9UNP1487HD_Don_Sanford_WordPress	A Social History of Lake Mendota		

- Today, we are pleased to introduce Don Sanford as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the Museum's employees. A native of Syracuse, New York, Don Sanford grew up on the shore of Cazenovia Lake, where he first developed his interest in boats and social history. 

Don earned a degree in communication studies from the State University of New York at Oswego in 1972 and his master's from Syracuse University in radio, television and film in 1974. He moved to Madison with his wife, Barb, in 1976, to accept a position with Wisconsin Public Television. During nearly three decades at WPT, he served as lighting director, production manager, volunteer manager and occasional on-air host. 

A Lake Mendota sailor since 1976, Don spends whatever free time he has racing sailboats and iceboats. Here today to share a social history of Lake Mendota, please join me in welcoming Don Sanford.  
[applause]
  
- Well, thanks very much, Katie. It's nice to be here, and thank you all for coming. And it's such a treat to be here and to be speaking on the Wisconsin Channel. In October of last year my book, On Fourth Lake: A Social History of Lake Mendota came out, and since then we've sold almost 2,000 copies.  It's pretty amazing. 

I've lived here, as Katie said in the introduction, since 1976, and in addition to this great job I had at Wisconsin Public Television, Madison was the perfect place for me because I could sail in the summertime. And in the wintertime we put all the sailboats away and we get out iceboats and we run around and race iceboats all winter long. And part of these two great sports is the time we spend socializing. 

And we do that, in iceboating anyway, we do that a lot because we're always waiting for either the temperature to go up or to go down or the snow to melt or one thing or another. But part of all the socializing, was hearing stories from people I would call my sailing elders. Guys and women who've grown up here in Madison, spent a lot of time in the lake, who would frequently say, oh, yeah, over there, that's where I almost drown three times when I was 15 years old. 

Or, that you know, that house over there that they just tore down, there was a crazy old guy who lived there. So these were just kind of stories that I had heard over, you know, at an after-race party, until September of 2003.  It was a fateful trip. This is a group of my friends. That's me on the far left when I had more hair, and we used to go up to Bayfield and go sailing every fall. 

And we started on one trip up there telling Lake Mendota stories, you know, it's five hours in the car to get there. And the other guys ran out of stories around Wausau, and I was still blathering on about this or that, something I had heard at a party, and we got up there and my friend said, "Oh, you know, you really ought to write this down, "this would make a great book." And I said, well, all right, fine, I'll do this. 

So a promise is a promise, and I started working on this book, and 10, 11, 12 years later, I finally got around to writing it, And so, while I was doing research, even though I probably knew this all along, you know, I interviewed dozens and dozens of people, trying to collect stories and then fact-check the stories because somebody usually would have little details, your memory gets a little foggy sometimes. 

And one of the things I learned, and I probably knew this all along, is that anyone who's ever grown up on a lake or a river or some other big body of water, seems to have a connection with that body of water that lasts a lifetime. And, like salmon, any discussion of water-related events quickly sends us back to these aquatic roots. And that's really the story of what this book is all about and how it got going and what I've tried to do collecting these stories. 

As soon as I would be at a party and I'd say, oh, I'm researching this book about Lake Mendota, somebody would say, Oh, that reminds me of the time, and that's why research on this project took like 10 years. Every time I'd turn around, I was getting a new story. So, what this book isn't about. It isn't about the large estates that were on Lake Mendota because there really weren't many. There were about three or four that I can think of offhand. 

Magnus Swenson's property, Thorstrand, at the west end of the lake. Real estate developer Hobart Johnson's home up in Maple Bluff was a pretty big piece of property. Or the property that belonged to telecommunications pioneers J.F. O'Connell and Sigurd Odegard up in Fox Bluff. Those are about the three big properties on the lake. And, you know, Lake Mendota was never really the home of the rich and famous, so-called. 

But if you wanna go see the homes of the rich and famous, go to Lake Geneva, take the mail boat ride, and you'll get thoroughly inducted in all that. And although Mendota is the most studied lake in the world, if you sit at your computer and pound that phrase into your browser search engine, you'll end up at the Limnology Lab. 

