| middle, and whenever he would move he would pull the blankets
off from the other two, and as they all rolled down toward the center of
the bed all of them had to move quite frequently and got very little sleep.
About 3:30 in the morning Ingram came in and made a fire in the stove and
came in after that frequently to put wood in it but it took two hours to
thaw the water which was in the kettle on the stove, so we could get breakfast.
That night there was a man frozen to death a short distance from the shack.
He had been walking in from Bruce's Crossing to one of the Diamond Match
Company Camps and he had evidently sat down or lain down to rest and was
frozen to death. I suppose the thermometer must have been twenty to thirty
degrees below zero that night.
One day in the fall of the year Bateman and I were cruising on
the east bank of the Middle Branch looking for roads to get the timber
out, and we came to a homesteader's camp. There was an old man living there,
one of the few who stayed on his homestead after he proved up, although
he did not cultivate the soil but did some hunting and trapping. There
was only one room, with a stove and bed in it. Bateman told him we were
hungry and asked him if he could give us a lunch, and he said he could.
He got out a frying pan to fry some eggs, but when Bateman saw how dirty
it was he said that I did not eat fried eggs and we would greatly prefer
having them boiled. The homesteader could not understand that but he boiled
the eggs, and I toasted some bread, and we had a good lunch. After we left
Bateman said he could not understand how any one could live in such a dirty
place.
In February 1906 my wife took a trip with me to the Ontonagon
camps and we spent several days visiting the different camps. We had a
cabin at Camp Two, which had been built for a locomotive engineer and his
wife, by the name of Twining, and after he left Bateman used it for visitors.
We logged in the Ontonagon River camps from 1902 to 1919 and
then, having cut all of the Pine timber, we stopped logging there till
1926 when we started one Camp and cut some hardwood and hemlock timber
in Town 49, Range 40. Then we took up our tracks and moved our logging
equipment to Tipler, Wisconsin.
Forty-six
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Some of the large fires which have occurred in (city of) Oconto are the following: June 12, 1886: The Oconto Company Flour & Shingle Mill burned and with it a considerable part of the lumber in their yard. The wind was from the Southwest so the fire did not approach the sawmill. The fire was so hot that the Fire Department could do nothing about putting it out but could only prevent it from spreading. September 28, 1899: The Oconto Company's sawmill burned. This was the most dangerous fire that we ever had in Oconto. It broke out under the sorting shed at the tail of the sawmill, about 7:10 A. M., and both the sawmill and planing mill whistles immediately gave the alarm. I ran over there as fast as I could and by the time I got there the Fire Department had arrived but the whole back end of the sawmill was afire and it spread so rapidly through the mill that some of the men were unable to get their dinner pails and clothing which they had hung up in the mill when they went to work. There was lumber piled directly east of the sawmill and the Fire Department devoted most of its attention to keeping this from burning, because if it had all got afire it would undoubtedly have spread into our yard, and with the wind blowing from the southwest would probably have burned all of the main part of the city. I walked down through our yard where the sparks and pieces of boards were beginning to fly through the air, and found the yard crew were at work putting out the fires that started; near the planing mill I met the entire sawmill crew on their way to the yard with pails, and all of these men worked hard and faithfully and they succeeded in preventing the fires starting in our lumber yard, although later on when we took the piles of lumber down we found many places where sparks had set fire to the lumber and it had gone out before it burned enough to do any harm. At the planing mill I found the men wetting everything down and things looked all right so I went on down to the sawmill where I found our sawmill crew foreman, Mr. Thompson, with one man and a hose wetting down everything around the office and sawmill. I met Mr. W. H. Young on the corner by the office and I asked him how much he would give for our lumber and planing mill and sawmill, and he said he wouldn't give more than fifteen cents as he thought they were bound to burn.
Returning to the planing mill I found that a fire had started in the foundation of the old Morrison house, on the north side of Pecor Street, and I thought if that building burned it would set fire to all of the rest of the buildings in that neighborhood, so I told the boys in the planing mill to shut off one line of hose and take it over across the street Forty-seven |
William
H. Young, Superintendant at Holt Lumber Co. Photo - Oconto County WIGenWeb
archives.