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- Kent Goeckermann: Enough people had an established interest
in coming to Copper Falls:
Sunday afternoon picnic, horse and wagon,
walking around on rough trails,
and that basically is what saved the park.
Otherwise, most of that trail that people hike today
would've been under about 12 or 15 feet of water.
It would've been a small lake down there.
The canyon and the waterfalls would've been lost,
because when the power company in the 1920s
proposed building a big dam and generating power
for all of Ashland County,
there was enough established use here
that there was a big environmental fight.
They lobbied and discussed, and they wrote letters to the editor
and in 1928, most of a trainload of people from Ashland County
went down to Madison, lobbied the state legislature,
and convinced the state legislature to buy
this central 500 acres from the power company
to preserve it for future generations
as a state park.
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