***********************************
Title: My Perception of the Village of Biron, Wisconsin
Date Occurred: 1971 through 2001
Date Written: October 8, 2006
Written By: Joseph T. Arendt
***********************************
Now that I live in Ohio and before that when I lived in Massachusetts, I have had trouble communicating what it was like in the part of Wisconsin where I grew up. My parents moved around when I was very young, so I have lived in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the city of Appleton, Wisconsin, in the town of Kellner, Wisconsin, and in the Village of Biron, Wisconsin. In that list, the place I have the most vivid memories of is the Village of Biron. We moved to Biron when I was in the second grade. My parents lived there in the same large house until two years after I moved away to attend college.
The Village of Biron that I knew in many ways differs from the Biron of today. Actually, I do not know the Biron of today. All my siblings moved out of the state of Wisconsin. My parents moved to Utah about five years ago. I have no other relatives left in the entire state of Wisconsin. So, the last time I have been to the Village of Biron or the nearby city of Wisconsin Rapids was about five years ago from when I am typing this in 2006. My wife, Helen, accompanied me on that last visit.
The automobile license plates of Wisconsin have a slogan, “AMERICA’S DAIRYLAND.” In these modern times when most states including Wisconsin offer choices in plates, I think residents can choose a plate without the saying. When I was a child, all the plates had that saying. That saying has taken root across the country so that nearly everybody I meet assumes that since I grew up in Wisconsin, I grew up on or around dairy farms!
The first time I recall seeing cows milked was not in Wisconsin, but in Minnesota. Not only that, I was about twenty-three years old and already had my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering before this happened! One might guess for it to be that late in my life to see cows milked, I must not really have grown up on or even anywhere near dairy farms. That guess would be correct.
There were only two big industries in the Village of Biron that I knew. One of these industries was growing cranberries. Two large cranberry farms take up much of the area of the village. These were never called farms, as far as I recall. They were instead called cranberry marshes or cranberry bogs.
The cranberry bogs do not look like a field that a crop such as corn is grown in. Instead, the cranberries are grown in fields about six feet lower than the level of the paved or dirt roads that encircle the field. The west to northwest side of the Village of Biron is bordered by the Wisconsin River. The river is dammed, making it as wide as a good-sized lake. The village does not extend to the distant side of the river.
Although there is a dam entirely across the river that starts right in the center of the Village of Biron, there is no bridge that one can drive or walk over. One cannot cross until one goes about five miles down the river to one of the three bridges crowded together in the city of Wisconsin Rapids or goes about fifteen miles north to a bridge in the city of Stevens Point. Walking across the river on the dam in Biron is not permitted. Many signs and fences are so imposing about that that nobody I know has even ever attempted crossing the river by walking across the Biron dam.
The water from the river can be allowed to flow into the cranberry bogs to flood them. My understanding is this can be protective against the plants freezing, stretching out the growing season. Thus, the cranberry bogs are located close to a plentiful source of water. In Biron, that source is the Wisconsin River.
A major problem with living close to cranberry bogs is mosquitoes. Chemicals were sprayed to reduce the number of mosquitoes, but even with that they were always plentiful. In the evening, Dad would wear a thick, long-sleeved shirt that the mosquitoes could not bite through. He would even do this in July when it was boiling hot since it did not cool off quickly in the midsummer evenings. Some seemed to think he had lost his mind dressing like that in summer heat. He claimed he would rather be hot than have to spray on lots of bug spray. Given dangers of long-term exposures to chemicals, I do not think this was crazy at all. I know from experience that the mosquitoes in Biron can bite straight through the kind of thin cloth in the dress shirts I typically wear today.
The other main industry in Biron is also dependent on access to large quantities of water. This industry is far more important to the health of the village than the cranberry bogs. The other industry is making paper. A large paper mill with several huge paper machines is located in Biron. Each paper machine takes about the area of a football field, but is located entirely indoors. Thus, the paper mill is a large place with many buildings, some of them enormous.
