The Cornell Pulpwood Stacker

If you've been to Cornell, Wisconsin in Chippewa County you have, no doubt, seen the Cornell Pulpwood Stacker in Stacker Park alongside the Chippewa River. You might even have read the state's official marker telling you about it. We decided to see if there was anything we could add. So we took a look at the old Cornell Wood Products Co., the dam, and bumped into Ezra Cornell, Jean Brunet, Mule-Hide Manufacturing, some history about the logging industry in the region, and the Jeffris Family Foundation. All together, a delightful ride!

March 2, 2007

Anyone who has been to Cornell, Wisconsin in Chippewa County is sure to know about the Cornell Pulpwood Stacker. You simply cannot miss this behemoth!

The Wisconsin marker standing before the stacker gives its history.

To have a little fun, we set out to see what we could add to this explanation and the photo of the stacker.

Pulpwood Stacker, Cornell, Wisconsin. Presented by The Jeffris Family Foundation, a Wisconsin foundation dedicated to historic preservation.

We were fortunate early in our research to run across this old photo of the stacker at work. You can see the piles of sawed pulpwood chunks in the background. This big guy could tower over even those towering stacks and pile on more!

Map courtesy of Google Earth

Cornell is located at the confluence of the Chippewa and Fisher Rivers in northwest Wisconsin.

Aerial photo courtesy of terraserver-usa.com

We'll zoom in on the area marked by the red box.

Aerial photo courtesy of terraserver-usa.com

The technology employed by Terra-server, a Microsoft Company, in conjunction with the US Geologic Survey is incredible. We do not know at what altitude the photography is taken, but we can say it is taken from way up there. Yet you can zoom all the way in and by-golly, there you see it, the Cornell Pulpwood Stacker, plain as day. That's the Chippewa River on the left portion of the photo; the bridge is a wonderful bridge, very low to the water; the factory on the right is the Mule-Hide Manufacturing Co., Inc. plant at Cornell; and in the lower left quadrant, you can see a dam. We'll show you photos of each in order.

Cornell's bridge across the Chippewa River.

Mule-Hide Manufacturing Co., Inc., Cornell, Wisconsin

Northern States Power Co., Cornell Hydro dam

Now that we have the lay of the land around the stacker, let's get back to the stacker.

Looking up river from the site of the Brunet home at the Cornell Wood Products Company's Plant. Presented by Canku Ota, an online newsletter celebrating native America. The photois not the greatest resolution, but you can see the dam through the trees to your left. You are looking from the west side of the Chippewa River at the plant.

This is a real nice old photo of the Cornell Wood Products Co., presented by epodunk.com. You can see the dam to your left.

You will recall from reading the marker that the Cornell Wood Products Co. set up shop in 1912 (we have also seen 1911). It guaranteed steady employment for the area. Pulpwood came in by rail and was unloaded into a millpond. It was then sawed into two foot blocks. The Pulpwood Stacker carried the blocks or chunks upward on its v-shaped metal troughs and dumped them into large piles, like the ones you saw above in the old photo. The pulpwood was then placed in waterways and floated to a nearby paper mill. We're not sure we know how they did that; that would be a nice little research project.

The 45 degree angle was maintained by concrete counter weights. A 35 horsepower electric motor at the tip of the stacker drove the conveyor. The conveyor consisted of a one inch wire cable with iron discs. There is a catwalk on the side. Workers could climb up the catwalk to do maintenance.

Hydraulic systems eventually were brought in to replace the stacker.

The Cornell Wood Products Co. manufactured paper products, cardboard, and wallboard. It also published the local newspaper, the Chippewa Valley Courier. The Mule-Hide Manufacturing Co. which we showed you earlier, is headquartered in Beloit, Wisconsin. The Mule-Hide's Cornell plant can trace its lineage back to Cornell Wood Products. Today it produces asphalt dry felt and facer.

Central to the company's operation was the dam, built in 1911. As an aside, the hydro plant served by the dam was on the list to be abandoned.

But a project gathered steam to demolish and rebuild the old plant. She was modified to maintain a constant minimum river flow, increase the flood passage capacity, save energy with single small transformers for each generator, and use heat recovered from the generators for space heating. She's fully operational today.

