Poking Around in Rhinelander
Wisconsin
May 2023
by Craig Mains
Poking Around in Rhinelander
by Craig Mains
In late April 2023, Chain-Wen had a two-week assignment at hospitals in Rhinelander and Minocqua, Wisconsin. I went with her and served as her driver. While she was at work I walked around exploring the area. The weather wasn't great---it was unseasonably cold, windy, and rainy or snowy most of the time. Even the local people were wondering what happened to spring. I got outside everyday though. I discovered that Rhinelander had a couple short river walks---one on both sides of the river. This one was on the west side of the Wisconsin River. The river was running high from snow melt.
The wooden walkway ran through a big patch of horsetails, which caught my interest. I wasn't used to seeing colonies this large. They're apparently pretty common in Wisconsin, with 11 different species present. It's no wonder horsetails like Wisconsin---they require silicon and Wisconsin soils are very sandy and silicon-rich. The horsetails are able to absorb dissolved silicon from acidic, sandy soils and incorporate it into the cell walls of their stems. (Horsetails grown hydroponically with no silicon become as limp as a spear of overcooked asparagus.)
Horsetails (genus Equisetum) are one of those plants that are considered living fossils. Horsetail fossils have been found that are 400 million years old and they once grew to be 30 feet tall. Today, with fewer than 100 species worldwide they are just a vestige of a group that at one time represented the majority of the earth's vegetation. Some experts believe that coal is mostly formed from decomposed ferns and horsetails---which means, that if, like me, you get your electricity from a coal-fired power plant, that your electricity is coming from horsetails.
Horsetails don't have flowers or seeds but send out spores. Shown above is the spore-forming structure or strobilus of the horsetail. They also spread through their underground rhizomes, probably more so than from the spores. Some species have whorled branches around the stem but this one (Equisetum hyemale?) doesn't. The stem is photosynthetic.
Note the ridges on the stem. They were noticeably abrasive to the touch. This type of horsetail is sometimes called "scouring rush" because pioneer women would dry them and use them to scour pots and pans. Short sections of dried horsetail stems are sold commercially for use by musicians to sand clarinet and saxophone reeds.
Above is a photo showing more of the stem. It is commonly believed that John Napier, a Scottish mathematician who invented logarithms was inspired by the stem of the horsetail since each segment of the stem, as it moves toward the tip, decreases in length by the same proportion. There is, however, no written record from Napier confirming it.
The white collars between the segments are modified, non-photosynthetic leaves. The stem is hollow.
After admiring the horsetail colony, I thought I'd check out the county courthouse, which I thought looked pretty impressive for a county of only about 38,000 people. I suspect the architectural inspiration for the dome of the courthouse came from the strobilus of the horsetail plant.
The dome is covered with stained glass and when illuminated at night casts a green glow.
I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to walk into the courthouse without having to empty my pockets and go through a metal detector. There was no sign of a security officer and I was free to wander around inside.
Above is view of the interior of the dome. There are actually two domes---an inner one and an outer one. There is a space of about 60 feet between the two.
The third floor had three murals I thought worth noting. Two of them were painted in 1919 by a German immigrant named Franz Biberstein. They were both at the top of a stairwell so it was hard to get a good angle to photograph them. The first one shows an undisturbed forest with a teepee [1] and three Indians engaged in drying and stretching skins. The river running through the scene could be either the Wisconsin River or the Pelican River, which both flow through Rhinelander. The two murals together provide an honest and succinct history of the area. First, the land needed to be taken from the Indians.
Then all the trees could be cut down and made into lumber.
To be fair, the same scenario played out in other forested areas besides Wisconsin and the forest resources are now more sustainably managed. However, it was still a tragedy that some of the original forest could not have been preserved undisturbed---other than just a few small fragments
The third mural is a painting of the local imaginary beast called the hodag. Although tall tales about the hodag were part of Paul Bunyan folklore for a long time, Rhinelander has made the hodag their own. In 1893, local resident, surveyor, timber cruiser, civic booster, and practical joker Eugene Shepard, along with a group of other locals, claimed to have killed a hodag in the forest near Rhinelander. His account of the event, which was accompanied by a staged photo that didn't look remotely realistic, managed to garner some attention outside of the area.