But even though it is the most studied lake in the world and dozens, hundreds of papers have been written about it, this book isn't about science, that's all covered elsewhere. This book is about ordinary people who've lived and played on Lake Mendota. And people like to have picnics, like here.  Your beer always is cold. You don't have to worry about ants,
[audience laughing]
and it's a sunny day. It's just as nice in the spring as it is almost today. 

And it's also about, oh, fishermen, like this guy. This is the legendary Charlie Brand, the guy who once claimed that he could catch enough white bass in one day to sink his rowboat. I think he may have. It's about interesting characters too, like the guy, like Bruce Mohs, who was the designer, builder, and captain of the only battleship to cruise on Lake Mendota.  
[audience laughing]
That was, he launched her in 1978. This was a picture I took a couple of years ago up at the Iola car show. 

And it's also about folks who lived in more down-to-earth housing, like these buildings, I shouldn't call them buildings, structures, at the University Tent Colony kind of between Frautschi Point and Shorewood. And I like to say that it's a book about history, Madison history, from a different point of view. 

If you've ever taking a walking tour, like this one run by the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation, you go to a street, a docent meets you, you walk along the street, and you talk about the houses there. In this book, you get into a boat and you cruise along the shoreline, and we talk about the houses that are there or what used to be there or what happened here or sometimes what's underneath you. 

And the neat part about going through, going around the lake, you're really looking at people's backyards, but if you, unlike doing that on shore, where you'd have to climb over a fence or squirrel your way down through a garden or something like that and think that these people are going to call the cops, your safe out here on the lake. Lakeshore owners are pretty used to people walking, going by in a boat, and looking in their backyards. So you can do this without fear of any reprisals. 

So it's a story about people and places and that together, when you put them all together, contribute to this social history of Lake Mendota. And, you know, today, most of us who are on the lake, spend our time cruising around in boats, sailing, just relaxing, having a drink on a hot day. But there was a time when Lake Mendota was a watery highway, and there was a lot of commercial boating going on. 

And that's what I'm going to talk about today, is the commercial boating that happened here, and we'll get into that here right now. Let's step back here to 1897, and if you, I'll take the super away, and if you look at this map of the lake, this is 1897, and there's still aren't a lot of roads around Lake Mendota. Down here on the city side there's quite a bit, but up on the north side of the lake, there are dirt roads at best. 

But there were people who spent time in the lake and there were, I'll put it in quotes, "destinations". Places that people like to go, like Picnic Point, or the little village of Pheasant Branch, or up to the State hospital, or the Maple Bluff Golf Course, and a little resort called Bernard's Park, and cottages, Mendota Beach, Morris Park, Borchard's Beach, Woodward's Grove.

 And, let's see here, Shorewood and the University Tent Colony, and the far away destination of Camp Sunrise in West Point. And to get there, most people took boats that left from what's now James Madison Park, from a pier that was built right out at the foot of North Hamilton Street. The first person we're going to talk about here is Captain W.W. Plummer, Plummer perhaps.

 Although the development of Picnic Point in earnest wouldn't happen really for another decade, when it got hot in Madison, and Kaisonians wanted to get away from the heat and the smells and the flies, Picnic Point, about a mile and a half across the lake, was the shining destination.  And but getting there was always a problem. It was a long, dusty trip in a carriage over rutted roads in the summertime from downtown out there. A boat was the ideal solution. 

And one entrepreneur here, this guy Captain W.W. Plummer, built the Capital City, a little steamboat. And actually, his primary business was ferrying workers back and forth to the quarries at Maple Bluff and Farwell's Point. But in his off-hours, he went into the pasture business and took people on rides out to Picnic Point.

 In 1865, about 10 years later, a fellow named John Boehringer, built a quote "comfortable refreshment and dancing hall" on Picnic Point, where I'm quoting from another article about him where I quote, "the invalid can procure the genuine red wine "of Missouri and other wholesome stimulants "necessary to invigorate  "and impart tone to the jaded frame."  But before people could be invigorated, they had to get there. 

