Summary Information
William F. Dalrymple Papers
1836-1916
- Dalrymple, William F., 1825-1901
Wis Mss MO
7.2 c.f. (30 archives boxes and 21 volumes)
Wisconsin Historical Society (Map)
Papers of William F. Dalrymple, a native of Pennsylvania, dealing with his investments in mills, railroads, farmlands, and city real estate in Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The collection consists primarily of incoming letters, but includes occasional drafts and copies of Dalrymple's replies, brief diaries, and records of the Bayfield Transfer Railway Company, the Milwaukee and Dubuque Railroad, and the Milwaukee, Peoria and St. Louis Railroad. Many letters concern investment in wheat “bonanza farms” near Fargo, North Dakota.
English
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/wiarchives.uw-whs-wis000mo ↑ Bookmark this ↑
Biography/History
William F. Dalrymple was born at Sugar Grove, Warren County, Pennsylvania in 1825. He attended the academy at Jamestown, New York, not far north of his home and later taught school and served as county superintendent of schools in Warren County.
A few notations in Dalrymple's memorandum book in 1848 show that he had financial interests in a local saw mill and store at that time. His investments expanded rapidly, both in amount and area. In a statement prepared on February 2, 1878, he itemized a portion of his property holdings. Those in Pennsylvania, consisting of farm and pine lands, mills, city lots, dwellings, together with money due him in that state, he valued at $103,700. In addition, he owned city lots in Milwaukee worth $124,000 and other lands in the vicinity of St. Paul and Bayfield, Wisconsin, the value of all of it totaling, he estimated, $245,700. On these properties there was an indebtedness of about $75,000.
This estimate did not include what was probably at the time his largest speculative venture. A couple of years earlier he had joined with his younger brother Oliver in the latter's vast wheat farming enterprises in the Red River Valley. Oliver Dalrymple had experimented with hard wheat growing on his large farm near St. Paul and in 1875 had extended his operations to the lands just west of Fargo, North Dakota, which were opening up to settlement with the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad. George W. Cass, president of that railroad; Benjamen P. Cheney who had made his fortune in the express business; the wealthy Grandin Brothers, bankers of western Pennsylvania; and others associated with Oliver Dalrymple in the ownership and operation of thousands of acres of wheat lands in Cass and Traill counties, and the name of Dalrymple had come to be synomyous with the idea of "bonanza farming" in the Northwest.
The ownership of huge wheat farms forced upon the attention of the proprietors the problem of marketing their grain, and this in turn led to a consideration of transportation routes. Dalrymple's secretary and executor of his estate, H. C. Hale of Madison, states that the two brothers disagreed on the more satisfactory solution of the question. The younger brother favored the Red River route but William F. Dalrymple insisted that the natural direction was by rail to some Lake Superior port, and thence by lake steamers to Eastern lake ports or even the Atlantic, thus anticipating the much discussed Great Lakes-St. Lawrence waterways project.
It was in furtherance of this belief, according to Mr. Hale, that William F. Dalrymple began to take an active interest in the development of his properties at Bayfield, on Lake Superior. He planned to build and operate a road, the Bay-field Harbor and Great Western Railway, which would connect with one or more of the larger roads leading to the West. The only part of his plan that ever materialized was the establishment of a short lumber line north from Bayfield, the Bayfield Transfer Railway Company, but the project absorbed most of his time, money, and attention to the end of his life.
The Bayfield Transfer Railway Company was incorporated on July 26, 1883 but for various reasons work on the road was not commenced for over seven years. Stock was sold in the company but Dalrymple retained a controlling interest. In 1891 Dalrymple, who continued to make Pittsfield, Pennsylvania his residence, established a permanent office at Bayfield, placing Herbert C. Hale of Jamestown, New York, distantly related to the Dalrymples, in charge. Hale became general manager of the road when it began operations. Dalrymple's health began to fail early in the 1890s, and from 1896 to his death in 1901, he conducted his business affairs as well as he could from hospitals in St. Paul and Racine, and his home in Pittsfield.
