Coolidge is a
ghost town in
Price County,
Wisconsin, United States. Coolidge was located in the town of
Fifield near
Coolidge Lake Coolidge may refer to:
People
* Coolidge (surname), including a list of people and characters with the name
** Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933), 30th president of the United States
Places United States
* Coolidge, Arizona
* Coolidge, Georgia
* Cool ...
, north of
Phillips
Phillips may refer to:
Businesses Energy
* Chevron Phillips Chemical, American petrochemical firm jointly owned by Chevron Corporation and Phillips 66.
* ConocoPhillips, American energy company
* Phillips 66, American energy company
* Phil ...
. The town was marked on
USGS maps as late as 1941 and is still marked on
Wisconsin Department of Transportation maps.
History
Coolidge was one of the first settlements in the Town of Fifield along the
Wisconsin Central Railroad. The town was set up as a flag station for the railway in November 1886. It consisted of two stores, a
boarding house,
post office and a saw and
planing mill A planing mill is a facility that takes cut and seasoned boards from a sawmill and turns them into finished dimensional lumber. Machines used in the mill include the planer and matcher, the molding machines, and varieties of saws. In the planing mil ...
. The latter was built by W. H. Coolidge in 1884.
When ''Boyington and Atwell'' of Stevens Point built their
sawmill at the sight known as Fifield, Coolidge had a population of 500. The mill operated until 1891 and had a pine cut of over 80,000,000
board feet.
According to ''Fifield: A History'', by Douglas Severt, all that is left of Coolidge today is a pile of stone in the clearing that was once the company's vault. Near this same stone pile stands a huge spreading
lilac
''Syringa'' is a genus of 12 currently recognized species of flowering plant, flowering woody plants in the olive family or Oleaceae called lilacs. These lilacs are native to woodland and scrub from southeastern Europe to eastern Asia, and wid ...
bush that blossom every spring, as if in memorial to the past. William Ehmke was born at Coolidge and later became section boss on the Wisconsin Central as was his father before him.
References
{{Price County, Wisconsin
Geography of Price County, Wisconsin
Ghost towns in Wisconsin