And back in those days, like I said, it's a mile and a half straight across the lake, but several miles around by land, so Boehringer had the answer. He needed a boat, so he built one. And his answer was the Yacht St. Louis. She was schooner rigged, about 30 feet long, and sailed from a pier at the foot of North Hamilton Street. Public trips were just a quarter, and you could also charter the St. Louis for longer trips, a little newspaper ad here. 

So business must have been pretty good because a year later, Boehringer launched the quote "staunched side-wheel steamer the City of Madison." Well, it turns out that the City of Madison was not actually a new boat, over that winter, he had the St. Louis cut in half, and they stuck about 10 or 15 feet in the middle of it, put it all back together again, dropped two steam engines into it, and he had a side-wheel steamer. And now he could go, he wouldn't have to wait for the wind. 

If there's too much, yeah, he could just go at any time, in any weather, back and forth to Picnic Point, business boomed and he did really well. The St. Louis went through, the City of Madison went through two or three owners until it was finally sold to somebody in the Dells. The newspaper articles I've found said that she was renamed in the Dells, The Dells Queen. And I did find this image of her. So this might be The City of Madison under another name. 

I don't know, but that's history for you. The next big change came in 1877, another 10 years, when E.H. Freeman launched the steam Yacht Mendota. Here she is. Here's the Mendota in Freeman's boatyard, also at the foot of North Hamilton Street about 1876. They launched her the following year. Apparently the newspaper story said that several thousand people stood in the rain to watch this boat get slid into the water. Freeman engaged D.J. Lawler, a celebrated east coast naval architect, to design a boat that could take almost any kind of the weather that Lake Mendota could dish up. And if any of you have been on Lake Mendota, you know that it can get really rough and really ugly in a hurry, and he designed the Mendota to survive those conditions.  And he put one giant steam engine in the thing so that she could make up to 18 knots, 18 miles an hour, in good conditions. 

A reporter who had taken a ride on her early on described her as beautiful, fast, strong, and safe.  Here she is just before she got launched, sitting on the hard in the boatyard at the foot of North Hamilton Street. Freeman was involved in a land deal over on what's now Maple Bluff. And so he had a second reason, you know, he needed to get people over there to the picnic grounds and the camping grounds. 

He built two all-weather boat landings over there, and people went back and forth on the Mendota, with the occasional stop at the state hospital, to visit other people who were there, not to drop passengers off, I don't think, but that could have been. She carried 150 passengers, quite a few people, and was skippered by many fine captains, including this guy, Captain George W. Patterson. Mendota also had another benefit.

 In 1878, the year after she was first launched, her owners built the 75-foot barge Uncle Sam. Her lower deck was used as a dance hall and a dining room, while her upper deck, as you can see here, was just a big wide open promenade. And the Mendota towed the Uncle Sam to various parts around the lake, where passengers were transferred over for a good time. The Uncle Sam had one other feature, it was a unique opportunity of having a large vessel like this, and she had a bartender. 

I've never seen anything written that said she actually had a bar, but the assumption is that if you had a bartender, you probably would have a bar. Alcohol consumption in Madison in those days was very closely regulated, but out on the lake,
[audience laughing]
I'm just saying, you know? Presumably, law enforcement was a little lax, and not only hazy but just lax.

 So, unfortunately, all this good time came to an end in 1882 when the Uncle Sam burned to the water line, and that was the end of her. The Mendota survives for another decade perhaps. In 1893, Bert Ainsworth, a Madisonian who saw opportunity on every wave that rolled across the lake, built the Satirio, Spanish for water raft. Ainsworth was a fisherman. He made, a very famous lure maker, and he was also a captain. He drove the mail boat for a while. 

But he had just purchased some property up on the north shore of the lake fishing camp, and he need to get his people, his guests, across the lake in good shape, so he had the Satirio built. She was 43 feet long.  Here she is sitting at the pier about 1892 at the foot of North Franklin Street. And if you look at the picture where you see the sunset, that's Picnic Point. 

