This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/where-the-hell-is-yuba/

Wisconsin’s smallest incorporated village is on a hill, and in a valley, too. Third in a series of profiles of persevering small towns in the Badger State.

On your way in on County Highway C, t-boning into Main Street right in front of the two-garage-door fire department, the sign says: Yuba, Population 91.

The state put up that sign a long, long time ago. As of the 2020 Census, Yuba has 53 people, making it, as Jim Huffman will tell you with considerable pride, the smallest incorporated village in the state of Wisconsin.

“In 2020 at the League of Municipalities meeting, someone came up to me and said, ‘You’re too small to exist,’” Huffman, the former village president for 38 years, says. “I said, OK, game on. And we’re still incorporated.”

Just down Main Street, on one of the walls of the Pine River Inn, a sign says, “All Roads Lead to Yuba.” A few doors down in the other direction, on the wall of the small community center is another sign, “Vitame Vas,” which is Czech, or as the locals prefer to say, Bohemian, for “We Welcome You.”

That’s the old Yuba. At the top of a hill overlooking the village is St. Wenceslas, the Catholic church Huffman’s grandfather helped to build. Bird’s nests decorate the front door and a few of the unbroken stained-glass windows. The church hasn’t hosted a service in decades.

Across the street, in the once-shuttered elementary school, is the Gospel Light Christian Fellowship. Mennonite and Amish families who have been pooling their money and buying up parcels of farmland 40-acres at a time in the area, pack the services. That’s the new Yuba.

“We have a huge Amish population and I think it’s great,” Terry Jindrick, the current village president, says. “They’re buying farmland like crazy and filling in a depopulated place.”

The modest population boom isn’t recognized by the Census figures because it’s occurring outside the village boundaries. Inside is a community that has lost more than 31% of its population over the past 30 years, according to Census data reviewed by the Badger Institute.

Of the towns and villages we identified as having lost the highest percentage of its population since 1990, Yuba has, by far, the oldest median age, 70. Nearly two-thirds of its residents are 65 years of age or older. The Census identified two children.

The median annual income among villagers is $27,011. By comparison, in two previous stories about small Wisconsin communities, the median income in Chaseburg in Vernon County was $61,667 and $60,313 in Millville in Grant County, according to the 2020 Census data.

The village budget for this year is $33,000, enough to cover the barest infrastructure upkeep. When the billions of dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 made its way down from the state, Yuba’s share, $3,500, was plowed into infrastructure.

“We’re on a shoestring,” Jindrick says. “We don’t do a lot of long-term planning.”

Yuba has never been big, with a population that peaked at 153 in the mid-1930s. Its creation came 20 years after Edward Pinick registered the plat with Richland County in 1855 and six years after Pinick moved to Kansas, never to see Yuba realized, according to a history written by Phillip Braithwaite. Despite his dogged research, Braithwaite was unable to discover why Pinick chose the name Yuba.

Yuba very gradually became the hub for settlers who had come to claim the inexpensive hilly farmland around the Pine River in an area that looked much like their homeland, what was then southern Bohemia, now a part of the Czech Republic.

As Braithwaite learned from an earlier history, “It can be said of the Bohemians of Wisconsin that they are truly a dancing people.”

Terry Jindrick is an ancestor of one of the first Bohemians and his 400-acre farm has been in the family for 165 years. Huffman’s eyes light up telling stories of drinking pivo (the Czech word for beer) and playing the tuba in a band in what used to be a two-day pre-Lenten Mardi Gras-like festival called Masopust.

On a bookshelf in the community center where we met for coffee and talk is a songbook called Where the Hell is Yuba and Other Songs of a Denizen by Randy Durst. Durst has played his village refrain and others at Masopust and other local events.

“Yuba’s on a hill,” the song goes, “and in a valley, too. The topography can get to be confusin’ where the ol’ Pine River flows, nobody really knows, but it’s somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin.”

When you have so few people, the civic volunteering invariably falls to a few people. Durst is a retired farmer, the village trash collector and a poll worker. In addition to village president duties, Jindrick still farms, has served as a village trustee for 23 years and is the president of the Yuba Fire Association.

Huffman has been a county supervisor for eight years, a firefighter for 59, eight of them as chief, and a first responder for 32. “Everybody around here wears at least a couple of hats,” Huffman says.

The annual smelt fry to raise money for the fire department is well known in the area. The department is well known to volunteer firefighters around the state for punching well above its weight class. And after applying for grants from the state for 30 years, Huffman and Jindrick were able to get $70,000 for a first responder vehicle in March 2023.

“It’s a big thing around here. We’re kind of isolated,” Jindrick says of the Yuba Fire Department. “We have 17 members, some who live close, some who live far away. Hillsboro has 1,400 people and our fire department is bigger than theirs.”

The Badger Institute, at its core, believes in the power of civil society, that space between the individual and government where our friends and families, associations and communities — perhaps, especially, small-town communities — provide the support and succor we all need to navigate life’s challenges.

There are 1,000 little cities, villages and towns with populations under 1,000 in the state and 420 of those with populations of less than 500, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data gathered in a Badger Institute study.

The community leaders in Yuba  have little patience for lamenting what Yuba doesn’t have. You are driving to Hillsboro or some other bigger little city for gas or groceries. While the Amish and Mennonite farmers have been good for agriculture they are not, by faith, active in the Yuba community.

What Yuba has are two tavern owners, of Louie’s and of the Pine River Inn, who have combined to promote festivals, like the signature Labor Day celebration that draws 2,500 people every year, Jindrick says.

Or the Fire in the Hills Motor Show that brings classic car owners and enthusiasts for a weekend in early September, many of them camping out on Jindrick’s farmland. For the first time last Aug. 1 Yuba hosted a cancer fundraiser they dubbed the Testicle Festival.

Vitame vas, indeed.

Huffman and Jindrick say there are enough retirees and people who work in bigger cities to keep the less expensive homes in Yuba occupied. Jindrick has farmed for 50 years and knows it might be the end of the Jindrick line. No way could his son take over and make a living just farming, he says.

But he’s also not ready to let go just yet. “The Amish would buy my place right now for whatever I wanted for it. I don’t plan to do that right now. The farm has always been so small and I have run it so tight. I plan to keep it going for a while.”

Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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