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Beloved sisters earned place in Star Lake history

Last Updated: Sept. 28, 2000

Dennis McCann

Star Lake - They are gone from the lake now, like the mill and railroad before them, all of Star Lake's historic fixtures now alive only in the stories people tell.

I refer to Edith and Hazel Fredrickson, of course, but if you have visited this Vilas County community at any time in the past, oh, 70 or 80 years, you may have known that.

They ran the minnow shack at water's edge, dispensing bait and candy and ice, renting boats and telling Star Lake stories season after season, decade after decade, until Edith died at age 95 and Hazel followed just this year, two days short of her 99th birthday.

"That's all that's left of the old girls," said Jim Flugam one recent night when we coincidentally stopped at the same time to see the old shack, still wearing its weathered "Fredrickson's Minnows" sign but open for business no more.

If neighboring resort owner Bill Hintz has his way, though, the shack built of box car lumber will open once again next fishing season, stocked not with minnows but with the sisters' own story. Already he has established a memorial to them, a rusted boat surrounded by red and purple flowers and topped by a plaque that laments the passing of an era and ends with, "Thank you, your friends."

Next he plans to install plexiglass windows, furnish the shack with old photos and memorabilia from the sisters' house, dust off the rocking chairs, oars and heater that visitors knew so well through the years and let the world look in and remember.

"Like a historical landmark kind of thing," said Hintz, explaining his plans. "They were such a big part of Star Lake I didn't want them to be forgotten."

That seems unlikely now, but then many who visit today know little of Star Lake's days as vibrant mill town or a railroad hub.

That was more than a century ago during lumbering's heyday, back when the sisters' father, a native of Oslo, Norway, named Fred Fredrickson, walked from Minocqua to Star Lake looking for work and stayed to marry and raise a family.

Lumbering died off and the railroad left, but Hazel and Edith stayed in their turn-of-the-century house and assumed key roles in Star Lake's new business of recreation, because there are certain essentials in the fishing game and the sisters sold them.

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"This was the only place we ever came for ice, and we bought our bait here, too," said Flugam, of Wisconsin Rapids. The sisters were here when he started coming to Star Lake as a boy and so he brought his daughter and her boyfriend to see the shack and hear of kids coming for penny candy and grown men for ice frozen in milk cartons or one of the rusty rental boats the sisters kept on the shore near the shack.

"It didn't look much different then than it does now," he said, but he had an admission.

"I could never keep them straight," he said. "(We'd say) the girls, was about it. Let's go down and see the girls. A lot of people used to come and see them. They were just a fixture up here for years."

"As much of a fixture as you can get," said Hintz, who owns nearby North Star Lodge. "They were just always friendly, sweet and kind. They were definitely a big part of Star Lake. No one came here without stopping to see the sisters."

Now they are gone. When the last logs were cut in Star Lake and the mill closed, the company town did, too. Houses were taken down, shipped to another city with a future and rebuilt for new tenants. But the bait shack will have a happier fate. A museum for the minnow maids, and why not?

There are a million museums in Wisconsin, but none other for beloved sisters who sold bait and rented boats and collected Star Lake's history, even as they became part of it.

Contact Dennis McCann at (414) 224-2528, or e-mail him at dmccann@onwis.com.