HAYWARD'S HISTORY COMES HOME

Hayward's history just got a little kick from a friend of history and former resident of the area. Clyde Dwyer, who grew up out on the Round Lake Flats and Brownlee Country, recently wrote back to me about his 1933 trip from Hayward, down the Mississippi to Baton Rouge, LA in a homemade boat. I am including a synopsis of this trip in his words.

I would also like to thank Bob Comstock for his response to our request for information about the Totogatic Falls that we ran last week. Bob says he spent a while at the bottom of the falls fishing with his brother-in-law. The falls were at the junction of the Totogatic and Duck Pond Road. I have to get up there to see it. Thanks, Bob!

Rowin', Rowin' Down the River by Clyde Dwyer
"So in the spring of 1932, with the able help of Felix Rondeau, we built a 14 foot flat-bottomed rowboat with the intent of going down the 3 rivers. A tricky part of building a boat, and getting all the angles just right, is getting a stem of the right shape, tapered and slanted on all sides and both ends. We went to Mr. Limeburner at the boat factory and asked if he could help. He simply handed us a stem already cut out. With that beginning, and some first class lumber from the Gillette Lumber Company, we proceeded carefully to build a very good boat. The materials, including paint, and oars, came to about $40. I had another $100. saved from my teacher's salary to finance the trip. School let out early that spring, so on May 23, 1932 with the boat on the water below the dam, the trip started, as planned.

Now as Sawyer County history that trip hardly counts, because the Namekagon flows only a few miles from Hayward before leaving the county. Anyway, the good boat survived a few rapids and other stresses and took me about 2000 miles as far as Baton Rouge, Lousiana, where I had to quit the river because I was sick with malaria. I passed word that the boat was for sale, for $5. Several big husky men, shrimp fishermen, came and looked at it with tears in their eyes. They wanted that boat very badly == but they didn't have $5. I sold it to the owner of a Texaco Service Station who wanted it for duck hunting on the bayous. This was when the Depression was most acute -- Hoover was still president, but Franklin Roosevelt was about to be nominated.

There is still a Sawyer County angle to the story. The boat, manufactured in Sawyer County, found a market in Louisiana, where it probably served for many years.

From Baton Rouge I went by bus to New Orleans, got a nice clean airy room in the French Quarter, for 25 cents a night. I stayed a week touring historic sites very intensively. In the Cabildo, the capitol of Louisiana, when the whole Mississippi valley was claimed by France, I saw hand-drawn maps made by French fur-traders and trappers and explorers. They were probably 200 or 250 years old. Primarily they were maps of river systems, canoe routes, in the Mississippi valley and the Great Lakes areas. Here they were preserved along with other historic artifacts in the Cabildo, now mainly a museum. But on at least one map with its network of rivers I could easily find (with no names lettered in) the Namekagon, the Chippewa and the Flambeau rivers. All Sawyer County waters drain to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, so the terminus of my river trip ended up with a spot of Sawyer County history after all.

Since it wouldn't be possible to row a boat back upstream to Hayward in any one summer, I found other transportation -- partly on top of an Illinois Central train of refrigerator cars, all loaded with bananas, and finally by Greyhound bus and little hitch-hiking."

Mr. Dwyer, adventurer and teacher, was also later a director of five corporations which made up the CUNA Mutual Group. As the manager of the Colorado Credit Union he organized more than 200 credit unions before he retired in 1969.

I would like to thank Mr. Dwyer for his contribution to our written area histories and I will be asking him for more of his story. If there are other folks who have the time to write their history, I appeal to them to do so and to help others transcribe their own histories.