Iron Works - Tunnels

 I'm told that, north of the bridge,  there are still tunnels which go from the east side of North Main Street where the Coke stoves and the briquetting plant  were located over to the Iron Works west of the street.  If anyone has evidence to support this, let me know.  

St. Peter's Chapel - Milwaukee

 

My great, great grandfather, Joseph Schussler,  and great, great grandmother, Fanny Neukirch (daughter of pioneer Franz),  were married here in 1848.  I would like to make a pilgrimage to Old World Wisconsin to see it.  This also interests me because Solomon Juneau had donated the land.  The Solomon Juneau Theresa/Mayvillle Husting -  Milwaukee connections are some of my favorite strands of local history, and here it touches my own family.  The old French Canadian Fur Trader, Juneau,  was also much loved and respected by the Native Americans in the Green Bay area. 

Photo credit: UW-Milwaukee

St. Peter's Chapel was built in 1839, and originally stood on the northwest corner of Jackson and State Street. It was the first Catholic church in Milwaukee, built on land donated by Solomon Juneau. In 1874, the chapel was sold to Saints Peter and Paul Parish, and moved to a location at Murray and Bradford Avenue. When that parish eventually built a larger church in 1939 the chapel was moved to the St. Francis Seminary. In 1975 the chapel was moved to Old World Wisconsin in Eagle, WI.  

I thank Kristine Kampa and the Milwaukee History Lovers FB page for posting this history and picture.

Making Barrels

Joseph Schuessler

 I am interested in the making of barrels, the work of the cooper, because when the beer  business was bad in Oshkosh, that 's what my great-great grandfather, Joseph Schuessler, or Schuessler, had to do, to support his wife and eight children up to about 1870 when he moved to Fond du Lac and owned a successful brewery there for 20 years.

This is from the Age of Wood, by Roland Ennos (Simon & Schuster, 2020):

Wooden barrels, made by joining together curved wooden staves, were probably invented around 350 BC by the Celts and quickly proved far more practical. They were strong, could be rolled along the ground to move them, and could readily be stacked. The key to their success is the curvature of the staves, which allows the center to bow outward, enabling the longitudinal stiffness of the wood to resist the internal pressure of the liquid inside. To make a barrel, coopers had first to precisely carve each stave to shape, using specially made drawknives to give it the desired curved cross section, and a jointer to cut the sides at an angle so when put side to side the staves formed a circle. They then joined the staves together, inserting them into a temporary hoop at each end, and heated the staves until they fitted together snugly. Finally, the cooper made the ends and fitted them onto the ends of the barrel of the staves and reinforced the structure at the ends with iron rings. Barrels proved to be the lifeblood of commerce in preindustrial times, the equivalent of the tin cans, plastic bottles, and shipping containers of today combined.

 Source:   Oshkosh Beer: Joseph Schussler’s Road to Oshkosh

Mayville and the Van Brunts - Quick History

Thanks to my good friend, W.J. ("Bill") Lee for these remarks which he prepared for other local history enthusiasts.  Bill is a John Deere alumnus whose love for Deere and for the Mayville-Horicon area is legendary.

    Early Settlers: Daniel and Mary Faucet Van Brunt 

By 

William J. Lee 

The family of Daniel and Mary Faucet Van Brunt, from upper NY State, homesteaded in the Town of Williamstown in 1846. That's a year after the Fosters and Mays came to what is now Mayville. They had  a son born in Williamstown. His name was Willard Van Brunt. Daniel was a wagon maker by  trade. 

Long story short, when iron was discovered south of Mayville, a blast furnace was built (a very  small one), close to the river for cooling water. With a furnace producing a product, pig iron, what do you do with it on the frontier? 

The iron had to be moved to the closest rail head which was Oconomowoc. How do you  transport iron to market? Wagons. Big, heavy-duty, wooden wagons. But wooden wagons had  iron parts. So the wagon maker left his homestead to build wagons in the new place called  Mayville named after George Mays from Fort Atkinson. At first it was Maysville but soon  became Mayville. Of course Williamstown was named for William Foster of the Foster and Mays that came to what is now Mayville in 1845. Think Foster Park in downtown Mayville! So, William for the township and Foster for the Park. 

