 Well good evening everyone and welcome to the Sheboygan County Historical Museum. My name is Chloe Sider and I am the program coordinator here and I am just so excited that so many people are here just as excited. That is fantastic. We have a wonderful speaker tonight for our next part of the March Speaker Series, which is all about the history of transportation in Sheboygan County. We have my good friend Peter Federer and I am so excited that he gets to present on the history of railroads in the county and that I get to cheer him on tonight because normally he's cheering me on so this is really special. So without further ado, let's turn it over to Pete. Thank you. I know a lot of you here tonight. I also know there's a couple of guys sitting out here that know more than I do about the railroad one way back there. So I asked them not to harass me and we'll just have a good time talking about this. One of my teachers once told me the way to do a talk like this is to get to know your audience. So I'm going to begin by asking you a couple of questions. If you get all the answers right, there will be no reason for the rest of the program. Let's see, how many of you have never ridden on a train? Never ridden on a train. Only one, two. Way to go, Tom. Well then you know what, how many of you have ridden on a train, stayed overnight, and slept in one of those small compartments? Which of you, oh it's probably the guys. Who got the top bunk? There you go. That's an adventure in itself. If you ever get a chance to ride the train overnight and get a room at, the top bunk comes down from the ceiling and you have to crawl up a couple of little steps that are on the side. And then when you get up there, you have to strap yourself in. There's a big net that comes down from the bottom and you hook it up to the top. So if you fall out of that top bunk, you land in the net. You don't go down, land on the person down below you. Let's see. Let's go a little closer to home now. Where on the railroad line between here and Plymouth was a place called DECA. Okay. It was the 10-mile station when they first started building the railroad out of Sheboygan. And it was a little place called DECA on the county line between Plymouth and Sheboygan Falls county lines. How about if you were at the Shanghai station, where would you be? Well we're staying in Sheboygan County now. All right, well that'll come up later on in the program. And maybe one more. How about Hull's Crossing station out near the marsh, north of Lombula, just before you start running along the edge of the marsh there. And one more. Where was the Usberg, where was Usberg before the railroad came through? Do you know about that? Yeah, closer to the lakeshore on Long Sock Trail Road. Okay, so tonight we're talking about railroads and let's go back to 1845, three years before Wisconsin became a state. What do you suppose was the best way to get to Milwaukee at that point? What's that? On a boat. And if you were going to ship products from here to Fonsalac, what was the best way to do that? We had the program last week, if you're here you saw that. It was by Plank Road, stagecoach, things like that. Okay, so boats were the best way to get around at that time. From the earliest beginnings of Sheboygan, the Sheboygan Harbor was one of the best on the shores of Lake Michigan. And every year, thousands of passengers and cargo landed at the harbor. That was good for our city, but that wasn't so good in another way because we had a problem. How do you move people who land at the harbor and want to go out to Plymouth? How do they get out there or maybe they want to go to Haven or Usberg? And how do you move protests coming from the fields and the farms west of town? How do you move those things to bigger trade centers like Milwaukee and Chicago? Again, both were the answer. So, you know, boats didn't sail west of town. The good highways didn't exist at that point. Plank roads were very rare. There was one from here out of Glenbeild and beyond, or Greenbush and beyond, but not all the way across. And local roads were only as good as the weather. Once it rained or there was too much snow, you couldn't move it that way either. So, the answer was railroads. It was time at that point, 1847, local business leaders chartered the Sheboygan and Fongilac Railroad. Unfortunately, it went nowhere. They never got around to laying a rail down, putting a tie down. They went bankrupt before they got anywhere. Five years later, the business leaders in Sheboygan were dreaming bigger dreams, and that was that they were going to build a railroad, not just to Fongilac, but all the way across the state. That line going all the way across the state, all the way over to the Mississippi, and they called that the Sheboygan and Mississippi Railroad. Well, that one succeeded. They, on about 7th and Indiana Avenue, they built a roundhouse, not a roundhouse, an engine house. There's the engine house. There's a turntable here, gallows-type turntable, water tower, and then back here, a little closer to Ace Street, they built the depot. So, that's where the railroad began, and that made sense because we just talked about the fact that boats were the best means of transportation. So, if everything coming into the harbor, if they wanted to move it further west, the railroad was already right there at the harbor. This is long before Rice had built these coal yards and all that there. The railroads ran all the way out to the breakwater, and there was a big warehouse at the end of the breakwater on the south side, the south breakwater. South or south? South of the river, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that. Yeah, this whole complex of railroad here was built on the south side of the river. When the railroad started moving west, they crossed Ace Street. This is a little later than we're talking about right now, but you can see... Here's the gate