Door County, Wisconsin - Chapter 49: Clay Banks and the Norwegian Settlement, 1917

Clay Banks is the smallest town in the county, containing only about fourteen sections of land. Yet small as it is, its history may be divided into two parts - ancient and modern. Its modern history deals with the steady and quiet development of a beautiful farming district, uneventful in its prosperity. Its ancient records, however, tell of seaport villages where long piers extended far into the lake, where the hum of the sawmills and the click of the telegraph once was heard, but where now nothing breaks the silence and solitude of nature but the chirp of the crickets and the wash of the waves.

Along Clay Banks' half-dozen miles of water frontage there were at one time three hopeful villages - Foscoro, Clay Banks and Horns Pier. All of these villages were once upon a time post offices and telegraph stations. Now their very existence is forgotten except by the oldest inhabitants.

Foscoro was in the extreme southeastern corner of the town where Stony Creek rambles down among its rocks to the lake. Some time in the '60s three enterprising * men came along and decided that here was a most favorable spot for the construction of a mill and a pier for shipping forest products. Their names were Foster, Coe and Rowe. They planned a village which they fondly hoped would grow and become a mighty city. In order that their village might have the benefit of a real distinctive name they combined the first syllables of their surnames into the name Fos-co-ro. Being thus happily named after three mighty men they hoped it would have a threefold happy growth.

Foscoro was so near the Kewaunee County line that it sometimes was not sure which county it belonged to. In all events, it was so far removed from the currents of life in Door County that it was little known and less visited. We are fortunate, however, in having a description of Foscoro in the fullness of its might by one who saw it in its prime. The following pretty description of Foscoro was written in 1871 and printed in the Milwaukee News of March 15, 1871.

"To the north of the village plat, about a quarter of a mile, the high bluff at the lake recedes some forty or fifty rods and diminishes to a gentle hill, which extends southeasterly about the same distance from the lake for some miles and then returns to the shore again. Within this amphitheater is in the future, the sweetest village that the waves of Lake Michigan shall kiss. The surface of the ground, from the gentle hill, descends softly to the lake, so that there can be no idle water there, and the soil is rich and easy of cultivation. Springs of chalybeate water abound on the hillside. I thought when I first saw the spot that imagination might call it the home of the fairies.

nearly as large as Cedar Creek in Ozaukee County, bounding along as if glad to get there, and then stops in a quiet estuary at the lake and smiles upon the scene. The Indian name of this stream I understand to be Sensippi, which I am informed means 'stream of rocks, a name very appropriate, as its bed is filled with the freight of some former glacier.

"Such was this place when the canny hand of nature left it. But then came a Mr. Rowe of Chicago and a Mr. Coe and a Mr. Foster from Port Washington - and must it be! dug a large race for the water of the Sensippi to run in, built a large sawmill, where they are destroying those beautiful cedars and other trees, those suggestive monuments of bygone ages, and converting them into lumber, to be sent to Chicago, perhaps, that place devoid of all beauty or sense of poetry.

"Nor is this all; only a short distance from the mill, and connected with it by a wooden rail, is a pier run out into the lake 1,000 feet. How it mars the beauty of this fair nook! It is as if some beautiful girl, with a mouth to excite an irresistible desire for a kiss, should all at once run out a tongue like an ant-eater.

Now all remains of the village, the pier, the mill and the mill race have disappeared. Once more the little amphitheater looks as charming as when the writer of the above article called it the home of the fairies. Mariners on the lake, however, do not share this view. They are rather prone to believe it is the dwellingplace of imps. Just outside of Foscoro lies a shoal which has been the cause of a number of shipwrecks. The most recent is that of the Carolina of the Goodrich Line, which in the winter of 1917 stranded there and sustained an injury of about thirty thousand dollars.

Only two miles north of Foscoro is the site of the former village of Clay Banks. The grandeur of Clay Banks now survives only in the picturesque ruins of a couple of boarding houses, but in the early '70s it was quite a populous place which seriously considered the question of incorporating as a village. At that time (1874), according to the Ahnapee Record, Clay Banks was "doing more shipping than any other port in Door County." Two large piers were located here, one owned by Hitt & Davidson, the other by James Tufts, and vessels were loading daily. The chief industry which contributed to this business was Hitt & Davidson's sawmill, which in 1872 was cutting 100,000 shingles daily, besides large quantities of lumber. Clay Banks was also a telegraph station. The Hitt & Davidson pier was originally built in 1866 by Gilman & Brown of Chicago. It was the longest pier in the waters surrounding Door County, being 1,600 feet long. It was at various times damaged and repaired until finally the great storm in March, 1886, carried away the last of it.