Why did they come to the Mayville location? Water power!! From the south end of what is now  the city the Rock River falls 17 feet. Think about it! The upper dam was built for a grist mill and  a saw mill. A dam was built of wood and a canal was dug around the dam for the water to flow. Two flumes of water fed the two businesses. Later a lower dam was built to feed more water to  the blast furnaces at the end of Furnace Street. 

Upper Dam - Mayville  1909 postcard
  St. Mary's Church atop the hill

There is a third dam in Kekoskee. That's where the paddle wheelers on Lake Horicon had to  stop. There they unloaded goods and passengers. As it turned out, there is more fall at Mayville  than at any location on the Rock River basin. That's why the Fosters and Mays came to the area  and staked out land claims. By the way, where the Rock meets the Mississippi River was the  location of Saukenauk, the main village of the Sauk and Fox Indians of Chief Blackhawk's fame. 

With this background there is an interesting part for Williamstown. Daniel Van Brunt and  brother George built the heavy duty wagons to haul pig iron to Oconomowoc. A trail (not much  of a road) was cut through the wilderness to Oconomowoc. That is today's State Road 67. But  originally the road (trail) cut off at Browns Corners and went south through Neda, Iron Ridge,  Woodland, and then on south following Route 67 into Oconomowoc. 

Daniel Van Brunt and his brother George (from Burnett) experimented with a way to sow seed  faster and hide the seed from the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that ate the seed as fast as the  farmer could sow it with hand seeders. They came up with a seeder that measured seed out and  covered the seed with soil - thus foiling the damned pigeons. They built the first six in Mayville  and left for Horicon (as in Mayville they had no money nor big enough building) and a partner there who kept them  alive as they established the Van Brunt works in Horicon. Again a note, that by the 1860s a railroad  was being built through Mayville to Fond du Lac. The brothers had to come up with something else as the need for big HD wagons would soon disappear. So off to another twist and turn in  ones life. 

Lower Dam - North Main Street Bridge
 Postcard 1908

Daniel also founded the Horicon State Bank. In 1901 he died. His son, Willard, took over the  business and sold it to John Deere in 1911-12. Willard ran the business into the 1920s. He  retired to California and died in 1936. His was a cremation burial and he is buried in Graceland Cemetery in  Mayville with his mother and two infant brothers. The three, mom and two babies died of  frontier fever between 1849 and 1852. Daniel never had another son although he buried two  more wives. Life was hard, to say the least, in the 1800's. 

The factory the family founded in Horicon became the John Deere Horicon works. Not bad for a  family to homestead, build a life on the frontier and then build a business that is part of a world  class multinational company known today as Deere & Company.

Bethlehem Steel Furnaces - They Used to Make Money Here

Now they spend money.

July 31, 2007 Bethlehem PA, just before demolition for a casino.
Credit: By Jschnalzer at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3069664

Mayville Historical Society - Bonau and Whereatt

The December,  2018 newsletter of the Mayville Historical Society has a section on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.  There they report:  "The end of the war found two Mayville men buried on the battlefield, Frank Bonau and Walter Whereatt."  Buried at war, on the spot. So terrible.  Freedom comes at such great cost.   May the memory of Frank Bonau and Walter Whereatt be a blessing.

Briquetting Plant

Here my friend W.J. Lee explains the Mayville Iron Works briquetting plant:

The Briquetting Plant made briquettes of iron ore for charging the furnace to make pig iron.  The ore taken from our mines at Neda was high in phosphorous which caused the ore when handled to turn to dust.  When the ore was dumped into the furnaces (from the top) by the carts called skip jacks it created a tremendous cloud of dust.  Everyone in those days had laundry hung outside to dry.  Continuous complaints about the dust, from wives doing laundry to workers breathing in the stuff,  caused the Iron Company to build the Briquetting Plant.  There the ore was compressed into briquettes which cut down on the dust dramatically.  Think of today’s charcoal briquettes.

There were no bricks of clay made in the plant.  After the plant closed the wood building on top of the foundations was moved to the Clark farm on Bayview Road.  There it stood until it was finally taken down two or three years ago.  

South of the foundations in the open field of Andrew Thomas stood the Ironman baseball stands.  In the 1930's the stands were moved to Fireman’s Field and there they stand proudly to this day.  

***

Message to this blogger from W.J. Lee 10/25/2018

After the Iron Works Mayville WI – Part 3

            This is the  last of three posts on Mayville's response to the closing of the Iron Works.  As a former Mayville alderman I'm proud of how the City Council fought to keep the city from an economic wipeout after 1928. 