According to Mr. Hale, levels were run for the survey of the road in 1891 and in April 1898 trains began to run. The line led from Bayfield six miles north along the lake shore, through the Red Cliff Indian Reservation. The road carried freight and passengers, but in later years, Mr. Hale says, it was leased to a lumber company, becoming more profitable to its owners than when they had operated it themselves. In 1936 the road was in decay, the bridges down, the ties rotted, and the rails rusted.
About the year 1878 Dalrymple acquired a controlling interest in the Milwaukee and Dubuque Railroad. This was a successor to the Milwaukee and Beloit Railroad, a farm mortgage line of the decade of the fifties that had never built a single mile of track. Elaborate plans were renewed for financing the road. A reorganization of the company in 1887 under the title of the Milwaukee, Peoria, and St. Louis Railroad indicated expanding ambitions and a change of route, but no portion of the road was put into operation during Dalrymple's life-time.
Provenance
The building at Bayfield later used by Booth Fisheries was once the Bayfield station of the Bayfield Transfer Railroad Company. This collection of records was left in the attic of the building when H. C. Hale left the city. The business records connected with the operation of the road were transferred to the Railroad Retirement Board in Chicago about 1940. The remaining papers were sent to the Historical Society in 1942 for examination and selection, and preservation of those valuable for historical use.
Scope and Content Note
The earliest unbound records in this collection (save for some Milwaukee land records of the 1830s), are those of the Milwaukee and Beloit Railroad. The road was chartered in 1855 with Horatio Hill as president and James D. Reymert as vice-president. To aid in the construction of the road and in anticipation of the benefits they expected to derive from it, hundreds of farmers along the proposed route gave title to the company for a right of way. These deeds, as well as subscriptions to the stock, agreements, minutes of meetings, reports, receipts for mortgage bonds, and some correspondence, dating from about 1857 to 1859, fill two manuscript boxes.
The reorganized company apparently inherited these papers and William F. Dalrymple, as secretary of the new Milwaukee and Dubuque Railroad Company, filed them with the records of the new concern. There are quantities of letters for a decade beginning about 1880 written by U. B. Hall of New York City, a business associate and agent for J. P. Robinson. Robinson, in his capacity of civil engineer, filed a report on the prospects of the road on December 14,1881. The following year he was in London, seeking financial backing for the construction of the road. Robinson and Hall wrote numerous letters to Dalrymple describing progress in the negotiations in the next few years, and giving innumerable reasons for delays in actually getting the work underway. The collection contains occasional drafts of Dalrymple's replies and a few drafts of his proposals to large railroad companies in the United States that they take over or connect with the proposed line. George H. Noyes, a Milwaukee attorney and for a number of years judge of the county superior court, who handled much of Dalrymple's Milwaukee city property business, also was connected with this railroad, although in these papers he figures most prominently as a director of the Bayfield Transfer Railroad Company and an executor of Dalrymple's estate.
Oliver Dalrymple in 1861 was associated with Horace R. Bigelow in a loan and collection office in St. Paul. His letters to his brother during the Civil War years contain comments and advice on the settlement of a family estate in Pittsfield, Pennsylvania, on investment prospects and opportunities in the West, on his activities as agent for claims arising from the Sioux Outbreak of 1862, and on securing substitutes during the draft in the Civil War.
No more letters from Oliver appear until January 1876, when he proposed terms on which he would purchase and operate wheat lands for his brother and other speculators. "For ten years I have been the largest wheat grower in the Northwest," he wrote at that time. From this and later letters it appears that neither of the two brothers ever made their home in Dakota, but two or more nephews and other members of the family were connected with wheat farms west of Fargo. Their operations were extensive; Oliver wrote early in 1878 that he would have 20,000 acres under the plow by July 4.
The nephews were employed as managers or agents for several tracts in the Red River Valley; letterheads used in their correspondence are from the Grandin Brothers farm, the Cass and Cheney farm, the Watson farm, the Silas A. Dalrymple farm, and the Oliver Dalrymple farm. They reported in considerable detail on crop conditions and prices, and spoke of land sales and settlements and crop storage. A number of letters from grain brokers in Duluth, Minnesota and Buffalo, New York, touch on the subjects of elevators, marketing costs, and transportation. There is little information in the papers on the history of the wheat industry after 1890, save for summaries on the investment shown in the papers dealing with the settlement of William F. Dalrymple's estate and two brief record books on North Dakota lands, 1891-1912.
