First, I must begin this blog with a very sappy, very loving “Happy Anniversary!” to my husband, Tony. Eight years we’ve been married. Been together for about ten, but have known each other for something like eighteen years.
It’s weird to think I’m old enough to have been married for eight years, let alone known somebody for eighteen. I mean, eighteen years of actual, semi-grown up memories. Like meeting Tony during a listening party over a Metallica vinyl at Jesse’s house (Jesse is now my brother in law, by the way). Or gaffing Tony’s cigarettes when my boyfriend’s stash was cashed, because Tony was too nice to tell me no. Or the Sepultura, Chaos A.D. tape he gave me for my 16th birthday.
Ah, the memories of teenage youth. A place that can be so wonderful and so horrible at the same time. Neither a child nor an adult, trapped in this bizarre ribbon of being where the surrounding world expects everything and nothing from you at the same time. It’s a shit place to be.
So, let’s avoid the conundrum of being a teenager by diving a little deeper into the memory pool. Travel back in time to mall bangs, snap bracelets, fluorescent clothing, and – gasp! – Zubaz. While the world of modernity zipped along on green-screened computers and actual floppy disks, there was one place that always seemed unaffected by time.
Tioga.
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| Tioga General Store, photo by Boo circa 1996 |
A little ghost town nestled in central Wisconsin, with little known places like Fairchild and Augusta the only points of references I can offer. This little ghost town also happens to be where my grandmother established her presence in Wisconsin after big city living in Detroit and Chicago. And where I was born. Well, not literally. I was born about forty-five minutes away in the St. Joseph hospital in Marshfield. But I lived the first few years of my life at Tioga. And even after my mom married and we moved to Minnesota, we visited Tioga often and spent considerable time there during summers. Some of the best memories of growing up are lazy summers spent with my brother, cousin, and grandma.
Tioga was established when Nathaniel Caldwell Foster, a railroad tycoon from New York, laid tracks through Hendren Township in Clark County the summer of 1900. Construction of the Tioga Depot and Tioga Feed Store, which was also a hotel, post office, and home of the proprietor, started in August of 1900. On September 29th of that year, the local papers proclaimed Tioga open for business.
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| Tioga General Store, 1909. Photo property of Clark County, Wisconsin |
I’m not sure when Tioga’s depot and store went out of business. By the time I arrived in 1978 the railroad tracks had long since been removed and the buildings abandoned. My grandmother purchased the property in the 1960’s using money she stole from my grandpa. If you couldn’t deduce from that statement, their marriage was not exactly a stable one. It has also been speculated that my grandma was merely stealing money that my grandpa, himself, had stolen from his employer. Another story for another time.
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| Tioga Depot, 1909. Photo property of Clark County, Wisconsin |
My grandma, described by my cousin as a “chain smoking, coffee addicted woman,” was proclaimed Mayor of Tioga upon its purchase. It wasn’t until 1977, though, that my grandma moved into Tioga permanently, setting up residence in the old store while a new house was being built on the other end of the property. My grandpa had long since disappeared (he did resurfaced again when I was twelve – yet another story for another time), so it was just my grandma and her four kids. My mom, second oldest, was seventeen. And relocated from Detroit to a dinky of town of maybe a hundred people, she was not happy.
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| Tioga Depot. Photo by Boo, circa 1996 |
Oh, and did I mention there’s no bathroom in the store? Just an old, rickety outhouse ravaged by time and assaulted by thousands of other people’s poop. You couldn’t get to it without tromping through waist high weeds and field grass, and, no doubt, acquiring several ticks in the process. It was no loss when that thing burned down. I think my grandma intentionally burned it down to get rid of it, but I don’t remember. I do remember the scorched patch of field grass where it used to stand, though.
When I was about six, and my cousin Matt, about four, my grandma built us a little playhouse about twenty feet from the depot. It was a great little playhouse. Well, once the annual wasp nests were dispatched by my dad, it was great. But it had nothing on the depot or the store. They taunted us with promises of mystery and adventure that beckoned to our young, fertile imaginations.
