Green Bay: State & Church

Posted on September 14, 2021 by admin

The town of Green Bay wasn’t our primary destination over Labor Day weekend, but when I stay somewhere, I like to look around if I can. Never know what you’ll see, such as a bit of history of the Green Bay Packers.

Moreover, the sign said there’s a Packers Heritage Trail. A little further investigation reveals information posted by the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay.

“The Packers Heritage Trail consists of 22 commemorative bronze plaques. The trailhead is located at the front entrance of the Neville Public Museum. On the journey, you can see Curly Lambeau’s childhood home, as well as the birthplace of the Packers. Visit the train depot that sent off the team for road games. Stop at City Stadium, where the Packers played home games from 1925 to 1956. You will also see the hotel that Vince Lombardi held his first press conference as Head Coach, and the church where he attended daily mass.”

By golly, that’s quite a trail. The plaque pictured above is on the grounds of the Brown County Courthouse, itself a sight to see.

A Charles E. Bell design. He did other courthouses around the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the Montana and South Dakota state capitols. This courthouse dates from 1910, and with its Beaux Arts-ness, reminded me of the Palacio de Belles Artes in Mexico City.

Also on the courthouse grounds is “The Spirit of the Northwest,” by Sidney Bedore and dedicated in June 1931. Looks good for being out in the Wisconsin elements for 90 years; maybe it’s been restored at some point.
The trio are an unnamed Fox Indian, Jesuit missionary Claude Allouez, who arrived in the area in 1669, and Nicholas Perrot, an explorer who arrived about 1664 and claimed the lands around the bay for the King of France.

One more: an unusually modest memorial to the Civil War veterans of Brown County. Late, too — erected in 1934 by the Woman’s Relief Corps No. 91 of the GAR.

A few blocks away from the courthouse is St. Francis Xavier Cathedral, the cathedral church of the Diocese of Green Bay, completed in 1881.

“The original cost of $35,000 was contributed by the immigrant population of the area, the Bavarian Mission Society in Germany, including a donation from King Ludwig I and friends of Bishop Francis Xavier Krautbauer, the second Bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay,” the cathedral web site says. “The architecture is Romanesque in form and was modeled on the Ludwigkirche in Munich, Germany, where then Msgr. Krautbauer was pastor before immigrating to the United States.

“Bishop Krautbauer is interred under a granite slab in the floor at the Bishop Wycislo entrance. A 40-by-25-foot mural entitled ‘The Crucifixion’ is painted on the rear wall of the sanctuary. It was painted in 1883 by Johann Schmitt, a German immigrant.”

Egg Harbor, Wisconsin

Posted on September 13, 2021 by admin

Here’s a short and incomplete list of businesses you can find on the few streets of Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, in Door County: Be Beauty, Buttercups Coffee, Fat Louie’s Olive Oil Co., The Fireside (restaurant), Greens N Grains Natural Food Market & Cafe, Grumpy’s Ice Cream and Popcorn, Hatch Distilling Co., Plum Bottom Gallery, and Shipwrecked Brew Pub & Restaurant.

Businesses aiming to capture out-of-town dollars, in other words. We dropped a few ourselves. We arrived just after noon on September 5, enjoying clear skies and warm temps, and by mere luck found a parking space on the main street (Wisconsin 42). On a slight rise at that spot, a little set back from the road, is Macready Artisan Bread.

With cast iron tables and chairs, it looked like a good place for an al fresco lunch, which it turned out to be. Good sandwiches: a braunschweiger and an egg salad. As Wiki says, braunschweiger refers to pork liver sausage in North America. At least it did in Egg Harbor that day.

As you’d expect, main street in Egg Harbor sports some handsome buildings and landscaping.

A park adjoining the street leads to the lakeshore.

The shore is mostly given over to a marina.

“The Seafarer” by Jeffrey Olson, 2012. He’s a local artist.

There’s also this, with a sort-of egg on top.

Just what is this kind of multi-directional sign post called, anyway? Who built the first one? How many are there?

