Stoddard

The man generally given credit for being the founder of the Village of Stoddard is Henry H. White who came to the area from New England in 1867 and bought land in and around the future site of Stoddard. As the 1870's indicated, he did quite well and he probably started out pretty well off to begin with. Two events contributing to the formation of the village were the building of a two-room schoolhouse in 1881-82, and the building of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad down the Mississippi Valley in 1885. In 1886, White platted the portion of the Village east from the railroad tracks to Main Street between "B" (Broadway) and "D" (Division) Streets. According to a post office record book started in 1887, Henry H. White was postmaster in that year.

A very nice story attributed to Charles P. White, son of H.H. White has it that the elder White named the village in honor of Colonel Thomas B. Stoddard, first mayor of La Crosse (in 1856) "who helped the new community advance and expand". This would be remarkable not only because Stoddard was born in 1800 and would have been 86 years old at the time, but also because he was already been dead for ten years.
From early on, there were general stores, blacksmith shops and of course the school. Next to the railroad tracks there was built a warehouse and grain elevator and later a tobacco warehouse. Carpenters and masons lived in the Village and did work for the framers and there was a Dr. W. Tillman in the Village in the early 1900's and perhaps before.

In 1891, Henry Blashek, who had come to Stoddard in 1887 and John H. Hanesworth, who came to the Village from Genoa in 1889 formed a partnership and operated a flourmill, feed mill and planer. They produced a variety of wood products of use to area farmers including shingles and beehives.

They also produced a product for "export" called the "boom plug." In the early 1890's, North La Crosse was sending massive quantities of logs from the Black River down the Mississippi. These masses of logs were kept together by being surrounded by a chain or boom composed of logs. The pins, which held this chain of logs together, were called boom plugs. They had to be made of wood rather than iron because the logs forming the boom went through the sawmill at the destination. According to one account, North La Crosse ran out of logs before Stoddard ran out of boom plugs.

Of particular interest are the means that were used to power the Blashek-Hanesworth mill. At first, a one-cylinder (large cylinder) gasoline engine with twin flywheels weighing one ton each was used. This was later replaced by a more conventional power source - a coal fired steam engine. The resulting need for coal prompted the establishment of a fuel business, which continues to the present time, with oil replacing the coal. Around 1900, Hanesworth introduced hydroelectric power with a 25 foot overshot waterwheel driven by artesian well water. (In Stoddard, the term "artesian well" is reserved for free-flowing wells from which water flows under natural pressure.) The waterwheel ran a dynamo that produced 110-volt direct current for the mill, two houses and a barbershop. Possibly because of the newness of electricity, the light switches were often left on and the water turned off at bedtime.