Yellowstone Trail: Lake Hallie's Electric Park Traditional Cache
zuma!: Shutting this one down. It is on private property, but very close to private. There is a new one in the Yellowstone Trail series that replaces this one, in a better spot, albeit, further from the actual yellowstone trail
Yellowstone Trail: Lake Hallie's Electric Park
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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This cache replaces the earlier YST series cache in Hallie, that is now private land.
The Yellowstone Trail went through Hallie on the east side of the tracks, where Highway J (Joles Avenue) is today. The railroad tracks are still there. On the west side of the tracks ran the route of an electric streetcar system, that ran between Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire. No vestige of the old streetcar system can be seen, but the route was parrallel to the tracks, just to the west of the existing tracks, probably about where the ATV tracks are now.
The last electric street car went by here on August 7, 1926. The route started at its barn on Menomonie street, rocked over town to Barstow Street, puffed up the Madison Street hill to Omaha Street, swung north on Starr Avenue to begin its 11-mile trek to Chippewa Falls, a journey that ended at the loop in Irvine Park.
The electric streetcar had one stop in Hallie near here, a stop called Electric Park. The Electric Park had a canopied waiting station, amusement rides, a dance pavilion, a ball park and a band shell.
An overhead cable structure was used by the electric car Power generated to run the electric Interurban streetcar line came from the Cedar Falls dam near Menomonie.
It cost 2o cents to ride the Interurban from downtown Eau Claire to Chippewa Falls. A sliding scale of fare rates was in effect all along the line, with a six cent fee from downtown to Second Crossing; eight cents to Melby; nine to Michaud; a dime to electric park; 11 cents to Hanson; 12 ents to Hagens; 13 cents to Chippewa Junction; 14 cents to Staffords; and 15 cents to the Chippewa Falls city limits.
The Interurban line was established in 1897 by A. E. Appleyard, who came into the bustling lumbering communities of Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls from fresh financial successes with electric rail lines in Boston and Columbus, Ohio.
On Nov. 5, 1889 the first electric street car was driven over city streets. Eau Claire then was only the fourth ity in the United States to operate electric street cars, the second in Wisconsin (Janesville was first). The street cars that ran by this cache site, were the first in the country to have electric heating.
This is one of several caches I have placed along the route of the historic Yellowstone Trail. The trail is a historic motor route that went across Wisconsin from 1918 to 1930. The Wisconsin portion of the Yellowstone Trail is 406 miles long, starting at the state line south of Kenosha and going north, and then west to Hudson. The Wisconsin segment is just a part of one of America’s first transcontinental auto routes, a 3,754-mile long road that started in Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts and went to Puget Sound, Washington.
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