Google Image “multi-directional sign post” and you’ll get a lot of images, so maybe that’s it. Seems a little too bland, though. This fellow, who built one, calls it a travel signpost. Also bland, but maybe current in the UK.

There’s whimsy to many (most?) of them, including the one in Egg Harbor. One sign points upward — the (sort of) direction of the International Space Station. Then there’s one pointing to Santa’s House, presumably due north, and a non-directional, still unfulfilled wish that Covid-19 disappear.

That reminded me that I saw a different take on such signs in Fairbanks.

Alaskan destinations up top, but also international ones, which are listed on the post itself on the side not visible in my picture. As if you need more evidence that Fairbanks, unlike Egg Harbor, is a long way from everywhere.

Door County Vistas

Posted on September 9, 2021 by admin

I’ve read that Peninsula State Park in Door County, one of four state parks on the peninsula, is a good one. And as the name says, it’s a peninsula on the peninsula. I have to like that.

“Deeded to the state in 1909, Peninsula is the second-oldest park in the state system, and with no statistical manipulation, the park is numero uno in usage in Wisconsin — with good reason,” Moon Handbooks Wisconsin says. “The peninsula, rising 180 feet above the lake at Eagle Bluff, is a manifestation of the western edge of the Niagara Escarpment, here a steep and variegated series of headlands and reentrants.”

A pretty and popular place, in other words. On the Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, so popular that when we got to one of the entrances, we — and ever other car — were turned away. “The park is full,” a ranger told us. That must have meant the parking lots, but in any case we had to move on.

On to Plan B: a few miles up the coast on Green Bay is Ellison Bluff County Park, hugging a smaller peninsula not far from the town of Ellison Bay. As a mere county park, it has a couple of advantages: no crowds, no fee to get in. But it had the walk and the vista that we were looking for.

First, the walk, an easy path through shady woods on a warm summer day.

The path loops through the property. A separate short boardwalk off the parking lot goes to an overlook, about 100 feet over the water.

A vista straight across Green Bay to the Upper Peninsula on the horizon, about 20 miles distant, with the wind off the water whipping the trees around.

I couldn’t help thinking of the vista from Polychrome Pass in Denali NP only a little more than a month earlier. Different, yet its enormous sweep is compellingly similar, as if a vast valley were flooded to form Green Bay. Which is, of course, exactly what it is. To encounter two such vistas in the same year — well, that makes for a good year.

Not far north of Ellison is Bluff Headlands County Park. For no good reason, I was expected a similar set up, a trail and a short walk to a view. But no: the park includes a longish trail to the view.

Actually, it wasn’t that long. Half a mile, if that. It started easy enough.

The trail followed a heavily forested cliff edge. Soon the trees didn’t just lord over the ground, their roots were everywhere underfoot, with plenty of rocky patches too. The pictures below weren’t along the trail; the trail went through them.

Every step, an opportunity to take an injurious tumble. That was me, thinking more than ever like an old man. The dog didn’t mind the path — she’s near the ground, after all — and so pulled me along, with more energy than you’d expect from an old dog. Still, I believe her pull helped me keep my balance.

Eventually, we got to an opening in the trees, with a view from the cliff. It was about as spectacular as the one from Ellison, just harder to get to.

The fellow sitting at cliffside was reading a book. I didn’t ask what, since I didn’t want to bother him — or risk startling him.

Door County Shores

Posted on September 8, 2021 by admin

In the outskirts of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, county seat and largest town on the Door Peninsula, is a simple sign on state highway 42/57 that says LIGHTHOUSES, with an arrow pointing to a side road. After that, you’re on your own if you want to see those structures, which are on the Sturgeon Bay Canal where it meets the Lake Michigan.

Getting to them involved a couple of wrong turns and passing by the intriguing side road to Leif Everson Observatory, marked by what looks like a model of the planet Neptune, with its Great Dark Spot and some Poseidean moons.

Eventually we found ourselves near the shore — and the lighthouses, but also a pier jutting out into the lake.

Besides the road and a small parking lot, most of the area is divided between private property and a Coast Guard station. Many signs warn you not to trespass on either, which hints at a history of miscreants showing up and making messes.

