Hughey is an unpopulated spot in the town of
Cleveland
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...
,
Taylor 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,
where logs were once loaded from the
Yellow River
The Yellow River, also known as Huanghe, is the second-longest river in China and the List of rivers by length, sixth-longest river system on Earth, with an estimated length of and a Drainage basin, watershed of . Beginning in the Bayan H ...
onto the
Omaha Railway. The logging operation was shut down in the 1930s,
leaving today only the railroad bed and a few foundations overgrown by brush.
Before settlement, the lands along the upper Yellow River held various kinds of timber: hemlock, birch, maple, white pine, etc. White pine was the most valuable, and was floated down the river in log drives. But the Yellow was not easy to drive and the logging companies built log-driving dams so they could release "splashes" of water to push logs along when the natural floods didn't do the job. One of these "splash dams" was built about 1861 near the spot that would become Hughey.
After the pine was logged, other timber species remained, but they didn't float well.
In 1902 a subsidiary of the Omaha Railway, the ''Eau Claire, Chippewa Falls, and Northeastern Railway'' began building a line up along the
Chippewa River from
Chippewa Falls
Chippewa Falls () is a city located on the Chippewa River in Chippewa County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 14,731 in the 2020 census. Incorporated as a city in 1869, it is the county seat of Chippewa County. The city's name orig ...
to
Holcombe. In 1903, that railway extended its line from Holcombe through
Arnold
Arnold may refer to:
People
* Arnold (given name), a masculine given name
* Arnold (surname), a German and English surname
Places Australia
* Arnold, Victoria, a small town in the Australian state of Victoria
Canada
* Arnold, Nova Scotia
U ...
and
Hannibal
Hannibal (; ; 247 – between 183 and 181 BC) was a Punic people, Carthaginian general and statesman who commanded the forces of Ancient Carthage, Carthage in their battle against the Roman Republic during the Second Punic War.
Hannibal's fat ...
to the Yellow River, primarily so that the Yellow River Lumber Company could get access to their timber holdings in that area. Where the rail line reached the river, they built a loading works, where logs could be fished out from their
boom in the river and loaded onto rail-cars bound for the company's sawmill in
Stillwater.
[ The stop was named for E.K. Hughey, president of the Yellow River Lumber Co.][
Along with the loading works, the site had a bunkhouse, a livestock corral, another structure, a wye for turning engines, and a gravel pit. From Hughey, one spur branched off northeast for five miles, into the Yellow River Lumber Company's logging operations. In 1908 it was reported that Yellow River Lumber Co. was loading 30 cars of lumber per day for shipment. A second spur branched off to the south to another loading works downstream on the river, run by the Stanley, Merrill and Phillips Railroad.][
By 1935 the line was no longer needed and the operator applied to the Public Service Commission to stop running trains to Hughey. The request was approved, and the rails were pulled up.][ Today Hughey is a quiet brushy place along the Yellow River, with no one living there - only a farm nearby.
]
Notes
{{authority control
Unincorporated communities in Taylor County, Wisconsin
Unincorporated communities in Wisconsin