Guy Kinsman

1957 interview by Mrs Franklin Neuschafer

 

My father was Isaac Nelson Kinsman.  He was what was called a Green Mountain boy from Vermont  He was born in the state of Vermont and roamed the mountain heights and valleys when he was a lad, until one day he came to the middle west.

 

My mother was born in Manchester England.  Her maiden name was Jane N. Chalmers.  When she was nine years old her folks with a colony of English people moved to France.  While they lived there Jane learned the French language without too much difficulty.  After she understood enough of the language she was assigned the duty to shop in the French shops for the whole English colony.

 

Apparently this colony stayed in France for five years for at the age of fourteen she came to the United States with her parents.  They came inland to Wisconsin.  They settled on the outskirts of the Pine River.

Jane had a better than average education already, and to get acquired even more she decided to attend Lawrence College at Appleton for advanced education. While attending Lawrence College the professors found she had more knowledge of Latin than they did, so they asked her to teach the Latin class at the college.

 

Later she taught schools at Berlin and Fremont Wisconsin.  While teaching in this area she met Isaac Kinsman. 

 

Isaac and his parents had moved from Vermont to New Castle, Wisconsin near Campbellsport.  Isaac’s search for work brought him to the Berlin-Fremont area.  Where he met Jane and they fell in love and married.

 

While teaching she learned to speak the language of the communities and so now she could speak five languages. She stayed with the parents of the children when the weather made getting about difficult, so learned much through these contacts.

Jane and Isaac set up housekeeping and in due time a son was born to them.  (They became the parents of Guy Kinsman of this interview). 

 

My mother died in the year 1917  She was eighty-four years old  I was born in this house in which I still live today.  I grew up here.  I was not a good student.  I skipped school quite often with some of the other boys.  We would go to our favorite swimming hole which was where the old railroad grade was built later, below the bridge.  We never did get that railroad to come through Fremont.

 

That swimming hole was something.  We would hang our clothes on the willows and go in our birthday suits.  Later we found another choice place where the post office is now, but where we had to wear swimming trunks.

 

I loved the river.  I practically lived on and around it all the time. I watched the steam boats go up and down river and dreamed of the time when I could work on one of them.  as of then there were five steam boats carrying produce and freight up and down the Wolf and Fox Rivers.  At the age of thirteen I became a cabin boy on the OB Reed, during the vacation weeks in the summer time. How I loved it. Zellmer Reed was the captain of the OB Reed, and also the owner.

 

We carried freight and passengers between Oshkosh, Winneconne, Tustin, and Fremont.  In the spring the River was filled with logs from the northern Wisconsin Logging Projects.  The river men were busy guiding these logs toward Oshkosh where they were sawed into lumber.  The river was so filled with logs all the way to Bay Boom that our steamer had to move at a snail’s pace along this section.  On the end of the log run was the cabin built on the raft of logs in which the river men lay during the log drive down river.  At the end of the spring drive the loggers would disperse to their homes and families until another drive developed.  Logging was done all the way up river to Post Lake and surroundings.  At that time Wisconsin was a land filled with trees.

 

I worked on the boats through my teenage years and until I was a young man.  I met and married Nettie Walrath in the year 1897.  We lived on a farm southeast of Fremont for five years and why I do not know for farming was not in my line of work.  I was unhappy for the river kept calling me, and in the end it conquered me.  I went back to work on the boats.  They were my great interest and my life.  I worked my way up from deckhand to mate to captain.  My first charge was the Dixie.  She was owned by a man from Ohio late on.  I had worked this steamer for four or five years along the Wolf and Fox rivers and also worked the W.W. LaFever.  One fall we delivered a steamer to a man in Sandusky Ohio, via the water from here to there.

 

We left Oshkosh in the morning and traveled to Green Bay the first day.  There we fueled up and at five a.m. the next morning started out again and arrived at Mackinaw City by ten p.m.  We dropped anchor there and stayed there until the next morning. By four a.m. we moved into Lake Huron.  We traveled the whole length of Lake Huron and arrived at Port Huron the next day by three in the afternoon.  We stopped to fuel up there, then traveled down the St. Clair River and across Lake St. Clair to Detroit.  From there we traveled down the Detroit River and into Lake Erie. There was rough weather and we had difficulties so we tied up to a dump scow on the Canadian side for a day until the wind went down.  We then began traveling again across the end of Lake Erie to Sandusky, Ohio which was our destination.  We were to get there.  We rested from our long trip, then took a passenger steamer to see the sights along the Ohio shore.  After our sight seeing we returned to Oshkosh and our work on the Wolf.

 

The river steamers sometimes caught fire from the smoke stacks.  It was especially dangerous when straw and hay was freighted.  Some of the steamers that did burn up this way were the City of Oshkosh; the KW Hutchinson which burned below Willow Bar, the outlet of Lake Poygan.  The Leander Choate burned at North Port.  So we had our tragedies on the Wolf River from time to time.  I worked for and on the river steamers for years then I worked for the Government supplying the locks on the Fox River of which there were twenty seven.  The name of the steamer while I worked this job was the US Wolf. I also worked for Cock and Brown Company and was a captain of the boat named Brown.

 

I had one bad experience.  One fall around Labor Day I was moving a load of coal from Menasha to Oshkosh.  The wind was blowing hard from the southeast.  I could not hold the steamer in the channel. Then it seemed the steamer was sinking forward. I called the mate to take the wheel and I climbed over the coal which was loaded at the front of the barge with the cabin at the back.  Here I saw that the hull was damaged and that the water was flooding the coal.  I managed to get it fixed.  Then we had more trouble.  Some of the flues let go and we were not able to get up enough steam to travel.  So we had to dump about ten ton of coal into the Fox River. That was better than to sink the whole load.  We then stopped and built up steam for power – move then stop again build up more power, a repeat all along the way we were indeed in a crippled state. When we neared Oshkosh we saw one of the men with a tug.  I hailed him, and asked him if he would pull me out of the river channel toward the dock for I did not have enough power to do so.  He obliged and we made the dock.  We were one relieved crew.  Mr. Brown wanted us to reload right away and start back – we told him it was impossible because of the condition of the freighter.

 

“Alright,” he said, “We will then call it quits for this year.”  For it was Labor Day. All this is now in the past yet I can still go back in memory.  The river is now crowded with fishermen in season and pleasure boats in our lazy summers.  The logs and the steamers have vanished with the horse and buggies.

                                                                                    Guy Chalmers Kinsman