History of Wood County, Wisconsin

              250 HISTORY OF WOOD COUNTY
1872 was hauled from New Lisbon 44 miles through the sand by four-horse teams on two-inch tire wagons, one of the Lisbon roads passing through what is now Ne¬ koosa. The Green Bay and Lake Pepin, now Green Bay and Western, was com¬ pleted to Grand Rapids in November, 1872, and the Wisconsin Valley Railroad, now the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, was bufft in June, 1873. Wiffiam C. Tra- hern, now deceased, hauled lumber from his sawmffl at Elm Lake on sleighs across country to the Wisconsin River and piled it on the right bank just below the tail race of the paper mill. This was about 1870. After the failure of the Nekoosa Lumber Company the town was dead and the leading store building at Pointe Basse was torn down and made into a raft and run down the river to Lone Rock, Wis., and made into a hotel.
"The plat of the first survey shows that Amable Grignon had a sawmill on Ten Mffe Creek near Lyman Hammond's on SW-SE, Section 26, 21, 5. Ten Mffe Creek is marked on the plat as 'Iron Creek.' The first lumber sawed at Port Edwards was in 1837. The Barnum sawmill on the Wisconsin in Adams County sawed its last lumber in 1876 and was burned in November the same year.
"When the Nekoosa Paper Company began to build its paper mill, the dam and a town, in March, 1893, there was not an acre of ground improved, or a building on the west side of the river between Moccasin Creek and the Manz farm at the lower ferry, a distance of two and a half miles. Mr. Strong told me the Indians called the Whitney Rapids Nekoosa, meaning 'Swift Running Water.' To show you the price of lands in that territory before the mill was built the following are some of the prices: On Nov. 21 I bought part of Lot 7, and the SW-NW and the NW-SW aff in Section 15-21-5 for $500. On Nov. 1, 1890 I bought the NW-SE and the S half of the SE Section 9 for $200, and on Jan. 3, 1893 I. bought the whole of the SW haff of Section 9 for $250. and on Aprff 10, 1897 the whole of the NE haff of Section ? for $600. On Oct. 7, 1897, my brother Frank and I bought 50 forties of land at $1.25 an acre. Thirty-three of these forties were near Nekoosa (Nekoosa is in Sections 3, 4, 9, 10, 15 and 16). Two of these forties were in Section 3, three of them in Section 4, four of them in Section 8, three of them in Section 9, 13 of them in Section 16 and eight of them in Section 17, ah in 21-5. On May 20, 1886, I took a tax deed on NE-SE 9-21-5 for $25.    On May 12, 1897, the SE-NW 9-21-5 sold for $100.
"In March, 1893, I built the first dwelling house in Nekoosa, on the Wood road about 100 rods west of the paper mill, and it was occupied by my nephew, Joseph Balderstone, and in the spring of 1894 I let a contract to Mike and Pat McDonald to clear and break a strip of land nearly one mffe long of 60 acres at $8 per acre on what is known as the Wood farm, which they did in a short time, using a 22-inch plow with eight horses, four of them abreast, and the same vSummer Louis Wakeley and Frank Ross built a fence for me around the whole tract, which was the south half of Section 9, 320 acres. The same summer I sowed the whole 60 acres to rutabagas, and I had some "beggies' too. I shipped most of them to Minneapolis and they netted me 25 cents per bushel on board cars at Nekoosa.
"The only wagon roads into Nekoosa at that time from the west were, by the Lynn road or around Moccasin Creek. The winter of 1894-5 I opened up the road through the swamp and the hill now known as Wood Hill at my own expense and the town of Port Edwards was very liberal (?) with me in giving me $250 for a