Two smokestacks towered into the sky. Both stacks were painted in an alternating pattern of white and red. These could be seen from a long ways off.
As far as I know, there were no churches in Biron. Most of the churches were in the nearby city of Wisconsin Rapids. While Biron in some ways reminded me of a quaint, sleepy village, my idealistic image of such a place is of a church steeple being the tallest thing around. In Biron, the twin smokestacks tower over all else. The constant outpouring of white smoke is not a sight I found pleasant, even though it was a sign of financial prosperity.
My father, as did most of the fathers of the other boys and girls in the village, worked at the paper mill. The cranberry bogs required relatively few employees in comparison.
Because of this, I felt that Biron was similar to many other company towns, although the village was only partially owned by the company unlike a mining company town where the company might own the whole town. The company in this context refers to Consolidated Papers, Incorporated. That company no longer exists, having been bought out around 2000 by an international company called Stora Enso. The Village of Biron itself still exists, of course.
Curiously, I never found out where the word Biron came from. Was it somebody’s last name from the nineteenth century? I have no idea.
While the cranberry bogs prevent Biron from being a true one-industry town, the paper mill brought in far more money and employed far more people than the cranberry bogs ever have. I felt this gave Biron a company town feeling.
One hallmark of a company town is houses owned by the company and then rented out. When I was a boy, there were about four blocks of houses owned by Consolidated Papers. These houses were located close to the paper mill. All these houses were painted white and were two stories tall. These houses were also fairly narrow, so many could fit in a small area.
After those blocks came other blocks of houses owned by individual families on land they owned themselves. We lived in a house that we owned.
The Biron Credit Union all through the time I was in grade school through junior high school was located in a converted company two-story house. It looked quaint and cute. I put my allowance and later newspaper route earnings in there.
A village store that looked like something out of the Waltons television show was in another converted company house. It had just a few essentials as far as groceries, priced considerably higher than at the supermarkets five miles away in Wisconsin Rapids. Deli sandwiches for the mill workers seemed to provide much of the business, as did selling candy and soda pop to children and teenagers.
Next to these company houses but even closer to the mill was a village swimming pool and the village hall. The swimming pool was the center of summer activity. I worked there during the summer during my high school years. It helped me save money for college. During the winter, the village hall was the center of activity. It had a basketball court and a two-lane bowling alley. The village hall was open from 6:30 p.m. through around 9:00 p.m. Little kids had to leave at 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. That let the older kids and adults take over the entire basketball court. Prior to that magic time, the older teens and adults got use of half the court and younger kids the other half.
The village hall functioned as what these days is called a recreation center. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Weeblos (kind of a Junior Boy Scouts, but for older children than Cub Scouts) met there. When I took my hunter safety course that would let me hunt at age fourteen rather than sixteen, the course was taught in the village hall.
Cub Scouts, in contrast, were held in the private home of the “den mother.” That is, in the house of the mother of one of the boys.
Two blocks east of the paper mill was the public school. It covered from kindergarten through sixth grade. I attended it from about second or third grade to sixth grade.
What I have described is not all of Biron. Biron is really a much more spread out place than it seemed to me in my daily life. It followed one side of the Wisconsin River. On the Biron side of the river, if one went north from the center of the village, it seemed you had left the village entirely. For roughly a mile, on one side of the road is the river and on the other side is cranberry bogs. This was followed by a half mile or so of woods owned by the paper company. There was a nice nature walk through those woods. It had placards by various trees. The placards tended to emphasis what trees work well for paper making, as you might imagine given who owned these woods.
About a mile and a half past the center of the village where these cranberry bogs and woods take over, houses start back up again. These houses hug the river for miles. Another couple miles more is technically still in the limits of the Village of Biron. There was not any industry or stores or much of anything up there other than houses, as far as I ever knew.
If one started at the center of the village where I lived, then followed the river in a south-westerly direction, the paper mill itself extended for about three-quarters of a mile. There were many railroad tracks with trains bringing in logs. There were buildings, sheds, warehouses, gigantic stacks of logs, and so on.
