Introduction
The River that made this valley also brought the men who lived its history. It carried the canoes of the Native Americans who fished and wandered on its banks, and lured the white trappers and traders who noted in their journals and letters the beauty of this deep, swift-running river. Later it brought the Eastern money-men who bought up land and river rights for speculation; and it gave passage to the settlers who flocked here after the mid-nineteenth century to farm the rolling land.
The River was transportation, supply line, and communication in those days before the railroad and highway . . . a fluid trail that connected these towns with the outside world.
The River also brought the lumbermen to the northern pineries, and it floated countless millions of pine logs down to their voracious sawmills.
The River banks widened in places with a succession of small towns that boomed with the lumber industry. The towns grew as the northern forests dwindled. Wolf Creek, St. Croix Falls, Taylors Falls, Franconia, Osceola, Marine, Stillwater -- all flourishing as the river choked with logs.
The River soon became the scene of spectacular log jams . . . jams that stopped the operation of sawmills, that imperiled many a logger's life, that stopped all river traffic. By the last quarter of the last century, there was not enough river for the greedy lumber industry, let alone the steamboats that were the main link to the rest of the world. Many a steamboat and ferryboat was threatened by the unending flow of logs on the river.
The River was blockaded by big log jams in 1865, 1877, 1883, and again in 1886. In 1878, the Taylors Falls "Reporter" lamented that "ruin and stagnation" were being forced upon the St. Croix River by the loggers' monopolizing the river thoroughfare. The sawmill at Marine, the last one to survive above the Stillwater boom, was forced out of business after the gigantic jam of 1883, when the narrow bend at the Dalles held back millions of feet of logs for 57 days. It was clear to the prosperous enterprising lumbermen at Stillwater that their headlong race to strip the pine forests in the north would be hampered unless they built a dam to regulate the flow of logs and the level of the water in the river. Their answer was . . . Nevers Dam.
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This old photo shows how the l886 jam packed the Dalles of the St. Croix River solid with logs . . . an estimated l50 million feet of lumber was tied up in the jam. Loggers worked with dynamite to blast loose the logs at critical points. Jams such as this, as well as the necessity to control the flow of logs to the mills down-river, brought about the construction of Nevers Dam in 1889. |
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Nevers dam. |