We want to talk a little about Ezra Cornell and the logging industry way-back-when. Born in 1807, he founded Cornell University in Ithaca, New York as a land-grant university. It was chartered in 1865. He began looking for lands for the university. He often visited Jean Brunet's trading post and home in what came to be known as Brunet Falls, present-day Cornell.

Canuka Oka has a nice article about Jean Brunet. The Wisconsin Magazine of History, published in September 1921, has a very informative chapter on him as well.

Brunet was a Frenchman, born in 1791. H came to the US in 1818, settling in St. Louis. He is shown here from a crayon portrait owned by Ben Gauthier, and presented by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Employment moved him to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1820. He formed interests in the Chippewa Valley area, and moved to Chippewa Falls in 1828. He built a sawmill in Chippewa Falls that did not fare well, and then set up a trading post about 25 miles north of Chippewa Falls, near the present site of Cornell. The trading post also served as a stopping place, an inn, for woods and river workers. His trading post grew and became quite well known, a favorite. He built a cabin at a place he named Brunet Falls, now known as Cornell. He became a judge and a member of the territorial legislature in 1837.

In any event, Ezra Cornell visited frequently and befriended Brunet. Cornell bought vast tracts of land and waterpower, hoping to build mills and manufacture lumber as a means to finance Cornell University. He planned a village in the area but died before it could be built. Just before his death, he gave all his land, waterpower and the site of Brunet Falls to Cornell University as a rich endowment. Brunet Falls was later renamed Cornell.

The Paul Bunyan Logging Camp provides a nice history of lumbering in the Chippewa Valley. It flourished in the last half of the 1800s, and came to a near standstill as resources of the coveted pine were depleted in the early 20th century. Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls were the main centers for sawmills; the main markets were Hannibal and St. Louis, Missouri. The Bunyan web site says this about the waning days of the industry:

"Most Eau Claire mills closed down in the period of 1891-1902; mills in Menomonie and Chippewa Falls closed in 1901 and 1911 respectively. The closing down of the rafting works near the mouth of the Chippewa River in 1906 was proof that mills on the Mississippi, many of which had already stopped sawing in the 1890's, had largely drained their sources of good saw logs. The Daniel Shaw Lumber Company, one of the oldest firms in Eau Claire, which sent the last lumber raft down the Chippewa River in 1901, finally stopped its saws in 1912 because it had no more timber reserves. One rather small mill in Eau Claire which sawed mostly hardwood and hemlock closed in 1929; it was merely a faint echo of what was once a booming pine lumber industry."

This was a very common trend in Wisconsin and Michigan. Many forward looking men of the time could see that they were running out of good timber, so they began setting up companies that focused more on finished products than logging and sawing. The Cornell Wood Products Co. did that, and in the form of Mule-Hide Manufacturing, survives to this day. We encountered a similar story with Robbins Sports Surfaces over in White Lake, Wisconsin, in Langlade County. You might be interested in reading the story we put together.

Before closing, we earlier presented a photo of the old pulpwood stacker at work, and said we got the photo from the Jeffris Family Foundation. It is a Wisconsin foundation dedicated to historic preservation, and it provided some of the funds used to restore and maintain the pulpwood stacker in Cornell. If you do a Google search on this foundation, you will be surprised to see how many projects this foundation has funded and committed it is to its mission. It is located in Janesville, Wisconsin in Rock County. We talked by phone to its president, Tom Jeffris, and he was kind enough to send us the foundation's brochure. On the inside cover is a quote worth repeating:

"A city without old buildings is like a man without a memory."

Those were the words of Graeme Shankland, a city planner in Dublin, Ireland.

We presented an article back in September 2005 that tried to say something similar: "Historic buildings make towns unique." In that article, we quoted Mary Jane Hettinga, the former executive director of the Marathon County Historical Society. She said this in an editorial published by the Wausau Daily Herald:

"The past is important because the past is responsible for everything we are today. It is our individual collective identity. Today things have changed. Almost every town looks the same. They are no longer unique, unless they have retained some of the historic heritage. It is the uniqueness of the historic buildings that make each place individual."

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Photo credits: Ed Marek, Marek Enterprise unless otherwise noted.