Event Calendar

Part History and part memoir, in this presentation, Tom Stanley shares the story of Ashland's pulp hoists in the context of Wisconsin's long and colorful forest history. Why was pulpwood rafted, hoisted and sent elsewhere? Why Ashland? How did the hoist operate? Who were the workers? What were the dangers? Why did hoisting end in…

Eight siblings of the Bonifas family immigrated from Luxembourg to the Garden Peninsula in upper Michigan. They began working in lumber camps and slowly worked their way up to owning and operating one of the largest lumber operations in the upper peninsula. We will spend some time looking at their foray into Wisconsin where they…

Prentice Hydraulics had its beginning in 1945 in the Heikkinen Machine Shop near the village of Prentice. Leo Heikkinen repaired and welded heavy equipment, fabricated steel, and manufactured mechanical jammers there. To meet the needs of customers, Leo designed special innovations on their jammers. These improvements attracted attention and soon requests for custom built jammers…

A History of Lumberjacks, Log Drives, and Sawdust Cities in WisconsinFor more than half a century, logging in Wisconsin’s Northwoods provided jobs for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites and impacted the lives of nearly every Wisconsin citizen. When the White Pine Was King transports readers back to the lumber boom era and reveals how the…

William Henry Upham arrived in Marshfield in 1878, to establish a sawmill and general merchandise store. In the years that followed, Upham became known to many as Marshfield's most illustrious citizen. His activities as a lumberman are only a small part of his remarkable life story. This presentation will share stories that demonstrate why Upham…

Discover how forestry advocates are collaborating to create the Northwoods Forest History Museum. DNR, Manitowish Waters Historical Society, North Lakeland Discovery Center, Youth Conservation Corps Alumni, and folks who prize our amazing forests are leading the museum project. In this presentation learn about the museum’s design and exhibit spaces including the digital display extensions for…

Ignited by a single match on April 30, 1977, the Five Mile Tower Fire raged out of control for seventeen hours. It would be one of the largest wildland fires in Wisconsin history, ultimately destroying more than 13,000 acres of land and sixty-three buildings. Based on his own experiences during the long battle, plus dozens…

Sometime around 1912, a group of men engaged in a log drive posed for some photographs. One of the resulting pictures has been identified ever since as the "last log drive" on the Wisconsin River. In this program, Ben Clark dives into the history of these photographs, to consider whether it is indeed the "last…

 In 1992, the late Jacques Vallier, a retired high school biology teacher, longtime collector of logging memorabilia, and member of the Forest History Association of Wisconsin donated his collection of logging photographs to the UWSP archives. The collection contains scenes of the interiors and exteriors of camp buildings and sawmills, locomotives, lumberjacks at work and…