The Mayville Iron Works blew out its two blast furnaces January 17, 1928, and shut down.  Adding insult to injury,  not long thereafter the Great Depression hit the city.   This is the third of a three-part story on Mayville’s response to the shut-down.    Last week’s Part 2 covered the City Council’s aggressive subsidies of the shoe company, at great taxpayer expense, as the city’s effort to provide jobs during the Great Depression.   This week’s Part 3 describes the city’s purchase in 1934 of former Iron Works real estate, and the dividing up and successful resale of that property to four businesses. 

City Purchase

In 1934 the City of Mayville by vote of the City Council  purchased a portion of the former plant of the Mayville Iron Works for $6,000.00.  The vote was taken after a mass meeting of local citizens.  The legality of this purchase was questioned by some, as improper private activity of a municipality without a public purpose.   The city defended the purchase arguing that it served a public purpose as fire protection and to provide equipment storage.  But the fact is that the purchase was a bold economic development move which help to launch  four successful businesses, and ultimately at no cost to the taxpayers.  And more importantly, taxpayers benefited from jobs created and tax revenues  generated by these new businesses.

Success!

W. D. Knight reported:  “The city eventually realized $20,000 from the sale of  this property to industrial users, disposing of it in parcels to the Mayville Construction Co. [who used the Iron Works slag piles]  in 1937, the Mayville Die & Tool Co.  in 1938, the Rilling Endlich Co. in 1939 and the Purity Cheese Co. in 1941. These companies now [in 1947]  have a combined employment of 175 and an annual payroll of $250,000 or more.”   W.D. Knight, Subsidization of Industry in Forty Selected Cities in Wisconsin, 1930-1946 (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, October, 1947).   Before selling to Mayville Die & Tool Co. the city in 1937 made improvements to the old roundhouse at that former Iron Works site.   The sale to Rilling-Endlich Co.  was preceded by a lease to that company of the former Iron Works office building and garage in 1934 after which the city spent $2,500 to add a 70 ft by 90 ft addition to the leased property.

 Advertisement - date and publication unknown. Purity Cheese Co.
 was  founded by Kenneth M.  Royer  in 1936.

Results – Employment

Apart from these new businesses which opened on the former Iron Works property,  the city received another boost when in 1937 Maysteel Products, Inc. opened its business at the  former Wisconsin Radiator Furniture Corp. property  on Horicon Street, at the site now owned by Mayville Engineering Company.  Knight  reports the following industrial employment in Mayville in 1945-1946:                                                                             Employment

MaysteelProducts, Inc                                                  200

Purity Cheese Co.                                                         100

Mayville Shoe Corp.                                                     100

Mayville Die and Tool Co.                                             50

Other Industrial Employers                                           100

About 50-75 Mayville workers were employed by  the Van Brunt John Deere plant in Horicon.

Resilient Community

After the closure of the Harsh-Chapline Co. in 1932  the City of Mayville purchased and improved  the shoe plant from the Mayville Improvement Corporation, to bring to Mayville the B&B Shoe Co. of Milwaukee.  That was an expensive venture for the city to deal with the city’s then desperate economic straits, as described in last week’s part 2 of this three-part story on Mayville’s response to the closure of the Iron Works.  The purchase and then resale of portions of former Iron Works property beginning in 1934 kept that property on the tax rolls and  helped to create or develop  four new successful Mayville businesses.

            The aggressive response of the Mayville City Council after the Iron Works closed and during the Great Depression of the 1930’s  is a reflection of the courage and determination  of the community as a whole.  When the going gets tough, the tough get going.   And that’s exactly what happened in Mayville after 1928.

                                                                                   

Sources:  

W.D. Knight, Subsidization of Industry in Forty Selected Cities in Wisconsin, 1930-1946 (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, October, 1947).

George G. Frederick, When Iron Was King in Dodge County, Wisconsin (Mayville Historical Society, Inc. 1993).

Mayville News (now Dodge County Pionier), various dates.

