I can at least claim some understanding of what it's like to grow up in a small Wisconsin town, albeit over fifty years later. By a bit of coincidence, I grew up locationally diametrically opposed to Chuck. Hawthorne is in the far northwest corner of the state, twenty miles south of Lake Superior; Bristol is in the far southeastern corner, around the same distance west of Lake Michigan. Bristol when I lived there was so small as to be unincorporated. Hawthorne in the year 2000 had just over 1,000 people.
I haven't been able to find out what size the town was when Chuck lived there, but the Census information from 1940 indicates that all of Douglas county (where Hawthorne is located) fluctuated between 49,771 (in 1920) and 46,583 (in 1930) around the time that Chuck was growing up. The 1930's to 1940's Census comparison shows a very slow (0 to 1.9% range!) rate of growth in the counties that occupied that remote corner of the state over the course of the decade.
In fact the towns themselves are not even measured unless they're of significant size. Only the county size, and the ratio of urban to rural dwellers in those counties. In that Douglas had about one third of its people living rurally, and had the rare distinction (only two other counties shared it) that its rural population actually increased while the urban population fell from 1930 to 1940. Want an interesting and odd parallel? The other two counties where this happened in that timespan were Kenosha county--where my hometown of Bristol is--and Racine county, right next door to Kenosha.
So what does this tell us about life in that section of the state? In 1930 Chuck would have been twelve years old. The population of the area he lived in was dropping slowly overall, and while he was traversing his teenage years people were moving out of the towns instead of into them--perhaps to other, more prosperous towns. There certainly was no gangbuster growth to keep a boy of Chuck's ambitions occupied or engaged.
Research Started: I contacted the Town of Hawthorne today via email, telling them about my project and asking if they could refer me to someone I could talk to about the town's history during that time. I wasn't able to find a link to history on their website.
Field Trip Proposed: I'd like to go up to Hawthorne. Since I grew up in Bristol, my mom's family are in Portage, and I went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I might even be able to combine it with a family visit or two and a romp through some old college haunts. Fall would be the best time to go, with the northern change of colors, but this year the schedule is full and the bank account empty. Winter's out of the question. Perhaps I'll be able to make the time this coming spring or summer to visit the area and absorb some local color, maybe talk to some people about old times.
No rush, really; I suspect, with the depth of research I'll need to do, that I'll be working on this project for a while.
In the meantime...anyone reading this who's familiar with Hawthorne or northern Wisconsin before World War II, drop me an email: littlehoboblog@gmail.com. :)
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