- Female Narrator: This program is brought to you
by the combined resources of
the Wisconsin Historical Society
and Wisconsin Public Television.
[jaunty piano music]
On Wisconsin Hometown Stories ,
two villages on the Wisconsin River
at the edge of a rich prairie landscape
built up by the bounty of the land,
villages transformed by war,
[explosion]
ambitious projects,
and revealed in the work
of local artists
on Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Sauk Prairie .
[light upbeat piano music]
- Male Announcer: Major funding for
Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Sauk Prairie
was provided by
Greg and Carol Griffin,
Darlene Ballweg,
Culver's Foundation,
Wollersheim Winery and Distillery,
with additional support from
Bank of Prairie du Sac,
Milwaukee Valve Company,
Sauk County UW Extension Arts and Culture Committee
and Wisconsin Arts Board,
Schwarz Insurance,
Jim Slattery,
Wyttenbach Meats,
Focus Fund for Wisconsin History,
supported in part by
the National Endowment for the Humanities
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.
[light piano music]
- Peter Shrake: The earliest known inhabitants
of the Sauk Prairie
would have been the Sauk Indians themselves.
And hence the name
Sauk Prairie, Prairie du Sac, Sauk City.
And the earliest village as far as is known
was a Sauk village
that was established around 1740.
Jonathan Carver, the British fur trader and explorer,
was coming down through the area,
and he provides
a fairly detailed description of that village
in his journals.
And he describes a community of about 90
buildings, of about 300 warriors,
but well-laid-out streets,
well-laid-out and constructed buildings.
The buildings are of, as he describes it,
hewn timber
with very tightly fitted joints,
covered with bark.
He describes the prairie full of plantations,
as he put it, very well-maintained of corn.
The village lasts until
sometime after the Revolutionary War,
and the Sauk move out of the area.
- Narrator: The Sauk Village,
on the site of today's Sauk City,
was located in the center
of traditional Ho-Chunk territory.
After ceding much of their land,
the Ho-Chunk continued to control the area
north of the Wisconsin River,
until the Treaty of 1837.
- Peter Shrake: In 1837, the Ho-Chunk
were invited to send a delegation to Washington, D.C.,
to meet with the President of the United States.
And after some very forceful negotiations--
the delegation was told
they would not be allowed to return home
if they did not sign the agreement--
the leaders did indeed sign the agreement under duress.
And it was as a result of that treaty then
that the Ho-Chunk lost
all of their remaining lands in Wisconsin.
And within a matter of a year,
the earliest settlers crossed the Wisconsin River
and start the settlement of what becomes Sauk County,
but in the area of Sauk City.
- Narrator: In 1840,
Hungarian immigrant Agoston Haraszthy
climbed a hill with an expansive view
of the Sauk Prairie
and the Wisconsin River Valley.
"The view," he later wrote,
"Was more beautiful than anything I had seen
"in all my travels.
"I was firmly convinced that nowhere in the world
could there be a more enchanting place."
- And so, he saw potential here.
He saw potential in that pioneer sense of,
"How can I make a buck?
And how can I develop something?"
- Paul Wolter: Well, he was known as The Count.
We do know that he was of
kind of middle-class nobility in Hungary.
He kind of added the "Count" business
when he got here
to impress people, which it did work.
- He could say, "Well, I am of noble family,
"and you don't know what that means in the United States,
so, you know, it translates as Count."
- So, he's only, like, 27
when he hits the Sauk Prairie for the first time,
apparently learning about Wisconsin on the trip over.
- Philip Hasheider: So, in the fall of 1840,
he went to Milwaukee to see
if he could find anybody to invest in
this new, grand area
he was trying to open up.
He met a man by the name of Robert Bryant,
and Bryant came to this country with
$90,000 to invest.
- So, the count,
who apparently was quite charming,
goes into partnership with Robert Bryant,
gets him up here to Sauk Prairie,
and they start developing things.
- One thing you have to say about Agoston Haraszthy
is that he had plenty of energy.
And so, he comes here,
and he files a plat for the village,
names it, of course, Haraszthy.
- Paul Wolter: And this is even before the land
is federally for sale,
but they lay out the village of Haraszthy,
named after Haraszthy,
but certainly financed by Bryant.
- Goes up to Baraboo, starts a store there.
He gets into lumbering.
- Philip Hasheider: And the Honey Creek had enough water
where they could dam it up
and then run a really primitive sawmill.
- They have the rights to the ferry crossing.
- He builds a home for his family,
because he, of course, has gone back to Hungary
and brought his wife and several children
and his parents.
And while he was there, in his spare time, he wrote
the first guide to Wisconsin in Hungarian
in order to stimulate more immigration.
- Paul Wolter: He was definitely flamboyant, colorful,
apparently had quite the charisma
to get all of these German settlers to come.
They start building buildings.
They eventually open a brickyard.
- Michael Goc: He also convinces the Catholic bishop
to build St. Aloysius Church in Sauk City.
- Julie Coquard: This cave is built out of sandstone,
and it was carved out
of the bedrock by Agoston Haraszthy,
who founded Sauk City.