After the Iron Works Mayville WI - Part 2

This is the second  of a three-part story on Mayville's response to the closing of Mayville’s  Iron Works.   Why this story?  The year 2018 marks the 90-year anniversary of the 1928 closing of the Iron Works.  Last week’s Part 1 covered efforts of local citizens to build a shoe factory in the early 1920’s, and then to keep Harsh Chapline Shoe Company’s Mayville operation  going after the Iron Works closed in 1928.    Harsh Chapline ceased doing business in 1932.  Now Mayville has no Iron Works, no shoe plant jobs, and no significant industry  in a  Depression economy.  Things were looking bleak.   While last week highlighted the efforts of local citizens working to help the Mayville economy apart from government, in this Part 2 the focus shifts to the efforts of local government, the Mayville City Council.

B & B Shoe Co.

In 1932 Morris Bernstein, owner  of B&B shoe company of Milwaukee, approached Mayville about producing shoes at the shoe plant here.  To get B&B to come the Mayville City Council took aggressive promotional action.  The investment by the city to keep the shoe factory going comes across as major sticker shock for a small city in the 1930’s.  The city did this:

1.     Bought the shoe plant from Mayville Improvement Corporation for $28,000 on a 14-year land contract. 

2.     Received (from Mayville Improvement Corporation) a house next to the plant worth $5,149.

3.     Spent $56,000 on improvements.

4.     Spent $15,000 worth of federal relief labor on other improvements.

On top of this, I found it upsetting to hear that shoe plant employees had to chip in $15,000 to pay for B&B’s moving expenses, in the form of payroll deductions over a two-year period.  Demanding factory work, low pay, and then pay for the company’s move?  I’m glad that couldn’t happen today.

1936 postcard -  Mayville Shoe Co - building later razed
Site of present day City Hall and Police Department

Huge Subsidy - Was It Worth It?

B&B  also received a break on the rent. They paid $100 per year for a 20-year lease. The capitalized value of that nominal-rent lease amounts to another $40,000 of assistance.   All in all, the new shoe company received over $155,000 of support from the city and the community.  Today that amount would compute to more than two-million dollars!  

It’s understatement to say that the public subsidy was a major setback for local taxpayers.  The city was already under pressure to provide support  for its out-of-work residents, in the form of what was called city “public aid.” (George Frederick noted from news reports that in December, 1934 100 Mayville families depended on the city for relief.)

           Comparing Mayville’s shoe factory subsidy to similar actions taken in other cities at that time, W.D. Knight says: “Relative to payrolls and tax revenues resulting from the present level of operations, the costs of the Mayville shoe promotion appear among the highest of any of the promotions covered in this [statewide] study.”

High Risk

Looking back,  you might question it all.  Local government should stay out of business and stick to fire protection and public safety, we are taught.   But these were desperate times, with people out of work and many on public aid.     With the Iron Works gone and the Depression bearing down on the city, Mayville had to have those factory jobs, even though it paid a premium to secure them.   This assistance was a risky move by the city.  Even with citizen financial support of  the shoe plant the previous operator had closed shop in 1932.   What made anyone think that B&B could do any better this time around?   

Success

           Thank goodness, city support for the shoe plant did not go to waste.    B&B now  operating as Mayville Shoe Corporation under the direction of J. B. Brindis, president and general manager,  provided 300 jobs during an era when there were few private industry jobs.  The shoe factory in Mayville opened in 1934 operated successfully in the  1930’s and carried on during and  after the war. With its shoe factory subsidy the city made the best of a bad situation, and I give the City Council members and Mayors Dr. W. J. Schmidt (Mayor, 1928-1932) and Walter W.  Schellpfeffer, Sr.  (Mayor 1934-1942) credit for taking action.  

Tough Decisions

How did the city and the community come up with these funds for this public subsidy of a private business,  in the depths of the Depression?  I don't have the answer that question.    The 1930’s  had to have been  a grueling time to sit on the City Council.    Did these shoe plant subsidies keep aldermen awake at night?  From what I  can tell the answer to that question is a surprising  “no.”  The city had excellent leaders who were not crushed by the Depression.

 Certainly constituents were grilling the Mayor and council members with questions and criticism about the shoe plant.   But  I spoke with Walter (“Rags”) Schellpfeffer, son of the Mayor (and his father was also a three-term alderman),  about conversations that he had with his father about what it was like for him to be a Mayor and council member during the Depression.    Mr. Schellpfeffer reported to me that his father was not stressed by his  work for the city.  His impression was that  city officials  at that time saw  the shoe company project as something that had to be done and they did it, without hand-wringing.  “My dad and people he worked with at City Hall were tough individuals,” Mr. Schellpfeffer said.   And W.D. Knight, looking back on the shoe company subsidy after the war when things had improved, also found that people of Mayville were for the most part fine with it.     Knight writing in 1947 says this:  “Commenting on the marked improvement in the pre-war business conditions effected by the shoe company’s employment, one businessman stated that in his opinion, ‘the shoe company did not owe the community a dime.’”   