It worked well enough that he decided to take the prank to the next level. In 1896, in an effort to attract attendees to the Oneida County Fair, he claimed that he and a group of men had managed to chloroform a living hodag, which he planned to display at the fair. He then contrived a fake hodag using wood, cowhide, and wires that were used to make it move. The illusion was assisted by displaying the hodag in a hot, dimly lit tent and keeping the customers moving and at a distance so they didn't have the opportunity to scrutinize the creature too closely. It also helped that the cowhide he used wasn't tanned and emanated a putrifying odor that he said was characteristic of the hodag. Between the odor and the heat, viewers didn't tend to linger. The prank worked well enough that it received national attention and the Smithsonian announced they were sending a team to Rhinelander to investigate---at which point Shepard had to come clean about the hoax.
Not everyone got the message though and he continued to charge people to view the hodag at his home. He conscripted his sons to jiggle the wires to give the hodag some semblance of life. It was a duty his sons later said they disliked because people showed up randomly and they had to drop whatever they were doing to operate the hodag. Since then, the hodag has taken on a life of its own.
Eugene Shepard died in 1923 but 100 years later hodags are everywhere in Rhinelander. The local high school athletic teams are called the Hodags and numerous local businesses incorporate Hodag into their names (Hodag Express Lube, Hodag Taxi, Hodag Guns & Loans, etc.). There were more hodag statues around town than I could keep track of, including in front of the courthouse, the library, and the Chamber of Commerce. And, as shown above, there is enough interest to keep a hodag souvenir shop in business.
Somewhere along the way, the hodag changed colors. Shepard's hodag and the mural in the courthouse show a black hodag. All of the hodags around town now, however, are a less sinister shade of green.
Besides the dome of the courthouse, two other prominent landmarks in Rhinelander are the smokestacks of the Rhinelander Paper Company. The one on the right used to be as tall as the one on the left. At one time it read: GLASSINE & GREASEPROOF. That referred to a type of glossy paper that the mill produced from before World War I to after World War II. The paper had various uses including wrapping food. [2] The Rhinelander plant was for some time the leading manufacturer of the translucent glassine paper. The smokestack had to be shortened, in multiple stages, because of the deteriorating condition of the masonry. Now, only the E is left from the word GLASSINE.
Rhinelander Paper Company was founded in 1903. The company has changed ownership multiple times and is now owned by Ahlstrom-Munksjo, a multi-national company headquartered in Helsinki with 38 plants in 13 countries. Ahlstrom-Munksjo manufactures fiber-based products for filtration, medical fabrics, wall coverings, and food packaging, among other things. The Rhinelander plant currently employs about 500 people. At one time, 1400 people worked at the plant.
Shown above is a photo I snapped as we were leaving Rhinelander. In the center of the photo is the AhlstromMunksjo plant. (There is also another unit of the plant, not shown, that isn't contiguous.) The lake in the upper left is Boom Lake, which is an impoundment [3] of the Wisconsin River. The river flows from left to right. I assume the lake is called Boom Lake because a boom was once stretched across it to catch logs floated down from upstream. At one time there were six sawmills around the lake.
The paper mill remains the economic anchor of the town. Besides paper, Rhinelander has in the past manufactured soda pop, screen doors, ice boxes, row boats, and potato chips.
I spent some time just walking around in the neighborhoods of Rhinelander. I couldn't help thinking about some of the similarities between Rhinelander and Portage, in which I had spent some time in July 2019 when Chain was working there. They are both small cities, or big towns, depending on your perspective. Rhinelander has about 8300 people; Portage has about 10,300. The Wisconsin River flows through both towns.
The similarities seemed to end there though. Portage had a noticeable number of handsome older yellow and brown brick houses. The houses in Rhinelander were, in general, more humble and smaller, and few of them were brick. There were a lot of small houses similar to the one shown above.