And we think that he did this to use it as a wine cellar.
He had planted grapevines here on the hillsides.
And so, being right next to the vineyards
is the perfect spot to age the wine.
- Philip Hasheider: The last thing that Bryant invested in with Haraszthy
was a steamboat.
It was used
to transport stuff
all the way down to Prairie du Chien and back.
- Narrator: Agoston Haraszthy left Sauk City
during the California Gold Rush.
He went on to establish
a large winery north of San Francisco
and become known as a founder
of the California wine industry.
- Peter Shrake: But it is the Great Sauk Prairie itself
that is the biggest draw to the area.
This large expanse of land,
natural prairie land,
exceptionally fertile ground,
is perfect for farming.
- Narrator: At the end of the last ice age,
a melting glacier deposited thick layers
of sand and gravel over a broad outwash plain.
Layers of windblown soil created ideal conditions
for the growth of the 14,000-acre Sauk Prairie.
- Michael Goc: All of this stuff coming together
to make that patch--
that 14,000-acre patch--
as fertile as it was.
- Narrator: Using oxen,
early settlers plowed up the prairie
acre by acre
and planted the pioneer crop of wheat.
[water flowing]
The sawmill on Honey Creek
soon became a flour mill.
- Goc: To give you an idea of the quality of the farmland
and the farmers,
in 1859, flour ground at that mill
won the championship at the Wisconsin State Fair.
- Narrator: In Prairie du Sac, entrepreneur Miles Keysar
built a 50,000-bushel grain elevator
next to the Wisconsin River.
There he could load his steamboat,
the Ellen Hardy ,
to transport the grain to market.
[steamboat paddle wheel churns]
- These villages exist because of the prairie,
because of that fertile farmland
that was there,
as farm service communities.
[current rushes powerfully]
?
- Narrator: The age-old dream of capturing the raw power
of Niagara Falls
became a reality in 1896
when the Niagara Power Company
built a large hydroelectric plant
just upstream.
Niagara Power selected the Westinghouse Company
to manufacture
the electrical generating system,
recently invented
by visionary scientist Nikola Tesla.
The large plant drew nationwide attention
when it sent electricity 11 miles
to Buffalo, New York,
where it easily powered the city's streetcar system.
[streetcar bell dinging]
The success at Niagara Falls
triggered a kind of hydro-mania,
which swept into Wisconsin.
Catching the fever
was Madison entrepreneur Magnus Swenson,
who persuaded investors to fund his vision
of electrifying Wisconsin
by building large hydroelectric plants.
At Kilbourn-- now known as Wisconsin Dells--
Swenson purchased a site
and began building a dam and a hydroelectric plant.
And even before he finished that project,
Swenson began searching for a bigger site
with more drop that would produce more power.
Just north of Prairie du Sac,
he found what he was looking for:
a site so large
that it would be second only to Niagara Falls
in size.
But there was a problem.
- It's a location that
is not a typical location
to build a hydro because
it's a very sandy river bottom.
- In that part of the river,
the sands extend somewhat beyond 50 feet thick.
And so, if you think of building a dam,
you need to typically anchor it or key it
into some kind of solid foundation.
In this case, there's nothing there.
It's just sand.
- Narrator: Swenson worked with Daniel Mead,
a professor of engineering from
the University of Wisconsin,
to come up with a solution for the site.
- Amanda Blank: And they
designed a very unique one-of-a-kind facility
that had never been built before.
- Carson Mettel: Mead would be
given the credit for coming up with this idea
of building the dam
on, essentially, a forest of piles.
- Amanda Blank: Basically,
a wooden pile, it's a tree. [laughs]
So what they did is they had to do logging,
and they would find a variety of different types of species,
and they actually drove them into the ground
using steam-driven pile hammers.
[steam-pile hammer has a slow driving vibration]
- So, this idea of building a pile foundation required
nearly 12,000 trees,
and they had to be of the right material
and the right diameter,
and they had to be nice and straight.
- Amanda Blank: Maybe the top two feet of that pile is there,
and then they will pour a concrete cap on top
so that whatever weight they put on top of that--
whether it's a wall or part of the dam--
it's then being supported by all those pilings.
- Narrator: Starting at the Prairie du Sac stockyards,
crews also used pile drivers to build
a rail line north to the construction site.
Contractors then brought in boilers,
to build a steam-driven electrical plant.
At a time before earthmovers or dump trucks,
the plant's generator powered
a remote-controlled electric rail system.
[rail cars move quietly]
Tracks extended several miles to a stone quarry
and gravel pit.
And while rail cars hauled the raw materials back
to a concrete mixing site,
much of the excavating work was done with shovels.
- One of the quotes I've heard
is that the dam was built with
steam power, horsepower, and manpower.
And it took about 400 people to build the dam,
and they really seemed to be separated
into two different groups.
There were the local laborers,
and they had an area on the west side of the river.
And there they had sleeping quarters,
and they had a nice dining hall.
And then, immigrant workers
were recruited from the Chicago area.
They came from Poland and Serbia, Russia, Italy,
and, as it's described, they had
more of a tent camp over there.
