In the 1880s, mills in La Crosse and Onalaska churned out
what seemed to be unlimited amounts of lumber.
- Ed Hill: The peak point of lumber production in La Crosse
was 1892.
- Narrator: In that peak year, La Crosse sawmills
cut 242 million board feet,
the equivalent of a 12-inch wide board, 45,000 miles long.
It was a rate of harvest that would soon destroy the resource.
- Ed Hill: The pineries became pretty much exhausted.
And that rollover period was very abrupt.
- Chuck Lee: The age of lumbering really ended quickly,
to the point where the industry itself literally crashed.
- Narrator: As La Crosse headed into the 20th century
without the industry that built it,
the city searched for ways to reinvent itself.
- Charles Gelatt: Well, I like to think of it as adaptation.
And my definition of being alive is to be able to adapt.
- Narrator: In the decades to come,
the city of La Crosse would become more industrial,
creating large manufacturing businesses.
It would establish new educational institutions,
and become a college town.
And new, conflicting visions of the Mississippi
would both restore and radically reshape the river.
The city's rebuilding began with the industries that grew up
with the frontier economy.
The railroads became the city's largest employers.
There were now five rail lines in town,
two of them with division headquarters and repair shops.
- Charles Gelatt: We had over 4,000 railroad employees.
And we had manufacturing, in part, because of the railroads.
And we had some big businesses
for the early part of the 20th century.
- Narrator: Manufacturers like the La Crosse Plow Company
continued to grow,
turning out an assortment of farm implements.
- Charles Gelatt: They shipped their plows
west of the Mississippi.
And the railroads west of the Mississippi
were essential to their success.
- Narrator: In 1929, the La Crosse Plow Company
merged with a national corporation, Allis Chalmers,
and would build implements for their popular line of tractors
for the next 40 years.
In 1884, the city's five breweries
produced as much beer as Milwaukee,
and brewing became a major industry.
When the John Gund Brewery burned down,
Gund rebuilt a huge facility, the biggest in the city.
- Charles Gelatt: It was reputed to be larger
than Anheuser-Busch at the end of World War I.
It owned and controlled more saloon sites
than Anheuser-Busch.
And saloon sites
were the filling stations of the brewery industry.
- Narrator: Nearby, the City Brewery
was run by the widow of Gottlieb Heileman.
- Susan T. Hessel: Johanna Heileman was one of the first,
if not the first, female CEO in the country.
And after he died,
instead of turning the company over to someone else,
she ran it.
And she ran it very well.
- Narrator: From the Heileman home and office,
Johanna incorporated the business
as the G. Heileman Brewing Company.
And soon, her sons-in-law developed a new brand of beer
they called "Old Style."
To start a new industry, a group of city investors
pooled their resources
to build the La Crosse Rubber Mills,
which manufactured raincoats, sneakers and rubber boots.
After several expansions,
the large plant employed a thousand people,
and was capable of producing
30,000 pairs of shoes and overshoes a day.
- Charles Gelatt: Walking to school, I had overshoes.
They were difficult to put on,
almost as hard to put on as long underwear.
- Narrator: Like many cities, La Crosse hitched its fortunes
to the emerging automobile industry,
and developed some large, local companies.
The Northern Engraving Company, a metal decorating firm,
took over White Beaver Powell's former medical office,
and began to make dial faces for another La Crosse business,
the National Gauge Company,
which became a leading maker of gauges for cars.
National Gauge eventually merged with Electric Auto-Lite,
a national maker of auto parts,
though it was still known locally as "the Gauge Plant."
- Man: Heat and pressure indicators,
instruments for the control panels of modern motor cars.
- Narrator: The biggest company in La Crosse
grew from a small plumbing supply business
run by Norwegian immigrant James Trane.
When Trane's son Reuben returned from engineering school,
they formed the Trane Company,
to market a steam heating system,
which included Reuben's design for a new kind of steam trap.
- Charles Gelatt: And he told me that in 1916,
he traveled the country by rail and visited a hundred towns.
And he was a congenial gentleman and a good salesman,
as well as an engineer.
He sold them on his trap.
He began manufacturing it.
He hired friends of his.
- Narrator: The company's breakthrough came
when Reuben invented a convector radiator,
which distributed heat through coils of copper tubes
and thin metal fins.
- Charles Gelatt: And it was useful,
particularly when the hot summers of the '30s came along,
because they converted it to air conditioning.
- Narrator: Trane soon became a leading manufacturer
of heating and cooling systems,
and eventually grew to be the largest builder
of central air conditioning systems in the world.
The collapse of the lumber industry highlighted
the need to conserve local resources, like Grandad Bluff,
a towering local landmark.
A stone-mining company, chipping away at the bluff,
was about to expand its operations.
Ellen Hixon, the widow of lumberman Gideon Hixon,
led a campaign to purchase the bluff
and preserve its sweeping view for future generations.
Other lumbermen and their families
had already donated land along the river,
and where abandoned sawmills still stood.
The city commissioned noted landscape architect John Nolen
to design a park system for the city.
He began with what is now called Riverside Park,
guaranteeing that the area where Nathan Myrick built his cabin,
would continue to serve as the city's front door.
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But as parks developed along the water,
the Mississippi faced new threats
from drainage of wetlands for farming,
and pollution of the water.
- John Anfinson: Pollution in the Mississippi
has become so horrendous, from garbage, from human waste.
In fact, a young boy from La Crosse dies as a result,
they say, of exposure to the Mississippi River,
from swimming in the river.
So conservationists start saying, you know,
its time to think about this river differently.
- Narrator: In 1921, a group of anglers
from the Izaac Walton League,
an early conservation group,
went fishing on the Mississippi,
where the group's leader,
a Chicago advertising man named Will Dilg,
was trying to figure out a way to stop
a huge wetland drainage project south of La Crosse.
- John Anfinson: One day he was fishing off a wing dam,
and he turned to the person next to him and said, "You know,
"we can make this whole dang thing
"into a fish and wildlife refuge
and save the fish and the wildlife in the Mississippi."
So Dilg starts one of the first
powerful environmental campaigns in America.
And by 1924, he succeeds when Congress creates
the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish refuge.
That's going to be 261 miles long,
basically from Wabasha all the way to Rock Island, Illinois.
And La Crosse is right in the heart of that.
- Narrator: Creation of the refuge
was an early success in a long effort
to clean up and protect the Mississippi,
and came at a time when it seemed
the river would never again
become a major shipping channel.
- John Anfinson: The wingdams
really failed to bring commerce back to the Mississippi.
The river just gets too low in the fall.
There are too many drought years and it just doesn't work.
There's no through-commerce.
There are no boats that go from St. Louis to St. Paul.
And the Midwest faces a pretty important decision.
And the decision is,
"Do we want to be connected to the world
through the Mississippi River or not?"
- Narrator: Navigation boosters said yes,
and pushed to bring shipping back.
This time, by building a series of locks and dams
that would hold water back to create a nine-foot-deep channel.
The massive public works project would, once again,
radically alter the Mississippi,
and create the multi-purpose river we know today.
Now used as a major shipping channel,
the river also serves as a recreation area.
And as a wildlife refuge,
the river provides a major bird migration route,
and a home for hundreds of species of fish and wildlife.