KENNEDY - RIB LAKE - He can make roads but not snow -- John Kennedy says he can make roads but not snow. On Monday and Tuesday last he put in each day 125,000 feet of logs. HE SHOVELED SNOW ON THE ROAD and the teams went right along. He said if the snow holds out, he would put in that much every day—but he couldn’t make snow. John is a hustler—and make no mistake (about that).
The late thaw had nearly demoralized the loggers, Many companies were seriously contemplating withdrawing their men from the woods—indeed, one man that we know of had gone into his camps for that purpose, The snow on Wednesday morning revived their hopes, and they will stick. The Signal Service Bureau [the predecessor to the U. S. Weather Service] unofficially predicts an early January freeze.
Without doubt, the loggers of that era were dependent on cold temperature and snow to get their logs out of the woods, or, at least, to the river bank for spring drives.
Ninety nine percent of the sleigh roads cut out by Kennedy’s crews have disappeared. In 2012 you can still see at least one small segment in the Town of Rib Lake. The Rib Lake Ski & Snowshoe Club uses it, named Die Promenade, as part of its network of non-motorized winter trails, The old sleigh road runs through a conifer swamp uncut since the Kennedy era; it is within the northwest ¼, southeast ¼, section 12, T 33 North Range 2 East. In 2012 the landowners are Rodney and Kristin Strobach and Mary and Scott Geisler.
Ironically, the old sleigh road is within the very first piece of land purchased by John J. Kennedy at Rib Lake, the west ½, southeast ¼, section 12, Town 33 North, Range 2 East.
1/9/1886
TC STAR AND NEWS
KENNEDY -- J. J. Kennedy was in Medford Thursday and called at this office [Taylor County Star & News] during the absence of both editors.
I conclude that one key to JJK’s success was his practice to visit and talk to people.
1/16/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
MCLENNAN -- Duncan J. McLennan, chairman of the Town of Rib Lake, General Manager of J.J. Kennedy’s lumber interests, has assumed another title, and one with the gravest responsibilities attached. On the first of January, with the regularity with which he does everything, he became “Papa McLennan.” Duncan is a small man, physically, but he is just about a father as if he weighed 300 pounds. The boss of that household is a little girl, and her name is Mamie Flora. We tender our congratulations to the happy parents.
The child’s second name honors her aunt, Mrs. Flora Kennedy, a/k/a Mrs. John J. Kennedy. Duncan and Flora were siblings.
1/16/1886
TC STAR AND NEWS
KENNEDY -- J.J. Kennedy’s mill at Rib Lake will start up for the winter’s run about the middle of the next month.
1/16/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
RIB LAKE -- Thirteen persons living at Rib Lake are suffering from …trichinosis. They are Fritz Milke [Mielke] and wife, Fritz Radtke, wife and 4 children, Chris Seaman, John Hump, and wife and child, and Lewis Kennedy.
They all ate sausage that was not fully cooked. Parties have examined the pork from which the sausage was made and claim to have discovered trichinosis.
It was later determined they were not sickened by trichinosis.
Arthur J. Latton, writing about 1940, reported to Taylor County cases of trichinosis.
1/30/1886
TC STAR AND NEWS
RIB LAKE TRAIN SCHEDULE -- Rib Lake Trains: leave Chelsea 1:30 pm and arrive Rib Lake at 2 pm: leave Rib Lake at 2:30 pm and arrive at Chelsea 3 pm.
Trains connect at Chelsea with north and south bound mail trains, Sundaysexcepted.
It was 5.5 miles by rail between Chelsea and Rib Lake. Rib Lake was on a spur that dead-ended at Rib Lake. Chelsea was on the main line.
2/27/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
RIB LAKE MILL -- The Rib Lake mill was idle for 3 months and in all that time no slabs were thrown into the pit where the mill refuse is burned, and yet, when preparations were being made to start up the mill last Monday, live coals were found in the pit.
2/27/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
WHITTLESEY -- Wheelock, Winchester & Co. are putting in a band saw in their mill near Whittlesey and expect in the future to make better lumber and save timber as well. BAND SAWS ARE BECOMING VERY POPULAR with mill men in this locality. (emphasis added)
Kerf is the term for the width of the cut made by the saw. Typically, the kerf was much less with a band saw as contrasted to a circle saw. In this way band saws made more lumber than circle saws. This is especially the case with the initial sawing of the log; here circle saws had to be especially thick to cut the log in half.
J.J. Kennedy installed a band saw in his Rib Lake mill in 1885; see below.
2/27/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
RIB LAKE – HISTORY -- We do not claim to be the original discoverer of the village of Rib Lake; It has not been hid away for years from mortal ken until the great magician came with his goggles and a pimple on his nose and made the place famous.
