History: Greenwood, Wisconsin (1909) Greenwood Gleaner 29 Jul 1909)

Contact: janet@wiclarkcountyhistory.org

----Source: 1909 Greenwood History, Originally published by Max C. Baldwin in the Greenwood Gleaner, Enhanced and edited and compiled with various photo collections by Janet & Stan Schwarze.  Copyright 2008

1909 Greenwood History

Originally published by Max C. Baldwin in the Greenwood Gleaner

Enhanced and edited and compiled by Janet & Stan Schwarze.

Copyright 2008

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Source: Greenwood Gleaner 10/14/1909

The Brush Dam at Greenwood Park.

Greenwood, Wisconsin Tourist Park.

While it is our intention to give our readers a history of Greenwood in detail, it is also our intention to present to our readers, interspersed with the history, pictures and details of the present day.  We are aware that this will not interest our home readers quite so much, perhaps, as the early history, but, nevertheless, the real beauties and advantages of our present day environments must not be overlooked.

The picture presented above is a good representation of one of the beautiful spots to be found in or near our city, and shows the driveway to the park and electric power house at the dam at Black River, whose turbulent waters it is that supplies our city with the brilliant electric light, the rays of which can be seen for miles away.

Aside from this river being a power, it is also a sporting place for the man with rod and reel, and which has furnished such sport from the time the first settler cleared his little tract of land to the present day.  It was on the west side of this river that the first land was cleared, and it was not until several years later that any move was made to produce what are now known as the best farming lands and diary farms to be found in Clark County or in Central Wisconsin.

The real beauty the above picture has to be seen to be appreciated, and Greenwood is noted for many such beautiful spots, pictures of which will appear in these columns as the weeks roll along, and which present a never tiresome beauty from the time that the leaves begin to sprout to the time when the chill of winter robs them of their mantle of green.

Even the transposition of this state of beauty again has its great advantages, for it is then that the forests abound with game that it is the delight of every true sportsman to bring to the ground.  Birds of every description, rabbits and squirrels, bear and deer, the season for the latter of which opens to the sportsmen on the 11^th day of November, .and even now the woods ring with the reports of the sportsmen’s guns and rifles.

Speaking of the forests and the Black River, again brings us back to early history, when the forest was not only an immense garden preserved for the sportsman, but was a means of a livelihood, in fact the only means at that time, for settlers who were all lumbermen, and the felling of mighty trees their daily toil.

In the winter of 1871-72, Black River was a scene that will never again be witnessed in this section.  That river, with its many tributaries was fill with 350,000,000 feet of lumber, and in the winter following, 1872-73, the labor in the woods had been improved upon to such an extent, and the lumbermen became so well acquainted with their duties that the output of logs increased to 8,000,000,000,000 feet of lumber, and which was the greatest output before or since in one winter.

It takes a great deal of imaginative power to think that this beautiful river, whose waters flow serenely on through the winter months nowadays beneath a shield of crystal ice and snow, once carried away the timber that stood in majestic beauty and grandeur, where now stands such a beautiful and thriving city, in addition to the thousands of acres of grassland and productive farms.

Source : Greenwood Gleaner 10/21/1909

First Shoe Shop in Greenwood, Wisconsin.

Elias Peterson.

Again taking up the old residents of Greenwood, we go back to the year 1871, when Elias Peterson came to Greenwood from Neillsville and built the house pictured above, in which he lived with his family and plied the trade of cobbler.

Elias Peterson is number among the few of our oldest settlers.  He was born in Norway in 1833, coming to America and Neillsville the 17^th of June, 1870, where he worked at the shoemaker’s trade until the 9^th of November, 1871, when he moved to Greenwood and built the house pictured above, and in which he successfully carried on his trade until 1878, when the building was burned to the ground.

This building stood on the east side of Main Street and occupied the site where the building now occupied by the Common Council now stands, and which is also the residence of Mr. Peterson and Mr. Amundson.

What a comparison it is to look at the picture above and notice the high board fence with the old fashioned swing gates, an unkempt, rough and stony roadway for Main Street and a narrow boardwalk, which at that time, was to be seen in a very few place only, to the present day, when our sidewalks are good and wide, the most of them either of cement or flagstone, our wide, graded Main Street with it curbs and sluice ways, beautiful shade trees and well kept lawns.

The second store to be built in Greenwood was built in 1872, by A. S. Eaton, a brother-in-law of Frank Brown, and who conducted a general hardware business, and is the store now owned by Rossman Steiger Co., who have remodeled the old building and are now considered one of the most prosperous business firms in our city, and who carry a large line of up-to-date merchandise of every description, besides a large and staple line of fancy groceries.

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