Probably, if those rocks were still there, I could triangulate this and figure out where the photo painting was done, but it's Picnic Point, it's Lake Mendota, it's the Satirio.  The next big change in commercial boating came in 1848.  That's when this guy, Charles Bernard, arrived in Madison. Bernard immigrated to the United States from Germany. 

He worked for quite a while as a kid in the naval shipyard in Brooklyn, learned the trade of cabinetmaking, and somehow he moved out to Madison and opened a tailor shop.  And he ran the tailor shop for a couple years, and then somehow got this idea that with his skills, as a carpenter and all this water, maybe he could make some money building boats. So, in 1850, he built his first little boat in the building behind his home at 624 East Gorham Street. 

And he started building little, you know, rowboats, fishing boats. And then, in 1891, he launched his first commercial vessel, The Anna, cleverly named after his daughter, although I would have named it after my wife.  
[audience laughing]

But The Anna was not just the beginning of a boat business, but it really was a beginning of a company that would dominate the boating scene on Lake Mendota for almost five decades, in winter and in summer. 

In 1893, the same year that Ainsworth launched his Satirio, Bernard launched The Columbia.  She was 52 feet long, steam powered, and she made fishing trips across the lake to the best fishing spots, and of course over to the State hospital. In 1905, he built another big steamer.  This one called The Wisconsin. First she was powered by steam, and later she was switched to gasoline. 

So here she is approaching the pier at the old University Boathouse, it’s right behind the Red Gym on Langdon Street. The Wisconsin was 51 feet long. Now things get interesting. In 1906, Charles' son William took over the Bernard Boat Company and decided that the way to expand this business was to build a picnic ground out on some piece of property somewhere across the lake, and he found the exact perfect spot over on what's now Woodward Drive, and built a place called Bernard's Park. 

It was a roller skating rink, had a big pavilion in it. People went there and played baseball games, It wasn't an amusement park, but, in those days, that’s what people were looking for was just a place far from town, lots of trees.  And, conveniently for the Bernard family, they had The Wisconsin to get there because in those days the only way to get there was really by boat. Again, the trip from downtown Madison was like a whole day's ride in a horse-powered vehicle. 

So, conveniently for the customers, they could step on The Wisconsin downtown at the foot of, at the Bernard boathouse,
[soft whooshing]
and off they went. Business was so good, that to keep pace with the demand, in 1907, they launched another boat called The Forward. And here you can see The Forward and The Wisconsin sitting on the hard, on their railroad, right next to the Bernard boathouse. That's the building you see here on the right, that's the old Bernard boathouse. 

Wisconsin is in the middle, The Forward is on the far left side. Here they are in the water. Forward, again, is on the right. By now, she's still steam, we can still see the stack there. The Wisconsin is tucked a little further back behind The Forward, and over on the other side of the pier is The West End, so this picture was taken around 1921. 

By now, these guys had three 51, 52-foot vessels, principally running back and forth, servicing the east end of the lake, and the east end of the lake, Bernard's Park asylum.  In 1910, this ad from 1910, says that Bernard's offered regular service to Maple Bluff, the State hospital, and of course Bernard's Park where paying boat customers were granted free admission privileges. In the '20s, they ran boats, they had dances at the Bernard's Park in the evening. 

They ran boats nonstop from the pier at Park Street to get all those university students out to Bernard's Park and back.  In the spring of 1940, the Bernard family sold their business to Benny Berg, who ran the Berg Sporting Goods Company. He changed the name of The West End to The Badger, ran the business for another two or three years before he sold it to the Hoover Boat Company, and I'll talk a little more about Harry Hoover as we get deeper into this.

 But the Bernard's weren't the only people who ran boat yards, boat lines, on the lake. In 1904, the Maple Bluff Golf Club launched a little steamer called The Putter.  
[audience laughing]
She was followed by The Putter II and then The Putter III. And The Putter ran back and forth between the foot of North Carroll Street at the city boathouse and over to Maple Bluff Golf Course. After a while, she also did cruises, did stops, to the asylum. 

