Shanagolden 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 Shanagolden, 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. Shanagolden is located on the East Fork Chippewa River northwest of Butternut.

History

In 1901 the newly formed Nash Lumber Company bought 40,000 acres of timber in southern Ashland and Sawyer county. In 1902 and 1903 they selected a site along the Chippewa River and built a

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

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 which later housed the post office, homes for workers, a schoolhouse, and a four-mile railroad branch which connected to the Wisconsin Central line at Glidden. The plant consisted of a sawmill, a

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 ...

and a shingle mill. The little mill town in northern Wisconsin was named "Shanagolden" after the fishing village in County Limerick, Ireland from which the Nashes' ancestors came. Unusual for the time, the Nashes preserved virgin timber around town for the looks. And they let workers buy lots and build their own homes as they chose, so the two streets weren't lined with identical boxes. The Nashes themselves had the Milwaukee architect Alexander Eschweiler design one of their homes and the meeting house/reading room of the Shanagolden Improvement Club, a women's club. Recreation included picnics, fairs, parties, fishing, hunting, baseball,

trap shooting Trap shooting is one of the three major disciplines of competitive clay pigeon shooting. The other disciplines are skeet shooting and sporting clays. Trap shooting is distinguished by the targets being launched from a single "house" or machine, ...

, card parties, and covert drinking at the

livery stable A livery yard, livery stable or boarding stable, is a stable where horse owners pay a weekly or monthly fee to keep their horses. A livery or boarding yard is not usually a riding school and the horses are not normally for hire (unless on wor ...

. (The town was officially dry.) In the winter of 1905-06 Nash had six camps with about 600 men logging in the surrounding forests. The mill employed 250 men and 300 to 350 people lived in the town. But despite glowing accounts of the operation in the newspapers, it was losing money. In June 1907 the sawmill burned. The people saved the planing mill and the wood piles. There was talk of rebuilding, and that summer the company improved some of its buildings, but the sawmill was not rebuilt and most employees were laid off in November. After a couple years the Mellen Lumber Company bought the mill at Shanagolden and much of the surrounding timber. They built a new shingle mill and resumed reduced operations. Then in 1912 the Mellen Company consolidated, moving the operations from Shanagolden into Glidden. Most of the workers moved too, and some of the homes were moved to Glidden on railcars and on horse-drawn sleighs in winter. In 1916 the Ashland Farm Land Company bought the Nash buildings and 40,000 acres of surrounding cutover land, planning to sell the land to

Bohemia Bohemia ( ; ; ) is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. In a narrow, geographic sense, it roughly encompasses the territories of present-day Czechia that fall within the Elbe River's drainage basin, but historic ...

n farmers from Iowa and Illinois. They sold some 40 to 160 acre farms, going for $5 to $7 per acre, but the land was hard to farm. Major logging ended in 1919, the Soo Line abandoned the rail line to Glidden by 1925, and the town gradually withered.

History

References

Further reading