Augusta House

A river town means motion.  It means transportation – people and goods especially.
La Crosse today is a small city but it's at the crossroads of a river, an interstate highway, a railroad, and an airport.  Although La Crossites often make the claim that they settle here for the stability of living in a smaller urban center, there is a transience here that is also felt today much in the same way it was experienced nearer its inception, "La Crosse was in these days (c. 1850) a mecca for transients who were looking for locations or were on their way to Minnesota points; the hotels were many and in the summer were reported as being full."  Amazingly, for a town so small in population, there were eleven hotels in 1856, and another being built.  One reporter counted seeing sixty-one "prairie schooners"

(covered wagons) arriving here in one day in June from the east and departing across the river by ferry.  "The same month a traveler counted between here and Mauston, a distance of 70 miles, 357 covered wagons headed westward."  Steamboats 

brought folks here and pushed lumber out along the river; stages carried more into the city until – in a bit of local irony – "The La Crosse and Onalaska Plank Road and Bridge company was incorporated…to build a solid road across the swamp to North La Crosse and thence in a direct line to Onalaska, thus saving two and a half miles over the customary route."  

On a recent frigid January day, kids released from school because of the dangers of wind chill, we ate lunch down on Pearl street in an old building with a new name.  Afterwards, we walked across the street to the Pearl Ice Cream Shop, located on a historical strip of eateries and retail shops.  This would have been the very hub-area of early La Crosse, right off the water and in the center of the hotel district, where thousands of fortune seekers, homesteaders, and hopeful farmers would have paced in activity.  One visitor, the anonymous 'Viator,' who visited in 1857, wrote of this very spot in his diary, "La Crosse, further up the river, is the most important river town in Wisconsin.  It presents a fine appearance from the river.  Its finest Hotel, the Augusta House, 

looms up like a fairy palace, as the eye almost wearies with the wilderness of prairie grass, and overtopping bluffs and blooming flowers, of the regions above and below.  The appearance of the buildings at this point denotes a more permanent and enduring state of things than most other towns along the river."  As we stood at Front and Pearl long enough to see the closed sign on the Ice Cream shop, due to inclement weather, we could see that the Holiday Inn parking lot across the street was packed; traffic spun up and down front street; a crack of the frozen river peeked through the opening between the Radisson Hotel and La Crosse Center; and up behind us, in the background, loomed the leafless winter trees of the bluff line.