I do believe they were able to come over for food,
but really the two,
as I understand it, didn't mix that well.
And I think there was probably some animosity there,
but they all did work together,
and it took all 400 of them
to get the job done.
[drivers pounding steel "bang"]
- Narrator: To prepare for building the powerhouse,
pile drivers began pounding down sections
of a steel wall,
or cofferdam , around the worksite,
that would then be pumped dry.
But in the fall of 1911,
the river rose quickly
and soon breached the walls and flooded the site.
- They had a record-breaking flood,
six inches higher than had ever been recorded before,
and it washed out a lot of the progress they had made.
They had another one in 1912,
which did the same thing
and wiped out a lot of the progress.
- Amanda Blank: One bad winter where there was--
they call them ice dams, so, large sheets of ice--
that damaged a lot of the construction,
and they had to rebuild portions of the dams.
And they continue to press on.
- Narrator: Contractors hired divers
to inspect the damaged areas
of the cofferdam walls. [bubbles emerge from deep water]
And after replacing damaged sections,
and pumping water from the site,
workers began
shoveling out an area
where the powerhouse would take shape.
[shoveling]
Train cars brought in
tons of concrete and steel.
Steel forms gave shape to the draft tubes,
where water would exit the powerhouse.
Workers poured great quantities of concrete
using hand carts.
- Amanda Blank: They had masons on-site to do the masonry.
The powerhouse itself
is very large by today's standards.
It's an over three-story high building,
and the brickwork is just-- it's beautiful.
- Narrator: And as the powerhouse rose up,
attention turned toward finishing
the floodgates that would regulate
the flow of the river.
[light piano music]
And once the water turbines were installed
and connected to the generators,
the plant was finally ready
to begin producing electricity.
- Amanda Blank: I like to tell people
it's like working in a living museum
because our equipment's original.
We've upgraded electronics
and controls and safety devices,
but mechanically, everything here is running the same.
- Carson Metter: So, since it was completed in 1915,
we've been doing additional analyses
and refurbishment and looking at it
in a lot of different ways.
And today we have a lot more sophisticated tools
and can do very sophisticated computer models.
But what we find is that
the design is very, very...
eloquent, is the way I put it.
It's very perfectly balanced.
Even today, when you look at the loads and the forces on it--
it's wonderfully balanced.
It's actually hollow, which is interesting.
You can walk right through the middle of the dam.
But it's stood the test of time.
It's lasted a hundred years.
- Amanda Blank: To be able to see it every day
and to see it's still thriving
and offering electricity to the community
and being a big part of the community,
it's-- it's impressive.
[current rushing, birds calling]
[lure splashes, thuds into water]
[light orchestral music]
[delicate high-pitched chime]
?
- Narrator: In 1912, the Village of Prairie du Sac
turned out for the dedication of a new library
and village hall,
funded by local philanthropist J.S. Tripp.
Eighty-five years later, the building
became home to the Tripp Heritage Museum.
There, volunteers made a discovery.
Over the years, people had given the library
boxes of glass plate negatives,
the first photo format
used by amateur photographers.
- Jody Kapp Berndt: This is
a glass plate negative.
It's a very fragile substrate.
You have the glass,
and then you have this layer of chemicals
laid down in a thin film on top of the glass.
And when you hold this up and look at it,
you can't exactly tell
what this is going to bring
until you scan it in
and can see it
on your computer screen.
Suddenly, these images are brought to life
in great detail,
and it's surprise after surprise.
And after scanning several hundred of these,
you start to see patterns.
Here's a woman you've seen before.
Here's a house.
I recognize this place in town.
And our volunteers would
see a house that maybe they weren't quite sure of,
and they'd go out and get in their cars,
and they'd drive around town
to see if that house still stood today.
We have in this image the two photographers
who are our main photographers for the glass plate negatives.
The gentleman at the far back
with the big mustache and the tie,
that's F.S. Eberhart.
He ran his own jewelry store,
watch repair shop.
And then, to his left,
the gentleman with the big watch chain
and the mustache, this is C.C. Steuber,
and he had a farm
just outside of the village at the time.
It's now in the village proper.
And this unlikely pair,
they became amateur photographers.
I love this image because it really speaks
to the fragile nature of the glass plate,
that thin substrate that captures the photograph.
It's peeling apart,
yet, when you look in the center,
you are time-traveling
back to the early 1900s
here in Sauk Prairie.
The girl on the right-hand side
is F.S. Eberhart's daughter,
and you see
what everyday life was like,
the clothes on the line.
What type of clothing were they wearing?
The photographs allow us to see
that intimate look
that we can't see through portrait studio work
and to see the rural community.
The type of equipment they were using,
these steam-powered tractors and threshing machines,
yet also, the large teams of horses
pulling these very early looking plows.
To have all of that documented in one place,
it's just completely perfect.
Coming here into this wide-open landscape
of Sauk Prairie,
it was a tremendous opportunity
to start your own thing,
yet, on the other hand,
it's not going to be easy.