Rib Lake is a manufacturing village situated on the shores of a beautiful lake that gives the town and village their name. The saw mill, owned by J.J. Kennedy, consists of a circular and band saw for cutting logs, a gang edger and trimmer, a double cutting machine and the necessary small saws for cutting up slabs and mill refuse.
Convenience, time and labor saving appear to have been taken into consideration when the mill was planned and built, as there is no place in the mill where the “lubber life” is required for moving lumber or timber. The power is furnished by steam from 4 large boilers, the machinery being driven by a large, powerful engine.
This mill last year sawed 12,000,000 feet of lumber, and was not crowded beyond its capacity. For the past 3 months the mill has been undergoing repairs, fitting it for the long run just inaugurated. A start was made Wednesday last and the little village “among the whispering pines” is now full of the sound of puffing steam and the buzz of the hungry saw.
Mr. Kennedy also has a planing mill where, in addition to the machinery used in dressing the several grades of merchantable lumber, he also has machinery for working up cull lumber, usually a drag on the market, into box stuff, car roofing, etc., which is always in demand and finds a ready sale. Attached are commodious sheds for storing the dressed lumber until shipped.
A switch [railroad] track runs from the lumber yard to the north side of the planing mill where lumber is unloaded from the cars upon a platform and then fed directly through the [planing] machines coming out on the other side of the mill ready for loading upon [railroad] cars standing on another side track running parallel with the main track. THIS LITTLE MILL IS A MODEL OF CONVENIENCE AND NEATNESS. The engine room is of brick and contains a splendid 14x 24 [steam] engine, which does its work noiselessly, without apparent effort.
The village store, also owned by J.J. Kennedy, is a two story building, 26x24 feet, and contains a large stock of general merchandise. At present Ben Hoey is the only clerk, his later companion, Van Hecke, having accepted a position in Stevens Point. (Ben keeps a package of smoking tobacco and a box of cigars on tap for newspaper tramps). A large, well-lighted office in the body of the store is where the General Superintendent, Duncan J. McLennan, holds forth in company with the book keeper, William Young. Mc. does the buying for the store, attends to the shipping of lumber, and is the auditor of the concern, examining and paying all bills. He has his hands full.
The Village of Rib Lake contains within its limits 37 dwelling houses, with a resident population of about 170. This estimate does not include what is commonly called transients, who are birds of passage and are liable to fly to other scenes at any time. This latter class, or a majority of them, lives in a large hotel kept by Mr. and Mrs. D. W. Bodle. Mr. Bodle says that when the mill is running he has from 75 to 100 boarders, some of whom sleep in apartments over the store. The hotel is well kept house, with good, airy rooms, comfortably furnished, and the table is supplied with wholesome, substantial food, superior to the bill of fare in many hotels “along the line.” Mr. and Mrs. Bodle are lifelong hotel keepers who strive to make their house not a mere boarding house, but a comfortable stopping place for the traveling public.
Every building in the village, but two, is the property of J.J. Kennedy. The two exceptions are the residences owned by the General Superintendent Duncan J. McLennan and General Manager Angus Kennedy. NO SPIRITUOUS OR MALT LIQUORS, WINE, OR OTHER BRAIN BEFUDDLING BEVERAGES ARE SOLD WITHIN THE VILLAGE LIMITS, or nearer than Chelsea, seven miles away.
There is a good school district within the village attended by between 30 to 40 pupils, and the religiously inclined are privileged to attend services every other week by the Rev. N. L. Sweet, of Spencer, a Baptist minister. The Rev. B. Ungrodt, the German Lutheran clergyman of Medford, also holds services there occasionally.
The logs for the saw mill are cut in the surrounding forests and hauled to the lake by horse teams over ice roads, the main being seven miles in length, and of solid ice from 18 inches to two feet thick the entire distance, and about 10 or 12 feet wide. The sleighs used are the Common Sense (sic) with a six foot run [six feet between the runners] and an eight foot bunk for the two horse teams, the four horse teams using a nine foot bunk. The loads they put on those sleighs would make a prairie farmer who has never been in the lumber woods think that the loaders were lunatics.
The logs are scaled on the landing and the loads run from 3 to 5 thousand feet. There are 3 camps on the main road, all having a full crew of men and teams under the supervision of a competent foreman. There is another camp under the south arm of the [Rib] lake that extends easterly and bounds the village on the south. This camp does not use the main road, but has a shorter road of its own built and kept in repair with sprinklers also.
