My hometown, Merrill, Wisconsin, on the Wisconsin River, the superhighway French trappers, traders and Jesuit missionaries, the first  Europeans used in the early 1600s, the region supporting transient populations of French and Native American tribes until the mid-19th century.  I built a park across Highway 107 from the monu

Parc Joly, Semur-en-Auxios, France

Vaulabelle mentions in his book on Semur that, in 1786, Monsieur Joly de Saint Florent received from his friend Chartraire de Montigny, Treasurer General of the States of Burgundy and lord of Bierre-les-Semur, a beautiful statue of “Jason taking the Golden Fleece”. He had it placed in his garden along the Armançon downstream from “his” bridge. It is said to have been sold to Trouville in 1872.

Camp New Wood park:
Camp New Wood was one of numerous logging camps along the Wisconsin River and tributaries that appeared, then were abandoned after the timber stands were cut off. Camp New Wood is located on the site of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp that was active in the 1930’s. The summer 1965, before I left for the University of Wisconsin, I worked for the county ($1.25 an hour) restoring Lincoln County parks.

French influence is lightly sketched upon the history of Wisconsin. French priests, traders and trappers created and named towns––Portage, Prairie du Chien, Lac du Flambeau, St. Croix––and geographic features––Coulees’ (water drainage courses); Lac Supérieur is the largest body of freshwater in the world. The name ‘Wisconsin’ comes from the Jesuit father Jacques Marquette (after whom Marquette University is named) sounding out an Indian name. 

René Ménard was a French Jesuit missionary born on March 2, 1605, in Paris. He joined the Jesuits in 1624 and traveled to New France in 1641. Ménard was known for his work among Indigenous peoples, particularly the Hurons tribes driven from New York by the six-tribe Iroquois Confederation (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora). He was proficient in several Native dialects.

Missionary Work

In 1660, Ménard was sent west from Montreal with a trading party, aiming to establish a mission among the Ottawa in what is now northern Wisconsin. He faced significant hardships during his journey, including separation from his companions and limited supplies.

Disappearance

Ménard disappeared in July 1661 while attempting to reach a starving band of Hurons. He became separated from a fur trader named L’Esperance in present-day Lincoln County, Wisconsin . His last known location was near the headwaters of the Wisconsin River. His cassock and breviary were later found, but he was never seen again.

In the summer 1965, an Eighteen-years-old Robert Townsend earned $1.25 an hour (about €1.10) constructing a park across the road from where Father Menard allegedly disappeared. The forests remain similarly dense and untrackable. Seventy-odd-years-later, I help restore Parc Joly, Semur-en-Auxios, France.

A landscape of beautiful rolling hills suggests a superficial similarity between northern Wisconsin and the Cote d’Or. However, each came about through different geologic processes.

Glaciers formed the landscape of Northern Wisconsin. The Pleistocene glaciers ten thousand years ago, at places two miles deep, ground the bedrock, gouged, scoured, flattened and rounded the earth, and when it receded, left a landscape watered and wondrous. Today the Laurentian Upland as a whole is gently rolling with the inter-streams surfaces being plateau-like in their evenness, but the glaciers scoured the topsoil; agriculture is difficult.

Winds off glaciers deposited the rich loess soils of the Cote d’Or. The soil is rich, agriculture florishes. Semur gave its name to the Sinemurian stage of sedimentary deposits from the Jurassic era, characteristic of the Gryphae limestone, a grey-blue marly limestone containing numerous fossilized “oysters”.