Then, the houses started back up again in that direction.
During my time in Biron, there were more people living in the center part of the village than north of it or southwest of it. The river curves at Biron, which is why it is not a straight north-south description.
Last time I visited, which was about five years ago, the center of the village is far emptier. It seemed half the houses were torn down. Not only are the company houses now gone, so are many of the other houses. In compensation, the northern part of the village and the southwestern part seemed to have more houses than I had known them.
As a young boy and through being a teenager, Biron did in many ways fit the stereotypical midwestern ideal small town. However, things were changing even then.
For example, about half a dozen white two-story company houses that all looked like they came out of a cookie cutter were torn down to rebuild the credit union. The Biron Credit Union was put into a modern brick building, broad and sprawling. It looks like nearly any small bank in America after the change. It sprawled over two of the spaces that had been houses. The land for the other three disappeared houses became the parking lot.
More company houses were torn down when I still lived there. Another ten or so, I think, to make room for a massive new building holding what is called a Chipper. That name refers to a machine that manually pulverizes logs into wood chips.
Most of the wood pulp used in the paper making in both Wisconsin Rapids and Biron is made in Wisconsin Rapids at the Kraft mill. That is a process that chemically breaks down logs into wood pulp. The chemicals used include sulfur compounds, giving a rotten egg odor downwind of the Wisconsin Rapids mill. The chemically generated wood pulp was not only used by the paper machines in Wisconsin Rapids itself, but also flowed through a pipeline to also be used to make paper in Biron.
Thus, if the winds were wrong in Wisconsin Rapids and the smoke settled from its paper mill, the place had the rotten egg smell that gives paper mill towns such a bad reputation. When the winds were wrong and the smoke settled in the Village of Biron from its paper mill, there was not a noticeable bad odor, but that smog still burned and stung the nose and throat.
Nobody bothered to tell me how much the Chipper actually got used and how important it was.
One of the families who had a kid I played with in grade school had to move out of their rented house when the credit union expanded. Others had to move away from their rented houses when the Chipper went in.
The company houses were rented out cheap. It was a great deal, but the caveat was that at the drop of a hat, the company could end the lease if it needed the land or house for some other reason.
Also, the village store went out of business right around the time I went off to college. The house that had held it, a company house, was torn down.
As I moved off to college at Platteville, even more company houses back in Biron were torn down to build a parking lot. There were very few company houses left by then!
During my first couple years of college, a new paper machine went in at Biron. It went in a huge new building that seemed to stretch forever. This went in on land that previously had other company buildings and trees and roads on it. It did not actually eat into the center of the village. The parking lot for the people who would work there did eat into the center, though. In hindsight, that seemed what was going on with the new parking lots being put in when I was leaving for college.
With all the expansion of the paper mill into the village going on, my parents sold their house to the paper company in my sophomore year of college. My parents had a new house built in the city of Wisconsin Rapids. That house is located near the high school.
Against my expectations, our former Biron house did not get torn down like all the rest the houses the company owned. It was instead repainted and spiffed up, becoming a new company home. As of five years ago, it was still standing.
When I was last in Biron five years ago with my wife Helen, I found other major changes had happened. The swimming pool is gone. Completely gone. So is the village hall. Nothing replaces either, other than a parking lot and grassy field.
Very tall high-power electrical lines cross straight through what was the center of the village. Some more houses disappeared to make room for these. These are the type of power poles made of steel towers, far larger than the upright logs with wires attached that bring power to the houses of the village. These steel towers with power lines stick out like a sore thumb.
It turned out that there was much asbestos insulation in the grade school in Biron. Nobody thought much of it other than an efficient insulator at the time it was put in. The cheap way of dealing with such a headache was to sell the entire school off. A church organization bought it. I guess they pulled the asbestos, covered it, or sealed it with paint. I hope so, anyway. It is now a private religious academy. It has do-not-trespass signs ringing the place and the grounds.
