Dennis McCann - This Superior Place: Stories of Bayfield and the Apostle Islands

This Superior Place

Map from 1878 detailing Ashland and Bayfield WHi Image ID 73680

THIS

SUPERIOR

PLACE

Stories of Bayfield
and the Apostle Islands

DENNIS McCANN

Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Publishers since 1855

2013 by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin

E-book edition 2013

Publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from the Amy Louise Hunter fellowship fund.

For permission to reuse material from This Superior Place (ISBN 978-087020-579-8, e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-586-6), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.

www.wisconsin history .org

Photographs identified with WHi or WHS are from the Societys collections; address requests to reproduce these photos to the Visual Materials Archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street, Madison, WI 53706.

Cover design by Brian Donahue / bedesign, inc.

Interior design and typesetting by Brad Norr Design

17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

Front cover: Bayfields waterfront, 2011. Photo by Grandon Harris.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

McCann, Dennis, 1950 This superior place : stories of Bayfield and the Apostle Islands / Dennis McCann.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87020-579-8 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Bayfield (Wis.)Description and travel. 2. Bayfield (Wis.)History. 3. Bayfield (Wis.)HistoryAnecdotes. 4. Apostle Islands (Wis.)Description and travel. 5. Apostle Islands (Wis.)History. 6. Apostle Islands (Wis.)HistoryAnecdotes. I. Title.

F589.B3M35 2013

977.513dc23

2012039455

To Barb, as always

And to Judy,

for bringing us to this special place

Rock formation known as The Sphinx off Stockton Island, with the steamer Edna in the background on Lake Superior. WHi Image ID 49112

Contents

Preface

Apostle Islands Cruise Line boat at sunset. The cruise line recently added a glass-bottom boat to offer shipwreck viewing. Photo by Jeff Peters, courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Tourism

H alf a lifetime agowe debate the exact year but have narrowed it down to 1981 or 82my wife and I first made the long drive from southern Wisconsin to the states northern rim and the shore of Lake Superior. We checked into a room we had reserved at late notice and soon after caught the ferry to Madeline Island, where we met a friend who was staying at what was then the elegantly rustic Chateau Madeleine. Judy was dining on the Chateaus pier, so we joined her for a glass of wine and our first glorious Lake Superior sunset, a beautiful event even before the disappearing sun graced the horizon with a brilliant pink-orange blush atop the mainlands dark green forests.

If we didnt expressly say Where has this been all our lives? we certainly felt it. The next morning we checked out of our cabin in Bayfield, crossed again to La Pointe, and checked into an odd little round house on the main street (it would later become a coin-operated laundry), which came with a balcony that afforded us a birds-eye view of the passing tourists.

And so it began. We returned the next year, and the year after that. And when we saw our first Madeline Island Fourth of July parade, an old-fashioned bit of red, white, and blue Americana that ends with speeches and songs at the historic Madeline Island Museum, an island Fourth became as much a part of our lives as Christmas or Easter. We have missed only one parade since that first one, and while the parade has grown and gone a bit island upscaleyou can still decorate your kids or your dog and march proudly down the street, but now there are floats and more units and sometimes flying hot dogsits original charm has hardly been gentrified.

It wasnt long before one long slog up the belly of the state each year wasnt enough; we started squeezing in an extra visit, or even three in a year. It helped that, as a traveling newspaper columnist, I could usually find stories that contained critically important news for readers who lived 375 miles south in Milwaukee, even if many didnt understand that Madeline was the island in Lake Superior, not the one off the tip of Door Countybut no matter. Have company car, will travel to Madeline.

When we began visiting Bayfield in winter it was just further evidence, as if any was needed, that this special place had gotten a hold on us, that it had become what one friend who similarly loves Lake Superior calls soul country. Heart and soul, as it turned out. In 1998 we bought a piece of property just south of Bayfield and later built a home that looks at La Pointe and Madeline Island across often-shimmering Chequamegon Bay.

Some might say, well, it took you long enough. And thats true. In most communities popular with tourists, T-shirts or sweatshirts are souvenirs enough, but there are many stories of visitors who came to Bayfield for the first time on a Friday and left on Sunday owning a second home.

It can be that kind of place.

All of that is meant merely as full disclosure that the book you are holding is hardly a dispassionate telling of the story of Bayfield and the Apostle Islands. I am not a historian but rather a newspaperman by training, though my professional duties often involved sharing stories about Wisconsin history. What this is, then, at least by intention, is an effort to share the events that made Bayfield, and its environs, what it is todaya community where the past was layered with good times and down times, where natural beauty was the one resource that could not be exhausted by the hand of man, and where history is ever present.

That is not to suggest Bayfield has not changed in its more than 150 years as a city, because change has been a constant part of life here. Industries have come and gone; hopes have been raised and sometimes dashed. While old family names continue generation by generation, newcomers have arrived to spend their retirement years or, ever optimistic, to start new businesses. This community built on hard work on land and on water is now more dependent than ever before on offering recreation and relaxation.

At the same time, reminders of the past are everywhere.

The onetime cooperage for the Booth fishing company near the ferry landing on Bayfields harbor front, once a launching point for fleets of fishing boats, now houses a kayak business for paddlers heading out on the big lake.

The sprawling Chateau Boutin, the lakefront home built by the son of a lumberman and fisherman, is now an inn for Bayfield visitors, its beautiful curved leaded-glass windows and ornate woodwork elegant reminders of another time.

The old Bayfield County Courthouse, orphaned when the upstart city of Washburn stole the county seat in 1892, now houses the headquarters of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, a duty every bit as important as housing courtrooms and real estate records.

And in downtown Bayfield, the longtime bank building on the corner of Rittenhouse and Second Avenuebuilt of locally quarried Lake Superior brownstonestill bears the chiseled name of R. D. Pike, one of the citys biggest movers and shakers in pioneer days. Among his other accomplishments, Pike founded the local telephone company, brought electric streetlights to town, and owned the Little Daisy sawmill that was once one of the most productive mills in the North.