 Good morning, we're at the Sheboygan County Historical Museum for our third Saturday. It is June 15, 2013, and our topic today is Sheboygan River history. You're going to be able to go through the decades and see lots of the different changes and things that happened along the Sheboygan River. We have Bill Wongman here who has a number of slides that he's showing of the early history along the Sheboygan River. Then we have our former director, Barb Harker, who is going to talk about the mills that were along the Sheboygan River, and they were one of the first establishments that we saw along the river after the Indians. Then we also have some recreational activities that were along the river. We have Amanda Salazar from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and we have Jim Baumgart, who uses the Sheboygan River for many, many different activities, and he's very knowledgeable about the wildlife and the animals that are along the river. Then we have Scott Lewandowski, who has quite a few postcards of the early Sheboygan River, and many interesting items that go along with the development of it. Then we also have Debbie Byer and Vic Pappas, who have been working with the Sheboygan River Basin Project, and they have been working to clean up the river. We have Person Vern Witt, who grew up along the river and has many stories to tell of his adventures along the river. We hope that you enjoy the day and that you enjoy seeing some of the many things that happen throughout the decades along the Sheboygan River. My name is Bob Harker. I'll be introducing this area of the display today, and a lot of the information is coming from the historian of Keele, Ed McCarzac, and so I'll be reflecting a lot of the information that he has provided to us. First of all, I want you to see two pieces of equipment that we use in the full-day education programs. This first one is a saw, and Dale's going to operate the saw, and I'm going to push on this, and you can see right here, there's a saw blade going up and down, and this is how the saw at the Wade House works, a Muley saw, and we have pictures from the Wade House too. Okay, thank you. If you go right up there, you'll see some of the pictures from the Wade House, and that's what they offer here in Sheboygan County. Now, today we're talking about the Sheboygan River. That's not on the Sheboygan River, but it's a mill very similar to other mills that were on many areas of the Sheboygan River. Okay, the next item we also use in the education programs, and this is a water wheel. Many of the mills in Wisconsin used a water wheel. They had to have a dam, and they used a race for the water to elevate the water enough to get on top of the wheel, generally on top of the wheel, and that's turning the wheel, that's going to turn all the mechanisms inside the mill, whether it's a grist mill or a lumber mill, and create the power. So early communities really needed the rivers, and they needed rivers, particularly areas where there were falls to get the elevation they needed. There are two kinds of power sources. One was the water wheel, like you see here. The other is called the turbine, and the turbine was down in a tank of water, and as the water went through the turbine, it would create the power. We go from here up to a picture of Sheboygan Falls, and in Sheboygan County, that was the first community to really be able to grow because of the natural falls in the Sheboygan River at that point, so there was a lot of industry there. Much sooner than Sheboygan. Sheboygan didn't have falls. It wasn't until there was steam power that Sheboygan could develop as an industrial area, but Sheboygan Falls got a real early start, and you see here working on the upper dam in 1898. Here's two more pictures of the same dam in Sheboygan Falls, and using the falls for water power. But it's interesting, along the rivers, that would create the power and create the opportunity for communities to develop. Excuse me, was also in the flood path, in the spring with the ice jams and floods, and so it was also very common for there to be major damage to the mills and to the dams along the river sites for the mills, roller mills and sawmills. Right now, we're looking at a map of Manitowoc County. Sheboygan River extends into Manitowoc County, and actually into Calumet County as well. But if you look right here, here's the city of Kiel, and Kiel has a mill dam in sight right here, or I'm sorry, right in this area, right here. And a little bit downstream from that, not very far is Rockville with a dam as well, and farther downstream again is Mill Home right there. So it gives you a sense of how many mill sites there were along the rivers, and not just the Sheboygan River, but also many of the other rivers in Sheboygan County. We're looking at some of the other items on display at this point. That's the Arpkey Mill in Franklin, also on the river. And as many places along the river we talked about, there would be mills, there would be mills in Franklin, and we talked about Mill Home in Rockville and Kiel. But there were a lot of other activities along the river as well. Of course, there would be fishing, there would be bathing and swimming, there would be business of ice harvesting in the winter time, often called ice mining. And Kiel was a particularly good place for that. They had a large mill pond there. They could mine the ice. And the railroad coming from Chicago to upper Michigan was kind of a halfway point, and they could just supply the railroad. Other companies locally supplied residential and some of the other businesses in the community. But almost all the rivers in the county, and any place there was a wide place in the river