            Unfortunately, these courageous city officials are faceless to me, other than the picture of Mayor Schellpfeffer that I was able to barely envision gleaning  from the memory of his son (and my friend),  Rags Schellpfeffer.   Rags told me that he remembers going to Milwaukee from time to time with his father and the family to visit the Bernsteins.  If anyone has more details about these city leaders and their experiences during the Depression  I would love to hear about them.

Part 3 Next Week

Part 3 of this series will appear next week. Unlike the city’s gutsy high-cost and high-risk experience with the shoe factory,  next week’s part 3  describing the city’s purchase and resale of former Iron Works property is a powerful success story which the City Council pulled off at no cost to the taxpayers.  

                                                                                                     

Sources:  

W.D. Knight, Subsidization of Industry in Forty Selected Cities in Wisconsin, 1930-1946 (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, October, 1947).

George G. Frederick, When Iron Was King in Dodge County, Wisconsin (Mayville Historical Society, Inc. 1993).

Mayville News (now Dodge County Pionier), various dates.

After the Iron Works Mayville WI - Part 1

This is the first of a three-part story on Mayville's response to the closing of Mayville’s  Iron Works.   Why this story?  The year 2018 marks the 90-year anniversary of the closing in 1928 of the Iron Works.  The   blast furnaces and the pig iron produced by them, beginning in 1848,  had people calling Mayville the Pittsburgh of the West.  But over time the industry turned away from Dodge County’s iron to iron mined in Minnesota and upper Michigan.  The furnaces here also declined as the market for pig iron dropped after 1922 and as the industry transitioned from iron to steel.  My own view is that the beginning of the end came on January 3,  1921 with the death of company president and shareholder Armin Schlesinger.  After his death the family wanted out, but that’s another story, for another day.

Furnace Talk

Like many local history buffs I'm fascinated by "furnace talk,"  the stories of the Mayville Iron Works.  Actually, that history is a tree with many branches which, to name a few, would include the stories of  mining, the “Cast Iron Stove," the founders of the Iron Works who were also the founders of the city, the coming of the Eastern European immigrants,   the sad stories of workers killed and injured on the job,  the amazing blast furnace process, the Coke Plant, the Schlesingers,  the 12-hour days and 7-day (later 6-day)  weeks at low pay, the bar fights and murders, the "King of the Serbs,"  the company store,    the Iron Works and World War I,  the company houses which still stand, the use of the river, the slag piles, the remnants from the 1933 tear-down (archaeology!), the company owned farms, the horse races, the baseball teams,  and the iron company’s use of the rails.  And for my small “branch,” I offer this brief story about what the 1928 closure left in its wake. 

But first I need to make a pitch for the revival of furnace talk.   Furnace talk has slowed now that the eyewitnesses have died.  In 2013  I spoke with then 95-year-old Dolores Ihde, who died December 30, 2014.   Ms. Ihde  told me that as a child  she and her grandmother would sit out on the front porch at night and look  west from their German Street porch to watch  the tops of the two Mayville blast furnaces lighting up the sky.  I'm sure that's my last encounter with an Iron Works eyewitness.  But there is still a rich history,  thanks to our friends who share stories from their grandparents, and the documented history provided by this newspaper, the Mayville Historical Society, Inc., Mayville Limestone School Museum, Inc. and by the late George Frederick, author of When Iron Was King.  Mayville has its terrific two museums with Iron Works photos, postcards, documents and artifacts.  We have a wealth of information, but someone (not me) should write a book which tells some of the drama beneath the facts.

State Historical Marker North Main Street Mayville 

This post and Parts 2 and 3 which will follow provide a modest  drop in the "furnace talk" bucket.    If any readers have Iron Works-related  stories, give me a call and we will find a way to get them written down in time for Mayville's  175-year anniversary in 2020.  For this story I rely heavily on facts set forth in this publication written by my wife, Katy’s father, Don Knight, who (no car!) took buses and hitchhiked around the state doing research on subsidization of industry for this book:  W.D. Knight, Subsidization of Industry in Forty Selected Cities in Wisconsin, 1930-1946 (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, October, 1947).