The first appearance of Bayfield in the papers is found in a letter in 1868 from Andrew Tate, Bayfield County treasurer. For a number of years Tate took care of Dalrymple's tax payments on Bayfield properties and supplied him with brief information on local residents, lumbering, road building, and land sales. Letters and reports from R. D. Pike contain similar observations. Dalrymple's efforts in 1882 and 1883 to push the development of Bayfield are found in drafts of two letters of those dates, one to the Northern Pacific Railroad and one to R. H. Cudlipp, setting forth the advantages of the village as a port and railroad terminus and its attractions for residential and business purposes.
Unbound correspondence from 1891 to the time of Dalrymple's death consists of a continuance of Dalrymple family correspondence, which is largely of a business nature; frequent exchanges of letters between Hale and Dalrymple; and much miscellaneous material on the building and financing of the Bayfield Transfer road and on Dalrymple's Milwaukee investments. This is supplemented by eight volumes of letter books, covering substantially the same years and subjects. There are also three boxes of miscellaneous records for these years dealing with the road, containing such papers as records of board meetings, land contracts, agreements, and court decisions.
Judge Noyes, Hale, and D. M. Smith of Duluth were appointed executors of Dalrymple's estate, and it was probably for the purpose of settlement of his affairs that all his papers were assembled in Bayfield. One box of correspondence, 1900-1906 and two boxes of legal papers in the form of contracts, agreements, appraisals, etc, cover the years of the executors' management of affairs and the settlement.
A number of manuscript maps showing land holdings in the Dakotas and Milwaukee, printed circulars issued by the Bayfield Transfer Company, and other advertising matter on the promotion of settlement in northern Wisconsin that was found in the collection are filed in one box. A set of brief diaries kept by Dalrymple from 1861 to 1891, with only a few years missing, supplements the information in the correspondence.
Administrative/Restriction Information
Presented by the Railroad Retirement Board, Chicago, Illinois, September 1942.
Contents List
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Correspondence, 1836-1906
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Box
1
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1836-1857 April
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Box
2
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1857 May-1864 August
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Box
3
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1864 September-1876
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Box
4
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1877-1879 October
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Box
5
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1879 November-1882 February
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Box
6
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1882 March-1883 July
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Box
7
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1883 August-1884
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Box
8
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1885-1886 February
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Box
9
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1886 March-1887 July
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Box
10
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1887 August-1888
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Box
11
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1889-1890 June
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Box
12
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1890 July-1891
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Box
13
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1892 January-July
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Box
14
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1892 August-1893 January
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Box
15
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1893 February-August
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Box
16
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1893 September-1894 May
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Box
17
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1894 June-1895 June
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Box
18
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1895 July-1897
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Box
19
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1898-1899
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Box
20
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1900-1906
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Box
21
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Undated
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Box
22-24
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Miscellaneous Legal Papers
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Box
25-27
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Papers Dealing with the Settlement of the Estate
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Box
28
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Maps and Advertising Matter
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Box
29
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William F. Dalrymple Memorandum Books, 1847-1849
3 volumes
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William F. Dalrymple Diaries
28 volumes
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Box
29
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1861-1868, 1870-1880
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Box
30
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1881-1885, 1889-1891
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Box
30
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Herbert C. Hale Diaries, 1892-1895
3 volumes
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Box
30
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Field Notes of Survey
1 volume
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Box
30
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General Index to Note Books, Bayfield Transfer Railway Company
1 volume
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Volume
1-8
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Bayfield Transfer Railway Company Letter Books, 1892-1916
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Volume
9-16
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Bayfield Transfer Railway Company Annual Reports, 1904, 1908-1914
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Volume
17-18
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Bayfield Transfer Railway Company Trial Balances, 1900-1905, 1910-1913
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Volume
19-20
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Journal of North Dakota Lands, 1891-1912
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Volume
21
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Bayfield Transfer Railway Company Register and Distribution of Vouchers, 1898-1907
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