Highlights Archives
The Birth of Lake Delton
When Lake Delton disappeared on June 9, 2008, people naturally asked how an entire lake could disappear. The answer lies in the fact that the body of water around which much of Dells tourism revolves was man-made and has its own unique story.
After railroads bypassed the little town of Delton in the mid-19th century, its few business owners followed the cars down the line, and the village withered for several decades. A visitor in 1924 described the town as "only a name, utterly meaningless to the thousands who may pass through it during the [tourist] season..." But the very next year an imaginative Chicago millionaire named William J. Newman decided Delton had great potential.
Newman had started life as newsboy in the 1880s and by the 1920s had worked his way to being one of Chicago's better-known contractors, thought to be worth $30 million. He claimed that he'd always been too busy to take a vacation until he saw the beauty of the Dells, and that's when he decided to make tiny, overlooked Delton into an ultra-modern vacation resort.
He began by circling Dell Creek on a map and instructing a local agent to "buy up all that land within my pencil line." He brought engineers and laborers from Chicago to build a 30-foot high dam where the creek entered the Wisconsin River. They also piled a 1,000-foot dike alongside the dam and sculpted hundreds of acres of artificial shoreline into prime tourist real estate.
On July 27, 1927, Newman gave the order to let the pretty little valley fill up with lake water. At a banquet that night he said had invested $600,000 in the resort, and expected to put in another $400,000 before he was through.
By then his state-of-the-art Dell View Hotel was ready for occupancy. Promotional brochures like this one described its bathing beach, golf course, trout pond, fish hatchery, hiking and horse trails, baseball diamond, amusement park, family cottages, and its nightclub. For as little as $2.50 per day, or $20 per week for an entire cottage, visitors could have comfortable modern accommodations from which to explore the entire Dells region. A lock enabled small motorboats to travel into Lake Delton from the Wisconsin River, an airport welcomed wealthy tourists from around the nation, and "almost numberless" summer cottages and more substantial homes soon sprouted up along the lakeshore.
Unfortunately, all this happened on the eve of the Depression, and Newman's bubble quickly burst, during which time tourism declined and his contracting business slumped. A group of associates called the Lake Delton Development Co. assumed the resort's debts and kept it barely alive until the economy revived after World War II. That's when Tommy Bartlett arrived and turned the Dells into Wisconsin's premier tourist destination. Newman didn't live to see his dream reborn, though; he passed away in Chicago in 1943.
The disaster of June 9, 2008, was not caused by the failure of Newman's dam but rather by the collapse of County Highway A, along the 80-year-old earthen dike. Once breached by the swollen creek, the dike's banks melted away and were swept downstream, carrying three houses and portions of two others along with it. Improvements to the lake's dam intended to prevent a repeat of the natural disaster have already begun, and if all goes according to plan crews should be able to begin filling the lake this fall.
You can view historic pictures of Lake Delton in our online collection, Wisconsin Historical Images. Accounts of historic Wisconsin floods, like the one that destroyed Lake Delton, can be found through our online Dictionary of Wisconsin History.
[Sources: Besides the articles linked in the text above, we relied upon Michael J. Goc's excellent book, The Dells: An Illustrated History of Wisconsin Dells (Dells Country Historical Society and Michael J. Goc, 1999) and local newspaper accounts.
:: Posted August 1, 2008
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