Iron Works Closes – a Story in 3 Parts

The Mayville Iron Works blew out its two blast furnaces January 17, 1928, and shut down.  Adding insult to injury,  not long thereafter the Great Depression hit the city.  To provide work during these dark days concerned Mayville citizens  raised funds to support Mayville’s shoe factory.  That didn’t work.  The shoe plant closed in 1932.  That is the story of this Part 1.  But the city did not give up.  The City Council initiated an aggressive effort of subsidies to put a new shoe business into that plant.   That effort is the story of next week’s Part 2.  The final week’s Part 3 describes the city’s purchase in 1934 of former Iron Works property, and the dividing up and successful resale of that property to four businesses. 

How did the City of Mayville respond to the closure of the Iron Works in 1928? To approach this question we need to have some background.  For years  before the closure city and community leaders had been worried about Mayville having too many eggs in the Iron Works basket. They wanted to see some diversity, some new industry.  After all, the Iron Works had shut down its coke plant in 1921, and prices for pig iron were dropping.   In 1923 they took action.   Concerned citizens at that time formed  the Mayville Improvement Corporation (“M.I.C.”)  as a corporation for profit to build a shoe factory for the Harsh Chapline Shoe Company. Sales of stock generated $37,450, and an additional $9,800 was raised by mortgage making the total capital raised $47,250 to build the factory. That’s a major undertaking, worth well over $500,000 if you are thinking in terms of today’s dollars.

The shoe plant was leased for $4,600 a year and that was supposed to provide a 10% return on the investment over time. In 1927 M.I.C. put  $2,370 into the building and increased the rent to $4,837 per year.

 HC Closes

Harsh Chapline Shoe Company (“HC”)  started its Mayville operations in 1924 and normally employed about 175 people.  For the first four years they paid the full rent.   In 1928  HC  asked for a reduction in rent or other form of local assistance.  Amazingly, a group of local citizens independent of M.I.C. agreed to raise funds to pay part of the shoe company rent.   Over a three-year period these local contributions raised $7,255 or about 1/2 of the total rent.   HC continued to pay the other half of the rent until 1931 when these payments from the public stopped.  Now it’s the Depression and both M.I.C. and the locals who had worked so hard to keep the place afloat were tapped out.   In 1932  HC shut down its operations in Mayville.

            Why did local citizens band together to  pay a part of HC’s rent?  That kind of community financial support for a private business is unheard of today.   The obvious motivator here was that in 1928, the year in which these payments for support of the shoe factory started, the Mayville Iron Works closed.   But these payments from 1928-1931 did not succeed to keep the operations going.  Now in 1932  Mayville has no Iron Works, no shoe plant jobs, and no significant industry in a Depression economy.  Things were looking bleak.   But the city continued its fight for life after 1932,  mainly by approving use of public dollars to attract a new shoe plant operator.  That is  the subject of next week’s Part 2 of this story.

            Reflecting on the events described here, I wish I knew more about M.I.C. and the people involved in it.  They built a beautiful facility for the shoe factory, and brought a new industry to Mayville when it was badly needed.   Then, when times got tough  other locals came forward to help cover HC’s rent.  Who were these amazing people who made financial sacrifices to build this factory and then after the Iron Works closed to  keep these Mayville industrial jobs?   I wish I knew their stories, their work, what motivated them,  and how they found a way to provide this support.   These community efforts to bring in and sustain  the shoe factory show that Mayville had a strong backbone and was not going to roll over with the coming of the Depression.   We will also see that same spirit in next week’s Part 2.

  

Sources:  

W.D. Knight, Subsidization of Industry in Forty Selected Cities in Wisconsin, 1930-1946 (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, October, 1947).

George G. Frederick, When Iron Was King in Dodge County, Wisconsin (Mayville Historical Society, Inc. 1993).

Mayville News (now Dodge County Pionier), various dates.

Iron Works Baseball Field Grandstand and Bleachers

I read this today in When Iron Was King: 

When Iron Was King in Dodge County, Wisconsin, by George G. Fredrick (Mayville, WI, Mayville Historical Society 1993, citing Mayville News articles).

