Carl, Irvin
Elected Mayor of Greenwood
Greenwood--Irvin Carl was elected mayor of Greenwood for the next two years yesterday, polling 128 votes to rival Albert Schuette's 25. A total of 174 persons cast ballots in the city.
Russell Mead and E. L. Ketchpaw, unoppossed for the offices of city clerk and city treasurer, drew confidence votes of 158 and 152 respectively. In the only contested office, Harold Stabnow won by a 109 to 63 margin from Fred Drew in the battle for city assessor. Eben Ketchpaw, whose name was the only one on the ballot for justice of the peace, drew six votes and was tied for the lead with Robert Johnson, who got six "write-in" votes. Johnson later declared he did not want the post, so it went to Ketchpaw.
The rest was cutoff and no date was given in the scapbook, but we know Irvin Carl served the city from 1946-1954.
Source: Greenwood Library Scrapbook, (by News-Herald Correspondent)
Greenwood Blacksmith ‘Shod Everything’, Including Oxen
Greenwood—A blacksmith who served this community as mayor for eight years still is going strong here in a trade he learned at Neillsville 43 years ago, when his pay was 50 cents a week and his work day often stretched from early morning to midnight.
Now 58 years old, but as active as a man considerably younger in years, Irvin Carl has been a blacksmith in Greenwood since 1937, operating a shop he bought at that time from Tony Baird.
When you step into Carl’s shop---no one seems to know its exact age---you can step back a half century or more. That’s not to say Carl lives in the past. But he carries on his business in surroundings sharply reminiscent of blacksmith shops of an earlier day.
Iron shoes for horses and mules, and even oxen, strung overhead on rafters, serve as a mark of smithcraft rarely observed today in the few blacksmith shops remaining in the central Wisconsin area.
I’ve shod everything from oxen to race horses,” Carl said, posing for the accompanying picture before the hammer in his right hand slogged against forged metal resting on the anvil.
Carl, like most blacksmiths today, plies his trade sharpening plow shares and repairing farm implements and machinery, but his labors still include some horseshoeing. He shod more than 100 horses last year, often making trips to farms in nearby communities, long deprived of blacksmith shops, to do some of the work. He has to turn down many requests to make horseshoeing calls because the time detracts too much from his shop work.
Carl still manufactures a few wagon bodies in a woodworking department connected with his blacksmith shop, but on a scale that lacks any comparison with his output as a wagonsmith before he came to Greenwood.
He worked in Neillsville shops 27 years, except for a tour of duty in the army in World War I. During that time he turned out 964 wagons, often producing all the iron and wood parts required for construction. His wagon making today is limited to construction of bodies which he fits to chassis produced elsewhere.
Carl learned his trade in the Korman and Sommerfield shop at Neillsville, receiving wages of 50 cents a week the first year and $1.50 a week the second year. To supplement that meager income he mowed lawns and piled wood. “At the end of the first year I saved enough to buy a $14 suit,” he said.
He started his 43 year blacksmith career at the age of 15 and walked 7 miles each day to and from work and his home, 3 ½ miles west of Neillsville. After two years he saved enough to purchase a bicycle.
In 1921, a year before his marriage to Ida Weiting, he built a home in Neillsville where the family resided until 1937, when he purchased his shop in Greenwood.
Mr. and Mrs. Carl have four children.\, Robert, who works for the City of Greenwood; Harlan, a senior student majoring in physical education at the University of Wisconsin where he has made a name for himself as halfback on the varsity football squad, Duane, now at home on a 14-day furlough from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where he began basic army training two months ago, and a daughter, Marjorie, a senior in Greenwood High School. They also have one grandchild.
Mr. Carl served four consecutive terms as mayor of Greenwood from 1946 until the spring of 1954. City improvements accomplished during his term of office included new sodium vapor street lights and sidewalks for the business section of the community, and extension of water and sewer mains.
A brother, Arthur Carl, is mayor of Neillsville. Three other brothers, Alfred, Gustav and Harry, and a sister, Mrs. Walter Borde, also reside in Neillsville. Two other brothers are William, residing in the state of Washington, and Ernest, of Nekoosa.
On New Years Day, 1953, when their son Harlan played with the University of Wisconsin football team in a Rose Bowl game in California, Mr. and Mrs. Carl were among the spectators. A group of townspeople, who remained anonymous, underwrote the expenses of the trip. Marshfield News Herald 19 May 1954 P. 6
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