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Ladysmith, the Soo Line and the Cottonwood Ladysmith, once Flambeau Falls, Corbett, and Warner, is in Rusk County in the northwest. It has a great deal of charm and history. For our "six year-old" editor, the way the Soo Line Railroad intersects the Flambeau River and then intersects itself from four directions in the town center provided lots of fun. So did the two historic engines on display. And so did the town's claim that it has Wisconsin's largest cottonwood log on display. April 2, 2007
Let's first deal with the town's name. The town's claim to fame in its early years was that it was at the intersection of the Soo Line railroad and the Flambeau River. That the city was an intersection of river and rail is the foundation of this report. It was founded as Flambeau Falls in 1885 by surveyors who plated the area . Shortly after that, the Soo Line was extended through the town. Robert Corbett came to the area and set up the first sawmill, at a place he named Corbett Lake, southwest of town. The businesses of the area centered around his logging and lumbering for the next five years. He built a large barn, a boarding house, a hotel, a post office, and he became the first postmaster, at which time he renamed the town Corbett, the location of his sawmill. Unfortunately, his sawmill burned down. In 1891 the town was renamed Warner. We do not know why.
And Ladysmith is where the name stands. The town started to boom. Smith built a paper mill in 1902 and she was off and running.
With just that brief introduction, we've confirmed our initial instinct about its heritage as a rail and logging center. While logging is no longer what it used to be in the state, it is still important. Over 60 percent of Rusk County's land area, for example, is forest, mostly aspen and maple.
This is a nice aerial shot of the Ladysmith area courtesy of TerraServerUSA. You see the city. You see the Flambeau River, flowing from top to bottom. The yellow arrows point to rail lines. You can see where the lines cross (intersect) the Flambeau River. The bottom-most arrow shows where a second line intersects the first. The box marks where these lines intersect in the town center. We'll give you a better look at this intersection in a moment. The red arrow on the aerial image points to Memorial Park. We took a couple photos of the river and a section of the park on the river's edge. They follow.
As fortune would have it, we visited during the winter, in late February 2007. The snow with the snowmobile tracks mark the frozen surface of the Flambeau River at Memorial Park (red arrow on the aerial shot), looking upstream the river as it turns to the north. Another wider shot is shown below.
Wish we had been there when the snowmobiles were doing their thing! We took these from near the 3rd St. (Route 8) bridge coming into town. It was a very beautiful scene, and we wish we had taken more photos. You'll recall that we put a yellow box over the town center on the aerial shot to mark where the tracks converged. At the risk of sounding too much like kids, we found it exciting to visit that area and see the old terminal building and all the tracks converging with their attendant switches. It was easy to imagine what this must have been like back in the old days. We zoomed in on the aerial shot of this convergence area.
The yellow arrow points to the small rail depot in the city's center. You can see the tracks coming from each direction and converging here.
Here is the depot up close. Again, remembering that your editor still thinks he is six years old, well, we couldn't resist this close-up of the switch. It's one thing to have a switch on your model train set, it's another to see the real McCoy!
To those of us who are six, this is awesome. Another look at the terminal.
Next is an undated photo of the depot from the "good old days." Looks like there were two depot buildings at the time. The "tower" to the left, we believe, is a switching tower. Passengers are waiting!
Ladysmith Soo Line Depot, date unknown. Presented by Greg Krenzelok and his fact- and photo-filled web page on Ladysmith. The Soo Line has been the primary railway company to operate through here. It's lineage traces back to the Minneapolis, Sault Ste. Marie and Atlantic Railway, formed in 1883, designed to connect Minneapolis with Chicago. It took on the nickname "Soo" as a phonetic pronunciation of "Sault."
This is a nice map presented by wikipedia that shows most of the Soo Line system in its days. The green lines reflect what was the Wisconsin Central Railway part of the system, now belonging to CP. The red arrow points to the Ladysmith intersection. Greg Krenzelok operates a very good web page about Ladymsith which we commend to you. As we mentioned earlier, the Soo Line made its way through Ladysmith in 1885. , It was built by hand over many years. Ladysmith today boasts two historic Soo Line sets of equipment, "Old Smokey," a surviving steam locomotive, and "Sweet Soo," originally a demonstration diesel-electric. Let's take a look at these sweethearts.
This is "Old Smokey," under "protective custody." This is Soo Line Steam Engine Nr. 1011. She was built in 1920. Old Smokey is known as a "Mikado" engine, assigned to locomotives with a 2-8-2 wheel arrangement; two smaller wheels up front, eight (four each side) larger wheels under the main body, followed by two more smaller wheels. There's a photo on line at Railfan.net that gives you a better view, though the darn fence is still in the way. We'll give you two close-ups. This is when iron was iron. Just wonderful.
This type engine got the Japanese name "Mikado" because they were originally constructed by the Baldwin company in the late 19th century for Japan Railways, known as Nihon Tetsudo. As an aside, during WWII, many stopped calling this kind of engine the Mikado and called it the MacArthur! There is a good description of this lineage on line, "Mikado Type Locomotive." Old Smokey was powered by coal.
This is Ladysmith's visitor center, which also subs in as a railway museum. If you look closely on the other side of the center, you can see another Soo Line train, led by Engine Nr. 500, "Sweet Soo."
