ROADS

This week I was given a letter to read from Clyde Dwyer who used to live in this area and who knew my dad, historian Eldon Marple. Eldon apparently worked on the Ike Sileski farm long ago, cleaning brush in the back 80. In this letter Clyde remarked that dad was tracing a road from his dad's farm near Round Lake to our family farm.

Dad always had a fascination with maps and roads and would unexpectedly dart off the main highway in his vehicles down an old tote road or trail. He wrote an article about roads that was reprinted in his 1971 book "The Visitor Who Came To Stay".

He says that "An 1883 map made by the lumber interests showed only the above roads in Sawyer County. It is possible that wagonroads were cut along other routes but not considered good enough to be put on the map. Reserve must have had some kind of access to the south by this time, either by way of Chetac or the Couderay river."

How did he find this out? There are a number of research sources that are available at the Museum. We have old County Board proceedings, newspaper reports and town board reports for some townships. We have maps and photographs and a couple of good written reports of where roads went in Sawyer County.

"The Chippewa Road was surveyed and partly cut out in 1882 and graded in 1883-84. It began at the railroad at "the end of Dakota Avenue" in Hayward and climbed eastward over the hill near old "B", across the fields to Phalen's road, to the south side of Round Lake, thence along "B" to Little Round Lake and southward around it to Crane Lake and Hunter School to the junction at Kavanaghs." A first hand description of this road is found in Charles C. Hamilton's book "The North Woods Journal" as he traveled it in 1892.

Hamilton also described the road that Eldon discovered running through our property back in the late thirties which ran from Hayward eastward across the Namekagon at Newburg and then over O'Brien's Hill and out over the Round Lake flats. This road was referred to as the old road that connected with the Chippewa Road. Hamilton and his cohort used it as they rode in a sleigh to the lumber camps out in the Spider Lake and Lost Land Lakes area. Another correspondent Dad found said that "the road was very rough with stumps and rocks --through unbroken pine forests.."

Some parts of this road are still visible although they are rapidly disappearing under homes, roads and trees.