Short chronicle of a Pierce County ghost town

“They thought there was gold,” Roger Nelson said recently as he pointed to a river bluff situated northeast from where we stood on County Highway A at the site of Brasington, a Pierce County ghost town once located within the Rush River valley, in sections 16 and 21 of Salem township. Up in the hills yonder it seemed, there was a mineshaft which had first been dug for gold once and then re-dug out after being shown to two boys by an older man, with the mine tracks disappearing into the hillside. But while placer streams from glaciers might have seeded the area with more gold than elsewhere on account of simple geological process and chance, there was to be no gold strike nor riches to fuel Brasington’s growth, and the one-time Pierce County hometown, is now a ghost town. As shown in a photo from the Pierce County Historical Society, the community named for settler John H. Brasington was once supplied with a church, a post office, a school, a grist mill and even a grocery store is today replaced by new mostly residential dwellings, and present residents of the Rush River valley surrounded by corn fields and treelined hillsides—plus the occasional sign to watch for falling rocks on the highway close to the bluff base. But while Brasington itself is gone, pilings in the Rush River still mark where the grist mill once was, Nelson said. Not all, seems, has been lost. Oftentimes, the quest to verify isn’t that easy.

Chances are that if you’ve ever tried to find out about your family or the more general past outside of a textbook or exhaustive personal diary then it’s probable that know the limitations of such research. Among them is that history as officially related is often only as accurate as the records left behind or else their authors happen to be. Alongside the accuracy question of original history texts is the lamentable fact that much was simply left unrecorded from daily life in the way back or was alluded to as being common knowledge to contemporaries and so unnecessary to elaborate upon.

Such ‘common knowledge,’ of course, disappears with the generation in question. Luckily for Brasington, a newspaper then published at Maiden Rock and now archived at UW-River Falls in the Archive and Research Center, tells enough of the community history that Brasington—although gone—is not completely forgotten or left as a total blank upon history’s pages. Best known in contemporary times for an on-site artesian well which helps in the creation of rather spectacular ice sculptures by Mr. Nelson south of the school and grocery store, the history of the Rush River valley stretches much farther back in terms of settlement and geology, including but not limited to the late 19th century, when Brasington was oft spoke of by local correspondents in the Maiden Rock Weekly Press, located south and to the east along Lake Pepin.

“Business is rushing into our town,” the locals update for Brasington from October 8, 1892 says of the site near the Rush River, then going on, “A photographer from Red Wing is in town, taking pictures of our town from the surrounding bluffs.” Locals of the past would relate all manner of things, including who went to see who, if someone was ill or getting better, and even sneak an ad in or two. Three years later in November of 1895, the community of Brasington was humming and school set to start, as the Weekly Press relates: “School commences next Monday,” it says, saying that one Henry Powers “has purchased a farm of Mr. Hicks, of Maiden Rock,” but also that, “J. L. Zwickey expects to go to Maiden Rock to work, in a few days,” and finally that, “through a typographical error in last week’s issue of the PRESS, our schools average attendance was 37 ½ . It should have been 32.” These were the days when newspapers had to be typeset But whereas children are now bussed to school and newspaper creation done on a computer screen, the memory of Brasington and its people lives on, partly contained within the District Five school records for Salem township, dating back to July 12, 1890 and the days when long distances and less than ideal transportation options made country schools the way many received an education. What do those district records say? It’s all there in cursive script, archived at UW-River Falls.

“Record of the Proceedings of School Board Meetings,” the record states for District 5 in the Town of Salem.

“Pursuant to notice a school meeting was held at the house of David Suler,” it relates. “Meeting called to order by electing G. L. Bunce Chairman for the evening.

Motion made and carried that E. A. Collamore be elected as director of said new school district for three years. J. M. Horm as Dist. Clerk for one year. And J. H. Brasington as Dist. Treasurer for two years,” the record relates.