The Coast Guard station has a light: the Sturgeon Bay Canal Light, vintage 1899.
A little ungainly, but I suppose it gets the job done.

The concrete pier is a bit crumbled in places and its iron-and-plank superstructure is a bit rusty in places. The pier is open to the public. To get there, one treads the “public” half of a narrow footpath. More signs warn you not to step off it.

So if you are a mind to, you can go down the pier. We did.

The pier offers some nice views, including the Coast Guard facility and the private shoreline.

Even better is a view of the other light, Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal Pierhead Lighthouse, which is the older of the two, dating from 1881.

The light is on a rock island of its own, connected to the pier by the iron superstructure. In other pictures, the light is bright red, and maybe it still is, in the right light. On Sunday morning, it looked dull red, but even so considerably more handsome than the Coast Guard’s tower.

One more thing: a survey marker way out near the tip of the pier.

Those two lights satisfied the tourist requirement that you visit at least one lighthouse in Door County. So on we went from there, pausing briefly in Sturgeon Bay for gas, and then up the other coastline — the two aren’t very far apart — to the 14-acre Frank E. Murphy County Park on Horseshoe Bay, a small patch of Green Bay.

It’s a pleasant little park, grassland and a beach.

A homely concrete pier juts out into Horseshoe Bay, and we went there too, taking in the wind and the waves.

Frank E. Murphy was a Door County lumberman, cattle breeder and fruit grower in the decades on either side of 1900, according to a sign at the entrance. His family donated the land for the park in 1934.

Another fact on the sign: the man credited with naming Horseshoe Bay in 1842 was Increase Claflin Jr. (1795-1868, pictured). His Find a Grave bio is just a touch hagiographic: “Increase Claflin was a splendid type of a pioneer, a most auspicious forerunner of Door County’s men. He was sturdy, reliable, fearless, intelligent, loyal and self-sacrificing. In the rare quality of his ancestors as well as in his own noble manhood, Door County could ask for no truer type of American virtue.”

The text sounds suspiciously like it was lifted from a 19th-century bio of the man, maybe a newspaper obit, as a reasonable use of the public domain.

Anyway, Increase needs to be brought back as a first name. Perhaps Gen Z parents will take it up.

Door County Dash

Posted on September 7, 2021 by admin

This is a map of the Niagara Escarpment, borrowed from Wikimedia. I can’t vouch for the details, but the general outline seems to agree with other maps I’ve seen.

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited the east end of the escarpment, where big water flows over a big cliff. Over Labor Day weekend, we visited the west end of the escarpment, where big cliffs overlook big water. That is, Door County, Wisconsin, surrounded by Green Bay and Lake Michigan proper. (The map also fills me with notions of visiting the Bruce Peninsula and Manitoulin Island, though those would be a mite harder to reach from metro Chicago.)

Not our first trip to Door, of course. And maybe not the best time to visit the Door peninsula, since crowds converge there on summer weekends. Still, the place holds its crowds fairly well, except for the narrow streets passing through such towns as Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Sister Bay and Bailey’s Harbor.

We drove to the town of Green Bay on Saturday, leaving not particularly early, eating takeout Chinese for lunch at an obscure park in Germantown, a far north suburb of Milwaukee, where Yuriko thought there ought to be German food. There is a place called Von Rothenburg Bier Stube there, but we weren’t in the market for that.

West of Germantown is Hubertus, home of Holy Hill Basilica and National Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, which we visited. We arrived in the town of Green Bay late in the afternoon and settled in for takeout pizza from a joint with an Irish name.

Our visit to Door County on Sunday was essentially a day trip from Green Bay. It might be better someday to actually pay Door County prices and stay in Door County, to allow more time to explore the place. The county isn’t very large — only 482 square miles of land — but it packs in the tourist attractions, natural and manmade. Tourists have been coming for a long time, with resorts first developed just after the Civil War, and the industry really kicking into gear with better roads and cars of the 1920s.

My plans were vague, and we often went where whim took us, such as the lighthouse and pier at the south end of the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal, a walk along a beach, lunch in the crowded but still pleasant Egg Harbor, and visits along the shore of Green Bay, with its sweeping vistas.

