PLANNING 261 



roads. There are fewer old trees and more scrubby patches of 

 aspen. The towns are little better than a collection of cracker' 

 box houses set in a square like the headstones in a small grave' 

 yard. The main streets will run wide on either side of the rail" 

 road tracks for perhaps two blocks, then suddenly dwindle into 

 a country road. That's as far as the burst of optimism ran that 

 built the boulevard through the center of the town. 



If the brakeman on the train is in a talkative mood, he will 

 tell you that the railroad was built up through this area about 

 twenty 'five years ago to develop it. Then this northern corner 

 of Wisconsin was covered by a virgin forest of the finest white 

 pine in the world. The lumber companies were up there cut' 

 ting it as fast as they could. The supply would never run out, 

 so they thought. And the towns were built for the lumbermen. 

 And then the railroad came to carry out the lumber and start 

 the flow of goods back and forth, nourishing the towns along 

 the line like a main artery in the blood stream. They expected 

 that the towns would grow, and farms would spring up to 

 provide food for the towns, and in no time it would be like 

 southern Wisconsin. 



But the brakeman will look out at the fields of scrub aspen 

 and burnt'over pine and shake his head and say, "But it didn't 

 work out that way/'' Perhaps at this point you are passing 

 through a little town named Luck. You can see that it must 

 have been given that name a good many years before it reached 

 its present state. "No," the brakeman says, "it didn't work out. 

 Just two trains a day now, the up'train and the down'train, and 

 then a couple of freights." 



Why didn't it work out? The reason is that the timber which 

 was the great resource of the area was cut by the lumber com' 

 panies without any attempt at continuing the forests by natural 

 regrowth. Fires were allowed to sweep unchecked through the 

 cut'over lands, destroying what little tree growth had a chance 

 to come in after the logging. And the soil, unlike the rich earth 