The Iron Works closed in 1928.  The company donated the company baseball team bleachers and grandstand to the City in 1931.  Local history expert W.J. Lee has these comments sent to me by email:

Tom:  The Park was being developed.  Famous Mayville High teacher and football coach Ray Dunn (who was part Native American ) drew up the plans for the football and baseball combined field layout.  It was hard work scooping out the hill side and moving dirt to widen the area so the two sports fields were put  together.  The dirt was moved by horse teams pulling small dirt scrapers.  Much like the huge machines we move dirt with today only much, much smaller.   Ray Dunn's assistant Coach for football was the head baseball coach,  Mr. Whitford.  Dunn was the shop teacher and Whitford was the science teacher.  Both were very good coaches.  So the stands were moved from the Iron Works property off North Main Street way south to the developing  City Park above the Pavillion, and they still stand. City Public Works director  Mike Kurutz has kept the stands up.  Note the new steel roof on the stands.  Baseball lovers are fascinated by our stands that take inquiring minds back to another time.  The stands stand as sentinels of our past.

Sheboygan Street Fond du Lac

This is Sheboygan Street,  Fond du Lac, where I grew up,  about 35 minutes north of Mayville.   You see the hitching post to the left, for parking horses.   This postcard is probably late 1800's, but growing up in the 1960's I remember that there were still a couple of original iron hitching post remnants along the curb.

e.

Children of Ferdinand Schlesinger

Here is my 2012  post on Ferdinand Schlesinger:

http://mayvillestove.blogspot.com/2012/12/northwestern-iron-company-mayville-and.html

I just read this amazing Milwaukee Magazine  story by  B. Ellen von Oostenburg about Schlesinger, and his famous daughter-in-law, Mona Travis Strader Schlesinger Bush Williams von Bismarck-Schönhausen de Martini:         http://www.milwaukeemag.com/2010/02/22/HighSociety/  

While this article does not mention Schlesinger's  Mayville iron works, with their inherited wealth the Schlesinger children, Henry, Armin and Gertrude,  likely had little concern for their Mayville operations after Ferdinand died in 1921.   The von Oostenburg article states Henry was interested in his horses in Kentucky.  Armin is described as an industrialist who retired to Naples, Florida. And daughter Gertrude married Myron T. MacLaren, a vice president of a brokerage company. Gertrude's daughter said that "[m]other alone inherited $$80 million" from Ferdinand. 

      

Mayville Blast Funaces 1917

Here is a pic of a postcard showing  the Mayville blast furnaces at night 1917:

She Watched the Mayville Blast Furnaces in the 1920's

It's hard to find anyone in Mayville who can still give first hand stories about the iron works.   Dolores Ihde, of Mayville, age 95, told me today that as a child  she and her grandmother would sit out on the front porch at night and look  west from their German Street porch to watch  the tops of the two Mayville blast furnaces lighting up the sky.

Credit:  http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2011/02/10/blast-furnace-spectacle-will-be-fire-and-steel-festival-highlight-84229-28144283/              No,  this is not Mayville in the 1920's, but I'm using my imagination.

Dolores was born in 1918, and the Mayville iron works shut down in 1928.   Dolores' fond memory reminds me of this story of Cleveland:

My father and I made other trips and best were the ones to the blast furnaces.  He explained how the iron ore from the boats was mixed with coal and carried in little cars to the top of the chimney above the furnace. It was dumped in, and as it fell down “a special kind of very hot air” was blown into it.  The coal and iron ore caught fire, and below they fell into great tubs as melting metal, a pinkish gold liquid, incandescent as the sun is when it is starting to set. The man and child were allowed to go rather near the vats, to feel the corching heat and to drown their gaze in the glowing boil. All the rest of the building was dark; the
silhouettes of the men who worked at the vats were black shadows. Wearing long leather aprons, they moved about the vats ladling off the slag. That was very skilled work, my father said; the men had to know
just how much of the worthless slag to remove. For years afterwards, when we could no longer spend Sunday afternoons on these expeditions, we used to go out of our house at night to see the pink reflections from the blast furnaces on the clouds over Cleveland. We could remember that we had watched the vatfuls
of heavily moving gold, and those events from the past were an unspoken bond between us.

“The Blast Furnace” from Home to the Wilderness by Sally Carrighar (1944  Houghton Mifflin Company).

Here you see the blast furnaces at Völklingen Ironworks, Völklinger Hütte (Germany), a  - UNESCO World Heritage site.  The plant closed in 1986.   Today, the Völklinger Hütte is a museum.  You can tour the production areas, or visit the  interactive science center which has ironmaking exhibits.   