Remember, in those days the asylum, there were a lot of people in the asylum that today, at the State hospital, that today would probably be out wandering amongst us. But in those days, if you just couldn't quite figure out what to do with Aunt Susie, she would be at the asylum, so a lot of people went over there to visit relatives. In 1917, another boat operator enters the picture. 

This is the Anderson Boat Company, operated by Rolf Anderson, the son of UW Scandinavian professor, Rasmus Anderson. Anderson began service from the city to the foot of North Park Street, and he went out and covered places at the west end of the lake. The University Tent Colony, Mendota Beach, Morris Park and Borchard's Beach. Business was pretty good for him, and at one point Anderson proposed building a hundred-footer, but that project came and went and he was gone. 

While Bernard's were busy with trips  to the east end of the lake, owners of The City Boat Company also saw an opportunity, to take care of the cottagers at the far west end of the lake. Around 1910, and probably for about nine years after that, they operated a boat providing service to cottagers at that end of the lake. 

And they provided regular scheduled daily service to Blackhawk, which is, Shorewood like today, Merrill Springs, Mendota Beach, Middleton, Baskerville Park, Waconia, Camp Sunrise, Morris Park and Camp Indianola.  During, now, this is where it gets interesting again, during the summer of 1911, they were engaged by Madison realtor H.A. Smith. Is it Smith or Smythe Junior? He was trying to develop some lots up in Morris Park, and what better way to get there than by boat. 

So if you clipped the little coupon from the corner of this ad and went down to the pier, you could get yourself, you and whoever else was going there with you, you could get a ride across the lake and back to Morris Park where you could, let's see, the ad says, where perspective buyers can picnic in this quote, "beautiful wooded park of majestic old oaks and elms, "with ravines and wooded thickets, "Indian mounds, cornfields, "and the finest of sandy beaches".

And if you didn't buy a piece of property when you were over there, he'd still let you come back, and maybe you'd think about it another time. From 1920 until 1924, the Tofte Boat Company, I think they picked up where The City Boat Company left off. There's a lot of indications there that they may have had similar owners, similar boats, but it's a little gray. But they operated a small launch called The Sagagaweeah.  She was probably in the order of about 20 or 25 feet long. 

And they made pretty regular service. Here's an ad for them, to Baskerville Park and West Point, Morris Park, the YWCA Camp, Camp Lokanda. That was pretty much their run.  Not too much new happened until, oops, hang on, I got to rewind a slide here. Until 1933 when the Consolidated Boat Company launched the boat with the most romantic name, The Miss Helen III.
[audience laughing]

I don't know if there was, I don't know where the number one or the number two was, but, anyway, this was the Miss Helen III. And her features were she had a glass enclosed cabin with seating for 40 passengers. She was equipped with comfortable street car seats. And her owner, George Larson, who operated a radio repair shop in East Mifflin Street, fitted her out with the latest technology in AM radio so you could listen to the radio while you were out on the lake. 

Her time on the lake was short. Maybe about two seasons. He kept her at a pier at the foot of North Frances Street, which is really just down the street from where his mother lived. And I don't know what ever happened to Miss Helen, but Larson went on to become a chief engineer at a local Madison radio station. But, you know, not every boat that did commercial service on the lake was big and slow.

 In the 1930s, in 1930 despite the depression that was going on, many folks still felt a need for speed. And this guy, William Olds, was apparently some sort of a dealer in Chris Craft motorboats. And he ran, here's his ad, it says, a new thrill ride, come and take a ride in America's fastest stock boat. This was a 25-foot Chris Craft with a 250 horsepower engine. This thing would go. And he offered rides that summer in this boat. 

It was only 50 cents, well, 50 cents was a lot of money in 1930, if you had it, it was a lot of money. So it was 50 cents, weekdays after 1:00, and then on Sundays and holidays, he'd take the price up to 75 cents, and this boat ran out back and forth from the dock at the foot of Park Street.  Well, by the end of World War II, commercial boat operators on the lake were mostly in it for the tourist trade. 

