The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Wisconsin's last wilderness
Family lets go of land so conservancy can keep it intact as preserve

By Jo Sandin
August 12, 2000

Town of Presque Isle - Bordered on three sides by a North Woods development boom lies a 2,189-acre wilderness, a land of 15 wild lakes and dense forest forming the largest single acquisition in the 40-year history of the Wisconsin chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

High in a white pine at the edge of Lower Aimer Lake, a female osprey greets her mate with a shrill cry as he brings food to their nest.

At John Lake, a surface like clear brown glass is ruffled only by the struggles of an ill-fated dragonfly, soon gobbled by a crappie. Not even a distant hum of traffic intrudes.

Bird songs - shafts of audible light - pierce the still air. A green frog announces his presence with the sound of a rubber-band banjo.

Between trills, warbles and plunks, deep silence falls.

By next spring, those who know how to tread lightly - taking photographs, hiking, watching birds, seeing wildflowers, canoeing - will be able to visit the Catherine Wolter Wilderness Area.

The new preserve - part of which is a gift from Wolter, part of which was purchased by the conservancy - is named for the family matriarch, now 85 and still enthusiastically hunting deer each fall on land her family has kept virtually unchanged for the last 58 years.

Staff members for The Nature Conservancy, a private non-profit dedicated to saving some of the nation's best remaining natural areas, are now taking stock of an amazing acquisition, which includes more than seven miles of undeveloped shoreline around lakes in a self-contained watershed.

Matt Dallman, the conservancy's Chequamegon Bay Watershed project director, who can put a name to each birdcall, says he discovers something new every time he walks the property.

Beneath one section of the woods, the forest floor is carpeted six inches deep in the soft spikes and stars of many varieties of club-moss.

"You hardly ever see that," he says, "and yet that used to be the rule for hardwood forests."

Waving an arm at a tall stand of hemlock and yellow birch, Dallman says: "Here are the components of old growth forests. It's like hiking through a natural history of the state."

As property taxes rose, some trees fell to selective logging to pay taxes.

"Is this pristine?" asks Dallman, answering, "No, but so much has been preserved that this land shows us some of the very best of our natural heritage."

Land and water need not be completely free of human impact to be valuable, notes Tim Ehlinger, associate professor of biological science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who, along with two colleagues, will survey the Wolter lakes and their communities of fish, invertebrates and aquatic plants in mid-August.

Even relatively untouched bodies of water change over time, Ehlinger says.

"These lakes, which have probably changed over time at a slower rate than lakes ringed with cottages, can serve as a yardstick by which we can better understand the rate of change in other lakes in the state," he says.

Mike Staggs, director of the state Department of Natural Resources' Bureau of Fisheries, sees immense potential in waters that have been only lightly fished and not recently stocked.

"Waters with minimum perturbations from stocking or fishing are, first, outstanding resources, very, very rare," he says. "Second, we can learn a tremendous amount from waters such as these about what native ecosystems were and what kind of fisheries waters such as these can support."

Moreover, in a part of the state where most lakeside property is being sliced into parcels of paradise, some adorned with $500,000 homes, it is hard to overestimate the importance of lakes where there are no buildings at all.

No docks. No boat ramps. Just a couple of weathered piers and a depression in the sandy loam where children once dragged a rowboat into the water.

"Here in Presque Isle," says Margaret V. Johnson, broker for Headwaters Real Estate in the little town near the Michigan border, "we call it Wisconsin's last wilderness."

Like most local real estate brokers, Johnson is trying to keep up with an explosion of vacationland development that is the biggest in Vilas County history. In the 22 years she has been selling real estate, she has seen lakefront property soar to $700 a foot and even landlocked acreage zoom from $300 to $3,000 an acre.

Some of her longtime neighbors share the alarm of wildlife biologists from the state DNR, which in 1996 forecast that at the present rate of development all northern Wisconsin lakes not in public ownership would be ringed by development by 2020.

Yet Johnson says she remembers clearly the community controversy in the 1950s when Wolter's late husband, Fred, then town chairman, persuaded the Town Board to require that each lakefront property have a minimum 200-foot frontage.

"It was very unpopular at the time," Johnson says, "because people thought it would inhibit development. Now people feel just the opposite. We realize that he was very far-seeing, ahead of his time. Because of the 200-foot requirement, we have that space, that privacy that sends people up to the North Woods in the first place."

The wilderness enthralled Fred and Catherine Wolter, both Milwaukee residents, in the early 1940s. When a chance arrived to own a large swath of woods and water, the Wolters seized it.

In 1942, the couple had moved with their three preschool children to the shore of Rudolph Lake, where they built a home, one room at a time. Eventually, their holdings grew to 3,800 acres, some of which is being retained by Catherine Wolter.

Lorelei Kraft, 58, their middle child, has assumed the role of family spokeswoman now that the property is being passed to another steward.

"I grew up in the woods," she says. "I loved climbing the trees and feeling the thick moss in the swamp under my feet."

Grandchildren and eventually great-grandchildren also came to love this place of shady trails and amber water. But as children grew, land values and property taxes grew more quickly.

Realizing that it would only become more difficult to preserve the land as wilderness, the Wolters offered to sell easements for hiking and camping to the state for $75,000 in 1963, although they would continue to pay real estate taxes.

The state refused in the face of opposition from local and state officials who said the easements would prevent development.

"My mother has beggared herself to pay property taxes," Kraft says. "We knew that when she passed on, there was no way we could pay inheritance taxes. We would have to sell."

Although The Nature Conservancy is a tax-exempt organization, spokeswoman Cathy Harrington said the organization would be paying Vilas County taxes for 2000.

The Wolters began corresponding with various conservation organizations that might be able to keep the parcel together and preserve it without development. The Nature Conservancy, which plans to manage the property permanently, offered the most positive response.

Over a period of years, the family and the conservancy discovered how similar their views were on gentle use of the land.

For example, a limited deer hunt probably will be allowed for hunters holding permits from the conservancy. The need to cull the resident herd is visible in the browse line munched by deer that cuts like a knife through one part of the forest.

On the subject of motorized boats, the Wolters and their successor stewards are adamant.

Dallman says: "We say the same thing Mrs. Wolter told a couple of fishery experts from the DNR who wanted to do a survey on Rudolph Lake: 'Row!' "

In May, the whole family gathered to say goodbye to the wilderness they had loved as their own for so long. "While it was difficult for us as a family to give it up," Kraft says, "it would have been far more difficult to see it chopped up into little pieces by developers."

The Wolter family members love the land just the way they found it.

They want to ensure that future generations will have the same opportunity.