That is not to say that there weren't some bigger houses in Rhinelander. There were a couple blocks of more upscale homes near the courthouse and modest homes of more typical size such as this one.
However, there were enough small houses in Rhinelander that I was left with the impression of a town of modest homes---perhaps not so surprising for a mill town.
The following photos are some examples of the small houses of Rhinelander. I would estimate that at least 50 percent of the houses in Rhinelander were small.
Small houses, such as this one, have the advantage of being less expensive to heat in a climate with cold winters
A good number of the small homes had clipped gables like this one.
A lot of the house didn't have any gables at all and had roofs that sloped in from all four sides. There were many houses similar to this one. Often, additions had been made over the years.
There were enough houses of similar construction that I thought they might have been company-built homes for the paper mill employees. However, these types of houses seemed to be scattered throughout the town and not just in neighborhoods close to the mill.
If I had to guess I would estimate that a lot of the houses were built sometime just before World War II.
I looked at some of the census data for Portage and Rhinelander and, not surprisingly, the median household income and the median value of an owner-occupied home were both higher in Portage.
The median household income in Portage was $56,303 compared to $42,381 in Rhinelander.
The median value of an owner-occupied home in Portage was $151,000 compared to just $95,300 in Rhinelander. [4]
However, the percentage of owner-occupied homes in Portage was 55.3 percent, while in Rhinelander it was 66.5 percent. So, even though the household income in Rhinelander was significantly lower, a higher percentage of people in Rhinelander were homeowners. And, it seems likely that is because houses cost less in Rhinelander because most of them are smaller.
This made me wonder, since affordable housing has become such a big issue, what prevents builders from building Rhinelander-size houses today?
When I wasn't walking around Rhinelander neighborhoods pondering affordable housing I enjoyed walking in the Holmboe Forest, 32 acres of mostly conifers.
Outside of the forest most of the snow had melted away (except where it had been plowed into giant piles in parking lots). Since the forest was mostly conifers though, it was shaded and there was still snow. The trails got enough foot traffic that the snow was compressed and, with some freezing and thawing, they were slippery. The area was a remmant of a glacial esker with a lot of steep slopes that my photos couldn't adequately portray. After awhile, rather than slip and slide down the trails, I found it easier to just walk through the woods off the trail. Later in the week, most of the trails were clear.
According to some of the Nature Conservancy information, the woods were believed to have once been the site of a large battle between rival bands of Indians and some Indians who didn't survive the battle are believed to be buried in the forest. The woods are near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Pelican rivers, which would have been a strategic spot to control.
During the Depression, the forest was the site of a sizable hobo jungle. It had the advantage of being near the railroad line but outside the city limits and the jurisdiction of the local police.
The forest was mostly hemlock and white pine but black spruce, balsam fir, red pine, tamarack, and white cedar were also present, plus some occasional deciduous trees. There was a patch of shrubby Canadian Yew, which was fenced off to keep the deer from browsing it.
This footbridge over tea-colored water reminded me of hiking in Maine. Earlier in the week it had been ice-covered.
After nine days in Rhinelander, we were off to Minocqua, where Chain was scheduled to work four days in another hospital that was part of the same system.
May 2023
Footnotes
[1] Native Americans in what is now Wisconsin would have been more likely to use a bark-covered hut for shelter than a teepee.
[2] Bakeries used to use glassine paper to wrap sticky pastries. It seemed like in old cop shows from the 1950s and '60s that heroin always came in glassine envelopes.
[3] Impoundments in Wisconsin are referred to as "flowages," I think to differentiate them from natural lakes.
[4] Census data for housing in Portage and Rhinelander was for the years 2017-2021 and was reported in 2021 dollars.
Sources
Bright, Emily. "The Legend of the Hodag." Wisconsin Life, April 1, 2016
Holmboe Conifer Forest. Trailhead kiosk information
Oneida County Courthouse. Self-guided tour display information.
US Census Bureau Quick Facts. Portage city, Wisconsin
US Census Bureau Quick Facts. Rhinelander city, Wisconsin
Wisconsin Historical Society. "Eugene S. Shepard" entry