In the northeastern corner of the town, at a place now hard to find as it is buried in swamps and sand drifts, was Horns Pier. W. H. Horn of Manitowoc located here in 1864 and built a very long pier in 1866. Two thousand cords of wood could be stored on it. In September, 1871, the pier, warehouse, store and other buildings were destroyed by a forest fire which did great damage in the town of Clay Banks. It was, however, rebuilt at once and did a very big business, shipping about two cargoes of forest products daily. It was a regular stopping place for the lake steamers that plied between Chicago and Buffalo. According to published report in the Door County Advocate in January, 1873, there was shipped from this pier during the preceding year 100,000 cedar posts, 10,000 railroad ties, 5,000 cords of wood, 1,000 cords of hemlock bark and 5,000 telegraph poles.

Wm. H. Horn, the owner of this now forgotten energetic little business place, came from Manitowoc where he had considerable property. He was a keen man, rather too sharp in business dealings. For many year he did a very profitable business in Door County. In company with a Mr. Joseph he also built a pier a few miles north of the canal, which was a large shipping point for forest products in the '70s and '80s. The village that grew up here was called by them St. Joseph. When the people of Sturgeon Bay and the northern towns were unable to get the telegraph line extended beyond Sturgeon Bay Horn & Joseph in 1882 personally extended it from Horn's Pier to St. Joseph, Whitefish Bay, Jacksonport and Baileys Harbor, at all of which points they installed operators. When the timber cutting came to an end in the latter '80s Foscoro, Clay Banks, Horn's Pier and St. Joseph ceased to be shipping points and W. H. Horn moved to other parts.

Clay Banks was the seventh organized town in the county, being set off by the county board at the February meeting in 1859. The name, Clay Banks, is one of long standing and originated among the sailors of the lake. The entire Lake Michigan shore of the peninsula is low with the exception of the shore in Clay Banks. These high clay banks, rising almost perpendicularly to a height of almost a hundred feet, loom up very prominently and they became a sort of point to reckon distance from. These high banks are very picturesque, having a distinctive beauty not found elsewhere in the county. As yet no summer resorter has perched his bungalow upon them, but the time will no doubt come when the discriminating pleasure seekers will make their summer homes there.

Clay Banks is one of the best sections for farming that the county possesses. Here the rich clay soil goes down a hundred feet or more. While other parts of Door County are overburdened with stone, it is here at a premium. The land is gently rolling and easily tillable and raises bumper crops.

The first men to buy land for farming purposes were Wm. Helmholz, John Mackay, C. L. Fellows and Wm. H. Warren, who all settled here in 1855. In 1856 came B. B. Coon, Albert J. Schuyler and Chauncey C. Hitt. After this there was no further settlement until after the war. Then came John Hoslett, John Madden with his sons, James, Jerry and John; Alexander Tufts, James Davidson, Captain Chauncey M. Thayer, George Roberts and James E. Spalsbury, with his sons, Richard, Wesley and William. James Spalsbury died shortly after coming here and old Mrs. Spalsbury became a sort of grandmother for the whole settlement.

These Yankees and Irish who settled in Clay Banks were an unusually wideawake class of people and quite a number of their sons and daughters have distinguished themselves. Among these are John Madden, who became a Catholic priest; George Madden, the son of James, who is our present county superintendent ; "Millard Tufts, the genial principal of the Algoma Train School; Joseph Hoslett, the chairman of the county board; J. A. Spalsbury, who is a dentist in Sturgeon Bay.

The bulk of the population in Clay Banks is now of Norwegian origin. This large settlement, which lies partly in Clay Banks and partly in Forestville and continues northward almost to Sawyer, was started about 1870. A few years earlier Captain Andrew Larson, a friend of Tallak Haines, the founder of the

Hainesville settlement, had taken land in the town of Sturgeon Bay. He had lived for a time in Manitowoe County. While on a visit to Manitowoc County he told of the excellent land that was still open for homestead entry in Door County. A man by the name.of Arne Knutson (Odegaarden) made a journey northward to investigate. He personally selected a farm just south of the county line in Kewaunee County and reported that there was an abundance of land equally as good as the best in Manitowoc County. This caused quite an exodus of Norwegians from Manitowoc County, where land by this time was hard to obtain. The first were another Arne Knutson, who with his four sons, now known by the name of Arneson, and Ole Eliason settled in the eastern part of Forestville in 1870. They ed next year by Henry Jorgenson, Haldor Haldorson, G. J. Anderson, Erik son, Knut E. and Nils Viste, Peder and Tosten Olson, Ole A. Nelson and Knut Gigstad. The immigration continued rapidly during the next few years. Nearly all these Norwegians are from the same part of Norway - Valders in the central part - and had lived for a short time in Manitowoc County.