They have the team of horses in the front
and the oxen in the back,
and they're getting ready to break the prairie
to develop farmland,
and this was backbreaking work.
We have two bridges, one in Sauk City
and one in Prairie du Sac.
If you were going to walk or have a wagon
or take your automobile across that bridge,
you were going to pay a toll,
and you would encounter the tollkeeper and his family.
And they lived in the tollkeeper's house.
And this really speaks,
I think, to a long-standing tradition
here in Sauk Prairie
of businesses operated by families.
And I think this really shines through in the way
this family is grouped together.
You can see they are definitely a team.
What's so captivating about these images
is the fact that these were amateur photographers.
They were capturing what was interesting to them,
[alarm clock rings] things that made them laugh,
events that felt were important in their life,
festivals, parades, family,
a lot of family laughing, joking.
So you know that this is
really capturing what life was like.
Yes, it was hard work,
but it was also a lot of fun.
This is the Prairie du Sac train depot.
Every day, trains are running in and out,
so Sauk Prairie really had the best of both worlds.
You had this amazing landscape,
bluffs, river, prairie,
land like you wouldn't believe,
and then you also have the ability
to connect very quickly to the larger cities.
This photo is a classic because
the automobile starts to come into play.
And here you have
this young man, Mr. Steuber.
He is going to teach these three young women
how to drive an automobile.
Farm women, of course, were driving teams of horses.
They would have been very much involved
in learning how to drive
and doing these sorts of things.
I love these glass plate negatives
because they allow us to see
inside homes and businesses.
You get to see all these details
that I think really add the sense
of what life was like then.
And in this picture, we have at the very center
Anna Gasser Moore.
She had a millinery which made
hats for the women of the day.
And not only did she do that for herself,
she brought on young women to work with her,
and she taught them how
to make hats.
Each one of these photos
has such a great sense of detail
and depth and emotion.
And you have this real sense
of being there in that moment.
What they left us,
these two photographers,
is a true legacy.
[birds chirping]
[typewriter keys clicking]
- Narrator: In 1937,
Sauk City author August Derleth
published Still is the Summer Night ,
a novel set in a place he called
"Sac Prairie."
- He signed a contract with
Maxwell Perkins in Scribner's,
and at that time,
Maxwell Perkins was the editor
for Hemingway,
Fitzgerald,
Thomas Wolfe.
And the assumption was
that Derleth was in
this stable
of important American writers
and would eventually become as common a name
as Ernest Hemingway.
- Narrator: August Derleth was born in 1909,
the fourth generation of his family
to live in Sauk City.
The son and the grandson of blacksmiths,
Derleth grew up in a time of horses and dirt roads
and an abundance of nature.
As a boy, he wandered through the village
and the river bottoms,
getting to know the people and places
that would later appear in his books.
[bell ringing] At the St. Aloysius School,
nuns taught him great discipline,
and he became an avid reader
of pulp fiction.
[recording of August Derlerth] - I was reading pulp magazines,
a magazine called Secret Service ,
and a magazine called Weird Tales .
And I thought I could do as well--
or let's put it this way, I thought I could do as badly
as some of those stories in there,
and I proved that I could.
- He started working on his first public short story
when he was 13 years old,
Bat's Belfry ,
and it was published in Weird Tales
when he was about 16 years old.
And if you read it,
it's a terrible short story,
but it got in print.
And that was the start of his literary career.
- Narrator: In high school, Derleth's teachers
and the village librarian
encouraged him to explore
the great works of American literature,
like Walden by Henry David Thoreau,
whose work would have
a continuing influence on Derleth.
At the same time, H.P. Lovecraft,
a writer of horror fiction for Weird Tales magazine,
began a long and steady correspondence with Derleth.
- Lovecraft corresponded with a lot of writers
of Weird Tales
and Derleth among them.
And he gave uncle-ly advice to Derleth,
and, really, in his own way,
encouraged Derleth to be a writer of place.
[upbeat jazz music]
- Narrator: Derleth attended
the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
studying under
renowned English professor Helen C. White.
To pay for school, he churned out horror stories
for Weird Tales and other magazines,
often in collaboration with his boyhood friend,
Mark Schorer, who would go on to lead
the English department
at the University of California-Berkeley.
Graduating at the start of the Great Depression,
Derleth took a job in Minneapolis
as editor of Mystic Magazine
but felt confined
by both the job and city life.
- He just missed being at home,
and so when Mystic Magazine folded,
he came back to Sauk City
and decided that's where he was going to stay
and that was going to be
the center of his artistic world.
[ragtime piano music]
- Narrator: Moving back into his parents' home,
Derleth vowed to do-or-die as a writer.
Back in the place he loved,
and with the people he knew best,
Derleth revived an ambitious plan
he conceived in college.
He would write the story of his hometown villages
in what he called The Sac Prairie Saga .
- He wanted to tell the story of Sauk City
and Prairie du Sac
from the time of European settlement
into the 1950s.
- Narrator: Derleth found a publisher for his first work
of the saga, Place of Hawks ,
which won a national award for short story writing.