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| Little Boo by the playhouse Grandma built, circa 1983 |
Ever since I can remember, I was enamored with the store. Amidst the rusted nails and jagged edges of unidentified broken things was the original post office window installed in 1900, old and sturdy counters, topped with glass display cases that probably once held a variety of sundries and goods but were now filled with forgotten trinkets, yellowed textbooks, broken 8-tracks, and a thick layer of dust. I enjoyed rifling through the junk my grandma stacked in the store. It provided a narrow window, a tantalizing glimpse, into my mother’s life before me. Seventeen magazines from the 1970’s, photographs of my mom as a little girl, a long braid draped over each shoulder giving her an uncanny resemblance to Melissa Gilbert from Little House on the Prairie.
And when I wasn’t lost in the history of our family’s memorabilia, I was lost in the less personal, but no less intriguing history of the building itself. As I played house, using the original wood burning stove of the store to transport grass, rocks, and twigs into a magical feast for my cousin and brother, I couldn’t help but wonder about the people that used the stove before me. The ones that actually had to use fire, not the convenient electric stove, to cook meals. Or the kids, like me, that played on the property. Did they play post master behind the post office counter, too? Or maybe they weren’t allowed, because it was being used for real by the grownups.
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| Original Tioga Post Office. Photo by Boo, 2010 |
While the store held the majority of my attention, the depot was not forgotten. It had the original ticket counter, so my cousin, brother, and I would play train station. And sometimes, when we were feeling adventurous, we’d follow the ridge of land along the creek that was once lined by Nathaniel Caldwell Foster’s train tracks deep into seventeen acres of nothing but trees and assorted wildlife. We’d talk about the train tracks, the depot, and the store, the hobos the trains would bring. We’d invent stories for the hobos. Why did they leave home? What were they looking for at Tioga? Our creative minds could never get enough.
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| Matt, the Last Son of Tioga, with Tioga treasures. Photo by Boo, 2010 |
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when the buildings on my grandma’s property were shrouded in harsh shadows created by the bright security light in her driveway, we’d hear the distant whistle of a train. I assumed these train whistles were from far away tracks, but was only recently informed there are no train tracks anywhere near the area.
For an area so abundant in forgotten history, you’d think I would have experienced more in the way of creepy vibes or ghostly apparitions. Sometimes I’d hear noises in the store or feel the prickle on my back like I was being watched. Even so, I was never afraid or uncomfortable. My mom has always sworn there was something evil lurking in Tioga. In my thirty-two years I can only recall a handful of times that she has stepped inside the store.
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| Mayor of Tioga...and my little brother, circa 1988 |
Truth is, though, I felt much more afraid of our family home on Dakota Avenue back in Minnesota than I ever did of Tioga. Whatever was in our Dakota Avenue house found delight in terrorizing an eleven year old girl with ghostly touches on legs in the middle of the night. I used to think I was being taunted by demons. Demons that waited in the shadows, ready to snatch me before Heaven could claim me when I died. But I was raised in a creepy cult, remember? It’s only natural I would assign these things to scary demons. Older and, though arguably, wiser, I am certain those experiences had nothing to do with some imaginary war raging between the forces of Heaven and Hell and everything to do with ghostly energies left behind by former occupants.
Anyway, whatever was in the Dakota Avenue house wasn’t friendly and it certainly didn’t want me living there. But I never felt that way with Tioga. Tioga always welcomed me with open arms, whether it be through the cicadas buzzing in the tree tops during hot and humid summers, or through the deafening quiet of a cold winter night. I never felt unwanted amongst the ghosts of Tioga. And for that, it will hold a most special place in my heart in this life...and the next, since I've chosen to take on a ghostly form in my afterlife so as to haunt the remains of Tioga for all time.
And so I give you...Tioga.
Clark County, Wisconsin photos found at:
http://wvls.lib.wi.us/ClarkCounty/hendren/businesses/TiogaDepot.htm
And check out The Last Son of Tioga at:
http://malcantro.newsvine.com/_news/2010/06/22/4545227-last-son-of-tioga-
