“We thought it would be really neat to make it into a wedding venue,” Sara Abbot related this Saturday of the old Northwestern Lumber Company store at Fourth and Broadway listed through Coldwell Banker and going up for auction by Jerry Andrews as of September 14 at 5:30 p.m. Abbot is the property’s co-owner with business partner Harley Oemig Jr. of Hometown Farm Accounting out of Cornell.

The property with 30,000 square feet of indoor space and a total assessed value of $74,000, was most recently purchased from Deborah Asher of Eau Claire for just $10,000 in May 2019. Asher purchased it from Patrick Mamerow in June of 2017 for $58,000, state records show. Mamerow acquired it at a stated price of $95,100 from Dale J. Kramicz’s estate in March of 2017. Kramicz purchased the building from Don Smith Sales and started a variety of renovation projects there, with plans to develop apartments and a restaurant in the building.

The old brick came into being in the aftermath of the Great Stanley Fire of May 18, 1906, on which day a large portion of Stanley’s north side burned, including the old wooden store version just to the east. A brick replacement for the original wood version was later built on the present site. The Company store/Don Smith’s property includes a stretch of woods between the adjacent alley and Sunset Homes and extends its footprint northward to the south curb of Fifth Avenue at Broadway, thence to the alley which once hosted the S. M. and P. railroad track. Along with a wedding venue, Abbot and Oemig Jr. had considered having a gun museum on the second floor and swap meets, but current events got in the way of these plans.

“With everything that happened with COVID, we decided it wasn’t the right time,” Abbot said of plans for the building’s renovation, much of was already begun by the building’s previous owner. Specifically, the second floor has received new underlayment or flooring and partial sheetrock on the ceiling. The roof as viewed from the City Hall Clock Tower recently is in good repair and PVC pipes to the outside at ground level show new caulk sealant. Several windows have been bricked up in the basement and an apparent heater in the basement helps keep temperatures somewhat in sync come wintertime. The building’s windows, though covered up, are largely intact on the inside and the S. M. and P. addition to the west shows good roof support, with much of the tear out work at ground level already done. New strip wood has also been installed along the wall. The building also includes an elevator shaft in the northwest corner if someone should want to put one in, and the basement has also had work done to it, with natural light coming in at the front.

That said, the building’s first floor, although supporting of an adult male over 200 pounds, will need to be replaced or restored in places and some tuck pointing remains to be done on the outside brick. Asked of the building’s possibilities, Abbot said that “all sorts of things” could be done with it. Among them, she listed apartments on the second floor and a climate controlled craft beer/wine cellar in the basement. With this being the present situation, what of the past?

For a first clue or two, one need look no further than the building’s outside, where the remnants of its former appellation as the “FARMER’S STORE CO.” can still be discerned on the south and east sides of the building, sandwiched between floor windows. For more information, a good place to start is Wisconsin BadgerLink, as aided by the Centennial book.

“May 18, 1906 will live long in the memory of the people of Stanley,” the paper of May 18, 1907 related. “The wind blew from the northwest at a velocity seldom known and many had been the expressions of uneasiness during the day by citizens who feared the results which might accompany even an insignificant blaze.” Striking at 2:30 in the afternoon, fire was found in the North Western Company horse barns from a spark apparently blown from the “refuse burner.” Nearly eighty families were burned out of their homes in the hard fought aftermath, with about seventy dwelling houses being burned, the survivors being housed in vacant pub- AUCTION

lic buildings and the schools until late fall. With the former Company store a cinder in what is now the street outside American Pride bar, the rebuilding plans would be bigger and better.

“The N. W. L. Co.’s rebuilding plans contemplate a store and warehouse combined of solid brick,” with company officials already having consulted architects a week later. The dimensions then under consideration were to be 70 x 150 feet with two stories and a basement, while the warehouse annex was to be 40 x 290 feet and answer as a railroad building. For rebuilding purposes, the lumber company sold material to its employees “at cost of manufacture and on easy terms.”

By the fall of 1914 Dr. Hans Christen Ericksen (later to receive war honors) kept his office over the “N. W. Lbr. Co. Store” and also answered night calls from it at Phone 25. By 1920 the Company store had become “the Big Store” and a lost ad from December asked for the return of gloves to the store office, while a passing senator gave a speech against “radicalism” at at time when socialists were exploiting “We the People” in the Constitution to argue for revolutionary government overthrow. From L. I. Roe the store passed in 1913 to the able managerial oversight of a man named Burgduff, who died at Madison in 1948. Meanwhile, the Company store turned Big Store had become the Farmer’s Store Co., which it remained until being purchased by the Don Smith’s Sales enterprise in the late 1970s, the same general decade that Long’s South Side Store became the Auction Mart Apartments. Long’s North Side Store meanwhile—also a post-fire

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innovation—would become the American Pride Bar in due time. In the November 6, 2014 issue, meanwhile, “Daisy’s Diary” by the staff newshound reported that a sale had been finalized on the Don Smith’s Sales building, even as two local letter writers took the school board to task for it’s tone-deaf response to 58 percent of referendum voters voting “no” to Oriole Park’s construction, which the board had reportedly ignored. Back in the present, the auction of the 30,000 square foot Company store at 101 West Fourth Avenue now listed with Coldwell Banker approaches on September 14 at 5:30 p.m.

“I needs some TLC,” Abbot said of the old Company Store/Don Smith’s property, “but you know, it’s an icon to the city.”

A sign post marking the old S. M. and P. railhouse sits by the platform on West Fourth Avenue. Inside, partial renovation work has already been done.