As any overview of the lumber industry in Oconto County makes clear,
many of today's villages and settlements developed as a result of the
logging, railroading and milling industries. Following are capsule
histories of some of the Oconto County communities whose development was
influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the lumber industry. These
are not complete histories of the communities, since they focus on the
roles that logging, milling and the railroads played in their
development. Oconto, Suring, Gillette, and Mountain have all been the
subject of very detailed local histories, which are listed in the
bibliography at the end of this book.

ABRAMS

Lying inland along the Pensaukee River, the unincorporated community of
Abrams was first settled in the 1850s. At that time, the area along the
Pensaukee River was dominated by huge virgin pine. Mills owned by F B.
Gardner and the partnership of Busch & Hubble operated near the present
village. Many of the earliest settlers were natives of New England, and
wished to name their new settlement after Lowell or Portsmouth,
Massachusetts, where many of them had grown up. However, when the
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Western rail line was built through the
area in 1881, the railroad opted to name its station for W J. Abrams, a
Green Bay railroad investor who also served as a state representative in
the 1860s and as mayor of Green Bay in the 1880s. Abrams owned large
tracts of land including the parcel on which the depot was constructed.
As often the case, the name given to the railroad depot soon became
applied to the settlement, the post office, and eventually the town in
which the new village was located.

By 1887, the village of Abrams boasted three sawmills and a shingle
mill, as well as two hotels, three stores, and approximately thirty
houses. By this time, however, timber supplies in the Pensaukee River
area were nearly destroyed by both the Peshtigo Fire and the Pensaukee
Tornado in the 1870s. Although these natural disasters and smaller
forest fires had destroyed thousands of acres of timber, they also made
southern Oconto County more desirable to farmers. New immigrants from
Germany, Poland and other European nations found that the region's
fertile soil was easier to farm because of the destruction of much of
the timber. By the turn of the century, Abrams had become primarily a
farming settlement oriented to the agricultural needs of the surrounding
countryside.

BREED

This western Oconto County community received its first settlers in the
1880s, with most of these pioneers seeking homesteads and arriving from
the eastern United States and Denmark. Named after three brothers who
were among the first arrivals, most of Breeds late nineteenth century
economy was dominated by subsistence farming and trade with Native
Americans, who passed through on a well established trail to the
Menominee Reservation, approximately two miles west of the settlement.
In 1896, the Chicago &. Northwestern railway was extended through Breed
from Gillett to Mountain; trade with lumberjacks soon augmented the
community's income. The North Star hotel and tavern catered to the
lumberjack trade. Later Breed area residents worked in many of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century lumber camps in the area. Some of
those camps were operated by Peter Lundquist who lived in Breed from the
1890s to 1915, when he moved to Shawano to be closer to active logging
areas. As in other communities, many area farmers worked in the woods in
the winter, a practice which faded as the camps closed and dairy farming
became a more profitable and labor-intensive activity. By 1914, August,
Emil and Leo Elfe had established a small sawmill, which probably sold
much of its product to local farmers and other residents.

BROOKSIDE

Like Abrams, Brookside developed along the Pensaukee River and was
initially settled by people from, New England and the eastern U.S. By
1856, J. P Davie and W H. Sawtell had built a small sawmill near the
community, an enterprise that attracted additional settlers but which
apparently closed during the financial panic of 1857. By the close of
the Civil War, the Brookside vicinity had almost completely converted to
farming. Some people, including a shoemaker named Wellington did profit
from the river driving still being conducted in the Pensaukee River by
making caulked boots for the river drivers.

CHASE

The community of Chase took its name from the Chase & Dixie sawmill in
operation along the Little Suamico River by 1867. Like other southern
county communities, the combination of the Peshtigo Fire, the Pensaukee
Tornado, and increasing farming activity essentially ended the lumber
industry by the 1880s. In the 1890s and early 1900s, much of the
remaining cutover land was purchased by the Hot Land Company which laid
out new communities and encouraged numerous European immigrants,
particularly Polish settlers, to begin farms in the Chase area.

FROSTVILLE

The community of Frostville in the Town of Maple Valley began to develop
in the 1870s, when a small group of settlers, including future Town of
Armstrong founder A.C. Frost, arrived in the area. Frost became the
settlement's first postmaster and requested that the post office be
named after himself, a technique used by self-promoters across the
midwest to insure their names and businesses were literally put on the
map. Much of Frostville's nineteenth century development was assisted by
a stagecoach route between Oconto and Mountain. Two small hotels, one
owned by the Magnus Arveson family and one operated by Mike Peterson,
catered to lumberjacks and other travelers. The railroad, however,
eventually bypassed Frostville going through what is now Suring, a blow
which eventually cost the small community most of its businesses.

