic feelings for our grand country must have made an impression on my own son James because during WWII he enlisted and as part of the 717th Bombardment Squadron and flew combat missions over enemy targets in southern Europe, Germany, Austria, France and in the Balkans. Our family was devastated when he plane was shot down on February 19, 1945 and he was officially declared “missing in action”
My wife and I and James sister’s Mary and Ellen had a headstone placed here in our family’s plot in memory of him. I guess his name is also listed on a plaque in Florence Italy along with the names of the other soldiers missing in action and assumed dead. We were real proud when the Government awarded Jim with the purple heart for his ultimate service to our country.
Find A Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com : accessed 03 June 2019), memorial page for Corp James Lynn Paul (24 Nov 1925–19 Feb 1945), Find A Grave Memorial no. 143606612, citing Crandon Lakeside Cemetery, Crandon, Forest County, Wisconsin, USA ; Maintained by Kevin Jackson (contributor 47952677) .
My wife and I spent our last days in Crandon. I died in 1975 at the age of 81.
Our parade route has changed over the years. We have quite a few photos of parades on Lake Avenue, yet this parade took place on E. Madison street in downtown Crandon. Wonder why? Maybe a newspaper article will shed some light on the different parade routes over the years.
In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day with the following words:
“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…”
This morning I spent some time with the 1944 edition of the Forest Republican. Not a week went by in 1944 that Forest Republican readers were not told about a local boy missing in action, or one that had fought and died for our country. The clippings below only offer us a glimpse into the lives of these soldiers and does not give justice to their time served, nor their sacrifices given. It does allow us to pause, remember and to share.
If you are interested in helping us preserve these stories as they deserved to be told, please contact Michelle at the Library.
Living in rural Forest County in the 1930’s was tough. Newspaper articles, court records and family stories tell of multiple families living in one room shacks trying to farm the cut-over land with little or no success. Now a U.S. government collection of historic photos offers us a glimpse at just how tough it was. The photos are just part of a new website with interactive browsing tools Photogrammar developed by Yale University.
Housed in the Library of Congress for the past half-decade, the images of rural America were commissioned by the government in 1935 to gain public support for efforts to resettle poor farmers displaced during the Great Depression. A story Forest County farmers knew first hand. In fact “an elderly couple who found it no longer possible to make a living on their farm in the Forest county cutover timber region” was the first family in the United States to receive the benefit of the United States Resettlement Administration. [Appleton Post-Crescent, 03/01/1937, p18.]
Only 35 of the 170,000 photos on the site are of Forest county. However each of the 35 photos tell a story and remind us how grateful we are to those who chose to settle the land we now call home.
The joys of summer. Long days. Fishing. Lake Metonga. Genealogy Research.
Yep, that’s right. During the busy summer months, the Crandon Public Library sees an upswing in the number of visitors researching their family history. Just this week we enjoyed a visit from Kevin Jackson of Cudahy, Wisconsin. Kevin is researching the Wickham, Jackson, and Domrose families of early Crandon and left the library with a large stack of obituaries and newspaper clippings from our microfilm collection. {It also helped that the Library Director is also researching the same Wickham line!}
Before leaving Kevin shared with us the following photo from his Jackson family’s collection. It is an early photo of the Crandon Lions Club. Kevin estimated the photo was published pre-1959.
Thanks Kevin for the great photo and we look forward to visiting with you on future research trips!
Left to right: Art Carptenter, Herb Walker, Tony Kolspice, Art Lutterman, George Krohn, Dr. Rathert, Rudy Augustine, Alfred Kalkofen, Lyle Carter, Chester Jackson, William Bassett.
Here’s a follow up, written by local historian R.T. Krueger, about Forest County’s Civil War veteran James Beulen. R.T. has spent many hours researching and documenting Forest County’s civil war veterans and over the years he has managed to track down photos of the veterans. A photo of James Beulen and some of his contemporaries is included in this post as well.
I’d never make a good academic historian – I’m too eager to fill in blanks with my own opinions. Create personalities for people from the shreds of documentation. I’ve done this with far too many of the folks I’ve researched and James Beulen is no exception. He seems to me to have had the classic “bark is worse than the bite” personality. Serious, civic-minded, even gruff when the situation required, but never too full of himself to take things too seriously. Never afraid to be made fun of respectfully and to do the same to others. Quietly generous with his time and money.
Shirley Coleman, of Crandon, provided me with a page of hand-written notes her mother had put together on memories from her childhood. This is what she said of Mr. Beulen, “Civil War veteran, often visited my folks, told us war stories, every other word was a curse, we loved it.”
Jim Beulen was born in the east, but came to the frontiers of Wisconsin as a kid, along with a wave of New York farmers who made the journey in the 1840’s and 1850’s. He and several of his brothers enlisted in the Union service during the Civil war and Jim rose to the rank of sergeant by its close.
