Coolidge is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

in Price County,

Wisconsin Wisconsin ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest of the United States. It borders Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michig ...

, United States. It was located in the town of Fifield near Coolidge Lake, north of Phillips. The town was marked on

USGS The United States Geological Survey (USGS), founded as the Geological Survey, is an government agency, agency of the United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of the Interior whose work spans the disciplines of biology, geograp ...

maps as late as 1941 and is still marked on

Wisconsin Department of Transportation The Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) is a governmental agency of the U.S. state of Wisconsin responsible for planning, building and maintaining the state's highways. It is also responsible for planning transportation in the sta ...

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 A boarding house is a house (frequently a family home) in which lodging, lodgers renting, rent one or more rooms on a nightly basis and sometimes for extended periods of weeks, months, or years. The common parts of the house are maintained, and ...

, a

post office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letter (message), letters and parcel (package), parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post o ...

, and a saw and

planing mill A planing mill is a facility that takes cut and Wood drying, seasoned Wood, wooden boards from a sawmill and turns them into finished dimensional lumber. Machines used in the mill include the Thickness planer, planer and matcher, the Moulding plan ...

. The latter was built by W. H. Coolidge in 1884. When Boyington and Atwell of Stevens Point built their

sawmill A sawmill (saw mill, saw-mill) or lumber mill is a facility where logging, 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 ...

at the site 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 The board foot or board-foot is a unit of measurement for the volume of lumber in the United States and Canada. It equals the volume of a board that is in length, one foot in width, and in thickness, or exactly liters. Board foot can be abbrev ...

. 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 stone pile stands a huge spreading

lilac ''Syringa'' is a genus of 12 currently recognized species of 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 widely and commonly ...

bush that blossoms 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