or a mill pond, they would be harvesting ice. Even families along the rivers in Sheboygan County would be doing that as well. In the Kiel area, a gentleman very early, 1850s, put up what he called a hotel. It was more like a boarding house and very, very close to the river there. And because the river is such a focal point for transportation, for fishing, for all the other things that are going on, it's just so important. But the weather can be in spring and the ice and the floods and things can be a great deal of damage. But also in these early communities, it was often used as a place to dump garbage, dump things into the river. Eventually, these things got cleaned up. And as you'll hear later, the major cleanup from industry here in Sheboygan, the lower part of the Sheboygan River. But early on, the rivers were often used for filling in, filling in the swamp with dirt, but also the garbage and debris and things as well. Also in Kiel, in the 1930s, there was what's believed to be a WPA project for raising fish. And that lasted until 1949 or 1950. And it was not very successful. And part of what they believed the reason to be that they were not able to test for the kinds of toxins already in the water from farm runoff and things like that. But it was one of the businesses along the river as well. Like most communities, you needed a sawmill to build. They have the lumber to build houses, businesses. Some both provided planks for the Calumet Plank Road. But you also needed gristmills or roller mills for providing food for people and for livestock for communities to thrive. The topic this month is down along the river. And the Sheboygan River, of course, was an extremely important part of our city's development. The Sheboygan River runs a winding course of over 81 miles through four counties. Sheboygan, Fond du Lac Calumet, and Manitoba County was extremely important to the Indians because it was their highway to the center of the Sheboygan County. It was like their I-43 of the day. They had large canoes that they could travel most of the way up and down the river, almost up the lake when a bagel. A very early map of the area when Sheboygan did not exist. It was done in a survey by the government. The map shows the harbor and a proposed pier that was really never built. And this was done by the Army Corps of Engineers. And in later years, in a couple of years after the city started to become founded along the bank here, they dug through right here and straightened the river out so we didn't have this big bend in here. And then this land out here, or this area out here, was all filled in. And the city is out here somewhere now. So it's changed quite a bit. The first known settlement we had was up along the Sheboygan River at the first rapids, which is out near Estling and Park. And there was a large marker out there. And if you ever get a chance, stop in the park and read that marker. It's quite interesting. And here's the city as it looked back in 1836 or 1837, with only about 12 or 14 houses in it. And you can see by then, they did actually have a pier that they started to build out into the lake because ships couldn't get in here because of the sandbar that always occurred right in the bend there. And by the 1870s and 1880s, the city began to flourish. Another aerial view or bird's eye view of the city done by an artist. The peninsula in those days looked quite a bit different. This is where the Blue Harbor is back in here now. But this was the Grove family that settled it under the Homestead Act. And they had a hotel here called the Steamboat Hotel. And this is their tugboat. They had the Sheboygan tugboat lines to bring ships in and out of the harbor. And the Grove family still lives in Sheboygan, and they're still sailors after many generations. And we had a breakwater out in the lake that was not connected to any of the piers that sat at about a 45-degree angle. And it had a lighthouse on it that was made out of wood. And this was the first lighthouse the ship would see coming down the Great Lakes. And also, we had a catwalk along the main pier, the north pier, where the lighthouse stood. In the back here, you can see the breakwater. But that was not connected to the shore. And the catwalk was so that the lighthouse keeper could get out to the light in heavy weather, because those lights had to be maintained every day. They were kerosene operated, and they had to be fueled. And the wick had to be trimmed. The US life-saving station was located in the peninsula as well. They were in no way affiliated with the Coast Guard. It was a special government organization. Later on, they were absorbed into the Coast Guard. But their station was also across the river. And here's the present location of the Coast Guard station. This building is actually part of today's Coast Guard station. But this would have been taken, maybe, very close to the turn of the century. Ships couldn't get up and down the river on their own. They always had to have tug boats tow them up and down the river. And so the tug boat business was a very active business. The schooner they're towing is the schooner Roosevelt, very well known in Sheboygan, owned by Sheboygan people. And the tug is the Peter Rice, again, owned by the Sea Rice Coal Company, that by that time had taken over the area on the peninsula. And the rice coal facilities are back in here. They also had firefighting equipment on board the Peter Rice. And here's the Garden Toy Company fire that was a huge raging blaze that they figured for a while. And they set the whole city on fire. And the Peter Rice is helping pump water onto the fire. So again, the river again was very important. Transportation, the river was