Amanda’s Weekly Archival Discovery

Happy Independence Day Forest County Residents!

This week I organized and inventoried records from the City Clerk of Crandon from 1938-1950. There were a few interesting items because of Crandon growing as a city and because of the war effort. The city under took the enormous task of putting in a water and sewer system starting in 1941 and continuing to 1942 at the urging of the Public Health Department in order to provide the citizens with clean drinking water. The City of Crandon started the project with the assistance of the Work Projects Administration providing the labor and more than half of the cost of the supplies needed. Then at the end of 1942 The Works Projects Administration was being disbanded as a federal agency and the sewer and water systems in Crandon were not fully in place yet. There were quite a few frantic letters from the City Clerk to the headquarters in Madison asking them to complete the project or send another federal agency to complete it because the city could not function with only half a sewer and water system in place. From what I could gather from the correspondence the government granted Crandon a long term loan to pay for the rest of the project. Can you imagine the whole city in an uproar after hearing they would be stuck with only half the houses being able to receive water? The things we take for granted today and the huge undertaking our ancestors had to go through to provide us with the modern comforts is something to reflect on this Fourth of July weekend.

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