Welcome to our new Port Wing Heritage Hall website!
And thank you to Sheila Bergman for all her work in setting up our site and for hosting it on her server system. A website is a great way to share our Port Wing stories and treasures with people from all over, and being able to have a website provided in this way is a real gift for us!
As we planned what to include on the website, I asked to carve out some space to include a blog, now called the Curator’s Corner, to share some of the items of interest we come across while working with museum items. And, as I write this first post, I had trouble deciding which item of interest should be first.
The item I chose to highlight first may seem like a strange one, but I chose this handmade map of Port Wing from the early days. I found it in a folder labeled T.N. Okerstrom, along with photo copies of some the usual early pictures of Port Wing. (Click for a closer look!)
There is no indication who made the map or when, but it caught my eye because it gave me a rough idea where some of those early places were located. It’s not a perfect map, obviously, since there aren’t enough streets and some of the town items–town hall, school, church–aren’t in their exact locations.
But check down by the lake: 9 & 9a-Eben Olson’s mill and T.N. Okerstrom’s mill; #13 along the lake says it was Charlie Okerstrom’s brick yard; and #15 up on Klaung Road says it’s a “Nice view of the lake.” Even then!
Maps like this also interest me because we hope to open up the Booth Building again this summer and, along with the mock town display, I’d like to add a display to show how the area down the lake and slough looked back in the days when lumbering, quarrying, fishing and big boats like the America made that area a busy place to be!
If you can help us place some of those businesses from back in those days, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us and share your memories!
