Page:History of Goodhue County, Minnesota.djvu/720

 628 HISTORY OF GOODHUE COUNTY eminent among the manufacturers of the country, that he most largely applied his energies, he always took an active interest in public affairs, national, state and local. In 1882-83 he was mayor of Red Wing, and his term was marked by strict enforce- ment of the liquor laws, and the installation of a municipal water plant, in place of giving a franchise to private enterprise. He was a thirty-second degree Mason, a Knight Templar and a Shriner. He was directly interested in the business develop- ment of Red Wing and was one of the chief promoters of the Red Wing, Duluth and Southern Railway, an undertaking that made possible the success of the clay industries and which was afterward sold to the Chicago, Great Western Railway Com- pany. For many years he was a director in the First National Bank of Red Wing. He was a member of the St. Paul Jobbers' Association, the National Shoe and Leather Association, and of other important commercial bodies. He took a deep interest in the Foot Family Association of America, and attended the first annual meeting at Wetherfield, Conn., June 5, 1907, where over one hundred descendants of Nathaniel Foot, the first settler, gathered in the first Connecticut town, where he lived in 1637. For many years Mr. Foot was a useful and earnest member of and generous contributor to Christ Episcopal church, in which he long served as vestryman, and of which he was, at the time of his death, junior warden. In 1903 he erected, as an addition to Christ church, a beautiful and costly chapel, in memory of his deceased wife. The Forest Products Company, still in its infancy, promises to be one of the most important of Red Wing's industries. An evolution from the originally simple proposition of utilizing the timber on the overflow bottom lands up and down the Mississippi, it now represents an industry absolutely unique and constitutes an experiment which will be watched with interest not only be- cause it represents what is likely to be a financial success, but because it also has a sentimental side — that of preserving the rapidly diminishing forest areas of this state and vicinity. The "bottoms," a maze of winding sloughs, swamp and tangled woods, frequented only by hunters, wood choppers and campers, are the wide bed of the swollen river when melting snows or heavy rains crowd it over its low banks. Receiving the flood deposits of finest silt from upland farms, these lands are both the richest and least valuable in the county. Here and there are found the rotting houses of settlers who have wasted their best years in striving with ax and fire to clear meadows and tillable fields and who have at length given up the struggle against flood and vigorous timber growth and have left the land stripped of its big timber, the only value it can ever possess.