Ecological Stewardship Prospectus

 

N8976 Kaufman Lane, Crivitz, WI 54114 - Marinette County

 

36.8 acres | Park-grade stewardship | Rare-species habitat

 

Location is via Parkway Road, Wisconsin Rustic Road 32 along the waterfall tour.

 

Centrally positioned: north of Veterans Park, south of Governor Thompson State Park, east of the fabled Thunder Mountain—an enclave of ecological and historical richness, west of High Falls Flowage and within minutes of public recreation yet visually secluded.

 

Land Composition & Topography

 

• Total area: 36.8 surveyed acres.

 

• Extensive mowed trail network (ATV-compatible) permits discreet circulation without compromising the forest understory.

 

• Western boundary: a 60-foot ridge overlooks Handsaw Creek, a Wisconsin Class-A

trout stream; a broad natural valley provides riparian seclusion.

 

• Eastern sector: manicured clearings in thick forest with orchard infrastructure.

 

• Mature, seven-acre red pine plantation; needle layer supports prolific mycological fruiting.

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Botanical Inventory:

 

Edible & Fruit-bearing

 

– Pear: 5 trees (standard cultivars).

 

– Apricot: 1 mature standard + 2 smaller.

 

– Plum: 5 trees (European and American hybrids).

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– Cherry: 1 tree & 1 Cherry bush.

 

– Apple: 13 trees—Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Yellow

Transparent, Macintosh.

 

– Nut: 2 Chinese chestnuts, 2 English walnuts, 8+ acres of wild hazelnut bushes.

 

– Mulberry: 2 Russian Mulberry (Morus alba var. tatarica).

 

– Berry & cane fruit: blueberry (distinctive northern Wisconsin ecotype), wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens), raspberry, blackberry, Pixwell gooseberry (dozens of bushes), grapevines (3), cherry bush, honeysuckle (ornamental, Lonicera spp.).​

 

Medicinal/Herbal:

 

– St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum) (2), Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora), Lions Mane

(Hericium erinaceus).

 

Canopy & Ornamental:

 

Mature pin oak, red oak, blue spruce, pink crabapple, Bradford pear, purple-leaf plum, black cherry, hawthorn, basswood, red cedar, jack pine, scots pine, white ash, quaking aspen, juniper (transplanted Thunder Mountain ecotype), lilacs, naturalized orange day-lily, and ornamental grasses.

 

Mycological Resources:

 

Seasonal abundance of morels, puffballs, chanterelles, lion’s mane, chicken-of-the-woods, and Indian-pipe (Monotropa uniflora) documented across mesic hardwood and conifer zones.

 

Wildlife Observations:

 

Regular sightings: black bear (documented winter denning), coyote, ruffed grouse, gray squirrel, red squirrel, southern flying squirrel, eastern chipmunk, wild turkey, red fox, porcupine, blue-spotted salamander.

 

Avifauna: pileated woodpecker, barred and great horned owls, scarlet tanager, American goldfinch, rose-breasted grosbeak, northern cardinal, blue jay, black-capped chickadee.

State-listed or regionally rare species observed: pileated woodpecker (priority species), eastern massasauga rattlesnake (Sistrurus catenatus) (endangered), Karner blue butterfly (Plebejus melissa samuelis), Kirtland’s warbler (migrant).

 

Summary:

 

This property represents a fully integrated park-style agroforestry reserve offering immediate recreational utility, long-term botanical yield, and significant ecological value within a premier Northwoods setting on Handsaw Creek in the heart of Marinette County’s Recreation Zone in the sunset shadow of Thunder Mountain.

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Long History of Handsaw Creek

 

(Being a Plain and Curious Chronicle Compiled from Logs, Ledgers, Tavern-Talk, and the Memory of Old Men)

 

The name first appears in ink in the summer of 1874, when the government surveyor Elisha P. Brant, wet to the waist and bitten black with mosquitoes, scrawled “Hand-Saw Cr.” in the margin of Plat 37. Brant was no poet; his own notebook says simply “creek shaped in plan like broken handsaw.” Yet the moniker lodged, passed from mouth to mouth, grew taller in the telling, and after three generations and ten thousand camp-fire repetitions the little stream in western Marinette County became fully fledged legend—Hand-Saw, then Handsaw, Creek: a ribbon of dark, quick water believed to run luck, sorrow, and fish in equal proportion.

