Old Brule, Douglas County Wisconsin

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History of Old Brule, Douglas County Wisconsin

It is convenient to distinguish between the much smaller in area modern Town of Brule, Wisconsin, and the town as first formed within its original boundaries in 1887. The latter here will be referred to as "Old Brule." Old Brule formed against a background of expanding settlement in Douglas County coming upon the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad (NP), which was built through the region to its eastern terminus in Ashland in 1884. The huge white pine growing throughout the Lake Superior region had already been exploited utilizing the several streams running northward into Lake Superior and then shipped west to mills in the booming Duluth-Superior port on the St. Louis River, or eastward to commercial rival, Ashland. However, the NP railroad represented a greatly expanded opportunity for movement of logs from the forest, and the later movement of finished board products throughout commercially developed America.

Just as attractive to early speculators was the prospect of finding rich copper deposits on the variously named Brule, Douglas, or South Range, which entered Wisconsin in Burnett County and traversed the whole of Douglas County from the southwest to the northeast. The formation had been exploited by the Native Americans who used the native metal in unsmelted form. Their tools and excavations were used by the early copper prospectors as evidence of potentially profitable sites. It was examined as far back as the French Regime, noted by Jonathan Carver before the American Revolution and explored by the Astor Fur Trading company until it folded. George Stuntz did exploration along Copper Creek and submitted his reports to George Sargent back east. Upper Michigan's ore formation appeared to be duplicated within Douglas County, and for a brief time more copper ore left the ports of Superior and Duluth than iron ore. Through the year 1900 several exploratory copper ventures were at work along the range, sinking shafts, in some cases hundreds of feet into the formation, only to be suddenly abandoned as the national economy went through its boom and bust cycles. The demands of war would temporarily raise interests in the sites, but none of the sites ever attained the status of those in the Michigan formations. The earliest land speculation in the region appears to be along the Brule or Douglas range. Men such as James Stinson of Hamilton, Ontario, later of Chicago, and lumberman Isaac Staples, bought lands along the range early after Douglas County was formed in 1854. Frederick Weyerhaeuser, while involved in the logging and lumbering in the region invested heavily in a mine site in southeastern Douglas County in a formation that parallels the Brule Range. This too, was exploited by early Native Americans. In the early years of Old Brule's existence there were high expectations that places like the Percival Mine, and the Astor Mine and many others would finally produce the strike that would boom the region.

It was during these same years that settlers came into the region to take up government homesteads. This was before the days of the so called "cutover." Many of these settlers came before the Northern Pacific and in some cases they joined the laboring force as the line moved through their vicinity. The earliest of these homesteaders were settling in what was then part of the old Town of Superior. In 1887 the settlers managed to create the local town governments they were entitled to. The large towns of Brule, Nebagamain and Gordon formed leaving the Town of Superior reduced to a quarter of its original size, that being the full extent of Douglas County. Eventually Old Brule would become victim to the same desire for home rule. In 1906 the Town of Amnicon and its Poplar and Wentworth villages took the western third of the town. The following year the Town of Maple took over the middle third of the town and even its town hall. The same year the Village of Lake Nebagamon formed after the positive vote of its male citizens and took two more sections from Old Brule. The community of Lake Nebagamon had developed in conjunction with the logging activities of Weyerhaeuser’s Nebagamon Lumber Company beginning in 1898 until 1907, the year the village formed.

It is noteworthy that a significant portion of the early homesteaders within Old Brule were of Finnish origin, and their settlement across northern Old Brule, extending into the Town of Oulu in Bayfield County, formed at the time the most densely populated farming region within the State of Wisconsin. Surrounding them were settlements made up of French Canadians, English Canadians, Swedes, Swede-Finns, and old Anglo-American stock.