Serendipity? Coincidence? Who knows when two mysteries converge? We often make discoveries accidentally.
I still recall going to an auction sale with my dad in about 1973. Dad bid and bought a like-new Case 830 tractor, complete with a cab.
After the sale, we even drove it home about 80 kilometres to our farm in Basswood, Man.
As anxious as I was to drive it, I was also interested in the Case eagle logo. However, time dulls curiosity, especially after my parents sold the farm in 1978, and I went off to college.
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Flash ahead to a few years ago when a high school buddy and I cycled the Rails-to-Trails pathways in west-central Wisconsin. I convinced Brian Nicholls to take a jaunt on the Old Abe Trail where I knew there was a huge eagle statue. We found it, just north on Main Street in the hamlet of Jim Falls.
A few years earlier, my brother, Ron, and I had spotted it while cycling the same trail. We had wondered about it.
By chance, I noticed a farm magazine article about a fellow in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, who produces fibreglass Eagle on a Globe 1.5-metre-tall replica statues. Case farm implement dealers used that colourful cast iron statue to attract attention.
The Case eagle logo version looked eerily similar to the Old Abe 10 foot eagle statue we had seen in Wisconsin. Could there be a connection?
Yes. In 1861, Chippewa Indians traded an eaglet to a Jim Falls resident for corn. He raised it, and then sold it to a local military unit.
The Eau Claire Company C of the 88th Wisconsin Infantry used that eagle as their good luck mascot in their 40-some battles and skirmishes during the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War. Company C named the eagle Old Abe, after then U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
The regiment even changed its name from Badger to Eagle in honour of Old Abe. The great bird once shared a stage at a formal ceremony with famous Civil War generals, including Ulysses S. Grant, who later became president.
Old Abe perished in an 1881 fire in Madison, Wis. The bird was 20 years old.
The J.I. Case Tractor Company incorporated Old Abe into its logo in 1865. Through a stroke of fortune, Jerome Increase Case saw the stunning eagle flying and screeching overhead during a military parade in Eau Claire. Case was there on a business trip.
Case loved the story of the bird flying valiantly above the battle below, screeching and urging on the northern troops, and he wanted that same courageous free spirit in his flourishing farm machinery company, based in Racine, Wis.
More than 100 years later, the company phased out Case’s Old Abe logo.
If you are in a cycling mood, the paved Old Abe Trail runs from Chippewa Falls to Cornell alongside Wisconsin’s Chippewa River. The huge Old Abe eagle statue is located about halfway along the Rails-to-Trails route.
And your reward back in Chippewa Falls might be a tour and a sip at the 1867 Leinenkugel’s Brewery there, the second-oldest brewery in the U.S.
