Tales from the old-timer

Peshtigo-Marinette Relationship



The City of Peshtigo was first incorporated in 1903 despite efforts by the Town of Peshtigo board to prevent it. The new city, then a “sawmill town,” had a 1905 census population of 2,539, which left the Town of Peshtigo with only 1,352 in the 1905 State Census, down from a healthy 7,202 in the 1900 US Census. The town has rallied in the years since, and now has over 4,000 residents and the city has grown from a low of 1,440 in 1920 after the shutdown of the Peshtigo Lumber Co. sawmill in 1918, up to over 3,700 currently.

At the time of the 1871 Peshtigo Fire, which oddly enough put Peshtigo ”on the map” for all time by burning up, was an unincorporated village back then, and a part of the Town of Peshtigo. My grandparents lived at Peshtigo Harbor and my dad and his two sisters were born at the little village fronting on the Bay. When the harbor mill shut down about 1887 everybody moved to Peshtigo.

Marinette had always been dominant as a shopping center, and remains so, with big retail centers for the area, making it the biggest shopping town in northeast Wisconsin, second only to Green Bay, not to mention its Courthouse, County Government, and other important service centers.

When I was growing up, my dad went all the way to Marinette once a week to buy meat at Lauerman’s basement meat counter, and I even rode my bike once to Marinette to buy a $1 Taylor Cub model airplane kit at a hardware store there. The plane had a 3 foot wingspan and kept a 13-year-old boy busy for a few days.

A boy named Duncan Godshall was the best known model airplane builder in those days in Peshtigo, and budding modelers paid homage to him and his creations.

History doesn’t give many clews about the relationship between Marinette and Peshtigo. The winding, circuitous routes of County Highways B and BB tell us, though, that the relationship is very old, and must have enabled Indians and white pioneers to journey to and from Peshtigo and Marinette (and Menekaunee) from way back on what were once Indian trails.

Marinette’s historical namesake’s name, by the way, was not to honor Marie Antoinette, the French Queen Consort to French King Louis XVI from 1774 to 1793 who was reputed to have said, when told that the poor had no bread, “Let them eat cake!” Marinette means simply, in French, “Little Marie.” Her officially recorded name was indeed “Marie.”

There used to be a slight bit of jovial condescension toward Peshtigo on the part of some Marinette folks. When our east side softball team played some games against Buck Parish’s Marinette “River Rats” they mocked us as rubes by telling us it was nearly time to get on home to milk the cows at the ballfield across the street from Charlie Greening’s home on Noquebay Avenue on the East Side.

We have played high school basketball with Marinette for many years but rarely played them in football. We did in 1942 because of wartime travel restrictions and they beat us bad, 39-19, with the legendary Earl “Jug” Girard running circles around us.

This all is to not ignore that Peshtigo has a healthy, flourishing business district today that runs all the way from Brown’s sumptuous cafe and bar on the west edge of town to Pete’s Barber Shop on the east margins of this prosperous manufacturing town that goes “way back” and has a genuine Native American name!

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