Hello, and welcome to the Downtown Eau Claire Historical Walking Tour. I am Roger Gostomski, founder of Eau Claire Tours and I will be your tour guide.

Please stay near the Trust Point sign f...

Stay here.

Now that you have a little feel for the tour, I want to mention one more item. First, click the padlock button to view the screen. If there is a large picture, click on the back ...

When you get to where the sidewalk splits take a right and follow it along the river.

By the time our early settlers would have set up residence here there would have been only two Native Amer...

Stay on the white sidewalk.

The first people to stake a claim to this area were Stephan McCann and Jerimiah Thomas in 1845. A few years before they laid claim to this area, Stephen McCann’s br...

I do have about 10 minutes of Eau Claire’s early history to cover while in Phoenix Park, so feel free to take a seat anywhere along the path while listening to the rest of this segment.

While ...

Continue across the bridge.

Farming in the area started in the 1850s, just a few years after the lumber industry. When you cross the river, where the Haymarket Plaza is today, would have been t...

Keep following the path along the river.

When you were in Phoenix Park, I briefly mentioned how the bridges helped tie the three villages together. Now I’ll dive a little deeper into how the ea...

Continue staight.

If the year was 1860, during the early part of Eau Claire’s logging era, the Chippewa River, more than likely would have had some logs floating down it. On a more scenic note,...

We will be heading downtown next, where the blocks are short, but the history is not. During the rest of the tour, please follow the instructions carefully. Also, as this is a high-traffic area,...

Continue straight along Graham Avenue.

I have covered the highlights of Eau Claire’s early history, now it’s time to move forward to the year 1930. Eau Claire did a great job of transforming ...

Now let's set the backdrop of what I'll be talking about during the rest of the tour. In 1930 Eau Claire was a city of 26,000 people and had transitioned rather well from our logging roots. Manuf...

Continue straight.

As mentioned just a short time ago, Eau Clarie Tours has partnered with a few of my favorite places along the route to give you a discount. All you have to do is show them...

Continue Straight.

Coming up on your right is the Visit Eau Claire Experience Center, which is Eau Claire' marketing organization. It has an awesome website that will tell you everything you c...

If you stop and look to the left, you will see, what is still, a very impressive front to the Scandinavian-American Fraternity building.

Continue Walking.

Grand Avenue, in 1930 was one o...

Stay here for a little while and look at the white building across the street.

The founding fathers of Eau Claire valued culture and two of them, Peter Truax and Joseph Thorp, built a Music Ha...

Continue straight.

Enough bad news. When the Music Hall first opened in 1869, it was an awesome event. The very first act to perform in the Music Hall was the world-famous, and I mean world-f...

Stop here for a minute.

If you were taking a stroll along Barstow Street in 1930, you might have seen remnants of some railroad tracks. They would have been from the electric streetcar, or the...

Stop here, please.

The building on your left, at the end of the block, was built in 1899 and was the headquarters of Eau Claire's Masonic Temple until 1928. The first floor was a retail store ...

Stay here and a look at the side of the Mason’s building. Because Grand Avenue was such a major street, it is likely that this side was the front entrance to the building.

Continue walking al...

Stay here for a little while.

The brown building on the corner is over 100 years old, being built in 1917. It now houses two businesses, but in 1930 it was the Union Auto Company and it encompa...

As you walk along Lake Street, when you get about halfway down the block you will notice that further down is an older brick house.

The house was owned by Herman and Augusta Schlegelmilch and ...

Go to the front porch and stop.

A few years after Herman built his hardware store, his home burned down in the fire of 1869. That fire destroyed almost a full block of Barstow Street. The nex...

Continue straight, going parallel to the parking lot on the righthand side of the road. While you walk, look slightly in the distance and to your right at the large, dark brown brick building, with...

Keep walking straight.

O. H. Ingram moved to Eau Claire from Massachusetts in 1857 and was quite the businessman, establishing the Empire Lumber Company, one of several lumber businesses that h...

When you get to the middle of the first building on the other side, stop.

As you have already heard, culture played an important part in the history of Eau Claire and the library was no excepti...

Continue walking until you are in front of the second building on the other side of the street.

The building you are looking at is Eau Claire’s current City Hall, which now occupies both this bu...

Continue walking and when you get to Eau Claire Street please stop for a short while as I tell you the history of State Theater that is across the street.

In 1926, the Finkelstein and Ruben th...

Stay here.

In 1930 you couldn’t have missed the amazing Hotel Eau Claire, which would have been on your left. It opened in 1921, cost $700,000, or roughly $10 million today to build, and was ...

Stay here.

If you were to look across the street and to the left, in 1930 you would be seeing another one of Eau Claire’s beautiful structures, the Schleglemilch building. It was owned by Her...

Stay here for a minute. The large stone building across the street was called the Drummond Building in 1930. It was built in 1893 and has some great architectural features including the round bri...

Continue straight.

As mentioned before, Eau Claire was quite the place for entertainment in the 1930s, even having an auditorium. The Eau Claire Auditorium was on the far side of Galloway Stre...

Continue walking. When Eau Claire was three separate villages, Galloway street would have been North Eau Claire’s Downtown and even in 1930, it was still a busy place.

On this side of the str...

Stop here please.

If you look to your right there is probably a line to get into Ramone’s Ice Cream Parlor, which should tell you something. It was the first ice cream shop in Eau Claire and t...

Continue walking until you get to Dewey Street, then stop.

In 1930, across Dewey Street would have been the Eau Claire Candy Company. The Volume One Magazine Headquarters and their sister shop...

Stop here for a few minutes to enjoy the Eau Claire River one last time.

As you have heard during the tour, floods have wreaked havoc on our city throughout its early years, but none more so th...

This is where we end. If you would like to head to your vehicle, feel free to as the segment will continue.

I hope you enjoyed your tour of Eau Claire in its early years. It was a fascinating p...