Odd Wisconsin Archive
Wisconsin Ghost Town
In 1837 two entrepreneurs erected a grist mill on the banks of the Wisconsin just below Portage. Theirs was the only mill for 40 miles and pioneer settlers from Baraboo to Columbus and south to Madison carted their wheat to the hamlet of Dekorra so it could be ground into flour.
Soon the lumberjacks rafting logs from Wausau to St. Louis began stopping there, too, and a thriving village sprung up to meet their needs. In the 1840s a hotel, a blacksmith, shoe shops, a general store, and taverns opened (there's no mention of a church). The lumberjacks would trade logs to the locals, who would drag them by ox-cart to all the blossoming towns of south central Wisconsin, where they'd be transformed into homes, shops, schools, and churches. The local farmers would in turn trade barrels of freshly ground flour to the lumberjacks, who would row and pole them north to the pineries, where they would be turned into flapjacks and bread loaves. Dekorra's residents, many of them Scottish, brought the sport of curling (which we'll soon be watching in next month's winter Olympics) to Wisconsin. For a generation Dekorra flourished.
But then the railroad came. Or rather, it didn't: the locomotives by-passed Dekorra in the 1850s to run through Portage instead. From Portage, goods could be shipped by rail to Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago. They could be floated by boat down the Fox River to Oshkosh, Appleton and Green Bay, or in the opposite direction down the Wisconsin -- right past Dekorra -- to St. Louis. Young people moved away from Dekorra, shops closed, and even the mill shut down. Fifty years later an old woman, Alice Allen, was almost the only resident of the deserted village. After she gave this interview about 1920, Dekorra became a symbol of all the deserted Wisconsin settlements that had not lived into the modern era. Artists came to draw its ancient well, which was nearly all that survived of the once-thriving pioneer town.
Today, Dekorra is a crossroads village on the south bank of the Wisconsin about two miles east of the I-90 bridge. In the last generation its population has begun growing again, and today it boasts more than 2,000 residents. Next time you whisk past on your trip north or south, look beyond the Wisconsin's sandbars toward the east and imagine the hopes and dreams of the people of Dekorra 150 years ago, or the lonely life of Mrs. Allen, as she lived on alone in a tiny cottage as her friends and neighbors all departed.
:: Posted in Odd Lives on January 8, 2006
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