I encountered this Wisconsin Historical Society needs to be better stewards of Packers History. Before I started reading I knew being better stewards of history for The Wisconsin State Historical Society is not locked to Packers history. It is all history they are stewards of.
Town of Neva, Deerbrook, Wisconsin history is perfect seeing how no one is really being stewards of history in this state. Both the Wisconsin State Historical Society and the Langlade County Historical Society have near zero information on either the Town of Neva or Deerbrook. No, not a mistake. Near ZERO.
What they have are stories from people’s memories. Memories written long after the events they write about. Flavored with the language terms of the time. Martha Lucas is one such author these to historical societies pass around as fact. Even the Township of Neva website is using these documents as the areas history.
The next big one is Robert M. Desserau’s, History of Langlade County. A massive tomb of work where you are left to conclude the author had access to some source documents but you cannot prove this or review this, Desserau did not add a single source to this massive history of the area.
Contact the government of the Township of Neva for records and they respond we don’t have any historical records. Really? Zero historical records in their possession. No long past meeting minutes, no past documents for decisions they made in the past. Nothing, zero? They are required by law to keep historical records and they keep nothing? Either you believe what they tell you because you have no choice, someone is lying, or they are so poor at record keeping that no one knows where the records are. There is no other option to what is happening to those records.
This lack of records is why there is no official history written. I’ve spent 25 plus years digging for source documents to get even a glimpse of what the real history of this area is. Every step I found problems with information provided by others. Wrong dates, wrong order of migration to the area. Not even a clear definition of how Deerbrook came to be.
History that says the “Village of Deerbrook” became known as Deerbrook. Yet, the Village of Deerbrook is not platted until 1887 and Deerbrook had a rail with a depot for passengers and freight in 1881. The position of the depot was to the East of the East edge of what was platted as the Village of Deerbrook. This alone says Deerbrook was already there before the village was ever platted.
This all lies within both The Wisconsin State Historical and Langlade County Historical Societies realm of stewardship.
Documents are not easy to find for these areas in Wisconsin. Yes, they are sparsely digitized but only accessible from other sources and hours of research finding them.
Plat maps exist, land grant records exist all out there and few are digitized in any way.
Currently to find more records on this area it will require a trip to Wisconsin, a physical search at the land record office. Even they cannot give direct query answers due to staff limitations. Imagine a staff so limited you cannot find one person to do a search for a request with a fee attached to complete the search. Yet, they are very helpful in providing information they can easily access and do so without a fee. So it is not they don’t have records, they don’t have funds to digitize them or someone who can spend time on information requests.
History needs to be preserved. Every state should find the funding for making sure history is there for everyone. It was what these organizations are for.
In the case of all of this. The Wisconsin State Historical Society must to better reviewing publications they print. Review for facts, sources and the details.
Chris Christi has it right in the sub-title of the above linked article, “The damage it has done is both unfortunate and immeasurable.” This due to being from The Wisconsin State Historical Society others have used this work to write their own version, mistakes are now appearing in more work. Now more source two that have it wrong. The problem grows for decades.