History of Flannery / Velvet Lakes
Graciously Provided by Mike Barber
Geologic History
The bedrock under us is old. 1 billion + years up to 3.5 billion years. Composed of granites and metamorphic rocks. Hard rocks. These rocks left a legacy for us as seen in many of our water wells in the form of metals and sulfur in solution. They can come from old smokers in the rock. Smokers are a relatively recently discovered phenomena that can be observed today in deep ocean spots. They are hot water vents containing lot of metals in a sulfide form. These metals precipitate out and over geologic time may form large ore bodies like at Lynn Lake or the Pelican River deposit near Rhinelander. They may be small isolated pods that give us our pink water if untreated in Newbold. Iron, manganese, sulfur, copper, zinc, lead, silver and gold all can be detected and mostly are just enough to be a nuisance.
Our lake and property owe their form to glaciers. Glaciers are known to have formed throughout geologic time. They have formed repeatedly over North America during the last 2.5 million years. We are affected by the most recent cycle from the last 100,000 years when glaciers advanced and retreated many times. The last advance came 26,000 years ago, hit its maximum advance 18,000 years ago, and retreated north of us for the last time 10,000 years ago. We are considered to still be in a glacial period as glaciers are retreating. Hundreds of feet of thick ice can carve rock and move resultant boulders, and gave us our present landscape.
When digging on your property do you have only sand while one neighbor has coarse gravel, and another big rock cobbles, and another big boulders? The luck of the draw as to how the glacial material fell out as it retreated.
Three glacial features dominate our area:
Outwash plains, composed of mixed rocks dropped when the glacier streams deposited them. They are stratified into different size material.
Eskers, long ridges of sand and gravel that were deposited by a stream beneath a glacier.
Kettles, pot shaped depressions formed where buried ice melted causing the material over it to collapse. And yes, that is where the pot holes come from as well as our lakes. Many of these depressions only hold water in the spring from snow melt, or during wet periods like 2019.
Yes, the lakes and swamps are geologically quite young, but all are on a path to extinction as can be seen in many places where pot holes, etc. are filling in and over time will become a swamp/wetland. Flannery/Velvet are mesotrophic lakes heading to eutrophic and oblivion in time. While short in geologic time, a very long time in human terms.
Any early residents would have come here only in the last 10,000 years, our first immigrants (paleo Indians) followed the retreating glaciers north and hunted, fished, and tried to raise crops on our soil that was not conducive to plant growth except in meadows and swamp edges. Ground up glacial rock, while full of good minerals, works best when mixed with good organic topsoil that takes more than 10,000 years to form. Wild rice on the other hand thrived up here in the wetlands. Early European settlers would learn over time that Oneida county land with a few exceptions is not an agricultural marvel. The short growing season does not help. The outwash plains hosting potato farms are an exception. But, this land does give us our vacation land paradise. We are not the lush farm land of southern Wisconsin, but our scenery is better looking.
Recorded History
1850:
Our lands were patented under authority of the act of Congress of the United States, approved September 28, 1850 entitled “an act to enable the state of Arkansas and other states to reclaim the swamp lands within their limits."
The area was surveyed during the Civil War, which was completed in 1865. An interesting side note is that the surveyors were paid more per rod for working wetlands and lake frontages than for upper dry land. This partially accounts for some early surveys that showed the lakes to be larger than they are in reality.
Land Grant and Patent Made March 5, 1868 as shown by the records in the United States Land Office at Wausau, Wisconsin and in the State Land Office at Madison, Wisconsin.
First Sale State of Wisconsin to 3 individuals July 10 1882 Recorded June 26, 1883 Lincoln County and Transcribed to Oneida County. Lot 3.
Lincoln county formed from Marathon County in 1874. Oneida County 1887 from part of Lincoln County.
1882 deeds transferred from Lincoln County WI to Oneida County WI.