very important to transportation. This is a ship owned by the Crosby shipping company. And they're coming in with a pick up more passengers. You can see all the people up on the deck here. These were beautiful cruise ships inside that rivaled the very best ships on the Atlantic and the Pacific. They had chefs that served the finest food. And they had crystals, chandeliers, and fine china. It was a great time for cruising on the Great Lakes. And Mr. Crosby, who operated out of Milwaukee, lost his life on board the Titanic. Pennsylvania have no bridge in the very early days. They used to call it the Shanghai Bridge, looking west up the hill here. Right up in here, there's a tavern. You can barely see it. But that building is still there yet. And the area down in what they referred to in those days as the flats, where the baseball complex is located now was nothing but furniture factories. But between the Grove family owning the peninsula and the coal company, there was a shipyard on the peninsula. And the largest ship they ever built there was the Helena, 220 feet long, a steamer. Here, she's ready to be launched. The Helena was towards the end of the ship building. They had to move the shipyards up to Manitowoc because our river wasn't quite wide enough to launch ships. And you can see a lot of people have gathered. It was a big public event when a ship was launched. Schools were closed, factories closed. Everybody wanted to see the ship launched. Here's a tug to satisfaction being built in the shipyard. And here's the Lottie Cooper Direct that you see down on the Great Lakes. This is what Lottie Cooper looked like right after she was launched up in Manitowoc. In fact, the company that built the Lottie Cooper in 1876 is still in business today. And here's a schooner going out of our harbor with a load of, it looks like, cordwood piled up on a deck. There were hundreds and hundreds of these schooners on the Great Lakes. And many of them came and went out of Sheboygan. Here's the final steamer of the Sheboygan, a side-wheel steamer. Again, very luxurious on board. A very comfortable way to travel in a day when roads were very poor. Here we have a group of ladies picnicking along the river. And the river was very much different than it is now. The water was so clear you could see the bottom in 10 feet of water. And most people who lived along the river drew their water right out of the river, which I don't think is something you'd want to do today. And of course, industry flourished along the river because they could ship things out. They could bring things in. Over 850,000 pieces of furniture were shipped out of Sheboygan in 1880. So you can imagine the scope of that. How many people in the city worked in the furniture industry when the city was probably only about 15 or 16,000 people. And it's a little hard to read but it's a report from the chief engineers of the US Army who kept track of how much stuff was shipped in and out of the city. And up on top, he talks about something about during the entire shipping or some 1200 ships came and went out of Sheboygan. This is the Crocker chair company. This building right here is still in existence today. For some years, it was the city streets restaurant, which is still there, but they're no longer in business. It's now a cooking school. But that building is still there but the rest of this is all gone. But Crocker had over 600 people working for them. And then it was the Phoenix chair company. And there were so many others I could do nothing but show you furniture companies for the next 20 minutes. And some of the wooden stuff they built, this is bent wood furniture. They would take these pieces of wood and put them in a steam box and steam them and they got very soft and they could bend them in all kinds of shapes. And then put the Ratan seats in them and it was very popular stuff. And today, much sought after by collectors. Sheboygan Mineral Water Company existed along the river. Sheboygan Mineral Water Company was in the building that later years was owned by a very fine dairy company. And they bottled mineral water. It was the same vein of water that came up from Fountain Park. And it had a heavy mineral taste and tasted very rusty. But they bottled it and sent it all over the world. In fact, the president of the United States, I've forgotten which one it is, ordered mineral water shipped to the White House frequently. And if you tasted the stuff, it tasted awful. So I guess people thought that if it tasted that bad, it had to be good for you. And then there was the Aladdin Soap Company down along the river. That was in the area of 22nd in Indiana. I doubt that ships ever got that far up because they would have had to open a Jersey Avenue Bridge. And I never saw that the New Jersey Avenue Bridge opened. The 14th Street Bridge used to open, but I never saw anything on the New Jersey Avenue Bridge. And then there was the fishing industry. Here's a steam tug parked in the harbor. And it was a brutal way to make a living because they worked all year long. Whenever they could go out, they went out and the tugs would come in heavily coated with ice. It was a cold, wet job. Here we see one of the tugs frozen in. And then Rice Coal Company established their business down there. And here we see a bunch of coal men ready to go out for the day. That was hard work. In many cases, you had to carry the coal up to the house and dump it in with canvas baskets. Recently I gave up a show at one of the grade schools and then talking about coal. The kids asked what coal was. They didn't know what coal was. They had never seen coal. And there was an electric car that used to run around in the yard at the Rice Coal