Al Capone often stopped in Thorp on his way up north to his hide out near Couderay. He followed the Yellowstone Trail north from Chicago during prohibition, and this is one of the many places he stopped along the way to fuel up his caravan of cars. In Al Capone's day, this gas station was known as Dell’s Station, and had been known in recent times as Tony’s Corner Service, and known for the past 5 years as Bob’s Corner Service, a full service gas station and auto repair shop.
I stopped and chatted with the current owner, Bob, and he has a photo inside his shop of Al Capone and his guards and what the shop looked like in the 1920’s. He says that Capone had a girlfriend about a mile north of Thorp, so he often stopped here on his way up north. Capone would post 2 guards outside of the station, one on each side of the entrance door. Then he would go into the bathroom and take a shower, and then go see his girlfriend before heading north to Couderay. The bathroom is in the same location as it was then, though the shower head has been removed. The door that Capone used and that is in the photo has been boarded up, but you can still see where it was on the north side of the gas stot tion. The information in the Adventure Lab may or may not be correct. To me, there seems to be a lot of evidence that Al Capone did stop here.
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. Before there were numbered highways in the United States there were names attached to roads to help motorists navigate from town to town or from county to county. Hailed as being “A Good Road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound,” the Yellowstone Trail began as a 25-mile stretch of road near Ipswitch, South Dakota. In October 1912, Mr. J. W. Parmley formed the Yellowstone Trail Association.
By 1917 the Yellowstone Trail had grown to become the main auto route for those travelling from the East Coast to Yellowstone National Park and the Pacific Northwest. While the Association did not build roads, it did lobby local governments in towns along the Trail to help promote the fledgling automobile tourism industry by building and maintaining “good roads.” Trail towns paid the Association a small fee or “assessment” to help cover advertising expenses and upkeep of the Trail. More information on the Yellowstone Trail, including maps can be found at YST Wisconsin details
he final cache is located a 44.57.ABC 90.47.DEF
A = Number of letters in the color of the base of the old gas pump next to the old entry door.
B = 4
C = Number of garage bays.
D = 8
E = Final digit of street address of the gas station
F = 6