Saturday November 10th found us heading Northward, back to the Dubuque area as I continue to explore local history. I’ve been reading Dubuque: Frontier River City 35 historical sketches and have come across a couple of entries pertaining to a Tim Fanning. That is the same name on the Log Tavern originally located at the beginning of the Old Military Trail in Dubuque. I wrote about it here
According to Dubuque: Frontier River City Tim Fanning was elected as an alderman, as well as granted exclusive rights to run a ferry from Dubuque to Illinois. This agreement with Fanning was for 20 years starting in 1838. As Iowa experienced a rapid influx of immigrants, Fanning’s ferry could not keep up so the City of Dubuque asked Chas. Gregoire to also run a ferry service. His was a steam ferry with a capacity 6 times as large as a horse drawn ferry. Even with that boat in service, they were hard pressed to keep up with the demand. Fanning sued Gregorie and the suit eventually went all the way to the US Supreme court with Fanning loosing.
I’m entertaining having some type of celebration at the bar that is currently situated on Tim Fanning’s original log cabin site when I finally make it to Dubuque. It appears to be a 5 story bar currently, with rooms upstairs for rent.
On a different note, yesterday as we headed to Dubuque to explore we stopped at Czipar’s Apple Orchard located 4 miles South of Dubuque on Hwy 52. Run by Dick and Joan Czipar, they have 2000 apple trees and are open 7 days a week during Apple season. Dick gave us a tour of their business. Very gracious people, would highly recommend them to anyone! We came home with a couple of bags of apples ourselves, since ours are already gone.
We stopped by an antique store in down town Dubuque where I found an awesome framed cross-stitck for just $10.00. The frame was weak, so I took it apart and restapled the corners. As I pulled the cross stitch out from under the glass, was I ever in for a surprise…
The “cross-stitch” was not a cross stitch after all, but a picture!!! Boy did I get fooled. I showed it to some friends the next day, and they couldn’t believe it either. There was a tag on the front of it saying “pic”…duuu…I thought it was the initials of someone consigning it in the store. live and learn…decided to keep it and hang it up anyway,…there must be a lesson in this somewhere.
Coming back from Dubuque we got lost (not really, but just a little) we were taking a different pavement from Farley which I thought would bring us into Cascade the back way. Didn’t turn when we should have, and wound up North and East of Cascade. It gave me a very small taste of what it must have been like before there were roads. People got lost all the time before Old Military Road was created. We stopped at Marilyn’s in Cascade on the way home. And that was the end of another day of exploring local history.