When I lived in Biron, the school playground served as a park for the entire village. Not anymore. The playground equipment and the two baseball diamonds belong to the private religious academy now.
Biron now has a population slightly larger than the Biron that I knew as a boy when all the parts of Biron are included rather than just the center. Still, much of what was important to me is gone or greatly altered in what I find a negative way.
The way I look at it now, much of what made it a fun place for children to grow up came at the whim and largess of the paper company. I spent a lot of time at the swimming pool without ever realizing that it was really the paper company’s property to do with it as they wished. Same with the village hall. Even the small store had been in a building inexpensively leased from the paper company.
However, some of the changes that took place seemed related to nationwide social changes rather than being limited to Biron.
For a time, until around 1975, our family had only one car. If Dad was working in the Biron mill, he could walk to work. It was only a mile from our house to the building he worked in. If he had to go to the Wisconsin Rapids mill, he needed the car. When that happened, we were stuck in Biron without transportation.
A family having only one car was very common in that era.
The nearest grocery store was five miles away. This is not much of a distance if one has the use of a car. If it is January and one does not have use of a car, it seems a very long distance indeed.
So, if Mom was cooking and ran out of some ingredient on a day when Dad had the car, it was off to the village store to get it. Even at the marked up prices, it was worth it.
Then, my parents got bought a second car. It was a used Ford Galaxy 500 convertible. We didn’t have that long as the gas crisis came along. More importantly than the car being a gas-guzzler was that it required high-octane gasoline, which entirely disappeared from the gas stations at that time. In 1976, my parents bought a brand new Chevrolet Suburban, which ran fine on the low octane fuel that was available. The other vehicle was a 1967 Chevrolet window van, which also had no difficulties running on low octane fuel.
From that day through the present, my parents have always had at least two vehicles. When my younger siblings were in college, my parents often had three cars.
Becoming a two-car family ended Mom’s use of the village store. She would simply drive the five miles to the supermarket to get what she needed.
It seemed many of the other families also went from one car to multiple cars around the same time period. That hurt the village store’s business, so it was not surprising it failed to survive.
The fear of asbestos seems all out of proportion to what the danger really is. There is indeed a danger if asbestos fibers are inhaled. That danger from the inhaled fibers is not to be scoffed at. It has killed people. Yet as long as the fibers are not inhaled, there seems no apparent danger from asbestos. Asbestos is not a radioactive hazard! Also, rather than being chemically active, asbestos is about as chemically inert as a chemical can get. Asbestos occurs naturally in many of the rocks in the northern states. The panic about asbestos has been incredible. And incredibly expensive. Buildings with it often end up with a great negative value, since removing the asbestos in what is deemed a safe way since workers cannot be allowed to inhale any of it can cost more than what the building is worth.
It seems it was part of the nationwide asbestos panic that really doomed the Biron Grade School.
The danger from asbestos as described in a physiology class that I took at the Ohio State University is the fibers are of a size that can get trapped in the lung forever. The fibers are sharp, causing a constant irritation, which in turn the immune system responds to by trying to chemically break them down. The sharp fibers are chemically inert, so this does not work. Over many years, this constant irritation can lead to bad health consequences, including for some a high risk of lung cancer. So, although there is a definite real danger, being around is asbestos is not like sitting on a hot radioactive waste site or a hazardous chemical waste dump!
When Helen and I were visiting Biron and Wisconsin Rapids five years ago, we did a tour of the Wisconsin Rapids mill. Consolidated Papers signs were still plentiful, even though it was a Stora Enso mill by then. There seemed far more parking lots than the cars to put in them. When we toured, the place seemed so empty of employees. Certainly there were a few around if one looked for them. Mostly, these employees sitting at a computer just starring at readouts.
Eerily, even the vehicles that moved the several ton rolls of paper were computerized robots. Last time I went on the tour many years earlier, those were forklifts operated by men.
Automation had come in big time.
I assume it is similar at the Biron mill as well.