There is still another camp at Worthington’s [Wellington Lake] about equidistant from Chelsea and Rib Lake; where about 1,000,000 [board feet] have been landed. The Rib Lake branch of the Wisconsin Central Railroad runs by this lake, and in the summer the logs will be loaded on flat cars and taken to the mill by rail. Mr. Kennedy now has on the lakes nearly 10,000,000 feet of logs and is banking from 150,000 to 200,000 daily.
A trip over the main [ice] road with Mr. Lewis of Fond du Lac, J.J. Kennedy, and his brother, General Manager [Angus Kennedy], was a genuine surprise to the writer who flatters himself that he is no greenhorn in the woods, if he is not very cute in some things. The road is a perfectly solid bed of ice and the heaviest loads slip over its surface with very little effort on part of the teams except when ascending grades. Teams were meeting with loads towering skyward like hay stacks, while the horses plodded along contentedly without sweating a hair. The sleighing was remarkably good that day, of course, and it is only recently that the warm weather has greased the roads so the teams could have a chance, but even after the constantly cold weather of a month ago, many, in fact, nearly all of the teams are still in fair condition and will come out in the spring without showing very serious signs of overwork.
The teams on the 7 mile haul make 2 trips per day. Some of them start before 5 o’clock in the morning—it is reported. There are about 80 horse teams hauling logs from the several camps, only a part [of the teams] belonging to Mr. Kennedy, the rest being owned by the men who drive them and are working with their teams by the day.
Mr. Kennedy’s reason for going so far from the mill for his logs this winter is that he wishes to save his timber near the [Rib] Lake for an open winter, something every lumberman dreads. There are million of feet of good pine stumpage almost within sight of the lake, that could be put in with little or no snow, and it is the intention to save that until the last or until the absence of snow compels the work to be confined to the vicinity of the lake. A PORTION OF THIS TIMBER IS OWNED BY Curtis Bros. & Co. of Wausau and Clinton, Iowa. Mr. Kennedy is under contract to cut and saw all their timber. Mr. Kennedy has considerable timber of his own, and a portion of the logs he is putting in this winter are from his own stumpage. As an effort is made to cut each section clean as they go, taking the poor timber with the good, the logs will not grade as high as some logs put in for long drives, but the timber in that section is good and the average well, a large percentage beingof the very best quality.
Rib Lake is rather a picturesque body of water in the summer—just at present it is a body of ice covered with logs and is only picturesque from a financial stand point of view-shaped something like the letter L. It is a long distance from one side of the lake to the other and still further from end to end. At the point where the two arms of the lake join with the shimmering lake on the east and south, the dancing wavelets coming within thirty feet of the low windows, stands the pretty house of J.J. Kennedy, the man who owns the mills, the lake and the village, the same red-whiskered chap who roused us in the morning with the admonition to look out on the lake and see the logs coming. The cottage [J.J. Kennedy’s home] was built last summer and is unpretentious and homelike. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy are hospitable, kindly people, who take the visitor into their family circle, and make him feel that hospitality with them is second nature. They have one of the prettiest little houses in Wisconsin, they have five beautiful, bright children, and JOHN WOULD BE PERFECTLY HAPPY IF THOSE TEAMSTERS WOULD PUT ON JUST ONE MORE LOG. (emphasis added)
This insightful history was written by Edgar T. Wheelock, editor and owner of the Taylor County Star & News.
No sale of alcohol was legal until 1896 – when a referendum approved it.
A sleigh “bunk” is the rack that held the logs.
The location of all of Kennedy’s camps have been lost save one. The Matt McGillis pine camp is along the Rib Lake Ski & Snowshoe trail in the SW NW 13-33-2E. In 2017 the outline of the foundation of the buildings and camp well are clearly visible.
All Rib Lake development described here took place in less than 5 years.
3/6/1886
TC STAR AND NEWS
RIB RIVER -- Ed Flander’s logging crew, on the Rib River, broke camp, a part of the crew going to Cleveland and Ricker’s camp, on the same stream.
3/20/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
RIB LAKE -- Lightning struck J.J. Kennedy’s mill atRib Lake last Wednesday tearing a hole in the roof and setting fire to the mill, but the flames were extinguished before a great deal of damage was done. Several men were in the mill at the time, and all of them were more or less shocked. Fortunately for the crew, the mill was not running at the time of the accident, having shut down a few minutes previous on account of the raging storm which made it impossible for the men to work out of doors in caring for the lumber as it came out of the mill. Had the mill been in operation at the time, it is probable that some of the crew would have been killed as the electric fluid passed directly over the stations of several of the workmen.