It was John H. Brasington who came to Pierce County in the late 1850s and settled in Salem township, raising a family on a tract of land near the community that would later bear his name. Living until 1906, he is buried on the top of a hill at Maiden Rock Cemetery, having moved on from Brasington prior to death. The record continues: “Motion made and carried that Wallace Zwickey and J. M. Thorn be elected as a committee to locate School House lot and report at next meeting. Motion made and carried that we adjourn until one week from tonight,” the record with G. L. Bunce as Chairman followed by J. H. Brasington as clerk for the evening states. The night after their school board meeting, the Sea Wing would sink on Lake Pepin, though you wouldn’t know it from the meeting minutes recorded a week later, where no mention is made of the tragedy and only school business recorded. What else can be known about Brasington, and from where?

Going over to Ancestry.com as an additional source of information, an 1895 Wisconsin state census makes known that area resident William Holstead had two men and three women (all white) in his household, while presumptive town namesake “J. H. Brasington” had three women and two men in his house, also all white. But whereas early censuses tended to differentiate said “white” inhabitants by their country of origin and implicit first language (“nativity”), what appears for the town of Union as a whole without any differentiation among sections is that the seven-member household of Severin Sorenson also had one black man in it, along with one black man in the four-person household of “Chas. Walsingham,” the abbreviated name “Chas.” often being used for Charles. Also listed is a black woman in the four-person household of Frank Sanders, with no other designations being made in the not overly detailed census records. With each household short by one person in terms of stated birth ancestry, nothing conclusive can be said, although better records should have been kept. As to the store in Brasington, the 1895 census fleshes out “B. White’s store” on a corresponding plat map to potentially be one “Beverly White,” listed as head of her household in a household containing one man and two women, the second potentially a daughter. Other names in the 1895 census of the town of Union include “Anderson,” “Gustafson,” “Lundberg,” “Hovde,” “Johnson,” “Ost,” “Jas. Mc-Shane,” “Larson,” Olson,” “Levitt,” “Standfield,” and Seeley,” thereby explaining the “J” in J. Seeley of section 21 as being “Joseph.” Some cursive last names are inconclusive in their reading and spelling conventional, leading to one additional observation: If those in positions of influence regarding education policy want the future to be better at reading past census records than the present is at reading shorthand, NOW IS THE TIME to re-pursue cursive literacy in schools—old records are full of it—and that is all. Or maybe not.

“The town has commenced work on the abutment near C. Walsingham’s,” the locals update from Brasington for November 6, 1895 relates. Said “abutment” per old property maps would have been located then as now (for town section boundaries are much less changeable than other ones) somewhere on a 160 acre parcel in the upper northeast corner of section 16, just east of another 160 acres registered to “Chas. Mc-Shane” and north of 200 to “Mary A. Schults,” the center of Brasington itself located to the south. But as for the William Holstead family and Rush River Valley more generally, a permanent urban settlement, was not to be. Born in Sweden in 1857 and immigrating to the United States in 1866 per the 1900 U.S. Federal Census, William Holstead once of Brasington, became a Maiden Rock homeowner with no mortgage as of the turn of the last century, being married to wife Minnie (born September 1863 in Sweden) with four children: Grant O., 13; Lydia E., age 9, Rubin C. age 6, and a baby daughter, born April of 1900 with age listed as “1/12.” William and Grant are both listed as “day labourer” for occupation, while Lydia was “at school,” no other particulars given for Holstead family employment(s). John H. Brasington and his wife Eunice, meanwhile, are buried in Maiden Rock Cemetery above the village along with their three children. Before returning to Maiden Rock one final time however, the Brasington girls, Viola A. and Minnie M. would go on to Hennepin County, Minnesota, with the third generation venturing further still. All from a community named for a couple that started out in western New York (John) and Pennsylvania (Eunice) in the early to mid-1800s.

Meanwhile, also on the map from 1895 is a bridge across the Rush river at the edge of section 16, near the said property. Might there be a historical remnant of the abutment left? We encourage current owners of Rush River property in section 16 of Salem Township to check their river sides, and send in the photos!

Photo by Joseph Back.