This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/residents-of-glidden-and-jacobs-a-rare-breed-and-getting-rarer/

Lazy whiners not welcome. Latest entry in a series of profiles of persevering small towns in the Badger State — and the value of civil society.

When The Glidden Enterprise is gone — and that day is coming soon — owner Barbara Hart Kempf says she worries about all of her subscribers, but especially those who have been gone a long time.

Kempf moved back to Glidden after many years on the road with her husband to take over the 121-year-old family business because she knew what it meant to the larger community.

Birth notices on the front page and the obituaries inside. Board meeting agendas, the weekly senior citizens meal menu and the latest pool league standings. And the bracket columns, Pat Toomey’s “Glidden, Our Town” and the weekly look back, “Glidden’s Days of Yore.”

“Pat’s kind of the eyes and ears of the community and we have a lot of people who still read us even though they’ve moved away, Kempf said. “It’s like their letter from home. I’m not in it to make money any more. I’ll know when it’s time to decide when we can’t go on any more.”

The people who live here don’t really care that the U.S. Census Bureau classifies Glidden as an “unincorporated census designated place” in Ashland County. Glidden is mostly part of the Town of Jacobs, although parts of it are in the adjacent towns of Gordon, Peeksville, and Shanagolden.

No other town, village or city in Wisconsin has lost a greater percentage of its population from 1990 to 2020 than the Town of Jacobs, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by the Badger Institute. The 2020 population of 382, or 56.8% less than the 885 people in 1990, are spread out over 51.4 square miles.

Ashland County, on the southeastern shore of Lake Superior, just west of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is made up of sprawling, sparsely populated townships. The Town of Sanborn had a population of 1,336 in 2020 dotting 161 square miles. The Town of Agenda’s 520 people live within an 89.5-square-mile boundary.

Glidden is one of those pass-through communities like Prentice, Phillips, Fifield, Park Falls and Butternut on the way north through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest on State Highway 13.

Like the other communities we’ve profiled that have lost the greatest percentage of their population over the past 30 years — the Village of Yuba, the Town of Millville and the Village of Chaseburg — the Town of Jacobs grew in the 19th century from farming and lumber.

Glidden — even Louis Carl, Town of Jacobs Board chair, will tell you he’s from Glidden — is named after Charles Glidden, whose Wisconsin Central Railway Co. shipped thousands of tons of lumber, providing connecting lines to places like Chicago and St. Paul.

And like the other communities we’ve profiled, the contraction of the Town of Jacobs has followed a similar arc. “There is a dirty little secret that the people in places like these procreated beyond what the economy could support,” says Carol Megan, a former resident who came back to Glidden with her husband, Chuck, to teach and to retire.

Tourism has helped create jobs and spark the economies of some of Wisconsin’s small communities, that are, are a whole, doing better than the rural areas of other Midwestern states, according to Wisconsin Policy Forum.

Towns can be vast and encompassing in Wisconsin, some basically sparsely populated rural fields, some on the edge of developing villages and cities that might eventually annex parts of them. Some have grown, perhaps because of proximity to jobs or the economic benefits of tourism. Each has a different story.

The Town of Sanborn, adjacent to the City of Ashland and surrounding the Bad River Reservation, has seen a nearly 34% population increase from 1990 to 2020, according to our analysis of Census data. Ashland’s population decreased by 9.3% during the same period.

The Town of Gingles, 39 square miles south of the City of Ashland, has seen its population grow by 38.8%, from 492 to 683 people. Its median income of $77,375 is 54.6% greater than Ashland’s $50,053 and 50.8% greater than the $51,319 median income in the Town of Jacobs, according to our data.

And despite its proximity to the 13,000-acre Turtle-Flambeau Flowage and several resorts, the Town of Agenda has shrunk over the past three decades by 12%, from 591 to 520 people, although its residents have the highest median annual income – $87,159 – among the county’s biggest communities, according to our data.

Carl, one of those Glidden residents who never left, says the township’s reality is to push forward with a tax base that makes it hard to keep up with road repairs, much less major projects.

The Town Board considered it a major accomplishment in the past couple of years to have torn down three dilapidated buildings on Grant Street, the street that connects the two main halves of the community divided by the east fork of the Chippewa River.

The town has been in discussions with a resident Carl says intends to do some development on Main Street (Highway 13). Those discussions and plans are in the very early stages, he says.

As with most small towns, not everyone is always enthralled with the pace of things, and there is the occasional complaint that government can do more to spur growth, etc. Government programs have left their mark on this place, to be sure, but they are not the heart of Jacobs or Glidden the way they are in Madison. There is a belief in and commitment to one another, to pitching in together to get things done.

As in the other small Wisconsin towns we’ve profiled, it is through the efforts of volunteers, through civil society, that Glidden and the Town of Jacobs are most clearly defined. Memorial Day weekend, a pavilion is scheduled to open at Gordon Park. New lighting is planned for Matt Hart Athletic Field and Marion Park is getting electricity and lighting for campers who are allowed to stay at the park for a week at no charge.

The fundraising — nearly $300,000 in private contributions for the projects — is the result of the work of the all-volunteer Glidden Area Development Corporation. The corporation’s president is Ryan Thimm, who left home for a power company job 13 years ago only to be forced to come back after a 4-wheel accident left him partially paralyzed.

In typical Glidden fashion, a fundraiser paid to have Thimm’s parents’ home made handicap accessible.

“My long game was always to come home,” Thimm says. “This just shortened the time line. We’re all about family.”

Should you exit off of Highway 13 onto Grant Street, you’ll find walls of life-sized portraits of men and women from the area who served in the military and in their community. These three murals are part of a series that began in 1998 and can be seen from Butternut north to Ashland, painted by Butternut artist Kelly Meredith and Susan Prentice Martinsen.

There is another mural of Glidden’s civilian heroes standing in front of historic storefronts at Marion Park, a little west on Park Street. On the grounds is the food building, one section for the Lutherans and one for the Catholics.

At the center of the park is the pride of Glidden, a pavilion locals insist is the largest octagonal building of its type standing in Wisconsin, built by a Works Progress Administration crew in 1938. Standing on the beautifully maintained light maple floor, 92 feet in diameter, you can almost hear the circular roar of Thursday night roller skating from decades ago.

Less known on the grounds is the history museum, Depression era Civilian Conservation Corps barracks that were relocated to the park in 1944. More than 200 people have donated, with all of the old high school pictures going back to 1917 and German and Japanese flags brought home by men whose uniforms are on display. 

Festooned from floor to ceiling in one area are uniforms, caps and equipment from the kids who played school sports. The school changed the name from the Orioles to the Black Bears after two area hunters in 1963 shot a then-record 7-foot-10-inch, 665-pound black bear, whose snarling, stuffed carcass stands in a windowed case next to Town Hall.

Rather than the Black Bear Capital of Wisconsin, Carl says Glidden ought to be thought of as the Nickname Capital of Wisconsin. The familiarity and ubiquity of those names — Skip, Oz, Goat, Flash, Spud, Boog, Crooked Neck and Fence Post, among many others — is the expression of a tight-knit community, he says.

Pam Borman, the epitome of community volunteer, has a simple threshold for belonging in the Town of Jacobs. “As long as you’re not a lazy-ass whiner,” she says, “you are welcome here.”

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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