The lightning first made a landing in the smoke stack, passing thence to the mill, a portion following each guide rod to the ground. One guy rod is fastened to the “wood butcher’s” [carpenter] shop, and an inmate of the shop who was near the end of the rod will make an affidavit that he was struck in the leg by a “ball of fire as big as a pumpkin.” He shows a badly burned leg and blackened foot to back [up] his assertion.
The mill’s power plant had a steel smokestack that was stabilized by steel guide wires running to guide posts set in the ground. In this case, they all made an unintended lightning rod.
THE KENNEDY BUILT MILL IN RIB LAKE WAS DESTROYED TWICE BY FIRE, first in 1897 and for a second time in 1914. The planing mill rebuilt in 1916 was destroyed by fire in 1945. You can see a movie of the last fire at www.riblakehistory.com
3/24/1886
NEW RAILROAD CONNECTION TO CHICAGO -- The distance from Chicago to Medford, on the new line, is 317 miles.
The Wisconsin Central Railroad just completed extending its line from west of Milwaukee to Chicago.
The edition of August 7 reported that the Wisconsin Central’s “fast train” took 14 hours 35 minutes to run between Chicago and St. Paul; the distance was 457 miles; the train averaged 32 miles per hour.
3/27/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
FISH FOR PLANTING -- Our member of the [Wisconsin State] Assembly, the Hon. J. K. Parish, yesterday received 50,000 young brook trout, and forthwith proceeded to distribute the small fry in the numerous streams in the vicinity.
Parish would later serve as circuit court judge for Taylor, Price and Ashland Counties.
3/31/1886
KENNEDY -- Julius Roberts of Deer Creek, Tuesday noon, while at work in J.J. Kennedy’s mill at Rib Lake, for Sam Hagan, sawing shingles, met with a serious accident, cutting the fore finger of the left hand off at the first joint, tearing the flesh and severely bruising the middle finger and lacerating the third.
Dr. McDonald of Chelsea dressed the hand. Julius had been at work but 8 days when the accident happened. The boys at Rib Lake expressed their sympathy, and substantially showed their generously by taking up a subscription and raising the snug sum of $89.00 in less than one hour.
That is the way they do it up here in Taylor County, instead of furnishing them [the injured] with a certificate of good character and sending them elsewhere for substantial sympathy. All honor to the boys of Rib Lake!
Note, no money from the company or government. I presume Kennedy paid the Chelsea doctor.
Sawing shingles was probably the single most dangerous job at the mill. It required the worker to hold the block of wood and saw within inches of his hand.
4/3/1886
TC STAR AND NEWS
KENNEDY -- J.J. Kennedy broke all of his camps last Thursday. He has put in all the logs he wanted to this year.
The April 10 edition reported: the Rib Lake mill has shut down until the ice goes out on the lake and the mill additions are completed. This was the proverbial “spring breakup;” ice on lakes and sleigh roads were rendered impassable by sun and warmer temperatures.
4/10/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
KENNEDY -- It is said that J.J. Kennedy and John Duncan [owner of a mill at Westboro] will send their [horse] teams west this spring to work on railroad construction. It is claimed that teams kept at work during the summer will do better work in the winter as they hold their muscle and bottom [?] better than teams turned out to grass.
4/10/1886
TC STAR & NEWS
NEWLY ELECTED OFFICIALS OF THE TOWN OF RIB LAKE
Chairman: Duncan J. McLennan
Supervisors: Edward Van Gieson and George A. Clark
Clerk: A. B. Kennedy
Treasurer: W. E. Young
Assessor: William Layman
Justices: N. H. Stetter and Angus Kennedy
Constables: Robert Guenther and William Warren
The township of Rib Lake was created in 1885 – mostly from land taken from the Township of Westboro.
5/15/1886
TC STAR AND NEWS
FISH PLANTING IN SPIRIT RIVER -- The last invoice of fish from the State hatchery arrived Thursday last, consisting of 500,000 whitefish and 20,000 California trout. The whitefish were distributed around the county lakes one can, or 50,000 in each lake, and the trout put in the streams.
Gallagher, Wood, Worthington [n/k/a Wellington] and Gerow Lakes in the Town of Chelsea each came in for an apportionment, and Powell’s and Nigger Lakes in this [Medford] town were also planted with small fry.
Trout were placed in Spirit River, Mink Creek and other streams in Westboro and Chelsea...
These fish were transported to Taylor County by a special railroad car. In 2012 it has been restored by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
About 1980 “Nigger Lake” was renamed Mat Ochs by the Taylor County board.
Gallagher Lake, named for Michael Gallagher, was misspelled Lagher Lake on the 1913 Standard Atlas of Taylor County. It is in the NE ¼, Section 28, Town 36 North, Range 1 East. The 2007 Taylor County plat book fails to show it at all.
