Sinipee
Probably no community in Wisconsin had a more rapid and tragic demise than the amazing town of Sinipee. It would be difficult to find a geographical site with more dramatic beauty than that which surrounded this isloated village. The area is still a combination of incredibly high bluffs and a steep calley, both bordering the Mississippi River.
To this dramatic location add the people who were a part of the town when it thrived--well before Wisconsin became a state. It was not only the permanent residents who brought color and gave excitement to this bustling village. Even more colorful and exciting were the visitors, actually revelers, who enjoyed Sinipee.
Included in the latter group was one man who was destined to become the 12th president of the United States and another who, in 1862, would be inaugurated as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
In 1831, five years before Wisconsin became a territory and seventeen years before it became a state, twenty-five year old Payton Vaughn moved with his bride from North Carolina to the wilds of southwestern Wisconsin, and wild it was. At that time what today comprises the 56,000 square miles of the Badgar State had a total population of approximately 40,000 Indians and no more than 3,000 whites. The Winnbago War had been fought only four years earlier. And it was not until the following spring that the bloody and tragic Black Hawk War erupted.
Into this setting Vaughn and his bride came from North Carolina and built themselves a log cabin in the valley of the little Sinipee Ricer, a mere crack in Mississippi River bluffs on the Wisconsin side about three miles north of the hamlet of Dubuque.
Most of the white settlers living in Wisconsin were lead miners clustered in what are now Grant and LaFayette Counties. These men with their crude mining operations were ever dependent on Galena, a river community fifty miles to the south in Illinois. It was from the Galena merchants they bought supplies. It was to the Galena river docks they brought lead for shipment down the Mississippi.
The local tradesmen charged the miners whatever the traffic would bear. Because Galena had no competition, charges were high. In fact so high that in 1836 several of the more imaginative miners met with Vaughn and decided to develop their own Mississippi River port. They chose for the site of their village the mouth of the Sinipee Valley.
Vaughn and the entrepreneuring miners formed the Sinipee Company. The valley floor was platted. Vaughn recieved what at that time was immense sum of $12,000 for the land he sold to the company.
It was mutually agreed that he would use half of the money to build a grand hotel. The sam year that Wisconsin became a territory, in 1836, contruction started on the building.
The all stone structure had walls two feet thick, with fireplaces in every room, and a ballroom which occupied most of the second floor. The village grew quickly and choice lots sold for $2,000.
Sinipee, in addition to Stone House, which the hotel was appropriately named, soon included several stores, a bank, church, blacksmith shop, mill, post office and a score of homes. The hostelry became the focal point for the social activity of the area.
At this time a garrison of Territorial troops was stationed forty miles up river at Fort Crawford near the village of Prairie du Chien. Zachary Taylor, who subsequently became President of the United States, was commandant of the garrison, and Jefferson Davis, later President of the Condederacy, was stationed there as a young lieutenant. It is on record that both of these men on more than one occasion enjoyed the hospitality of Stone House.
The town's first postmaster, John Plumbe, was a man with a dream even bigger than Vaughn's. Fifteen years before the first railroad would be built in Wisconsin he envisioned a transcontinental railroad stretching from New York to San Francisco, with the first link to be built between Milwaukee and Sinipee.
Plumbe had immediate but temporary success when the government appropriated funds for a survey of the first link. A while later Plumbe moved to California to seek his fortune. He failed and eventually returned to Dubuque, a dejected man. He became Dubuque's first suicide.
For a year or two Sinipee looked like it might eventually rical Galena and Dubuque, perhaps even St. Louis. But suddenly all ended. In the spring of 1839 early thaws and heavy rains flooded the valley, doing damage to many buildings in the village. No one was overly converned because repairs could be made.
As the water receded stagnant pools remained in the village. And with hot weather Sinipee's doom was spawned in these very pools. In a matter of days an epidemic of malaria spread over the town. With the exception of one family, those who did not die during the first devastating weeks, and there wree few who survived, abandoned the village.
Sinipee became a ghost town. Nothing can be more poignant than a latter written shortly afterward by an early Mineral Point settler, Theodore Rodolph, who wanted to buy one of the abandoned village stores and move it to Mineral Point. Rodolph wrote:
When we finally rode down the ravine to the Mississippi River, and the bankrupted city burst upon our view, a singular sensation took hold of me. The buildings were all new, showing no sign of decay or deterioration by usage or the weather, having stood there but a little over a year. I expected momentarily to see the occupants come out to bid us welcome. There, was, however, not a living being to be seen or heard, neither a dog, nor a cat, nor a fox, nor a rat--I think not even a bird gave life to the desolation. The quiet of a church-yard reigned. The houses, all painted white, seemed to loom up as monuments of departed greatness.
Evidently Rodolph missed seeing the Vaughns, who were the only remaning inhabitants. After Payton Vaughn died in 1845, his wife remarried. Their daughter, Harriet, lived in the old stone hotel after her marriage to John Fenley, a Kentuckian who was friend of Daniel Boone and a relative of Davy Crockett. The Vaughns and Fenleys and their descendants are buried in the little cemertery on Sinipee Heights.
What remains of Sinipee today?
First the traveler must find the William Fenley farm whose neat white buildings are nestled under a massive sandstone bluff some three miles north of the bridge crossing the Mississippi to Dubuque. A quarter of a mile from this house a barely dicernible road, paralleling and only several hundred yards from the Mississippi River, winds through heavy woods. A portion of this road was the village's main street over a century and a quarter ago.
The Stone House stood on the east side of the road hard against a large bluff. A spring, which still cascades out of the sandstone wall, supplied the hostelry with water. The vague outline of the foundation is all that remains.
All of the information on Ghost Towns in Wisconsin is borrowed from Ghost Towns of Wisconsin by William F. Stark