Morse is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a region that is not governed by a local municipal corporation. Widespread unincorporated communities and areas are a distinguishing feature of the United States and Canada. Most other countries of the world either have ...

located in the town of

Gordon Gordon may refer to: People * Gordon (given name), a masculine given name, including list of persons and fictional characters * Gordon (surname), the surname * Gordon (slave), escaped to a Union Army camp during the U.S. Civil War * Clan Gordon, ...

, Ashland County,

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

, United States. Morse is located along the Bad River south-southeast of Mellen.

History

In 1881 the newly formed Bad River Lumbering and Improvement Company began building a milltown where the Wisconsin Central Railroad line touched the Bad River. The town would later be named Morse, but it was initially called ''Jacob's Station'', named after William H. Jacobs, the leader of the Bad River Company. At the same time they began improving a stretch of the Bad River for driving logs from their timber lands upstream to the mill. By next spring the company had completed the

sawmill A sawmill (saw mill, saw-mill) or lumber mill is a facility where logs are cut into lumber. Modern sawmills use a motorized saw to cut logs lengthwise to make long pieces, and crosswise to length depending on standard or custom sizes (dimensi ...

, a shingle and

lath A lath or slat is a thin, narrow strip of straight-grained wood used under roof shingles or tiles, on lath and plaster walls and ceilings to hold plaster, and in lattice and trellis work. ''Lath'' has expanded to mean any type of backing mate ...

mill, a boarding house, a store, a

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shop, and lumber sheds. The mill began sawing in June 1882. That winter the company ran three logging camps out in their forests. In 1884 the mill employed 50 to 75 men and shipped out as many as five railcars of lumber a day. The town had added a hotel named the Bad River House, and in 1887 a schoolhouse. In 1887 the company town and its holdings were purchased by the Penokee Lumber Company, an enterprise of some New York investors and Augustus W. Morse. Morse, from

Saginaw, Michigan Saginaw () is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Saginaw County. The city of Saginaw and Saginaw County are both in the area known as Mid-Michigan. Saginaw is adjacent to Saginaw Charter Township and considered part of Greater ...

, was the local manager. Under his direction machinery was upgraded, the plant was reorganized, and he added electricity and a planing mill. To reduce the hazard of fire, scraps of wood were cleared from the mill's yard daily and large barrels of water stood watch. The mill kept about 70

Clydesdales The Clydesdale is a Scottish breed of draught horse. It is named for its area of origin, the Clydesdale or valley of the River Clyde, much of which is within the county of Lanarkshire. The origins of the breed lie in the eighteenth century ...

in its stable. It was held up by the '' Northwestern Lumberman'' journal as a model mill. The town's name changed to Morse in 1889. Most of the lumber sawed in this period went west by rail to

Omaha Omaha ( ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Nebraska and the county seat of Douglas County. Omaha is in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's 39th-largest city ...

or east to

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via the Wisconsin Central Railroad to Ashland and via ships on the

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. 275 men worked for the company and it provided twenty employee houses. All buildings, including the homes, were painted "Morse red." In 1890 Penokee contracted to ship 3,000,000 feet of lumber to England. In the dry year of 1891 when the rivers were too low to drive logs, the mill ran out of logs and had to shut down for a while in the fall. In 1892, when millworkers went on strike along the Wisconsin River to reduce their work day to ten hours, the workers at Morse didn't strike, but the Penokee Lumber Company adopted the ten-hour day anyway. 600 people lived in Morse in 1895. Then Penokee Lumber shut down, possibly due to its timber running out, possibly a result of the

Panic of 1893 The Panic of 1893 was an economic depression in the United States that began in 1893 and ended in 1897. It deeply affected every sector of the economy, and produced political upheaval that led to the political realignment of 1896 and the pres ...

. In 1900 F. B. Chase from Oshkosh bought the town and timber nearby and resumed logging and milling operations. But in 1903 a fire destroyed the sawmill. Many people moved away. In 1917 the Kneeland-McClurg Lumber Company of Phillips began to use Morse as staging point for shipping logs to its sawmill in Phillips. Later it rebuilt a sawmill in Morse and built homes and a boarding house for the millworkers there. Population grew until the town had to expand the school. After Kneeland-McClurg left in the early 1930s, manufacturing was intermittent. In the early 1940s the Templetons used the old mill's kilns to manufacture cedar shingles. In 1946, Cohen and Carlson started making hampers and ladders. Today only a handful of buildings remain.

History

References

Further reading