Company and the old docks down there with a steamer coming in. Rice was a very, very big company. They were all over the Great Lakes, Mississippi River. They had dozens of docks. They had three docks in Milwaukee alone. And their ships were always beautifully painted, white and black, shiny, kept very clean. And here's a scene in their yards. And then there was the 880, a patrol craft that was kept down at the Naval Reserve Building which stood back here, which is no longer there. And that eventually was sold to Denmark and they used it as a training vessel. So that's about all for this short program and there's many other exhibits in the museum that you're welcome to go and enjoy. Hi, I'm Vernon Witt. I'm a native of Sheboygan. I am a fisherman by avocation and enjoy the Sheboygan River from its very origins right through to the lake. I have fished most of the river. I don't know of any particular area that I missed, but depends on what kind of fishing you would like to do. At many times I used to go for Northern Pike. This favorite place was Johnsonville. And of course that became fished out. So then we went after Smallmouth Bass. And this ever was the area around Sheboygan Falls. It was rocky bottom and they loved crossfish. So they had a good supply of food there. The upper reaches, the small streams had trout in them. Many of the trout streams were planted, but there was one stream that was a native trout in it. And this was called Shewitt's Crick and it dumped into the river just east of Highway 57. This stream has trout in it to this day. I shouldn't call them native because they've all been planted in that stream, but it holds trout today in a very small stream, maybe two, three feet across. And there aren't too many fishermen that bother to go up the little stream. As a result there are native trout in there, planted trout in there to this day. We used to go ice fishing along the river, but occasionally we would put a boat in. And I and two other fellows were occupants of the boat. And after we got done fishing, the guy who caught the first fish had a bite of a round of drinking after that. So one day we got into the boat and we started fishing. Finally Clarence caught a little fish. And that was the first fish caught. So his brother says, well, we can put bait on our hooks now, he's gotta buy. So I used to go there with my brother too. And one day he caught a small bluegill. Oh, it must have been about two or three inches long. And I said, hey, that's big enough for bait. He said, hey, that's a good idea. So we refastened it on his line and he's whipping it out there and he hit himself in the back of the head with the damn thing, he actually made him jar. And I said, no, Bob, you gotta use live bait, not dead bait. Well, this goes on and on. We can tell you stories all day about it. But I've enjoyed the Sheboygan River ever since I've moved into the area. And I think the people who live here in Sheboygan should be proud that they have a stream as well maintained as it has been. Many streams were followed by mankind and the Sheboygan River is not an exception but it's been only in the lower reaches that they have had a lot of contamination. And they've just finished, as of two days ago, they claimed that they finished dredging all the sediment out of the Sheboygan River that was contaminated. Well, we will see in time how it works out. But we're real happy that it was done. I have been in groups that have been fighting for this since 1988 and there are, of course, I believe there were five different groups in that time. They would come and go depending on funding and finally they got the funding and I have belonged to the Sheboygan River basin group which has been the longest running for many years. She was the lady who got me interested in the Sheboygan River basin group so I gotta blame her for that. But it's been a good run and I hope to fish in it for some years to come. And I had both my knees replaced because I was having trouble walking but I still get into the rivers and I fish from the water and it has been a successful operation and I'm enjoying it. I'm going to be 89 and I am having fun with the Sheboygan River and I hope everybody else. I'm Debbie Byer, I'm a natural resources educator with UW Extension and I've been working on Sheboygan River community education for about seven years and most heavily I've been working on the river for the past four years and my involvement includes coordinating the Fish and Wildlife Technical Advisory Committee as well as developing materials and programs to help get the word out to folks, help people understand what's been going on with the river as far as the cleanup of the PCBs and PAH contamination as well as the fish and wildlife habitat restoration. So I have a map next to me that shows the Sheboygan River area of concern which is a Great Lakes area of concern. The small map over in this portion of the poster shows the 43 areas of concern throughout the Great Lakes region that were designated in 1987 and the Sheboygan River is one of those. These are all really industrial areas that were contaminated with byproducts of industrial processes, oil, tar, liquids that had PCBs in them and so forth and so the Sheboygan River had contamination from PCBs and PAHs, the lower 14 mile stretch is the area of concern so essentially from the Sheboygan Falls Dam down to the shore of Lake Michigan and the dredging and habitat work primarily took place in 2012 although there was some dredging that began in 2006 in the upper portions of the river for peace to remove some of the PCB contamination. The bulk of the dredging work happened in this zone that's kind of highlighted in red. In 2012, 