tower. These gates here protected the crossing going across Ace Street. In the foreground are the railroad tracks. This building over here eventually became the offices of the Rice Coal Company before they built the building that's there today. And then that's the Ace Street bridge, which was a swing bridge at that time. That's also the story where the streetcar ran through the open bridge, and three women riding that car were killed down in the river. So are we looking towards the north? Here you're looking north, yes. Streetcar tracks, right? Now moving further west, the line is heading for Sheboygan Falls. Here's the... There were a lot of these wood pile bridges of different heights and all that. This is the one that ran over the ravine in Kohler, Wisconsin. Then in January of 1872, the engine called the Sheboygan pulled into Sheboygan Falls. That was the first train to Sheboygan Falls. And I think that building... This building is still standing there on that corner, right? It was a bank building at one time. It was also the first home of the... Well, not necessarily the first, but it was a home of the Sheboygan County Research Center, which is now located a little further to the east of this building. Finally the... Let's see, that would have been in January... March of 1860, the railroad arrived in Glambula. Now the railroad had goals to set, and the goal... The first goal they had was getting to Glambula. And so in 1869, they finally arrived... In 1860, they finally arrived there. And then they intended to push on from there, hoping to get support from Fondalac. And they never got that, so then it took a long while after that before the railroad finally got to Fondalac. Anyway, they got stuck in Glambula. And because there wasn't enough traffic and there wasn't any through traffic all the way, they went bankrupt again. So we have another bankrupt. And the railroad was sold for $131,000 in cash. And what happened is that the major stockholders of the Sheboygan and Mississippi bought up the line and reincorporated the railroad and called it the Sheboygan and Fondalac again. So now we're back to having the Sheboygan and Fondalac. If there's any important name on here is this Edward Appleton. He was the superintendent of the line. He was the one most responsible for getting the line built all the way to Fondalac eventually. So now we're in Glambula. There's one more station in Sheboygan County. There's Appleton's pass for the railroad line. And then there's the Hulse Crossing Station, just a little bit of a building along the track. It's one of those places that had a sighting. They eventually shipped a lot of beats and things like that out of Hulse Crossing. And there were some cheese factories there that got carloads of coal to power their equipment in the cheese factory. So the Sheboygan and Fondalac finally reached Fondalac in 1869 and soon pushed on to Princeton. However, they got overextended and the line went into bankruptcy again. There was a lot of that going on apparently. When that happened, this time the Chicago and Northwestern bought the line for $1.5 million. And at that time the Sheboygan and Fondalac owned 78 miles of track, 5 locomotives, 144 freight cars, and 9 passenger cars. Then the Chicago and Northwestern called this line now the Sheboygan and Western. That drops into a little bit of unknown history because most people don't realize there was a little railroad in there called the Sheboygan and Western before the Chicago and Northwestern took over all of the lines in Sheboygan. You can still see some of this original line. It's 150 years ago when they built this line. But if you go from about 17th and Indiana, you can see the railroad tracks going west. They go through Kohler, they go through Sheboygan Falls, and then they follow mostly double P all the way out to Plymouth. That's all part of this original line that was started way back when. So now let's jump back to the 1870s again. By that time you can see there were rail lines, pretty many rail lines going east and west across the state. But there was this whole country up here full of timber and full of iron ore. And the railroads wanted a part of that too, that business. So they started building lines that went north and south. And for Sheboygan that was good because that meant two more railroads coming through. Coming from the south, there were two lines now that were going to come through Sheboygan County. One took the western route and came through the little towns of Random Lake and Adele and Waldo. And then got to Plymouth in February of 1872. This is a newer picture but there were two depots in Plymouth on and off. There was one depot and then they went back to two depots and things like that. And then of course through Elkhart Lake and then out of Sheboygan County to the north. This little building is still in Elkhart Lake and it's part of the mill building that was there. It was moved north across the main street there and is attached. I think it was the little gift shop the last time I looked out there. So that building, that station still exists. These are some of the great trains that ran through Elkhart Lake. A friend of mine, John Suxey, now a department, took some wonderful pictures of trains running through Elkhart Lake. I thought you'd like to see that. Don't ask me. Yeah, I know but you can't really see on here what that is. Hudson's? Okay. One of the experts out here says those were Hudson's. This is the kind of things we don't see anymore. Then of course the Wisconsin Central came through Plymouth and after a while, the Sioux line first then the Wisconsin Central and then finally the Wisconsin Southern. Although they haven't gone to Elkhart Lake for quite a while, have they? They haven't been there lately, I didn't think so. Yeah, that's what the railroad does when they have too many cars and they don't know what to do with them. They find places like north