Brokaw

45° 01' 42" N | 89° 39' 23" W

The Wausau Boom Company dammed the river between 1880-81. Originally, it slowed the Wisconsin river flow above Wausau to "facilitate the dividing of logs..." It didn't become a power plant for the Wausau Paper Mill Company until 1899. A town grew up around the mill. Brokaw was founded by Norman Brokaw in 1903. The workers that didn't live in Brokaw took the "Scud" special Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul train. See "The Village of Brokaw" from 1913 History of Marathon County by Louis Marchetti (Wausau, WI). pg: 523-526. web. [wiclarkcountyhistory.org].

Wausau Paper sold the mill to Starboard Value, described by Industry analysts, INC as "an activist Manhattan hedge fund with a record of pushing boards to change directors." The dam was removed and the venture capitalists parted out the factory.

Brokaw was merged with Maine on 1 October 2018.

William F. Stark Wisconsin, River of History William F. Stark, 1988. pg 4, 5, 295, 297, 307, 337.

Stark grew up canoeing on the river with his dad, Howard (an Badger footballer--and tackle for the Racine Legion in 1923, Navy Corpsman and Milwaukee Public Library central building patron). Stark wrote some other Wisconsin histories between 1952 and 1988 about Pine Lake, ghost towns and the Blackhawk Trail. He also wrote a memoir of his 1948 trip around Cape Horn in a windjammer. He died in 2003. While William went to Dartmouth, he lists Frederick Jackson Turner as a "Giant of the [Wisconsin] valley."

Stark includes a history of the Wisconsin Valley Improvement Company. This organization was chartered in 1907 by Progressive Republican Governor Bob LaFollette. This organization oversaw the transition from lumber floats to factories ("such as paper mills"). The factories needed to control the "fluctuation of the river flow" in both the Wisconsin and Tomahawk rivers. The law provides reservoirs that "improve the usefulness of the rivers for all public purposes and to reduce flood damage." In 1988 the WVIC had 21 reservoirs on Tomahawk and the Wisconsin.

Though the WVIC is a pubic entity, it is owned by paper mills and electric power plants. This is a Progressive era pubilc-private-partnership. It benefits corporations through government authority. This is not lost on Stark, the WVIC is "truly surprising" because a "liberal politician [LaFollette] fostered this company which is privately owned and yet is steward of vast acreages of public terrain." This is the inverse of the NPL populism which featured publicly owned entities (like grain elevator co-ops) on private terrain (like railroads).

The Wisconsin official roadside marker featured on pg 297 was erected in 1982. It describes the Wisconsin as "The Nation's Hardest-Working River" a "title" which it "earned."

Stark describes Brokaw: "incorporated in 1906. The town's importance centered around a dam built across the Wisconsin in 1880...purpose of the dam was to produce slack water that would facilitate the dividing of logs for the Wausau mills....Wausau Paper Mill Company...town." The paper company built "a church and clubhouse for the use of its employees." The first white residents were immigrants from Germany in the 1870s.

Louis Marchetti. History of Marathon County Wisconsin and Representative Citizens. Chicago: Richmond-Arnold Publishing Co., 1913. 526.

Brokaw broke off from Texas in 1906. F.J. Edmonds was the first county board member. To Marchetti, "[Brokaw] owes its existence to the building of the Wausau Paper Mill Company's plant at that place." The Boom Company built the dam between 1880-81 "for the purpose of making slack water to facilitate the dividing of logs for the Wausau mills and points below..." The dam was built for one hundred thousand dollars. It was twenty years before the power it produced was used by the paper company. The Wausau Paper Mill Company was formed in 1899 by "some foreign business men represented by the brothers Edmonds, and with some business men from Wausau..." the mill had two hundred and seventy five employees. The "Scud" is a "special train on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railraoad..." that brings workers five miles from the city of Wausau to the village of Brokaw. The buildings: a workmen's "clubhouse" and Methodist church. The board to Marchetti in 1913: Walter Alexander, CC Yawkey, WL Edmonds, EA Edmonds.

Bill Hart. "Yawkey CC." [archive.org]

CC Yawkey was a big time lumberman born in Chicago educated in Saginaw whose first sawmill was in Hazelhurst. He became a town board member there and was a WI Republican representative 1895-96. In 1899 he moved to Wausau. Bill Hart of the Marathon County Historical society used to have a biography of Yawkey. Hart describes the "liberal education" Yawkey got in East Saginaw. He then wen to military school in Orchard Lake. He signed on to his uncle's business in Saginaw. They both sold in 1888 and went west to Hazelhurst where they bought timberlands and a "promising mill site." They, along with George W. Lee, founded a lumber company. CC moved to Hazelhurst to "oversee the construction of a mill on their site." The company "became one of the largest manufacturers of lumber, lath and shingles." CC's business interests ranged from Hazelhurst to Wausau, Arkansas and Alabama. He founded a few insurance companies and mutual funds including (Mutual of Wausau)

He "assisted in organizing a citizens' military training camp" during the first world war. And, in Gilded Age fashion, donated and established parks in Wausau. Hart claims Yawkey "was a strong Republican and too much interest in the party's business..." who served on the county board for four years beginning in 1891 before spending one term in the state legislature. In Carnegiesque fashion, his "house...at the time of his death is now the [Marathon County] museum."

Carrie Rasmussen. "Yawkey Forest Reserve is one of the largest donations of conservation land in Wisconsin." [northwoodslandtrust.org]. The Yawkee Lumber Company, its "shareholders and representatives" donated the land back to the town in 2019 after 125 years "under the same ownership."

The town of Brokaw was joint venture between Hazelhurst's extractive capitalists Yawkey and Lee (1888), the boom company's dam (1881), which attracted (foreign and domestic) investors to the paper mill (1899), which became private-public partnership under the La Follette era Wisconsin Valley Improvement Company (1907). The second decade of the two-thousands saw: a destruction of the dam, recapitalization of the mill and deincorporation of the town of Brokaw. This is the actual price paid by the state for the Yawkey Forest Reserve 'gift' from the Yawkee Lumber Company. The decline of this industry didn't actually start in the two-thousands. It started before the company was registered, in 1975, as a Foreign for Profit Corporation in the State of Florida. [corporationwiki.com].

It might have started as soon as the first foreign investor was attracted to the untapped power of the dam. The decline of Brokaw might have started in the 1880s--twenty years before Brokaw was incorporated--when the first "liberal educat[ed]" carpetbagger moved upriver and started to send the trees downstream.

The Federal Writers' Project. "Tour 7" Guide to 1930's Wisconsin St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006. 381. (first published: Wisconsin Library Association, 1941).

The WPA writers describe the development of the Wisconsin River valley paper mills between 1874 ("the first railroad") and 1906 ("the timber was gone") as a time when "Wausau had grown wealthy." Brokaw is one satellite paper town of Wausau's metro which also included "[w]oodwoorking and veneer plants, two shoe factories, an abrasive factory, a cheese plant, an electric motor works, feed and flour mills..."