The buyout in particular seemed a way to shed large numbers of employees. The few that work there now seem very well compensated, but the Wisconsin Rapids and Biron mills are no longer the large scale employers that they used to be. Computers and robots don’t need to sleep, don’t get tired, and don’t ever go out on strike.
This kind of change to automation has happened in many of the heavy industries all across the nation. That is, for the few heavy industries that simply did not move operations overseas.
As with the rest of America, the divorce rate has soared in the Village of Biron.
The divorce of the Boy Scout troop leader was treated like a big scandal when I was around fourteen or fifteen. Shudder! Not the D-word! It was the talk of the village for months.
In that era, women were often stay-at-home housewives. The job opportunities for women were little more than nurse, teacher, secretary, and the like.
In the Biron and Wisconsin Rapids of today, most families have to have both husband and wife work just to make ends meet. Daycare for children is the new norm. The divorce rate seems about typical for our nation, a big change from when it was a major social stigma. On the positive side, women have far more employment opportunities there from when I was a kid.
For either gender, the paper mills in Biron and Wisconsin Rapids just do not seem to need the large number of employees as before. Even for those it does hire, one almost always needs at least a bachelor’s degree in something or other.
High school diplomas are hopelessly watered down in meaning. So also are two-year associate’s degrees. A bachelor’s degree is the equivalent of what a high school diploma used to mean. That is as true in Biron and Wisconsin Rapids as in the rest of America.
When I was growing up, the college education of my parents was unusual. Mom had a bachelor’s degree in home economics. Many of the other housewives had no college degree at all. Even for those who had attended college for a time, the goal seemed to net a husband, then not bother completing the degree!
Dad has a master’s degree in physics. When I was born, he was a high school teacher in a suburb of Chicago, but hated that job.
Living in Biron when I was a boy, my college-educated parents seemed to stick out as something abnormal.
For my boyhood friends in Biron, most of their mothers had no college degree and stayed-at-home as housewife. Most of their fathers had only a high school diploma or two-year associates degree. Almost all their fathers were active in the union.
My Dad was classified as an engineer, which is a salaried, non-union position. Yet, it is also not management. Dad later passed the state Professional Engineering exam so can actually use the title engineer if he wants.
In that time and place, it seemed most thought of somebody working for the paper mill as either in the union or in management, with nothing else possible. Obviously, there were other engineers employed by a big place like Consolidated Papers. The way my boyhood friends acted, though, it was like it was a new concept as I repeatedly had to explain Dad was not a manager and not in the union!
Also unusual in that time and place was how our family came to be there. Most of my boyhood friends had lots of relatives living nearby. There were cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Flipping through the phone book, there were many families with the same last name. Most of the time, these families with the same last name were related to each other.
When I was a young boy, my Grandmother Arendt lived in Two Harbors, Minnesota. My other grandparents were in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My aunts and uncles were in Colorado, Nebraska, Louisiana, New Mexico, California, and for a time Alaska. I didn’t have any reasonably relatives in the entire state of Wisconsin. When I lived in Biron, having no relatives in the area was considered strange!
Yet, due to the dismal employment opportunities in that area for my graduating class, most of my peers have dispersed across the nation. The boys and girls that I grew up with were pretty much forced into the kind of dispersal that my extended family had had all along.
A common lifestyle in Biron seems mostly to have died.
The massive layoffs after the Stora Enso buyout proves that there is not much security anymore in having a job at the paper mill. It no longer is a place where one can count on being employed for life, as seemed the common assumption when I was a boy!
I would say that what was going on in Biron was not much like what would have happened in a small village surrounded by just farms. I think a better comparison would be something like a mining town. The fortunes and misfortunes of that one major industry affect the prosperity and even survival of the town.
The common lifestyle in the Village of Biron that I knew, despite the fact that Biron still exists as large as ever, is lost to history.
While there are some things to be nostalgic about, I feel that at least a few of the changes are better off to have changed! Even some of the overtly bad changes may be good in that they seem to have shaken off some of the complacency.
THE END
If you want to talk to me, I can be reached at arendtj@att.net