of Elkhart Lake and then park all these cars out on the siding for six months and then all of a sudden they're gone again. All right, the second railroad that came through Sheboygan County from the south started off as the Milwaukee Manitowoc and Green Bay. And to keep your interest, where is this picture taken? Yeah, you're right. Here's the crossing tower on Indiana Avenue. So Indiana Avenue is right down here. This train just left the depot which would be back underneath here. There was a bridge. You can see some cars up here. That line ran from Rice Coal all the way out to Fond du Lac. So that line went over the top of this line and this is down. Nowadays, there's a, the 14th Street viaduct goes over this area. But if you look down there, when you're running along 14th Street south of Indiana Avenue, you see that there were railroad tracks down there at one time. I thought it was kind of interesting because there's a view that you don't very often see. So coming in from the south, there was the village of Cedar Grove and then the village of Usberg. Usberg, like we mentioned earlier in the program, was a couple miles to the east of where it is today. But when the railroad came through there, the village fathers realized that, boy, if we're going to be a prosperous community, we need to be next to the railroad. So they built a depot along the railroad tracks and eventually the rest of the village moved that direction to take advantage of the passenger station and the freight deliveries. There was a big grain elevator there on all of that. I got to read a little part of this. The first depot lasted until the station agent, Henry Marion, went on vacation in 1881. The rookie who took his place mistakenly routed a fast freight off the main line and onto the depot siding, sending that speeding train into the depot. Marion was immediately called back from his vacation and his replacement was never seen in these parts again. Another picture of the Usberg depot. The daily passenger service to Sheboygan began on January 1st, 1873. A ticket cost $3 and the ride to Milwaukee took three and a half hours, which was still better than trying to do it by stagecoach. By this time the railroad was called the Milwaukee Lakeshore and Western and the first depots were located, you know where the depot is today on about 12th and Pennsylvania Avenue. The first depots were located on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue and they were small wooden depots like you saw in Usberg and Cedar Grove and difficult to find any pictures of those. Nobody thought they were photogenic enough to take pictures. So today's depot was built in 1905 and it is on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue now. The passenger shelters are gone but the depot is still there and pretty well preserved. There was a, oh interesting story, that crossing tower right up here. There we go. The top half of that is here in the museum. Back in that corner you might want to take a look at it. It was donated to the museum after it was used. Somebody bought it for his children, put it in the backyard. He used it as a playhouse. When the children got older this man donated the building to the museum. Let's see, I think there's a couple more pictures of the museum here. The passenger trains. That's the Phoenix chair company back here. There's better pictures of that. Imagine the long streamliners that we had coming into Sheboygan at one time. Then the last passenger train through Sheboygan left the depot on April 25, 1971. It was a foggy spring evening and this is the last train. Lots of us went under the pictures of that. There's one more depot in Sheboygan County before the train left the county. That's the depot in Haven at one time. It started off as a boxcar. They built a two-story building behind it. It was known as the Shanghai station because if you got to be the depot master at a station like that, you were as good as Shanghai. Apparently not everybody thought it was a bad place to be because these guys up on top seem to be having a very good time. The Haven depot became a much busier place when Camp Haven opened in 1949. Between 49 and 59 you had lots of these troops coming in for anti-aircraft artillery practice. That depot is just about a mile from the entrance to Whistling Straits, the golf course out there. Whistling Straits would be about a mile east, right on. Now let's do this. Let's take just a quick ride around Sheboygan County and look at some of the things that were there, aren't there anymore, but that you probably would remember. This is the 14th Street Bridge. Behind it is the railroad bridge. Both of those, if you notice, have bases like this. Both of them were swing bridges so that you could open that bridge and boats could still go up river further. There were a number of furniture factories way up there. They got loads of lumber by boat. Here's a better view of that swing bridge and there was a big motor, electric motor in there that would turn that whole thing open and closed. In 1948 the Chicago and Northwestern replaced that bridge. They no longer made it a swing bridge but it's interesting to see how they did that. They had two steam powered cranes like this that picked up the new bridge, the new part of the bridge and drove across the trestle and stopped there. Workmen pulled the old bridge out which is this part here and the cranes simply dropped the new bridge right in that empty space. Then they went to work putting ties and rails on it. They got the whole job done before the northbound passenger train came through about two o'clock in the afternoon. There's probably a lot of guys here and there and there and they're all holding their breasts to see if that train was going to make it across the trestle or not. That bridge is still in place today. If you realize it, if you've ever walked the shoreline 400 biking trail, walking trail, this would be just