GILLETT

Some of the history of Gillett has been discussed in earlier chapters,
including Rodney Gillett's logging activities and the Great Northern
Pail Company. Gillett's growth, however, stemmed from more than just
these two endeavors. Located near the Oconto River ten miles upstream of
Oconto Falls, virtually all of the river drives destined for, Oconto
passed Gillett. Not only did such drives entertain local residents, they
created demand for goods and services needed by the river drivers for
whom Gillett was often the first sizable settlement they had seen in
months. In 1883, Chicago & Northwestern built its line to Gillett and
made the settlement the terminal depot on the line. From 1883 to 1896,
when the line was extended through the remainder of the county, Gillett
had a significant advantage over other northern Oconto County
settlements. The city became the destination for supplies, equipment and
lumberjacks bound for logging camps to the north. The business of
transferring these cargoes off the trains and into the woods became a
mainstay of Gillett's economy. The rail connection also made the
community more attractive to industry. Within a few years the small
community could boast a flour mill, cheese factory, machine works,
brickyard, canning factory, bank, and a weekly newspaper, in addition to
the planing and saw mills and the pail factory.

HICKORY

This community helped support several pine era logging camps in the
woods to the north. Settlement began in earnest in the 1870s although
Pat Kelly is reputed to have landed in the area as early as 1855. The
community had a sawmill in the late 1800s, which, was initially run by
the Mills brothers and later by Jay Durham. By the 1890s, Hickory had
become eclipsed by the nearby resort community at Kelly Lake.

KELLY BROOK

Kelly Brook flows from Kelly Lake into the South Branch of the Oconto
River. The earliest Euro-American settlers to live along, this area
included people moving inland from the area destroyed by the Peshtigo
Fire. Like many other communities, most area residents participated in
logging during, the winters and farming during the summers. A portable
sawmill known as Kessler's was frequently used by farmers to cut their
own timber into lumber for their own building uses.

LAKEWOOD

Prior to the arrival of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad in 1896, the
Lakewood vicinity had already become a center of logging in the area
drained by McCauslin Brook, which had been logged by the Holt, Oconto,
and Eldred Companies since the late 1880s. Businesses supplying the
camps and providing services and entertainment for the lumberjacks soon
developed. Despite a 1921 fire that destroyed almost all of the
community's business district, Lakewood generally continued to prosper
into the 1930s. The closure of most of the remaining lumber camps in the
1930s, however, spelled hard times for the community which had few other
industries to support its tax base, and businesses.

One small side industry which had been operating in Lakewood since the
early 1900s did come into its prime in the years following World War II.
Small hunting and fishing resorts, including one at Maiden Lake owned by
John Anderson and one at Boot Lake owned by Hick McConley, had been
attracting serious hunters and fishermen from southern Wisconsin and
Chicago since the area first became accessible by rail. By the late
1940s the resort industry in the northwoods began to develop in earnest,
and Lakewood became a center of tourist activity.

LENA

Originally known as the Maple Valley settlement, Lena owes its location
to the railroads. The first white settlers in this vicinity arrived in
the late 1870s and consisted primarily of French Canadian immigrants. As
was common in other areas populated by French-Canadians during this era,
most of the Maple Valley residents engaged in small-scale logging,
concentrating their work and their homes along Jones Creek, a tributary
of the Little River. By 1879 the community  had become large enough to
support a post office and, since the name "Maple Valley" had already
been assigned to another Wisconsin post office, the recommendation of a
new name fell to Oconto Postmaster George R. Hall. Hall submitted the
first name of his future wife to the federal postmaster, and the choice
was approved. In 1882, the Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railway
extended a line through the town. The nearly straight north-south route
the railway chose passed close to the heart of the existing settlement.

By the time the railroad arrived, timber had become virtually exhausted
in most of the Little River watershed. As hotels, saloons and other
businesses began to be constructed near the new railway depot in the
early 1880s, the center of the settlement began to shift from the creek
to the depot. By 1902, the little village had an impressive six general
stores, one furniture store, two blacksmith shops, a jeweler, a barber,
two shoe stores, four hotels, and a total of seven saloons, four of
which were connected to the hotels. By this time the community also had
a sawmill, planing mill, and furniture factory as well as a large grist
mill and grain elevators. The grist mill and elevators, as well as the
proliferation of other businesses, resulted from the fact that the land,
surrounding Lena had been primarily converted to farmland by the turn of
the century. Such farms continued to power most of Lena's economy
through much of the twentieth century, as wheat and grain cultivation
were gradually replaced by the dairy farms seen throughout the area
today.