In 1949, Henry Reynolds, the Reynolds of the Reynolds Transit Company, quietly launched The Scorie. Ownership of the boat was attributed to a professor, a teacher, at West High School whose name was Butler. Reynolds was sort of the shadowy hand in the background running things. He had this boat, The Scorie built up at the Peterson Brothers shipyard in Sturgeon Bay. And she loaded passengers also from the pier at the foot of North Park Street. 

And she was 60 feet long, had a single engine, and probably was the largest commercial passenger vessel to ever serve on Lake Mendota.  She weighed in at 18 tons and had room for 90 passengers, but was powered only by a single engine, which, if any of you have driven big boats, driving a big boat like this with one engine a real treat, a real-- requires a lot of skill. 

She was here for maybe five or 10 years, and then Reynolds sold her to someone up in Green Bay, or in the Wisconsin Dells, where she was remodeled into The Red Cloud, and a second deck was added, her rooftop was strengthened so there'd be more seating up there for passengers. But we think, I'm sure if it's The Red Cloud, but that's what I was told, and I'll go with that. In 1963, our next guy, boat operator, comes on the scene. His name is Captain Fred Fuller. 

And Fuller started out his career as a radio broadcaster.  He worked for Wisconsin Public Radio, or in those days it was called WHA Radio before World War II, and he pioneered the development of a new kind of broadcasting where the host would play a record, and they would introduce it and tell you who was playing, where they played, the musicians, a little more information about the music. Nobody else had done this before. This was Fuller's big contribution to broadcasting. 

But the sea was always in Fuller's veins, he loved being on the water, he served in the Coast Guard during World War II. And, in addition to a number of other jobs, he worked for Harry Hoover, driving Hoover's tour boats, the ones that he had bought from Benny Berg. In 1963, Hoover apparently got tired of dealing with the tourist trade, and Fuller bought all of his boats.

 One of them was this fine vessel, the Queen Anne, and probably anybody who was around in the '60s here, may have been on this boat. She was 50 feet long, very old when Hoover bought her, she was built apparently in 1915. But she had the distinct advantage that she had room for a lot of people. You could get almost 80 people on her. And, in those days, nobody worried about being out in the sun, nobody worried too much about do we have enough life jackets. We're just on the water, this is fine. 

And so this is, you know, a typical load that they would carry, that Diana would carry. I haven't counted all the people, but I'm guessing there's about 60 or 70 people there. And all the seats, if you look carefully at them, look like they were taken from various dinette sets.  
[audience laughing]

But, again, she was a single engine vessel. The other boat that he owned was The Queen Anne.  She was only 35 feet long, and she had a little bit of a cabin, so if it was raining or, you know, sunny, you could at least be out of the weather with that. 

But the neat part about Hoover was, or Fuller, was that he really was a student of the lake, and it seemed like for years and years, he must have taken a camera with him, because when I started researching the book, I was trying to find a scrapbook or something about Fuller, and I eventually tracked down his grandson, who said, I said, well I'm looking for some pictures. Do you have anything? He said, "Well, I've got, “Grandpa Fuller's slide collection. 

"You want to come and see it?" So I get over to his house, and here's about 300 slides, all Kodachrome, the good stuff, and every slide had a little note on it about the day it was taken and what the subject was. It was a historical jackpot. And so I ended up using a lot of those photographs in my book, and they're all credited to a guy named John Lore, but a lot of times the photographs were really of something close up but the background had a picture of some building that's no longer there. 

So, that's kind of the end of the story here. There were a few other boat operators. I stopped at about 1965, 1966.  There's still a few others that I haven't covered, but I decided, I think, I'm just going to wrap it up there, my book ends in the early '80s, so I'm not going to stretch my history about this, I'll save that for another time. So, again, so that's sort of the end of my little story. Thank you so much for coming, and I really appreciate it. 

And I think we'll take questions after Bruce stops the tape.  
[applause]