300,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment were removed and this also is the general area of the biggest habitat projects and so in total about a little more than $80 million was spent on removing the contamination as well as improving some of the habitat along the river. Along with the contamination, there also has been degradation of habitat and fish and wildlife populations through the years just from the change in the land use historically this area was forested and also had a mosaic of wetlands interspersed throughout and so you can see the landscape has changed tremendously over time as we've built cities and villages and converted land to farming and residential areas and so forth so that creates great changes in the fish and wildlife that live here as well and so the main habitat projects are at Esslingen Park. Also there's a pond that was developed in the 80s I believe when the roads were built through here and that wasn't functioning as a wetland really the way it should and so that has been improved to serve more as a wetland to hold stormwater and so forth before it infiltrates into the soil there's also a wayside area at the intersection of Taylor Drive and Indiana Avenue that habitat was improved and access to the river was improved for people as well and then this island complex here we call Wildwood Islands. The islands have eroded and broken apart over time it used to be one larger island and now is a complex of several islands so that island was shored up essentially along the bank so that it won't erode but will rather grow and the habitat also was improved. A lot of the vegetation that was growing on the island was what we considered to be invasive species. They're not native and they tend to take over things they're quite aggressive so those were removed and replaced with native trees and shrubs and other plants and then Kiwanis Park was another huge habitat project. Kiwanis Park covers three quarters of a mile of shoreline and so that was another great opportunity to do some habitat improvement for birds since we're right along Lake Michigan the Sheboygan River corridor is potentially a really important habitat component for birds and bats that migrate north and south along the Lake Michigan shore and those are long strenuous journeys and so they need good habitat to rest and refuel for the rest of their journey so the goals for the habitat restoration work in this portion of the river is to get valuable habitat for fish and wildlife closer to Lake Michigan to help those critters that are migrating as well as to provide better fish habitat throughout these stretches of the river and also to just make it a nicer place for people to enjoy the river and the community in which they live. Trying to think of any other details folks would want to know. I think that sums it up for me for now. Hi, I'm Vic Pappas. I'm with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. I work out of the Plymouth office. I'm a Lake Michigan field supervisor now but I've held a number of positions in DNR over the last 32 years and worked in Sheboygan for a lot of my career in the Sheboygan area and I used to do landfill inspections, work with plants up here on hazardous waste material type handling. For quite a few years I was a watershed supervisor for the Sheboygan basin so I've been involved with the Sheboygan River quite a bit over my career and just a few words about we've been working with the county and a lot of our partners over the years on different kinds of projects, everything from agricultural best management practices to dealing with urban runoff and stormwater and doing monitoring in the river. We have some biologists that have done quite a bit of monitoring over the years and trying to do what we can to improve water quality and habitat in the river for many years. With respect to the Sheboygan River cleanup my initial involvement was probably back as a solid waste inspector in the early 1980s when Tecumseh was a manufacturing plant in Sheboygan Falls that had been identified as the ones who allowed PCBs to get in the river way up about near the river mile 14 or so. They took some immediate action to remove materials from their bank area and from immediate area right behind their plant. All of that material was considered toxic material in the soil that they had to remove and they took that material to a storage facility in Sheboygan Falls and then eventually it was shipped to a hazardous waste landfill out of state and then over the years Tecumseh hired a number of companies to do analysis and assessment of the river in terms of where the contamination was from the PCB discharge that occurred up there and there was also ongoing fish assessment that was going on because PCBs bio-accumulate through the food chain and they also have the potential to impact human health by folks who eventually end up eating the fish and so the fish advisory was posted for the river quite some time ago in the 1980s that advised people not to eat resident fish from the Sheboygan River at all, the fish that were from the river and so in the late 1980s there was some more removal that Tecumseh paid for in the upper river up near Sheboygan Falls into Kohler a little bit and then there was quite a few discussions over the years regarding how clean is clean and what kind of clean up should occur. There was what was called a feasibility study done in the early 1990s or excuse me late 1990s on what could be done to remove the rest of PCBs and 2000 the US EPA issued what's called the Record of Decision has sort of stated what the clean up objectives were for the river under their super fund program and since that time we've been working with a