"After stormy start, railroad served city 74 years" from the June 10, 1976 Door County Advocate
After stormy start, railroad served city 74 years
Born July 23, 1894.
Died Aug. 9, 1968.
If Sturgeon Bay ever erected a tombstone to the memory of the Ahnapee & Western Railroad, this is what it would say.
Regular train service to Sturgeon Bay was born on July 23, 1894. It died on Aug. 9, 1968.
First the automobile and then the semi trailer led to its demise.
The railroad was born in controversy and died in controversy. Railroad service was first bitterly opposed by the Advocate and turned down by the county board in 1881 and then rejected by county referendum in 1885.
Finally, a heavily endorsed petition convinced the county board to approve a $60,000 bond issue supporting the railroad with Sturgeon Bay voting an additional $16,000 and other towns and villages subscribing to the support of the line.
Working on the railroad, all the live long day
The railroad was also embedded in controversy when it died, the owners maintaining it was no longer profitable but city business and industrial interests trying to keep it alive to the extent that in late 1965 they convinced the city council to buy the railroad bridge for one dollar to keep it going. The county board had again voted to have nothing to do with it.
Then, when the bridge was declared unsafe and a portion of the roadbed was washed out by heavy rains on Aug. 9, 1968, the railroad died. The last regular train crossed the bridge at 1:30 p.m. Aug. 5, the last car at 2:50 p.m. Aug. 9, the same day as the last train from Sturgeon Bay to Casco Junction.
The roadbed from Sturgeon Bay to Algoma is now the Ahnapee State Trail, a hiking, biking and snowmobile trail which is part of the state park system.
Train service arrived before the turn of the century and yet Door county was the last county in Wisconsin to get a railroad, the primary reason lying in the geographical location of the county which made it easily accessible to sailing vessels and steamboats. Historical evidence also shows that pressure by entrenched steamship interests helped keep the railroad out of the county for at least several decades.
The east side depot, now the "Railroad Inn."
The Ahnapee & Western succeeded where no less than six other attempts had failed, starting on Jan. 19, 1870, when the Sturgeon Bay and Fond du Lac Railway Co. was formed with a number of prominent Sturgeon Bay names among the incorporators but failed for lack of interest.
The Wisconsin Peninsula Railway Co. was incorporated on May 31, 1881, not only proposing a narrow gauge railroad from Green Bay through Kewaunee and into the Door peninsula as far as Liberty Grove but seeking public support through a $50,000 bond issue. And while at first news of the proposed railway had been received with great joy, the atmosphere changed when the proposed bond issue was brought before a public meeting on May 25, 1881.
The math factor in the change of attitude was due to Advocate Editor Frank Long, who was to become a bitter enemy of the railroad idea as long as it was based on public support through bond issues. This fight continued for the next 12 years with public opinion swayed by Advocate editorials finally resulting in the county board turning down by a vote of 11-3 the railway company's petition for a referendum on a bond issue. The Wisconsin Peninsula Railway died with the vote.
The Milwaukee Lake Shore and Western Railway Co. had reached Two Rivers in the 1870's and was contemplating extending its track to Sturgeon Bay but the hostile treatment of the Wisconsin Peninsula Railway Co. caused it to change its mind and drop the idea.
Likewise, another "paper" company, the Fond du Lac Portage & Sturgeon Bay Railway Co., was also pushing plans to build a line from Fond du Lac to Sturgeon Bay but also required public funding and after seeing the attitude expressed by the Advocate and county board dropped the entire proposal.
Next came the Wisconsin Railway and Navigation Co., born in 1885 with plans to build a railroad from Green Bay to Sturgeon Bay with a branch to Kewaunee from Casco. But while partly backed by Door county interests, the company also wanted local support to the tune of $80,000 and a company representative traveled through the county urging support of the bond issue. But the Advocate, noting that the new railway would not go any farther north than Sturgeon Bay, countered with a scheme that pitted city residents against the rural population. And though the city supported the issue, 283-7, it was voted down by the towns, 1279-416.
Two years later still another company, the Wisconsin Midland Railway Co., was formed and actually got approval for a $35,000 bond issue, a feat accomplished by circulating petitions and obtaining the signature of such a large percentage of the county electorate that it was mandatory for the county board to heed them. However, the Sturgeon Bay line was but a branch of a large railroad from Fond du Lac to Lake Superior and when the main project fell through so did the Sturgeon Bay branch.
Finally, the Green Bay, Winona & St. Paul Railroad (Green Bay & Western) in 1892 built the affiliated Kewaunee, Green Bay & Western running from Green Bay to Kewaunee. Now the Door peninsula was resigned to the fact that any railroad that entered the Door peninsula would be a branch line, or connecting carrier to a larger road.
So it was on July 29, 1891, that the Ahnapee & Western was incorporated to build a railroad from Casco Junction on the Kewaunee, Green Bay & Western to Ahnapee (Algoma) and from there to Sturgeon Bay. The Ahnapee & Western asked support in the form of a $60,000 bond issue and of 2,871 resident taxpayers in the county, 2,080 signed a petition in favor of the bonding. Faced with such overwhelming support, the county board approved the issue and Sturgeon Bay voted an addition $16,000 while other towns and villages also subscribed support. The railroad was on the way.
The most outstanding and costly structure the railway had on its line was the city toll bridge built in 1887 which had to be fitted with railroad tracks. However, the biggest construction problem was posed by the Maplewood swamp which swallowed up tons and tons of fill.
An early train over the railroad bridge.
Three years after the project was approved the job was done and on July 23, 1894, the A & W started regular train service to Sturgeon Bay. This was followed by a gigantic celebration in Sturgeon Bay on Aug. 9 when special trains arrived from Green Bay and Ahnapee carrying over 1,400 people and special boats from Marinette and Menominee and carriages from throughout the county carried thousands more into the city for the celebration.
Sturgeon Bay welcomes the railroad, Aug. 9, 1894
The A & W offered regular passenger service until automobiles and competing bus service started cutting into its business in the 1920s. Mixed train service (freight train with passenger car attached) was substituted in the early 1930s but with a running time of about four hours between Sturgeon Bay and Green Bay, passenger business continued to dwindle and even limited passenger service was dropped in 1936.
The A & W railroad continued to serve the city during the busy World War II years but after the war the growth in the trucking industry with semi trailers competing in size with railroad box scores took bigger and bigger bites into the freight business.
It wasn't really a whole trainload of cherries for the markets of the world, as the banner proclaimed, but it was one of the late "Mitch" LaPlant's most famous publicity schemes. From Wendell Wilke, Algoma.
Another major factor in the railroad's demise was the closing of one of its biggest customers, the Evangeline milk condensery, on Jan. 31, 1964, and also the gradual decline of the Door county fruit industry, particularly the sale of the Fruit Growers Cooperative's Sturgeon Bay facilities in 1966.
So it was that on Aug. 9, 1968, two weeks shy of 74 years of service to Sturgeon Bay and Door county, the railroad died.
Last car over the railroad bridge, 2:50 p.m., Aug. 9, 1968
[author not stated]
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive