Uncertain Times.

The Panic of 1893.

The Chicago & North Western (C&NW) Railway was busy making acquisitions and added the MLS&W railway to its portfolio. Joseph was listed as a laborer for the new company in the 1893 Ashland city directory.

Events began to unfold that would alter the course of the young couple's future. Twenty years after the financial crisis that briefly closed the mill in Bay View, "The Panic of 1893" plunged the world into economic depression. In a pattern that would be repeated many times in U.S. history, albeit in different industries, the crash was triggered by over expansion, unbridled speculation and poorly secured loans made by the banks. Industrial stocks plummeted, thousands of farmers lost their land when the price of wheat and cotton bottomed, hundreds of banks closed and thousands of businesses were shuttered, never to reopen. Families abandoned their homes in droves and moved out West leaving many beautiful Victorian houses to crumble with only the ghosts of their former owners to inhabit them.

In a sign her parents had relented over the elopement, Lula took her five-year old daughter Mabel back to Milwaukee to visit her family for a couple weeks, returning to Ashland about the middle of March 1894. The following May, Joseph visited his family. Fortunately they concluded their travel before the summer because the Pullman train strike effectively shut down transportation west of Chicago in July.

Firestorm in 1894.

Publications of the period used the terms "inexhaustible" and "vast" to describe the natural resources in and around Ashland. In 1892 alone 285,500,000 feet of lumber was shipped, and the brownstone quarries yielded 2,313,000 cubic feet of stone. However forests where pines were so tall it was 50 to 80 feet to the lowest branch were soon decimated, leaving behind dried tree limbs, dying stumps, and land left exposed to a searing sun. In some areas people moved in to farm the land, but all too often large tracts were left with only stumps of the forest that once was. And no trees to cut meant no lumber to ship. The industrialists departed the depleted state to tap the inexhaustible supplies of the Pacific Northwest.

The spring and summer of 1894 had been particularly dry. There had been terrible fires in previous years, so lumbermen were vigilant. But the flames could come from anywhere, and a spark from a locomotive's engine started a conflagration. Driven by strong winds, the fires enveloped northern Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. Entire communities went up in smoke and the overall death toll was in the hundreds. The burnt remains of partridges, rabbits and porcupines in the charred forests were "numberless." In one area south of Ashland 32 deer suffocated by the smoke were found gathered together in a grass thicket. A freight train careened off of a burning bridge which had collapsed into ash and crushed and burned the livestock on board. In all several million acres burned.

There was a human toll. Among the casulties were six members of the Towney family who, along with two of their neighbors, sought refuge at the bottom of their fifty foot well. Neighbors described the fire coming in like a tornado, flames shooting high above the tree tops. Their shelter proved to be a crematorium.

Lula was seven months pregnant with her third child when they fled into the swamps with Mabel 5, and Walter 4. Estelle (Stella) was born on October 22, 1894.

In April 1895 Joseph and Lula returned to Milwaukee, at first staying with his mother Edesse. By June they moved into their own place at 1268 Kinnickinnic and opened up a confectionery store. The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago had sparked an interest in sweets.

Most businesses were family-run and given the Wolfe's earlier venture into the industry, they may have gotten their recipes from Lula's mother.