Ontario

John Ostrander, a wrestler, and William Saubert owned a lumber company. They bought virgin land for $1.25 from the government and sold the cut-over land for at 2.50 an acre to settlers. For 25-30 years, a little settlement flourished with a mill, post office and school. (It came to an end about 1900.)

The settlers kept busy building cabins, clearing land, hunting for meat, making feather beds and pillows, filling straw or hay ticks, weaving rag carpets, putting straw under them, making cloth and sewing clothes by hand, churning butter, making soft soap, drying fruits and vegetables, preserving food, hunting for herbs, roots, nuts and berries, grinding horseradish, making brooms and collecting sap for syrup.

When they came into Wisconsin, they brought apple seeds with them. There were more apple trees in 1890 than there are today. Every home had its orchard or at least a few apple trees.

Whitestown was named after Giles White, the first permanent settler, who came from New York State in July 1853. Here he found "pines and lots of good, healthful water." Cabins were often located near cool, sweet springs and on streams which yielded brook trout and other fish. The Whites built the first real house on 200 acres near the mouth of Brush Creek. He laid out and platted the village of Ontario in 1857.

This was a wild and lonesome place in the 1850s. One day in 1855, the family came down the river in a canoe to visit with a white woman. They hadn't seen one in two years! No wonder there was a great deal of homesickness. The first large gathering of people in this part of the country was on the 4th of July 1868, at Rockton. One old lady shed tears of joy to see so many people together "in the woods". There was no road to any point except for the track the families had moved in on, which usually followed the Indian trails. The woods were full of animals: the black bear, the white-tailed deer, the wildcat and the most numerous-the large black timber wolf. In the winter, during logging, the deer would get in the way and had to be pushed aside.

Everything was used in the lumbering industry. There were sawmills, shingle and planing mills, gristmills and hoop pole shops. A Rockton man owned a notable hoop pole chair industry. Eventually railroad ties were also made. The lumbering industry did have an affect on the river, however. It is said that the Kickapoo had 15 times as much water back in 1845 as it does today. The loss of trees, erosion, plowing practices and the accompanying floods lowered the water level. The heavy cutting of trees changed the drainage patterns of the springs feeding into the river also, decreasing the amount of water as the springs dried up. By 1890, the white pines and the hardwood trees were mostly gone. Villages in the Kickapoo Valley founded on the lumbering industry alone were the first to die.