 

Before the surveyor’s boots ever crunched the cedar duff, the creek had already borne other names—Chippewa hunters called it Ad-ik-ame-gon, “place where marten drink,” referring to the sleek brown animals that haunted the low cedar along its banks. French voyageurs coming down the Menominee in birch canoes marked the same bend on their mental maps with the phrase Crique aux Poissons Gras—Fat-Fish Creek—because the slow eddies below the half-submerged logs were thick with brook trout said to grow plump on spruce seeds dropped from porcupine-limbered branches. The earliest land deed filed at the Marinette courthouse—a brittle sheet now foxed by a century and a half—records the sale of 320 acres of “Adikamegon” to a shingle-maker named Ole Hanson in 1871, $65 paid up front in silver, the rest in two yokes of oxen. Ole built his first dam within a month; the millpond drowned the old beaver works and gave birth to the first small town, Hansonville, though only the mossy foundation stones of the shingle mill remain.

 

The first winter after the mill started—the winter of ’71-’72—was one of those iron-cold seasons when ironwood trees split of their own weight, and it produced the first written testimony to the creek’s peculiarity of never quite freezing. Ole told the logging superintendent, Mr. J. Thaddeus “J.T.” McNeil, that every midnight an eerie glow hovered above the water, “a sort of marsh-fire,” visible a quarter-mile away. J.T., who had seen ghosting phosphorus swamps in the Allegheny forests, declared it only rotting cedar logs. Still, he instructed the night-watch Swedes to keep rifles loaded with silver half-dollars, silver being “the sure counter to river-spectres.” The men grinned but did it anyway. Whether from prudence or Providence, no timber-wolf or logger was ever lost on Handsaw Creek.

 

The river-boss, Silas “Shorty” Moran, rode the top log cursing and praying until it snapped; he was hurled out, cracked his head on a half-sunken white pine, and disappeared beneath the froth. His body was never found, though in 1917 a boy fishing below Deadman’s Pool hooked what he swore was a mackinaw coat still wrapped taut round a skeleton rib-cage. For years afterward, loggers claimed they could hear Shorty whistling a waltz across the eddies at sunset—off-key, naturally.

 

During the clear-cutting days near Thunder Mountain Road Handsaw Creek itself remained strangely untouched. A forty-acre stand of virgin hemlock along the northern bend survived the saws, preserved perhaps because a Catholic priest from St. Michael’s Mission declared it had once been a chapel-of-air where Fr. Allouez read Mass to the Chippewa in 1670; the mill men feared to fell consecrated silence. When the logging camps folded one by one, the uncut “cathedral” became the seedbed that re-greened the entire drainage. Locals still speak of walking into that hemlock stand: the daylight turns bottle-green and hushed; snow lingers in patches until June.​

 

In 2001 a retired professor from Lawrence University, Dr. Helen Brant-Douglas, great-granddaughter of the government surveyor Elisha Brant, published a slim volume, Ghosts of Iron Rivers, in which she reconstructed six generations of oral history threading Handsaw Creek. By then only a handful of the loggers’ great-grandchildren remained to correct her. Her book records this final testimonial from Elwood “Woody” Hanson, age ninety-one, great-grandson of Ole the shingle-maker, days before he passed: “I’ve seen her go thin as whipcord under ice, and I’ve seen her swell fat with moon-glutted rain. But never once, in all my years, have I stepped to her edge without a catch in my breath. She runs not just water but time itself, and the current knows every name—white doe, Shorty, preacher Allouez, even the first cedar seed. Hold your ear to the water at dusk when the first star finds its reflection, and the creek will say them all back to you. That’s no fancy. That’s covenant. A man—any man—may walk away richer or poorer for the listening, but he will walk away different.”

 

Today a dirt two-track winds down through second-growth maple, jack pine, and the last proud hemlocks, passing on its left the stone abutments where Ole Hanson’s shingles once rattled onto boxcars—and on its right, the wide green meadow where Cream City Cheese once cooled its wheels. At creek-side the water still runs clear over sand the color of fresh biscuits; mayflies skitter like sparks; trout, fattened on black ant falls and mosquito hatches, flicker and hold in the shadows of the log-jams built of spruce trunks dropped by beaver and storm.

 

There is even—though no historical account mentions it—an iron hand-saw, rusted thin as a knife blade, wedged high in the fork of a red maple on the southern bank. Children find it when leaves drop; no one remembers how it got there. Some say Shorty Moran drove it deep the day he vanished, to mark the boundary between quick and quiet water. Others insist the surveyor himself nailed it to the tree in 1874, an obscure joke at his own expense, a wink across centuries. Whatever the truth, the saw gleams each April when sap rises and wet bark peels away like memory.

 

That is the fabled History of Handsaw Creek as a stubborn watercourse, carrying sawdust, blessings, fish and the low murmured prayers of Chippewa, Menominee and White folks alike. The land along its banks has shifted hands through deed, war, bankruptcy, inheritance and hope. Whoever now owns this final ribbon of frontage stands guardian of that covenant—and may well hear his own name spoken back from the current when the first star climbs above the water. Offered for kind consideration by one who has listened once too often at the creek’s hush.