Morse is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

located in the town of Gordon, Ashland 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. 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 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 ...

, 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 m ...

mill, 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 store, a

blacksmith A blacksmith is a metalsmith who creates objects primarily from wrought iron or steel, but sometimes from #Other metals, other metals, by forging the metal, using tools to hammer, bend, and cut (cf. tinsmith). Blacksmiths produce objects such ...

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 Saginaw County, Michigan, United States, and its county seat. It had a population of 44,202 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Located along the Saginaw River, Saginaw is adjacent to Saginaw Charter Township, ...

, 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 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 List of cities in Nebraska, most populous city in the U.S. state of Nebraska. It is located in the Midwestern United States along the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's List of United S ...

or east to Tonawanda, New York via the Wisconsin Central Railroad to Ashland and via ships on the

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes spanning the Canada–United States border. The five lakes are Lake Superior, Superior, Lake Michigan, Michigan, Lake Huron, H ...

. 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. 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