lot of partners trying to make sure that that clean up occurred and another firm called Pollution Risk Services got involved around 2004. They had a relationship with Tecumseh to do the clean up work and so they started dredging in 2006, 2007 in the upper river to remove most of the contamination up there they dredged about 20,000 cubic yards out of the river of contaminated sediment from the river and then went through some more work over the years to get, identify what we need to do in the lower river in the inner harbor and that work actually started in 2011 and was completed here actually in January of 2013. So a lot of effort to get to that point and in addition to what was required by the responsible party in this case Tecumseh there was another contamination site at the former Camp Marina site that was cleaned up in 2011. Those were coal tars associated with, oh, going back to the 1930s really when they used to gasify coal and had this coal tar that remained that good in the river and that was cleaned up in 2011 by the Wisconsin Public Service Corporation and so we had the PCB cleanup going on by this Pollution PRS company and we also had Wisconsin Public Service in their contractor doing a cleanup in 2011 in the river and then we were also able to obtain funding through the Great Lakes Legacy Act to do what was called a betterment action which was to improve the river even more than what was required under the regulations. So we formed a team of County City, the responsible parties, DNR, the EPA and a number of others, UW Extension played an important role for public education and we were able to do a project where we removed a lot more material from the river including the inner harbor area from East Street to the mouth of what would be more slightly contaminated material that was not required to be removed but was still there and preventing dredging from occurring because of the cost involved and so in 2012 we implemented the Legacy Act project and all together all four projects that were going on we did a habitat project that removes some contamination from some floodplain areas. We were close to 400,000 cubic yards of contaminated material that came out in 2012 so it was quite a great feat to get all of that work done and one year it took a lot of cooperation by a lot of people but we think we did a very good cleanup. We hope to be doing a lot more assessment of the river and the fish over the next few years to see how well we did and we're very optimistic that we're gonna see improvement in the fish and the wildlife. I'm Scott Levendusky. I'm the assistant city historian for the city of Sheboygan and I brought a collection of postcards of showing the Sheboygan River or the bridges that were over to Sheboygan River and I have postcards from Sheboygan. Sheboygan Falls, Johnsonville, Kohler and for some of the postcards I enlarged the pictures and put those on display also. Most of the postcards date from about 1905 through 1920. On this side I took some postcards and taped them together. They show a panoramic view of Sheboygan looking at 14th Street from Kiwanis Park. What is now Kiwanis Park? You know the Sheboygan River which passes from Fond du Lac County and swings through Calumet and Manitowoc County, spends most of its time in Sheboygan County and the beautiful thing about the river, it goes through, the Sheboygan Marsh, it goes through areas like Rockville and Kiel and it covers areas down through the Sheboygan Falls, Kohler and into the Lake Michigan areas and the diversity of animals and fish and birds in that area is far more phenomenal than people realize. We have of course a great migration of salmon and trout that move up. We've got a wonderful small bass fishing and some great Northern pikes that will move up from the lake and you've got animals that travel, you've got coyotes, you've got turkeys, sandhill crane lives along the area and we're blessed with some of the best agriculture areas that sort of parallel the river. But for people that like recreational areas, you've got snowmobiling during the wintertime, people can go across the marsh, even when there's no snow on the ground, they can canoe and they can kayak. I've gone from St. Cloud of Vanillac County to the Sheboygan Marsh Dam any number of times and the frogs and the sandhill cranes and the geese and the ducks that you'll find as you move from one curve to another on the river bends is a very relaxing and enjoyable way of spending a day or a week, people have camped out at the marsh. But we do have a diversity there and if you see the Henshel Museum and some of the artifacts that have been brought by the Indians of 10,000 years ago, these areas exist on lands that parallel the Sheboygan River. So it's been a resource for everybody for a thousand years and in recent years, of course, since about the 1800s, people that have moved to Sheboygan County have made this place an area that they like to enjoy and the river is enjoyment. We have, of course, a variety of things here today for people to look at, some of the backwater, some of the bird books, some of the fish items that people might have an interest in and the experience that people have had, they've brought it in today, they've talked about them, some of their experiences camping with Boy Scouts and others, it's been a nice rewarding time meeting some of the people that have come to share their stories and ask questions about birds and fish and wildlife. It's the exciting time to live in the Sheboygan area because we just finished $100 million effort to clean the lower part of the Sheboygan River, a compliment to the state and federal and county and city people in Falls and beyond of Sheboygan that have