We made it to the tip of the peninsula — I’d long wanted to go there — where the ferry disembarks for Washington Island, but the day was running out, so we didn’t go there. That would be a fitting destination from a base camp closer than the town of Green Bay, I think.

On Monday, we spent part of the morning poking around the town of Green Bay, including a look at a few churches, cemeteries, and city hall. Afterward, the drive back was straightforward and not that interesting, though we had another nice lunch in suburban Milwaukee.

All in all, a good little trip. Saw a few things you can only see in Wisconsin, such as this Green Bay item (maybe made here).For the record, that cheesehead hat was taped onto the dinosaur’s head.

12 Pix 20

Posted on December 22, 2020 by admin

Back to publishing on January 3, 2021, or so. Who knows, there might be snow by then.

Twelve pictures to wrap up the year, as I have in 2016 and 2017and 2018 and 2019, though this time around I won’t bother with a rigid, one-picture-for-each-month structure. They will be roughly chronological.

Chicago
Los Angeles

Azusa, California

Schaumburg, IllinoisWest Dundee, Illinois

Schaumburg, Illinois

Baraboo, WisconsinBeverly Shores, Indiana

Carbondale, IllinoisSchaumburg, IllinoisChicago

One bad apple

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all.

Thursday Postscripts

Posted on September 24, 2020 by admin

Beverly Shores, Indiana, pop. 600 or so, is completely surrounded by Indiana Dunes NP. One way to get to the town, or the national park for that matter, is to take the South Shore Line from Chicago. If you do so, the place to get off is at Beverly Shores station.
Since its renovation in recent years, the station also includes an art galley. Closed when we got there.
When I’m pretty sure no train is nearby, it’s hard to resist a shot of the rails converging off toward the horizon. The rails go on forever in a silver trail to the setting sun.

Arthur Gerber designed the station in 1929. “Gerber was the staff architect for Samuel Insull, who then owned the line, [and] it is one of several examples of an ‘Insull Spanish’ style used on the rail line,” writes historic preservationist Susie Trexler.

Insull must have been fond of the style. “Say, Gerber, old man, whip up some more Spanish-style stations.”

After all, look at his mansion, which is generally classified as Mediterranean.
Better known as the Cuneo Mansion, for its second owner, but utility magnate Insull had it built. Above are shots I took when we visited. When was that? I couldn’t remember till I checked. Ten years ago.

The fellow interred in the Beyond the Vines columbarium at Bohemian National Cemetery is Benjamin George Maldonado, 34, who died unexpectedly of an undiscovered brain cyst, according to a column in the Tribune by John Kass.

“The priest gave a great eulogy of Ben,” Kass quoted Maldonado’s widow as saying. “His urn had a baseball on top. We all signed the baseball that went into the wall. There were sandwiches and sodas, and we had a picnic. He was so young. A headstone would have been so somber.”

The man who created the columbarium, whom Kass also quotes, was Dennis Mascari. He’s interred there now as well.

My brother Jay is skeptical that the parade pictures posted on Sunday were taken in September 1967, he told me by email. Two reasons: yellow foliage and people wearing a little more than they would on a very warm Texas September day.

As Jay points out, mid-September is far too early for changing leaves. But I color corrected the images. In the original, faded now for more than half a century, it’s hard to tell whether the leaves are green or yellow.

In the color corrected version, some of the leaves look green, some yellow. I don’t know whether that reflects the original color of the leaves, or the color-correction process itself. So I’d say the leaf colors are inconclusive.

The clothes are a more compelling argument. The kid on the top of the station wagon is indeed wearing more than any kid would in high 80s temps, and so is the woman on the flatbed, and maybe the men leaning against that vehicle, who seem to be wearing long-sleeve shirts or jackets. Of course, the members of the band would wear their uniforms no matter how hot it was. I remember some sweaty times in my own band uniform, about 10 years later.