We present this zoomer because we wanted you to see the engine is clearly marked as Nr. 500. Our close-up in the next photos got too much sun reflection on the number and you cannot read it. Just want you to know we're not fibbing around here!
This is actually Locomotive 500-A, the first passenger diesel-electric on the Soo Line, a demonstration technology that served as a production model. This design ultimately meant the demise of steam engines like Old Smokey. Prior to Sweet Soo hitting the rails, all Soo Line trains were powered by steam.
Sweet Soo had 1,500 horses. She was built in 1949. She pulled passenger trains until 1960 and then moved to freight and snow plowing until her retirement in 1985.
The display in Ladysmith includes a US Rail Post Office-Railway Express Agency car Nr. 552, baggage passenger car 358, and first class coach 998. Take note of how beat up the engine and trailing cars are. We'll explain.
This brick building at the corner of Miner Avenue and West 3rd Street North was demolished. Photo credit: Todd Krause, Warning Coordination Meteorologist. Presented by NOAA's National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, Twin Cities, Minnesota. On September 2, 2002, Labor Day, Ladysmith was struck by a tornado that increased in ferocity from an F0 to F3 strength (severe damage, 158-206 mph winds) in a matter of moments. There was no warning. The tornado remained on the ground for about 15 minutes, moving at about 30 mph on a track that roughly followed Route 8. She passed through the city in two minutes, causing $21 million in damage and leaving 17 families homeless. A number of businesses were destroyed. All together, some 130-150 structures were damaged. Thankfully, no one was killed. Sweet Soo was not spared.
Here you see the damage done to a building near the train, and three cars from the train overturned. Engine 500 stood her ground (presented by Mason A. Clark).
This photo was taken by Ray Meyer during a visit to Ladysmith, Wisconsin shortly after the tornado passed through. You can see more of Ray's railroad photos at www.railpictures.net. Presented by Soo Line Historical and Technical Society. We'll switch gears now. Across from Memorial Park is a chunk of log, and she's called, "Wisconsin's largest cottonwood log."
Let's get closer.
And let's look at her from a different angle.
Okay, now what do we have here? We did not see any specifications on her. If you Google "largest cottonwood" you will be amazed at how many places and states claim to have the largest one. Over in South Dakota, they actually have a way you can nominate your cottonwood as the largest. Over there, they want you to measure the trunk circumference, vertical height, and average crown spread. Right now, they've got one with a 26 foot plus circumference, which this one most certainly is not. Iowa says they've got one with a 34 foot girth. Issaquena County, Mississippi, says it is the home of the world's largest cottonwood tree. Others say the county has the largest cottonwood tree plantation in the world. Moral of the story? Watch out for the claims! Well, most claims are for living trees still in the ground. It took us a bit to catch the line that in Ladysmith they're boasting that this is the state's largest cottonwood log. She's dead, while the others are still alive. The cottonwood has prospered in the Great plains, but it populates the US from the east coast to the Rocky Mountain states. It likes low-lying areas, near rivers, streams, swamps and bottomlands. It grows quickly, and in fact can invade fields. Its extensive root system can cause a lot of problems in cities. Both Kansas and Nebraska have named the cottonwood as the state tree.
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay says this is the known distribution of cottonwoods in the state; the counties in green. We shaded Rusk county in yellow to show you it is not among those states.
This photo of the Columbus Cottonwood was taken in 1979 by B-Wolfgang Hoffman, and was excerpted from Every Root and Anchor: Wisconsin's Famous and Historic Trees, by R. bruce Allison. It was presented on the internet by Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources. This Columbus Cottonwood was, when the photo was taken, and we hope still is, on the John Crumbie Farm near Columbus in Dodge County, in southeastern Wisconsin, in the Eastern Ridges and Lowlands Geographic Province. It had a circumference of about 26 feet when the photo was taken, and by 2005 it was 30 feet.
The Montello Cottonwood. Photo credit: Mary Francis Schjonberg (1982) excerpted from Every Root and Anchor: Wisconsin's Famous and Historic Trees, by R. bruce Allison. It was presented on the internet by Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources. It turns out the Columbus Cottonwood was not declared the state's largest. Rather, the largest is the Montello tree, in Marquette County, which lies adjacent to the northwest corner of Dodge County. Well, we're learning something about the cottonwood tree, but nothing about the Ladysmith display. About all we can say is that the town did say it was the largest cottonwood log, as opposed to cottonwood tree, the former implying dead, the latter alive. We're still working the problem and will append this as soon as we get more information. |
We highlight the great things about Wisconsin, which are also things that reflect so well on America --- its people, land, and culture.
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Ladysmith is in Rusk County, northwest Wisconsin. As soon as you enter the city center, you can sense that this was a big railway and lumber town in its day. It presently has about 4,000 residents.
Mr. Charles R. Smith led the 
The Menasha Wooden Ware Co. plant in Ladysmith burned to the ground in 1942. A picture of that fire, shown here, was presented by 
The Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) acquired control of it in 1888. The rail went through some acquisitions, mergers and the like, bringing in the Wisconsin Central Railway in 1908, and taking on the formal name, Soo Line Railroad in 1960. By 1992, CP Rail bought all the remaining stock. The Soo Line today is the US arm of CP.