Völklingen Ironworks  Credit and many thanks to: flickr.com member mbell1975, shown here
with permission.  This photo and others from the Völklingen photostream 
by mbell1975 are posted at this flickr.com site.

Mayville Hunter

Longtime Mayville resident, David Kern, died on December 31 after a long battle with cancer.  Dave's best friends knew him as "Cobby."  I have learned since I moved here that if you were born before 1960 and grew up in Mayville your boyhood  friends probably gave you a nickname, like Popeye, Brownie,  Strookie,  Lloydie, Stoney, Hub, Rags, Bumpy, Chickie, Melf, Steinie, Nubbie, Bootsie, Mouse, Fuzzy, Deke, Stick, or Cobby.   That's a nice tradition.  Better to grow up in a small town  where they took the time to give you a decent nickname than in a crowded city where you are little more than a number.   I don't know where Dave's nickname of Cobby came from, but you had to love it.  

Because I did  not know Dave as long or as well as many others, here I bring the perspective of someone who saw him around town and admired him greatly.  Dave figured out how to combine  work, recreation and community service into one life.   How did he do that?

My first experiences with Dave began  about 20 years ago,  on our local "muni"  golf course and  at St. Mary's basketball games.  Dave was an excellent golfer who would defeat me in Thursday night league matches, always a gentleman on the golf course and never too serious about it.  (Yes, we did enjoy a beer while out on the course.)  My  fondest memories were at the old St. Mary's gym where I first encountered Dave around 1995 as a referee for  the grade school games,  in which Jack Hurst and I coached.   Dave made the calls, but he also gave quick tips to the kids when he blew the whistle at them, showing them how to pivot to avoid a travel, or how to avoid a double dribble call.   Dave helped the young players avoid line violations on in-bounds passes, and that wasn't easy because the line along the length of our little court was about a foot from where the fans were sitting.  Other refs like Nubbie Dornfeld, and Melf  and Dale Gourlie (also a co-worker at MEC)  helped the kids in the same way, but Nubbie,  Melf and Dale would tell you that the kids really listened to  Dave.  Well, they had to look up to him.  He was tall and wiry, and I'm sure they saw him as a giant.    But for these children  his gift was that he was kind and gentle.

Dave Kern  Duck hunting with Maddy
Credit:  Koepsell Funeral Home obit 

Dave Kern saw a lot of Mayville history over his 60 years, and worked at Mayville Engineering Company (MEC) for 40 of them.   After he got sick he just kept working.  The word "disability" was not part of his vocabulary.   As the obit says, Dave was MEC's reloader division Sales/Customer Service Manager.  The origin of the MEC shotshell reloader product  is a huge manufacturing-hunting Mayville story, which I can't get into here.   

Dave represented MEC  at  outdoor trade events where he would present the MEC product around the country.  He met my brother Jim from Madison, who was selling sportsmen knives for some company, at one of those  events and Jim gets back and calls me asking, “Who was that great guy from Mayville that I met at the sports show in Vegas?”  Dave had gone out of his way to go up to Jim  and make conversation with him,   because he could tell (we look alike) that he was my brother, and of course Dave as always wanted to be friendly.   Dave was not for himself.  He was always reaching out,  as he did here with Jim whom he had never met.

I can't think of a better ambassador that a company could have than  Dave Kern.   With this job with the MEC reloader division  he could take his passion for hunting into the workplace.  Away from work he loved to hunt with his black lab, Maddy, whom you see here with Dave.  

The beautiful obituary talks about the outdoors organizations in which Dave was actively involved, and on top of that Dave helped out with our community organizations as well.  I was privileged to serve on the Mayville Area Chamber of Commerce board with Dave back in the 90's. 

One of the highlights of my Christmas season was at the Mayville Inn last month where I was able visit with Dave Kern at a get together there.    It's hard to find people like Dave, who figure out how to live "the good life"  which means that he mixed work with recreation, and he made time for unselfish community service, always with a smile and a handshake.  Dave's death is a huge loss to Mayville.   But it's a loss much worse for  Sheryl, their children,  Jason and Jaime and their families, mother and dad Hank and Jane,  Dave's  MEC co-workers, and his friends who now have to get along without this amazing Mayville guy they knew as  Cobby.