“When is it then?” Jay writes. “I don’t know. I know that the Denton HS band was one of many high school bands that participated in the NTSU homecoming — which sources online say was November 11, 1967 — but: (1) I have no recollection of a parade, only of marching in formation on the playing field, and (2) if there was a parade, it seems odd that it’s heading away from NTSU rather than towards it, as it appears to be the case here. Of course, the fact that I don’t remember a parade isn’t dispositive, nor is the direction.”

Ah, well. Guess we’ll never know for sure. The lesson here is to write the date on the back of physical prints. But even that is an increasingly obsolete bit of advice.

Here’s Nathan Myrick, founder of La Crosse, Wisconsin, whose for-certain public domain image I obtained. Founding a town is more than most people get to do.

It occurs to me that I’ve now visited all of the 15 largest municipalities in Wisconsin, and maybe the 20 largest, though I don’t remember visiting New Berlin, but as a Milwaukee suburb, it’s likely that I passed through.

Is that important for some reason? No. But for a state in which I’ve never lived, I’ve been there a lot. As an old Chicago friend of mine once said, one of the amenities of living in the Chicago area is access to Wisconsin. I agree.

FAST Fiberglass

Posted on September 17, 2020 by admin

Also not far out of Sparta, Wisconsin, is property belonging to FAST Fiberglass, until recently known as FAST Corp., which specializes in fabricating fiberglass statues.

Or, as its web site puts it [all sic]: “The next time you see a life size elephant at a gas station, 8 foot high cheese mouse at the store, 6 foot frog water slide, 20 foot high flamingo, or 3-story eyeball you can bet the piece originated in Sparta Wisconsin at FAST Fiberglass.”

This concerns me how? Turns out that the property is also an informal tourist destination. As a fairly informal tourist, the prospect of visiting the place intrigued me. Not the manufacturing facilities themselves, but rather the large patch of land where the company stashes the molds it uses to make statues.
A large sign welcomes visitors, but warns them as well.
We heeded those warnings and didn’t climb the molds or disturb bee or wasp colonies. We merely looked around the weedy dumping ground, and were well rewarded by the whimsy of it all.Look! A Big Boy. I explained to Ann what that was.
More oddities.

A muffler man? Maybe.
Old Scratch.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe/She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do?
Also, the field sported a large number of animal casts.

Including animal shapes made into slides — the kind you see at kiddie pools.

FAST Fiberglass was our last destination for our recent Labor Day weekend jaunt, and I’d say we ended things on an odd but satisfying high note.

Paul & Matilda Wegner Grotto County Park

Posted on September 16, 2020 by admin

Less than 10 miles from Sparta, Wisconsin, along a state highway, is the Paul & Matilda Wegner Grotto County Park, the county being Monroe, whose seat is Sparta. We arrived there early in the afternoon of September 6. Here’s the entrance to the grotto.
It isn’t a grotto in the sense of being a natural or artificial cave, or any other sense that I know of. Call it a sculpture garden? The Wegners didn’t sculpt, except in the sense of creating distinct three-dimensional shapes from raw materials. Anyway, the grounds feature naïve works created by German immigrant farmers, mostly made of concrete and shards of glass and other shiny bits.

Note the texture of one of their works up close. Look but don’t touch, unless you want a wound.
The Kohler Foundation tells the story: “In the summer of 1929 on their farm, [the Wegners] began building fences, and within a year their first sculpture: a twelve-foot concrete facsimile of the celebrated Bremen ocean liner.

“The building continued from 1929 until after 1936, primarily during the summer months; however, many pieces, including the walls of the church, were created in Bangor [Wis.] during the winter and then transported to the farm for installation. The extraordinary sculpture environment slowly grew over these years to include a fanciful American flag, a giant reproduction of the Wegners’ 50th anniversary cake, and a glass-encrusted birdhouse.

“Other constructions were religious in nature. The magnificent Prayer Garden, Glass Church, and Peace Monument once served as places for quiet reflection, wedding ceremonies, public preaching, family picnics, and community gatherings. Still surrounding the yard is an ornate fence with a concrete archway, which spells out the word ‘Home’ in crushed black glass.”

Here’s the Bremen, inspired by a postcard picture.
The Glass Church.
People get married there from time to time, according to the plaque (in front of the structure would be my guess), and Paul Wegner’s funeral was held there as well. The back of the Glass Church:
More structures. First is “Jabob’s Well.”