As his reputation grew,
Derleth signed with Scribner's of New York
and soon won a prestigious Guggenheim Award
to support his work on The Sac Prairie Saga .
- He wrote diaries of his experiences
living in the town.
He wrote contemporary histories.
Shield of the Valiant is set in the 1940s,
and Derleth is a character in the novel.
He's being encouraged to become a member of the school board
by the town librarian,
which is precisely what did happen.
And he wrote historical fiction
about the early settlers
to Sauk City and Prairie du Sac.
- "And in the stone house they built by the river
"there still lived in the fall of 1909,
three generations of their descendants."
- He published Atmosphere of Houses
in about 1940, I think.
And basically, it's a walk around town,
and he's looking at
the memory of the people
who had lived in those houses.
And most of them did not have happy lives.
- "As Celia ventured
"once again into the village
"she had so long ago renounced,
"she felt herself the focus of a hundred concealed eyes,
the focus of the vindictive attention."
- Kent Grant: And he'd try and evoke the kind of lives
that individuals lived,
and the lives of people who were looking for love
and were thwarted for one reason or another,
and he would try to tell their stories.
[light piano music]
- Narrator: Now making a steady income,
Derleth built a house on the outskirts of the village.
At the time, Derleth was devastated
by the early death of writer H.P. Lovecraft.
He and writer Donald Wandrei
decided to publish Lovecraft's stories in a book form.
But finding no publishing house willing to take it on,
they started their own, calling it Arkham House.
- I think that Derleth really saved Lovecraft,
and he would not be
as well known if it weren't for Derleth's work.
[typewriter clicking]
- Narrator: To finance his home and the money-losing
publishing house,
Derleth churned out work at a furious pace.
He wrote children's stories
and books about Wisconsin history
as well as hundreds of articles
for a wide variety of magazines.
- He had to work really hard and publish
far more than his publisher, Scribner's,
and his editor, Perkins,
would want him to publish.
- Narrator: While spread thin,
Derleth always managed to fit in long walks
through the nearby marshes and hills.
A lifelong observer of nature,
he filled hundreds of small notebooks
with ideas for poetry
and his most serious work
about the place where he lived.
- He is Wisconsin's most important
writer of place,
writer about Wisconsin.
He was inspired by Thoreau,
and that's why he called
what many people say is his best book
Walden West
because he saw
Sauk City and Prairie du Sac as his own Walden.
[Recording of August Derlerth] - These are character sketches
of people I've known
or places I've known,
and I've known them most of my life.
And for that reason, they're important to me
and I feel I know them well,
and I feel that the lives
I've seen lived around me
have profound lessons to impart.
[gentle piano music]
[children chattering]
- Kern's Corners
was a one-room school,
all eight grades.
[school bell ringing] It was the small Methodist church
down the road from us, but...
the neighbors were all very nice.
We would have things going on
at the school,
and everybody would come,
and it was a nice community.
We milked cows and had horses,
and some pigs, and chickens.
[geese honking] And we had some geese, too. [chuckles]
My mother liked geese.
My great-grandparents started it,
and they're buried in the Pioneer Cemetery,
and then my grandfather took it,
and then my dad took it over.
And that's where I was born.
[birds chirping]
We always went to town.
That was a big thing.
We banked in Prairie,
and we went grocery shopping.
Drugstore was there.
My mother would sell eggs.
I do remember if there was
a little bit leftover,
I got an ice cream cone.
And that lasted me all the way home.
?
- Narrator: With the coming of World War II
in Europe and Asia,
farm families on the Sauk Prairie
would soon be called upon
to make huge sacrifices.
As Nazi air forces
continued the bombing of English cities,
President Roosevelt vowed to stay out of the war
but called for massive amounts of military aid.
[recording of Pres. Roosevelt] - The people of Europe who are defending themselves
do not ask us to do their fighting.
They ask us for the implements of war,
the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters,
which will enable them
to fight for their liberty and our security.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
For us, this is an emergency
as serious as war itself.
- Michael Goc: The announcement of the coming
of the Badger Ordnance Works
takes place on October 29, 1941.
Ten thousand five hundred acres--
most of it is on the Sauk Prairie--
is going to be taken for the--
for the new plant.
- One hundred nine landowners,
seventy four of those were farms,
twenty six were cottages and residences in Weigand's Bay,
three churches, three schools, three cemeteries,
and a town hall.
- Shirley Bass Hasheider: All the farmers around,
they got together,
and they wrote to the congressmen,
and they were trying to urge the government
to move it further north where there was more sand,
instead of taking that good land.
- President Roosevelt: December 7, 1941...
[whistling sound]
[loud explosion]
A date which will live
in infamy.
- When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
everything changes.
- And at that point then everybody's attitude changed
180 degrees.
You know, we know-- we know it's needed.
And just give us a fair price.
- Shirley Bass Hasheider: So they came in,
and they gave my dad a dollar
to look over the land.
- As near as I can tell,
I think they got reasonably close to market value.
But market value was depression value.
So, bottom line, they got nothing.
And that hurts.
[somber music]
But you really don't know
what's going to happen
until you get that letter that you have to be off.
And that letter came
in early January,
and they had to be off by March 1st.
So basically, they had a month and a half
to clear their land-- to clear and move.
And if they're going to continue farming,
buy a new farm without money,
because none of them had been paid.
And to move hay
and their equipment
and the livestock.
In spite of
some of the bitterness,
and there is-- there is bitterness
even to the third generation--
those families should also be very proud
of what their-- what their people did.
You know, that was an impossible task,
and they did it.
[film projector reel clicking]
- Goc: The process of construction
starts in the spring of 1942.
First there's a couple thousand workers.
Summer goes on, and there's 5,000,
then there's 8,000.
By the end of August into September,
there's almost 12,000 construction workers out there.
- Verlyn Mueller: By June, this is full of buildings,
roads and buildings and railroad track.
It just went up like mushrooms.
[hammers pounding]
Everything had to be done yesterday.
So as soon as a building was ready to run,
it was running.
The principle reason for building the plant
initially was smokeless propellant,
which was used in ammunition
for everything from the 30-caliber
all the way up to propellant for the 8-inch howitzers.
[howitzer firing]
[shell clangs]
- Narrator: With thousands of workers,
the huge plant operated day and night,
and brought about big changes in Sauk Prairie.
At the edge of Prairie du Sac,
the government purchased more farmland
and built a trailer park to house hundreds of workers.
- Michael Goc: The coming of the powder plant
is bittersweet,
kind of glad and sad.
That plant ended the Depression,
what was left of it in this area,
not just here,
but maybe for a 50-mile radius,
because workers came from all over,
a lot of people who need a place to live
and a lot of people who are going to spend money.
They're going to eat dinner somewhere.
But if you're any kind of merchant
doing-- providing any kind of service in this village,
you can do pretty well.
You can do well if you're working at the plant
because the wages are multiple times
what you could make doing anything else comparable.
- Newsreel Announcer: Eighteen million women aren't enough.
As more men are called for military service,
their places must be taken by women.
- Goc: World War II is the "Great Patriotic War,"
and the powder plant really brings that war home,
obviously, literally, out the back door here.
And it gives people
who otherwise might not participate in that war
an opportunity to take part.
So, if you're a woman,
you know you're not going to hit the beach at Normandy,
but you're going to be able to provide the ammunition
for that invasion.
- WOWs were Women Ordinance Workers.
During World War II,
they had over 200,000
civilians working
in the Ordnance Department,
and of those over 80,000 were women.
Some of them were here producing propellant.
Just about all of the processes,
there were women working in there.
[gentle piano music]
- I worked in the employment office there
because I could type.
There was a row of us sitting there.
It was an interesting job,
but it was mixed feelings, that's for sure.
["Goodtime Charlie Polka" Uncle Julius] [inaudible German], eins, zwei.
- Jim Kirchstein: Right around '46, '47,
which found me still in high school,
I went over to
Fish Lake Dance Hall one night,
and on the stage was Uncle Julius.
And he was dressed as Charlie Chaplin,
that kind of gear.
He put together all the best musicians he could find.
And they sounded fantastic.
I kind of got hooked on Old Time music right then.
When I did get into the music business
a few years later, I realized that
that music will never grow old.
- Narrator: After serving four years in the Navy,
Jim Kirchstein
came home to study electrical engineering
at UW-Madison.
- I arranged to have all my classes in the morning
so I could go back to Sauk City.
My brother built a toy shop in Sauk City,
and he let me use the basement to set up a record store.
I got my degree in '58.
And I kind of stayed with the music business
rather than go to work, so to speak.
["Midnight Express" Willie Tremaine's Thunderbirds]
- Narrator: Buying some used recording equipment
and a machine to cut the grooves of a master disc,
Kirchstein produced his first record
for a local band.
- I used a German sign on the record
as a way my little way
of discrediting
the military in Germany of using that sign.
And I got a call from RCA in Chicago,
our contact there.
He said that we can't use that German sign anymore.
We're getting too many raised eyebrows.
He said, "I got you a re-order here.
What label should I use? What name?"
[projector hums and clicks] And I often admired
a cousin of my wife's
from New Mexico, who was a teacher.
Her name was Cuca.
?
- Narrator: A big break came
when Kirchstein recorded a song
by a Madison band called the Fendermen.
- And it was called "Mule Skinner Blues."
- You mean to tell me that you haven't heard it?
- No, I haven't heard it. Here, play it.
It's really terrific, Suzy.
Wait'll you hear it.
- And I had a little room-- not a very big room--
but that was the first studio--
and re-recorded the "Mule Skinner Blues."
I had 300 records made
and circulated them through all radio stations
that I could find.
In those days, they would play your record.
- Excuse me, ladies. I have a special request.
["Mule Skinner Blues" the Fendermen]
- ? Good morning, Captain
? Good morning to you
? Hah-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha ?
? Do you need another mule skinner ?
?
? Down on your new mud run
? Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha ?
- And I got a call from Lincoln, Nebraska.
Disc jockey, he said,
"I'm getting so many requests I'm getting sick of it."
- ? Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee - And then when all of a sudden
Lindy Shannon from the La Crosse radio station
called, and he said, "I think you've got something here."
- ? Well, I'm an old...
- Narrator: News of the song reached a music promoter
with national connections,
who leased it from Cuca Records.
- And all of a sudden,
the boys appeared on Dick Clark .
That helped a lot because the record broke.
It started climbing the charts,
and I think it was around 2 million sales
is when we were kind of wondering
where our royalties were.
- You promised you'd let me look at the books tonight.
- Why, Proctor,
you know I wouldn't cheat you out of a penny.
The books are right here.
Come back sometime when I'm not so busy.
- Kirchstein: We had to litigate in order to get our money.
Out of the $50,000 I had coming,
after I'd paid the attorney,
I had $9,000 left.
But I used that $9,000 to build a studio,
and Cuca Records was off and running.
Doc DeHaven was our first album.
["Just Off State Street" Doc DeHaven]
[upbeat Dixieland jazz music]
Every little town in Wisconsin had a rock band.
Every little town had a polka band.
And we recorded them both.
["Broken Wine Glass Polka" Verne Meisner]
["Sidewinder" Vibra-Tones]
?
It was one thing after another.
We had bands coming in from all over.
["Sneeky Pete Polka" Verne Meisner]
- Narrator: To deliver records faster,
Kirchstein set up his own record-pressing plant
in Sauk City.
- We had an open-door policy
where we didn't charge for recording.
- He would let bands come into his studio,
and he would donate
the studio and his time as an engineer
to record them for free
because he would make his money on the back end
through pressing.
There's a lot of people that traveled
from every corner of Wisconsin
to take advantage of that.
- Toward the end of the '60s,
we had released over a thousand records,
mostly rock 'n roll.
["Gonna Take My Guitar" B Hodge] - I'm gonna take my guitar and leave this town ?
? I'm gonna find me a new place to hang around ?
? Baby, I ain't comin' back for a long long spell ?
["Slippin' And Slidin'" The Citations]
[surfer rock]
- And then, of course, there's bluegrass.
["Bluegrass Breakdown" Bluegrass Hoppers]
- He was recording blues from Chicago.
["Dust My Broom" Earl Hooker]
[the Blues]
- Narrator: Cuca became well-known
for recording the "Old Time Music"
of Wisconsin's polka and ethnic musicians.
["Lovers Waltz" The Jolly Swiss Boys]
- Nate Gibson: He was recording
Czech bands, German, Polish,
Slovenian, Norwegian, Swiss.
All these different groups were coming through.
["Herdsman's Dream" Edelweiss Stars] ? Yodel-oh-ee-dee Diddly-odel-oh-ee-dee ?
? Diddly-odel-oh-ee-dee Yodel-oh-ee-dee-yodel-oh-dee ?
? Yodel-oh-ee-dee Diddly-odel-oh-ee-dee ?
- Nate Gibson: He was recording
a snapshot of what Wisconsin sounded like in the 1960s
and a lot of it.
["Long Hot Summer" Betty Moore vocalizing]
? Oh, hot summer
- Chorus: ? Too much to pay - ? My own way
["Do Lord" Chieftones] - ? Lord, oh, good lord
? Oh, do you remember me?
? Look away beyond the blue
["Home Style Polka" Roger Bright]
[energetic polka]
["Spring" Birdlegs and Pauline] - both: ? I feel that spring is coming on ?
? I feel it all in my bones ?
["Little Miss Brown Eyes" Vilas Craig] ? Little Miss Brown Eyes
? I really do believe
? You don't care for me at all ?
["Saxophone Schottische" Dick Rogers]
[slow polka]
["Little Dobro Polka" Goose Island Ramblers]
?
["Old German Polka" Syl Groeschl]
- Narrator: In the 1970s,
people began copying vinyl records [needle scratches LP)
onto audio cassettes.
And as record sales fell, Cuca--
like many independent labels--
began to fade away.
Eventually, Jim Kirchstein
donated master recordings--
and the Wisconsin music they preserve--
to the Mills Music Library at UW-Madison.
- Kirchstein: I liked the idea of having these recordings
of all these bands--
they were almost all from Wisconsin--
that I could make sure would never get lost.
["Swiss Echoes" Betty Vetterli & Martha Bernet]
And the music I don't think will ever grow old.
?
[birds chirping]
- Narrator: The Badger Army Ammunition Plant,
reactivated for the Korean War,
continued to run at high capacity
during the war in Vietnam.
Thousands of workers made the propellant
that powered weapons of various kinds.
For more than two decades after Vietnam,
the staff maintained Badger in a state of readiness,
until the Department of Defense
made a shocking announcement.
- Department of Defense has said to Congress
and to General Services Administration,
"Defense does not need Badger anymore for its purposes."
- Narrator: The closing of Badger set off a debate
about the future uses of the plant
and its seven and a half thousand acres,
over 1,400 buildings,
and its roads and railroads and pipelines.
- Curt Meine: A lot of us
who lived in this area,
especially those of us involved in the conservation community--
and Sauk County is extraordinarily rich
in conservation-minded citizens and organizations--
a lot of us began to think, this is an amazing opportunity.
