The Frenchtown Ferry

Once a year.  On Father's Day to be specific, Frenchtown is reborn.  There are colorful people.  There's drinking.  There are masses (of tubes not logs) covering the river.  Oh, and did I mention the drinking?  It's time for FATFAR, the Frenchtown Annual Tube Float and Regatta.  It is said to be the largest day long tubing event anywhere.  It happens not far from my house.

Some of the custom entries are pretty elaborate.  My boys and I considered building something for the event but were not sure we could top this:

Or this:

Captain Albert Taylor would not know what to make of it all.

Who?  Why, Captain Taylor.  Owner and operator of the Frenchtown Ferry.  I'm thinking he's the guy in a sort of dark uniform leaning on the railing in this undated photo.

No doubt there was some sort of ferry service at the Falls from the beginning.  But as an organized venture I can only say that I see ads going back to 1866.  The rates were said to be 50 cents per team of horses, 25 cents for adults.  Children were free.  Captain Taylor provided cradles for babies.  It ran from 5am to 10pm every day.  

Taylor ran between two points.  On the Chippewa side there was a little ramp down to the river just past Schmidmeyer's Brewery.  A small house there likely belonged to Taylor.  The other end was near Rousseau's on the Frenchtown side.

Of course a ferry service would face serious competition once a reliable bridge was in place.  Bridge building proved difficult on the tempestuous Chippewa River, but evidently the first one was managed in 1868.  When it burned down two years later there were said to be suspicions of Taylor's involvement.  But I think whoever put this into a local history may have fallen for a 19th century prank.....it seems that Captain Taylor was also the Fire Chief!

Which is not to say that there wasn't a bit of friction.  An 1871 article in an Eau Claire paper quotes Taylor as saying that his ferry was doing about nine tenths of the crossing traffic because the road leading to the bridge was in very bad condition.  You often find the juicier tidbits of local info in the newspapers from a rival community.

To run a ferry, or perhaps to have an exclusive right to do so, required a charter from the state.  Taylor was quite politically active and seems to have managed this for a while.  But eventually his charter was revoked, possibly in changing political winds.  In 1874 another, presumably better bridge was nearing completion.  Captain Taylor turned the ferry service at Frenchtown over to a man named Hanson and went downstream to start a ferry at Blue Mills.  I found a single later reference to the Frenchtown ferry from 1880.  It mentioned that a sandbar had formed in mid river interrupting service.  As it seems unlikely that the ferry would be able to compete against the bridges I am assuming that this was in the period after the 1880 flood that swept them all away.  

Delightfully for the symmetry of our tale, every year FATFAR starts at Chippewa Falls/Frenchtown (entrants put in the river on both sides) and ends at a pair of drinking establishments downstream......at the site of the former Blue Mill!

FATFAR is always a raucous affair but thankfully there are seldom mishaps of a serious nature.  Perhaps the guiding spirit of Captain Taylor still watches over the river.