A sign outside the grotto said that a cemetery with glass-and-stone memorials wasn’t far away. So it was: a spare little rural cemetery.

Glass is part of the Wegners’ memorial.
Along with a few others. Guess they liked the style.
What does the Kohler Foundation have to do with the site where old German farmers deciding to create glass-and-stone shapes? Kohler is plumbing money and based in Wisconsin. At some point in its existence, the foundation decided to find and preserve outsider art installations such as the Wegner Grotto which, in fact, was one of its conservation projects.

“Since the late 1970s, the preservation of folk architecture and art environments has been a major thrust of Kohler Foundation,” the foundation explains, including a list of sites on the page. Many but not all are in Wisconsin.

“After a site has been either acquired by or gifted to us, local and expert partners selected by Kohler Foundation employ museum-quality conservation techniques to preserve the site. The site is then gifted to a museum, municipality, university, or other nonprofit institution for the education and enjoyment of the public. We then work with the recipient and local community to ensure the future success of the project.”

Sparta, Wisconsin

Posted on September 15, 2020 by admin

After leaving La Crosse on September 6, we spent time driving some picturesque Driftless Area roads, but soon we were feeling the pull of lunch. That is, we wanted to find a place to eat. We arrived in Sparta, Wisconsin, and started looking around. Doing it the old fashioned way — not with a search engine or an electronic map, but by keeping our eyes peeled as we drove.

Sometimes you get lucky. Right in the middle of town, on W. Wisconsin St., we found Ruby’s. We stopped right away.

Ruby’s has a most traditional drive-in menu, with one exception.
Between the three of us, we ate a satisfying drive-in lunch: a chili cheese & onion dog, a grilled cheese sandwich, onion rings, cheese curds (this is Wisconsin, after all) and the unusual item: a walnut burger.

As the menu explains, it’s “seasoned walnut & cheese patty with lettuce, tomato, pickle & honey mustard on a whole wheat kaiser bun.” I had a bite. It was tasty. The menu also notes “the Historic Trempealeau Hotel” above the Walnut Burger description, presumably as its provenance. Naturally, I looked it up. The boutique hotel, dating from the late 19th century, is still around, on the Mississippi upriver some distance from La Crosse in a burg called Trempealeau.

Rudy’s also sports a fiberglass statue. A bear on roller skates.
Unlike Gambrinus, I suspect the bear is holding a mug of root beer. Rudy’s has a special section for that on the menu, including a root beer float, but not beer.

While we ate, I noticed another statue, much larger — or at least taller — than the bear. It was across the street catercorner from Ruby’s, in a park.

Of course I had to go see that, after we ate. The Sparta Downtown River Trail runs through the park.
At this point, a footbridge crosses the small La Crosse River, which eventually empties into the Mississippi in the city of that name.
On the other side of the bridge is the statue I saw from across the street.

It has a name: Ben Bikin’. Sparta, pop. just shy of 10,000, is the self-proclaimed Bicycling Capital of America. A nice local distinction. I imagined that Sparta might have been a bicycle manufacturing town at one time, maybe as long ago as the bicycle craze of the ’90s that popularized the modern bike. The 1890s, that is.

But no. “Sparta’s claim as the ‘Bicycling Capital of America’ is based upon the first rail bed in Wisconsin to be converted to bike trails between Sparta and Elroy,” says the city’s web site. That trail was completed in 1967, so fanciful penny-farthing statues aside, the town sobriquet isn’t that old.

In fact, I don’t remember seeing any more bicycles in Sparta, or dedicated bike lanes, than in any other small town. That is to say, not many. There is, however, a bicycle museum in town.

More than that: the Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bicycle Museum. I knew it was closed, but we drove by before leaving town anyway.
Slayton, the only Mercury astronaut who never flew in a Mercury capsule, grew up on a farm near Sparta. So he’s the town’s other attenuated claim to fame. The thinking must have been, best to combine the two into one (slightly) larger museum. Well, why not?

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Wisconsin