By January, 1872, they were so numerous that a congregation was organized. This was the first Lutheran congregation to be organized in Door County. For a while they held meetings in various places, once holding service in Charles Hitt's saloon or adjoining dining room, the condition being imposed that "they must not spit tobacco juice on the floor." Rev. Bjorn reported this injunction to his congregation and added: "Ja, dere kan vel holde dere fra at vere svin en times tid!"

A small church was built in 1874 or 1875. This was a plain one-story log house, 22x18 in size, with an attic which was used by the minister for a home. There was no stairway to get up to his humble quarters but only a rough ladder nailed against the wall in the fashion of primitive barns. For a few years this log house answered the needs of the congregation and many weddings, funerals and other services were held there. Once a bridal party assembled there with their numerous guests to witness the ceremony. The pastor was a little delayed in making his toilet up in the loft. Finally his feet appeared in the hole above, but being in haste he missed the narrow foothold on the ladder and shot down like a stone, landing in a most undignified manner at the feet of the bridal couple. For a while there was a bedlam of tittering from the assembled guests mingled with groans from the unfortunate preacher, who was industriously feeling for broken bones.

The Norwegian Lutheran Church is the only one in the town of Clay Banks. The Seventh Day Adventists a few years later hauled a lot of stone and logs together near Salona to build a charch but nothing more was done. The Catholics along the shore also planned to build a church but failed. One day they organized a bee and came back in the woods where the Norwegians lived to get out timber fora church. They brought so much beer and whiskey with them that the Norwegians wondered if they meditated on floating the logs down. However, by the time they had "taken on" the refreshments they could take on nothing more and the church project was dropped.

Clay Banks was originally covered with very heavy timber, among them being some of the largest pines cut in the state. C. L. Fellows tells of cutting a pine which was no doubt the biggest in the county. He writes: "In the winter of 1872 A. D. Eveland of Algoma and myself were engaged in getting out spars in the southeastern part of Clay Banks. We got out several measuring from 90 to 100 feet, giving a twelve to sixteen inch square masthead. We particularly wanted two spars, 104 and 108 feet long, squaring eighteen inches at the cap. We did not get either of them, but we felled one tree that would have made the 108-foot stick if it had not been broken in falling. I do not remember how large it was on the stump but recollect we could find no saw that would reach through it. We chopped more than one-fourth of the way through on each side and then used a saw. It broke ninety-two feet from the butt, spoiled about eight feet in the break and still left about fifty feet above the break. There was not a limb below the break but a large one just where it broke. I afterwards cut the tree into logs and hauled them to the Foscoro mill. There were four twelve-foot logs, one fourteen-foot log and two sixteen-foot logs below the break, the top log measuring thirty-four inches in diameter at the small end. Above the break I got two sixteen-foot logs and one fourteen, the ten logs scaling considerably over 9,000 feet. Including the eight-foot break (which I made into shingles) I estimated that the tree would scale very close to 10,000 feet. The four twelve-foot logs and the fourteen-foot being too large to saw, we split with powder and made into shingles. The tree stood on the northeast corner of the northeast quarter of the southeast quarter of section 31."

About 1880 there were found in Clay Banks on the farm of Eugene Madosh several fragments of musket barrels and other implements and also some human bones. The muskets were of the ancient flintlock pattern and were cut in two about fifteen inches from the breech, none of the muzzle ends having been found. The Indians evidently intended to destroy the weapons as the barrels have been hammered out of shape, and some of the breech-pins are missing. It is probable that these muskets are relics of some of the early French explorers who visited Door County before the Indians became familiar with firearms. The theory has been advanced that these are the remains of those men in La Salle's expedition who in 1680 deserted the post he had in that year established on the site of the present city of Peoria, Ill. These men made their way to Lake Michigan, where they found canoes and skirted the shore northward on their way to Canada. They never returned and here in Clay Banks may have been the fatal spot where they were overpowered and killed by the Indians. The remainder of the garrison under Captain Tonti were also obliged to desert the post at Peoria and fled northward along Lake Michigan. Some of them finally reached the Jesuit chapel at the head of Green Bay, where Father Hennepin found them.