It may look daunting,
and it was not an attractive place
in a conventional sense,
but we also recognized that it was
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
to take a large landscape
and to envision a whole different opportunity
involving conservation.
[somber piano music]
- Narrator: As the Army began the slow process
of dismantling the plant
and cleaning up the polluted site,
the discussions about Badger's future uses--
and its past-- continued.
- Curt Meine: There was a lot of controversy
about what would happen here.
There was a lot of pain.
There were all kinds of conflicts
that were playing out.
We had, of course, the loss
from the Native American perspective of land
170 years ago.
We had the farm families who were removed
from this landscape at the outset of World War II.
We had the army workers, who had devoted their lives
to working here, who were no longer employed here.
But we began to say
maybe we have an opportunity to turn the page
and create a new and more positive future
that could recognize
those historical episodes and chapters,
but also create a new chapter.
So, we brought together
as many different people as we could, and organizations,
and began to create a dialogue in our community.
With no set plan,
we just said, "Let's come together."
And a couple friends of ours commissioned
Victor Bakhtin,
an extraordinarily talented artist,
to do a painting, and we called it
"Sauk Prairie Remembered:
A Vision for the Future."
We took it around, we brought it to schools
and churches and town halls,
and we held discussions about it.
And that painting inspired a lot of people.
It planted in people's imaginations
what this place could be and look like and hold.
[crickets chirping]
- Narrator: Most of the Badger lands
were signed over to three entities:
the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
for its Dairy Forage Research Center,
the Wisconsin DNR,
to create the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area,
and the Ho-Chunk Nation,
which received 1,500 acres of its ancestral land.
A formal planning process,
involving all levels of government,
the Ho-Chunk Nation, and local citizens groups,
provided a roadmap for the reuse of the land.
- Curt Meine: And lo and behold, after a long hard year,
we actually found
that we came together.
We shared a vision,
and it was all but unanimous.
We saw that this landscape
had amazing opportunities for several different uses.
In fact, we identified them.
Opportunities for education and research,
both the natural and cultural history of this site,
large scale ecological restoration
of the Sauk Prairie
and the other ecosystems on this land.
The Ho-Chunk Nation has been very actively
undertaking ecological restoration work,
primarily through burning,
and a little bit of cropping in the interim,
before reintroducing native prairie vegetation.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture
is doing really fascinating research
trying to get some baseline information
about how agriculture
could be undertaken in new and different ways
that would be more sustainable and healthy for the land.
We had opportunities for recreation.
It's a large area.
It's right next to the most visited state park
in the state.
You have the Wisconsin River on its southern border.
So it's a positive story of environmental restoration
that can bring people together again,
behind a positive new chapter
in this land's story.
["Wokixete Naawa" in Ho-Chunk ("Love One Another" song)]
- ? Wokixete wire, aireno, aireno ?
? Herusga ra Wazagusra ewino, aireno ?
? (Love one another, they say, they say, The good people, The Creator said that, they say)
- Narrator: In 2018,
the Sauk Prairie community
celebrated the completion of a new section
[clapping] of the Great Sauk Trail.
Bikers can now wind their way
through the wide-open spaces
of the former ammunition plant.
Future sections will connect the trail
to Devil's Lake State Park to the north.
To the south, the trail runs along the Wisconsin River,
through the villages of Sauk City
and Prairie du Sac.
The trail runs by the Prairie du Sac dam,
which, in the winter,
created an unplanned tourist attraction.
After Wisconsin banned the pesticide DDT,
the endangered bald eagle made a remarkable comeback,
and the churning, open water below the dam,
created a perfect spot for winter feeding.
During the yearly Eagle Watching Days,
visitors can often take in the sight
of a rehabilitated eagle,
and experience its release back into the wild.
[all cheering]
Each Labor Day weekend,
the villages celebrate their agricultural heritage
with the Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw.
[crowd cheers excitedly]
Other community ties to the farm
include a century-old farm service business
and others not quite that old,
all relying on the bounty of the land
and the hard work of the farmer.
And the former prairie lands provide the setting
for the growth of many other local businesses.
To serve a growing number of residents,
a new hospital on the edge of both villages
provides care for the whole Sauk Prairie region.
Drawing on the beauty
that once inspired Agoston Haraszthy
to create a settlement here,
the two villages
continue to find creative ways to flourish
in their remarkable place on the river.
["Goodtime Charlie Polka" Uncle Julius]
- Male Announcer: Major funding for
Wisconsin Hometown Stories: Sauk Prairie
was provided by
Greg and Carol Griffin,
Darlene Ballweg,
Culver's Foundation,
Wollersheim Winery & Distillery,
with additional support from
Bank of Prairie du Sac,
Milwaukee Valve Company,
Sauk County UW Extension,
Arts and Culture Committee
and Wisconsin Arts Board,
Schwarz Insurance,
Jim Slattery,
Wyttenbach Meats,
Focus Fund for Wisconsin History,
supported in part by
the National Endowment for the Humanities
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.