made this happen and now we've got a river that is able to be developed even better and people that want to fish and canoe and kayak will have a water that is more pristine than it was before. So we have many things going for us and this river is part of Sheboygan County, it is lifeblood that brought people here, it's a river that people like to see and use and it's a activity that we could just share by looking and watching the migrations, the birds and ducks in the fall of the year. It's a great piece of history and it's a great piece of recreational area that hopefully everybody will enjoy. Okay, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the history of fishing and fishing in the Sheboygan River. You know when you go way back before settlement times, this was a fairly important river to Indian tribes that would camp out near Taylor Drive in that general area of the Sheboygan River and fish for Lake Trout and Brook Trout and probably some of the warm water species like suckers, whenever they could get concentrations of fish coming up the river, they would harvest those fish and probably preserve them in some manner by drying or salting down. Most likely drying those fish and then use them through whatever part of the year they could to subsist on fish. So my understanding is that there was a fairly significant camp of Indians down in that general area because that was the first rapids or major rapids on the river where they could easily access those fish as they came upstream. The Lake Trout probably didn't do as much spawning in the Sheboygan River as they do out in Lake Michigan. They're generally reef spawners but Brook Trout which were the other native trout species that would come up the Sheboygan River. Most likely were able to come up the river and then had even further inland to maybe the upper Onion River places like that where they would then try to spawn and then the adults would most likely drop back down into Lake Michigan. The young of the year fish would probably stay in the Onion River and other tributaries and develop and then come down as they reached adulthood into Lake Michigan. So as far as the original trout species it was Lake Trout and Brook Trout only. Then that shifted back in the early 1960s, late 1950s when the Pacific salmon were brought into Lake Michigan. First of all, they were brought in to control the alewife populations which were following the beaches with their vast numbers of fish. They would die, wash ashore and cause problems. So the salmon were introduced initially to control ale life and they being what they call anadromous fish where they live their life out in the ocean and then come up into freshwater streams to spawn. In our case they would stay out in Lake Michigan and grow and then move into the Sheboygan River in an attempt to spawn and they still do that to this day. It was initially, my understanding was that coho salmon were brought in. They're also called silver salmon. And they're followed up by Chinook salmon also called king salmon. The king salmon or Chinook are the bigger of the two species and get to be fairly large. There were probably times when Chinook salmon up to 30 pounds in size would come up into the Sheboygan River in fall and attempt to spawn. The Chinook would come up in September, the coho would come up more in October to attempt to spawn. And in fact they would spawn but because there aren't enough springs and good enough water quality in the river their eggs would most likely die. And primarily water temperature would be the biggest factor in that the salmon eggs develop during winter and hatch out generally in February or March. But in a Sheboygan River if there aren't enough springs to warm the water, ice crystals that are more or less arrow shaped would actually pierce the eggs and kill the eggs. So even if water quality were acceptable to the salmon they still would not probably survive because of cold temperatures. Because there are actually times when the river runs actually bevel freezing and temperature will get down to 30 and 31 degrees but because the water is flowing it doesn't have time to solidify in large chunks. But with the salmon coming into the Sheboygan River really created a huge sport fishery. Initially anglers were able to use snag hooks and they would cast those hooks into the river and yank the line in the hook and try to snag the fish. The thought was that salmon really weren't gonna feed at that time of year, which is incorrect but that was the major method of catching salmon as they came up river and it drew people in from Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin of course and other states would actually come here some with freezers on small trailers, fill those up with fish and then haul them back home. And of course the salmon come up river, they do not return back into Lake Michigan, they die after they spawn because of the Pacific salmon particularly that's their life cycles, they come in, they spawn and they die. Back in I believe probably the late 1980s, I don't know the exact year, snagging was eliminated as a method of catching fish and the primary reason for that was that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was also stocking rainbow trout which they call steelhead trout in Lake Michigan and steelhead will actually come up river, spawn or eat eggs of some of the salmon and then they'll drop back down into Lake Michigan, they can survive many years. So that's the history of the sport fishery and primarily it's a warm water fishery, a very good warm water fishery now after the Clean Water Act in 1972 created a situation where the river cleaned up and smallmouth bass and particularly also did well.