This photo is looking west on Stephenson Avenue in New Swanzy circa 1910. (Photo courtesy of Rick Wills)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Republished from the Forsyth Sagas, April 2004

Last week, we discussed the founding of New Swanzy by John Q. Adams, his son, Eugene W. Adams and a business partner, Henry E. Sorenson, in 1908. To find out what happened in the nascent village, read on.

The only restriction that the Adamses and Sorenson had put on buyers of their lots was that no building valued at less than $400 could be erected. However, the owners could put up their buildings using any material they desired.

The first building constructed in New Swanzy was a saloon built by the Leisen & Henes Brewing Company of Menominee. It was operated by John Ghiardi, a 33-year-old immigrant from Italy who had come to this country when he was fifteen.

It was soon joined by four more saloons, three grocery stores, two bakeries, blacksmith shops, boarding houses, several homes, and even an opera house.

The number of shops and stores was disproportionate to the population of New Swanzy but the store owners sold their goods to people throughout the township not just the residents of New Swanzy. Many merchants traveled daily routes, taking orders one day and delivering the next day.

Life in New Swanzy’s early days was not for the faint of heart. It looked much like a wild frontier town and in many ways it was. It was a rough neighborhood with a large contingent of young, single men who worked hard and played hard as well. Saloons were abundant and violent fights not uncommon, and any possible moderating effects of churches or a constabulary were down the road, in Gwinn, not in New Swanzy.

Frank Farquar was a young boy during these earliest days of the town. His father had one of the first grocery stores in New Swanzy, having moved his family there from Old Swanzy. Frank later wrote of a town that “… looked peaceful enough in the day time but when night came it was different.”

With four saloons open six nights a week (a fifth one later opened-the only brick building in Swanzy) there was much drinking. Arguments were often settled with fists or knives.

Drunks who became too unruly were tossed indelicately out the back door of the saloons where their friends could retrieve them later, sometimes loading them into the back of buckboard wagons to cart them away. The extra-curricular activities in the town matched the town’s frontier appearance.

By 1910, two years after the first lots in New Swanzy were sold, census records showed over 150 people in the bustling little community. The majority of the people were immigrants. Most of the men were in their late twenties to early forties. Names which would be familiar to future “New Swanzy-ites” were appearing by then, like Ghiardi, Valente, Vercellino, Duca, Mussatto; the list went on.

Among the occupations most often listed on the census forms was “sinking shafts.” This was a reference to the specialized workers known as “sandhogs.” They were construction workers who did the dirty and dangerous work of digging tunnels and laying deep foundations for major construction projects. They were busy here at that time digging the shafts for the new mines being developed.

The dangers involved in burrowing into the earth were real enough by themselves but there was an added risk for sandhogs. Compressed air was used to hold back the groundwater while the sandhogs laid the concrete collars down to bedrock. The added pressure squeezed a man’s body, making breathing difficult and labor exhausting. The sand hogs could work for only a short time under the physical strain before having to come to the surface.

And coming to the surface too quickly brought the danger of developing nitrogen sickness, commonly known as “the bends” being the same affliction familiar to deep sea divers.

Workers surfacing had to gradually acclimate their bodies to the surface pressure to allow nitrogen to be reabsorbed slowly back into their bodies. Failure to do so would cause the nitrogen in their blood to bubble up into a froth causing severe pain. (The term “the bends” was descriptive of the reactions of sufferers who would double over, or bend, in pain.) If the bubbles prevented blood from flowing or if a bubble reached a man’s heart he could die.

To prevent this, a decompression chamber, a device they cavalierly referred to as “the hospital”, was kept on site to slowly adjust the air pressure to surface levels. While the sand hogs stayed inside the chamber another worker would tend to them, providing them with coffee and whiskey.

Whether from the dangers of the job itself or the risk of “the bends” the careers of sand hogs were short, with many being killed or crippled for life.

One enduring mystery is why the town was named Swanzy in the first place. The name was already in use for a town site in the area at what we now call “Old Swanzy”. That village had been in existence for over forty years by the time the new town was built just a few miles away. No doubt that is why people began to differentiate between the two places as “new” and “old”.

Shortly after Gwinn and New Swanzy were built, “Old” Swanzy disappeared. Its reason for being had been usurped by the communities that had grown up around it. By the 1920’s the last of its abandoned wooden structures were reportedly consumed in a forest fire.

“New Swanzy,” both the name and the new town, endured however. The town, which started as a rough and tumble offshoot of a burgeoning model town, has weathered the economic booms and busts of the area and continues to grow, still serving as a commercial core for Forsyth township.