Serving Polk County’s St. t Croix C i Valley V ll since i 1897
WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 2015 VOL. 127 NO. 48 www.osceolasun.com $1.00
SPORTS: Braves no-hit Knights. P10
Best laid dams River archeologists examine forgotten structures BY MICHELLE MIRON EDITOR, THE LOWDOWN
The summer of 2007 was a dry time in the St. Croix Valley. With water levels low, boaters began to notice strange structures sticking out of the St. Croix River. Most of the 50-some log-and-stone structures were spotted along shallow parts of the river near Taylors Falls, Minn. and Osceola, Wis., but some were found as far south as Afton. Word got back to park service staff at the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, which began investigating. The structures were remnants of “wing dams,” channel diverters built in the late 1800s — when commercial boat traffic was common — to make the water deeper. Few of the structures have survived elsewhere, according to the Riverway’s Cultural Resource and Interpretive Specialist Jean Schaeppi-Anderson, making the finding significant enough to warrant a visit from the National
Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center as well as its Midwest Archeological Center. This summer, staff from the two centers have been diving into the St. Croix to measure, photograph and test the structures. The research is being funded by the National Parks Service via mitigation funding from the St. Croix River Crossing (Schaeppi-Anderson was unsure of the exact cost). Although ice and flooding have worn some away and others have been inadvertently damaged by boats and pedestrians, many have been preserved by their longtime submersion in relatively cold water. This summer’s research findings will be compiled into a report that will likely be available online and in print in the near future. Once the report is finished, the sites will be nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. Local knowledge of the wing dams seems to have disappeared with the structures themselves. “Because this river did not remain SUBMITTED
SEE ARCHEOLOGY, PAGE 13
Late 1800s-era wing dams photographed near Osceola on the St. Croix River in 2007.
Discovery Center to house Fab Lab
Osceola native recovers with yoga on the water
BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@OSCEOLASUN.COM
In Fab Labs, or fabrication laboratories, imagination rules and practicality often bends to meet it. The public-access labs bring together electronics, industrial-grade fabrication machinery and open-source software — typically written by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] — that anyone can use to make anything from circuit boards to furniture. If all goes as planned, when the Mill Pond Discovery Center — a hybrid library, municipal building and community space envisioned for Osceola — is complete, the village will join a net-
BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@OSCEOLASUN.COM
Four years ago, Christina McHugh was settling into her new job as a research chemist for Cargill in Des Moines. As a nature lover and semi-professional dancer, she was in great shape, and she and her husband had recently
COURTESY MILL POND LEARNING FOUNDATION
More to Come!
SEE BALANCE, PAGE 11
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bought a house in Iowa. Life seemed to be going just about perfectly for the Osceola native, who graduated from OHS in 2000. Then she had sudden bout of spinal meningitis, an inflammation of the membranes covering the spinal cord. Combined with a staph infection in her blood, the illness spurred two strokes and led to the eventual need for open heart surgery.
Early deadline A rendering of people using the Fab Lab in Osceola’s Mill Pond Discovery Center.
SEE LAB, PAGE 2
Finding her balance
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