south of Erie Avenue and if you've never done that, take a walk out there. It's interesting to stand in the middle of the river on that bridge and look both ways and see how different it is on there. It's a different view you don't get to see very often. So just south of Union Avenue on about 21st Street or so. The railroad, the Chicago Northwestern had an engine house. It had a turn table. It had a 20,000 gallon water tank and then it had a 100 ton coal tower. That was a very busy place at one time. Then the big south yard switching yard was just to the south of all of these facilities. Now you've all seen this massive bridge that goes across the Sheboygan River on the south end of the park, Cornice Park. We're told that there were 75,000 bolts that hold that together. If anybody ever wants to check that out, the train only comes through there twice a day, it wants each direction, so you're pretty safe up there. The story is that when they built these concrete abutments, they built cofferdams and had to blast, use dynamite to blast down to a solid foundation. When they did that, they knocked a lot of plaster off the walls of the church up here. So today that bridge is still standing. So is the church. Can you read the graffiti? You tell me how the kids got out there to put that graffiti on there. One of them says, who do you know wants to buy a car? You remember that one? And the other one is, where's the beef? But it took some ingenuity to get out there and paint those things. You had to paint upside down, I think. There wasn't any way you could put a ladder up there. At one time, the railroad lines north and south, east and west crossed west of South 17th Street and Indiana Avenue. There was a tower that controlled that crossing. One day when William Bering was on duty as the watchman there, he watched in horror as a derailing freight train crashed all around his tower. Fortunately, it didn't hit the tower and he wasn't hurt. How many of you remember that there was a bridge over the tracks on 17th Street? Okay, lots of people argue that point that never happened. A lot of fill was going there. They had to fill all that in. There's a filling station up there now and all of that. But there was a bridge, 17th Street was a bridge over the railroad tracks. Here's the crew on the Kohler job going to work and they stopped there to have their picture taken. That's another mystery that we have. The railroad switched Kohler Company for more than 50 years. I'll be darned if you can find a picture of a steam engine in Kohler switching in the Kohler plant, not just next to it, but they came in there every day, usually twice a day, to move cars around. They would bring cars in in the morning, line them up and then when the guys broke for lunch at 11.30 or so they'd come in with their steam engine, pull all the loaded cars out, push empty cars in there so that the afternoon shift would have cars to fill again. This is a nice view of the rail yard adjacent to the depot. Here's the end of the depot. It's a long railroad yard. There's the Phoenix Chair Company again. Big complex. This is what I was interested in. There was a walkway built across that yard so that the workers, that worked at the furniture factories and tanneries and so on could get from one side of town to the other without having to cross through the yards, which would have been a dangerous thing to do. That bridge was a favorite spot for a lot of photographers. There you get another view of it up here, right there. But it was a nice place to sit, to stand and watch the trains come through. Another one of those big long streamliners that used to come through Sheboygan. There's the depot. There was a big water tower here. Some of these buildings are still there. We don't know for how long, but they're still there. There's a saying that passenger trains make good pictures, but trains make money. And so these are some of the places that some of the businesses and manufacturers that did shipping on the railroad. From this building back here, Garten Toy made and shipped more than one million snow sheds. What's that? Oh, snow sleds. I knew I was going to screw that up. Every time I read this, I got it wrong. Snow sleds, right. Sheboygan shared on here in the corner. At their peak, they were making and shipping 2,400 chairs a day. So they had a very active rail siding down here. Rice coal was for many years probably the biggest shipper in town. Not all that coal that ended up in the docks along the river that you might remember was meant for Sheboygan. Much of that coal was loaded into railroad cars and shipped north, south, and west. They had a big operation doing that. They had as many as 10 switch crews working in a 24-hour day just to move those cars around, pull the loaded cars out, pull the empty ones back. It's amazing how much coal is there. When you look at those coal boats, we're five, six, seven hundred feet long, and it looks like a dinky little toy next to the coal piles. That was quite an amazing operation. The Edgewater Power Plant got most of its coal. One of the books that's in the museum store writing The Electric Interurbans, the interurbans delivered coal to the power plant in Sheboygan for a period of time. Some of us remember the coal trucks that ran down South Ace Street. Almost day and night it seemed, delivering coal for a while. Edgewater has its own engines to move cars around. This must be a much older picture because it's not yellow anymore. Kohler Company has a 80-ton center cab diesel built by General Electric for the Navy in the 1940s. Kohler bought that engine in 1973 to celebrate its centennial. This is how they decorated the engine. Well, now wait a minute. I didn't get to that part yet. The young lady there is Julie Street. She was an employee who was selected to christen the engine in the bottle of pink champagne for our centennial year. This is what the engine looks like