Once Upon a Logging Town:

So far as change goes, land tends to get altered last, taken for a general rule. Whereas human-built structures can be erased rather easily through collapse, fire, new construction or just the laws of physics that govern increasingly random decay (entropy), nature’s hills and valleys tend to stick around a little longer. But what about manmade dams and lakes?

Visitors to the Town of Edson hall will no doubt have seen a giant map of Chippewa County dated from 1902 and framed on the west wall. Among other things, the Edson map allows for tracing the old Chippewa River boundaries before the manmade flood that resulted in Lake Wissota and sunken farm silos (at least one, so the rumor goes) come 1917, thereby obliterating from the present nearly all above ground traces of the one-time river valley, save a hill turned into an island on County X. Water, you see, seeks its own level.

Also on the Edson town hall map from 1902, however, are several log ponds that then existed and have since been turned into recreational park grounds (think Chapman Lake) or else disappeared entirely, their dams removed and water contents drained, becoming mere low spots like the Kensington Runestone area, supposed per the runestone’s telling to have been a lake once, the reputed Scandinavian artifiact supposed to be upon an island become a hill. That’s another story.

Returning to the locally present, one such former water spot—if far from the only one—was called Wolf Pond north of Chapman on the Wolf River, above Stanley.

So named because wolves used to gather on its banks, before they didn’t (a subject for another time), the tributary of the Eau Claire River that served as a log raceway backed up behind a dam as early as the 1860s. The name of the dam’s keeper was Herman Boone, a family man and later Dairy Company president, at least as suggested by newspaper records. In line with the dam keeper’s name, the wall made of logs that held back Wolf Pond in the pre-railroad days was called “Boone’s Dam.” Appearing in old issues of the Stanley Republican and in the Centennial book, Boone’s Dam and the pond behind it dates to around the time of Gettysburg, as Betty Plombon once related in the Centennial volume published in 1981, 100 years after the site of Stanley was platted for settlement, in September of 1881.

“Boone’s Dam was built about 1863-64 by Red Murphy and Hans Young, who claimed they knew something about building a dam,” she writes in the Centennial publication with reference to remembrances by early newspaper correspondent Bill Warner, buried at Eidsvold. “The dam was built on the Wolf River, about one-half mile north of the Stanley city limits, just north of Carter’s Road.” Jim Caulkins took care of the first dam for a few years, before he was replaced by Herman Boone in 1888, Boone being hired by the Northwestern Lumber Company. Prior to the advent of the Wisconsin Central Railroad in the area come 1887, logs were floated over the dam and down the Wolf River to the Eau Claire River, where they were taken to Sawdust City (Eau Claire, Wisconsin) to be milled into usable building timber. Men would ride the logs down the river in those days, breaking up any jams with a pole. Even with the best of balance tragedy could strike, as one such incident related in Centennial write-up and dating from September 1900: the drowning of Hermann Huff on a log drive. From the Republican: “DROWNED ON THE DRIVE Herman Huff, A Stanley Young Man Falls in the Wolf River while Working on the Drive.

Is Lost to Sight by his Comrades and not Recovered for Twenty-four Hours.

Herman Huff, a young man aged about 21 years of age living with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. I. Huff, in the eastern part of the city, was accidentally drowned Thursday afternoon while working on the drive from Wolf Pond.

At a point about half way between the pond and the junction of the Wolf with Otter Creek, Huff was seen to fall into the water by his companions a few rods behind, as he was rounding a bend. When they arrived at the point where they had seen him disappear, he was not to be found and he was immediately given up as dead.

The flow of water impeded progress in the search for the body which was kept up unceasingly till yesterday morning when the body was found. It was recovered a few rods below the point where he was last seen.

Mr. Huff was a member of the local camp of Modern Woodmen in which he carried insurance for $1,000.”

Herman Huff is listed at findagrave.com as being buried at Edson Union Cemetery, while Herman Boone (the dam’s keeper) is buried within the City of Stanley along with family members, at the City Cemetery grounds. Within a week of the tragedy on Wolf Pond, six other men (John McQuestion; Andrew McQuade; Thomas Cameron; and Wm. Raycraft of Eau Claire; together with John Leiter of Seymour and Abe Parr of Augusta, were drowned as they were returning in a bateautype boat to a place called Five Mile Pond from a drive for the Northwestern Lumber Company, being overwhelmed by white caps as they came in from the “main river.” Five Mile Pond is identified as then being “over a mile wide” and five miles above Eau Claire, Wisconsin on the Eau Claire River. Contemporary and present day land maps suggest that this could have been what is now known as Dell’s Pond, though the Eau Claire River would demand a place closer to the City of Altoona or thereabouts.

As for the present day, it’s said that remnants of Boone’s Dam remain, although the site’s status as private property and an otherwise tight schedule prevent on-site inspection. Records from the Centennial book say the dam was burned, then turned into a sheep ranch in the years following drainage and closure. Plombon wrote in 1981 that the one-time area of Boone’s Dam “is now a rolling hillside with only memories of the activity that once took place there.” So what of the old log pond itself? Is there anywhere to see it without breaking the law or else asking permission to view things?

As it turns out, an overlay of certain aspects from the 1902 Edson town hall map to the present indicates that yes, there is somewhere that local residents can see the former log pond in partial relief: the spot west of the bridge across the Wolf River on 100th Avenue north of town. Get to 352nd heading west meanwhile, and you’ve driven too far.

100th Avenue north of Stanley marks the boundary line between ever-persistent town sections, with Wolf Pond crossing the site prior to construction of 100th Avenue at the site. As old ponds go, the present site doesn’t suggest much human history to the present observer, save the overlay. What once was, is now no more, replaced by contemporary buildings and road.

One other thing: while the above ground traces of the Chippewa River are gone from the lake surface, a map showing water depth and the present unadjusted township boundaries thereon still allow one to mark out the old river course, where it seems that Man once relied on nature to lay down the survey lines—lines that still remain to this day, unchanged.

Wolf Pond once backed up in the low area to the right on 100th Avenue, per the map.