Like so many other young men from Central Wisconsin, Jim hooked up with logging crews working in the northwoods and, by 1884, was employed at a new mill on the north shore of Lake Metonga. When Forest County was created a year later, Governor Jeremiah Rusk, himself a Civil War vet, named Buelen to be the first sheriff. Governor Rusk was probably looking for a man with some natural sense of authority and leadership and Buelen’s wartime experience would have made him a prime candidate. Jim Buelen resigned as sheriff after only a short time, but would later serve the community as an alderman and in other civic roles throughout his years in Crandon.
While these things make him noteworthy as a pioneer settler in Crandon, it is the informal paper trail that he left that makes him interesting to me. He seems to have been one of the local newsmen’s go-to guys on those slow news days. A man who always had some ridiculous cause, complaint, or issue to keep the typesetter busy. These are some of my favorites:
Fine Cut Club Resolves
That the Rights of the American Citizen are Being Trampled Upon
At the last meeting of the Fine-Cut Club a resolution was passed authorizing the president of the order to appoint a commission to investigate the workings of that unholy combination the tobacco trust. To the members of the Club, tobacco is the staff of life, and the article put upon the market in these degenerate days is something fierce. Brown paper, sawdust, bootlegs, and supernuated German socks, it is believed are ground up and sold as “Duke’s Misery”, “Dub’s Delight” and other popular brands, while plug contains things unmentionable.
A prominent member of the club said he bit off a chaw of plug once and immediately thereafter found a rat’s tail between his teeth. He said on more than one occasion the hired girl had complained about his breath and he would like to know how he could have a violet breath on a diet of rat tails. What?
One of the veteran members of the Club advocated a boycott upon all Crandon merchants who refused to keep “poor boxes” in a prominent place in their stores. He said he had patronized Crandon merchants liberally for many years, running large accounts, some of which he had been forced to pay, and he thought any self-respecting dealer should willingly furnish free tobacco to such as he, as well as free cigarette papers to tallow-faced dudes. The brother’s remarks were uproariously cheered.
The next meeting of the order will be held on “All Fool’s Day”, April 1st. A special program is being prepared.
Sporting News
Col. James Beulen, president of the Crandon Euchre Club and Fine Cut Chewers Union arrived home Saturday from a trip to Seattle. In an interview with the sporting editor of this paper he stated that prospects look good for some interesting games this winter and with the knowledge he had picked up on his trip he could easily trim anyone brought forth…. Mr. Beulen expects to meet all comers and convince them that they do not know anything about the game… Hereafter, spectators on the sidelines will be charged a nickel a piece, the fund to be used in buying chewing tobacco for the players… Thomas Walker, he of little words, has been chosen by James as a partner. When the score gets too close for comfort and the opposing players go over the top and out upon no-man’s land, Walker and Beulen will give them a gas attack. Mr. Walker will quote a few of the ten commandments and little Shakespeare and Mr. Beulen will use a few chose words that go something like pbzqtohellwiththem. This method of attack is sure to rattle their opponents and win the game. Since leaving Crandon, Mr. Beulen has learned to swear in French and Dago which feature will be introduced whenever necessary.
Beulen spent time out West with old buddies and his brother, but reported not being impressed and always returned to Northern Wisconsin. He passed away in 1926 after over 40 years on and off in the area.
As the Midwest Heat Wave of 2012 hopefully comes to an end, many news outlets are highlighting the July 4th, 1911 heat wave that struck the eastern United States and killed 380 people. This lead me to wonder what kind of weather Crandon was experiencing in July 1911.
As it turns out, the local newspaper didn’t make that big a deal out of the heat wave. The only mention of the heat is an advertisement from the “City Drug Store” and in an article titled “Beulen Loses His Beer”.
Beulen Loses His Beer
President James Beulen, of the Fine Cut club of this city, is warm under the collar and not from the warm weather either. The last-trip made to Crandon by Joseph Eihlien of the Schlitz Brewing Co., of Milwaukee, he met James and upon parting told him, that he being an old friend, he would send him a case of beer from his big Milwaukee brewery. The beer came just before the Fourth of July, and James placed it in his cellar with great care, and then presented a number of his friends each with a bottle before he sampled any of it himself. Later on he pulled a cork and discovered that some unhung reprobate had opened a good share of the bottles, drank the beer and refilled them with water. Then he had to hunt up the people he had given bottles to and find out if they had beer or water. If Jim should ever discover the perpetrator of the joke he swears that Forest county will have to record the worst tragedy in its history.
As it turns out, James Beulen was one of Crandon’s Civil War Veterans. According to R.T. Krueger, Beulen served in Wisconsin’s Company I of the 11th Wisconsin Infantry and Company E of the 52nd Regiment Infantry. Let’s hope someone discovered the “unhung reprobate” that pulled this prank on one of Crandon’s veterans!
