Museum Happenings: Bike Tours, Music, Sidewalks, and Much More

Another school year is coming to a close. Enjoy the end-of-year activities, the graduation parties, and the people who make our lives better. 

Peace,
Carrie Ronnander
Chippewa Valley Museum Director

PS - The exterior of the Chippewa Valley Museum has changed again. This time, it's new sidewalks. This project wasn't in our maintenance budget this year. However, a review of the sidewalks this spring made it apparent that something needed to be done. The asphalt walkways had deteriorated so significantly that they were unsafe. This was especially true for the walkway connecting the accessible parking with the front entrance. 

The project included replacing a gravel walkway between the Sunnyview School House and the Wisconsin Logging Museum with a concrete sidewalk. This will make it much easier to move schoolchildren between sites on rainy (and even snowy) days and provide a more accessible path for all visitors.

P.P.S. The last of the weekly Cutover Conquest Series posts written by Archivist Jodi Kiffmeyer appeared this week, which you can read below. If you're interested in learning more about the topic, check out the book Farming the Cutover: A Social History of Northern Wisconsin by Robert Gough. This book served as a major source for this series.

Cousins playing on tire rim swing on a farm that had been woods only a few years earlier; from left to right: Robert Cooper, Inez Cooper, Irene Cooper, Herbert Cooper; 1938.

"What are we going to do with the cutover?" It's a question that echoes in Northern Wisconsin even today. For all the optimism about farming, by the late 1920s it was widely acknowledged that most of the land was marginal at best for that purpose.

Talk soon turned to reforestation and tourism. In 1933, two different proclamations by President Herbert Hoover created the Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests, setting aside 1.5 million acres for preservation and recreation. And, of course, thousands of vacationers have visited resorts and cabins "up north" over the decades.

Despite the failure of so many cutover farms, those of us living in the Chippewa Valley remember the hard work of the thousands of farm families who gave it their best shot. What better way to memorialize them than the words of Ralph Owen, written in the mid-20th century.

"This great stretch of country that evolved from the cut-over lands, this inhospitable terrain, this mess from the early loggers' operations, now in its day of grace is a monument surely to the pioneers and settlers who broke the sod and cultivated the land; it is also a monument to those who made all this possible for these brave pioneers." 

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