now. The picture is somewhat distorted. That engine is now about 80 years old, I think, and it's still working. We don't use it too much because Kohler Company doesn't get a whole lot of real traffic anymore. But 80 years old, on the side of it it says, I think I can, I think I can. The cheese factories in Plymouth were another big user of rails. The Chicago and Northwestern had tracks along this side of the building and the Milwaukee Road had its tracks on the other side of the building. And you can see how many cars they might have shipped every day. There's an aerial view of the plant that, cheese factories at Plymouth. This is the, was known as the Borden Chemical, or we probably know it as the Borden Chemical Plant. It's now Hexion and they make chemicals, including formaldehyde. And the, they're one of the largest customers for the railroad today and yet you hardly know anything about it because they're so hidden back there. They're on the end of, I think, 24th and Union and all protected. You can't get back there. They have gates all around it. But the railroad switches that company every day just about. We know this one is Schreier Malt. It's now, who is it now? Yeah. They're kind of an on and off business right now, but they're still getting rail cars in there. Sheboygan paper, no, not Sheboygan paper box. Yeah. Georgia Pacific. Georgia Pacific generally gets cars every day. They have quite a business going there and in the back, there's an indoor loading dock so they can back all their cars right inside and load and unload them. Plastics engineering, they get cars almost every weekday too. They get all tank cars full of chemicals but they're an active, very active customer. Somebody asked me about the old Gus Holman plant. Now it's a Sadloff scrap metal recycling center. They get, they don't get much traffic, but they get an occasional car, maybe a couple of months or something like that so they're still an active customer. Out in Haven, the Richardson Lumber gets car loads full of lumber for their truss plant that they have out there. Cedar Grove has a siding that's active at a cheese warehouse and, you know, we think everything we eat around here is Wisconsin cheese, but I think that they bring car loads of California cheese into that warehouse. You don't want to boycott that though, you know. Yeah, it comes from all over, I guess. The plastics plants, there's one on Martin Avenue in Sheboygan and then there's a couple of them on the south side. They're all pretty active customers. What keeps the railroad going in Sheboygan, I guess. Who remembers the oil refinery? That was a big customer at one time. They did oils and they did asphalt and they did a lot out there. They had a double track siding in here. That's very true, yep. All right, one thing I didn't have time to do because we didn't want these programs to run too long is to talk about the people on the railroad, you know, you kind of have engines and boxcars and all that, but it doesn't mean anything unless you've got the people to run them and to manage the companies and things like that. I've been doing railroad history for a long time. I compiled a list of people that worked on the railroad, all in alphabetical order. If you know of anybody who wanted to see anything about them, it might be in there. You have relatives that worked for the railroad and their name isn't in the book. Stop and see me. We'll add their name to the book because that's what this whole thing is about. You really need people to run anything. Speaking of books, if you're interested, there are four books on railroads in the library here at the museum and the one out at the Research Center. Two of them are stories about the railroads. One is about the electric line that ran from Sheboygan to Milwaukee, the Milwaukee-Northern line. And then John Winter did a book on the reconstruction of the Wisconsin-Southern line from Plymouth to Sheboygan Falls. And that's a nice picture book. It shows before and afters and all of that. So those books are all available at the library. You can check with Chloe or somebody. Well, not a boy. He's got all four of them, he says. That helps. All the prophets, all the proceeds go to the museum and the Research Center. So it's a way of supporting some of these organizations. And I'll tell you just what's in one of the books. There's a story about George Williams. He was an engineer on the Chicago Northwestern. And one day he's bringing a train from Fond du Lac back to Sheboygan. And he thinks he sees something on the tracks up ahead that doesn't look right. So he puts the train into emergency stop and lo and behold, what did he see? There's a little blonde-haired girl sitting between the tracks trying to take some ducklings out that are trapped between the two rails. His train stopped about 10 feet away from that. By the time he stopped the train it was 10 feet away from that little girl. So those are the kinds of stories I think that make railroading kind of fun. There's some tragic stories. There's a story about the Packers. The Packers and the Bears are playing up in Green Bay. And so the Milwaukee Road train, well, and so did the Northwestern, but those trains all serve Green Bay. So apparently after the game all the Bears fans got on this train that's going to come down through Plymouth. And they've had a good time. Maybe the Bears won that day. Anyway, they're having such a good time to get into fights. So the conductor calls ahead to the police station in Plymouth and says I got some rowdies on this train. They stopped the train in Plymouth, got those guys off the train, and then the train took the rest of the people to Milwaukee. So there's all kinds of stories like that that just make railroading kind of fun. So a red board means that the railroad can't go any further than this and it also means that I'm out of slides and can't go any further than this. I thank you for coming.