By: Professor Joe Mason, Jaime Martindale, and Lauren Wunderlich
We are excited to share that an invaluable set of geographic documents has found a permanent home at UW–La Crosse, fulfilling a long-term goal of the late James C. Knox, Professor of Geography at UW–Madison.
These documents reveal how streams in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin responded to the high rates of soil erosion following 19th century land use change. The documents include notes, maps, and detailed surveys of streams compiled by Stafford Happ, a geomorphologist working in the 1930s and 1940s, who spent much of his career with the Soil Conservation Service (SCS, now the Natural Resource Conservation Service). Beyond documenting historical patterns, Happ’s papers are useful for scientists studying stream dynamics and fluvial landforms today.
Professor Knox of UW–Madison knew Happ and spent much of his own career studying how streams in the Driftless Area have responded to both land use and climate change over short and long timescales. He heard that Happ’s papers were about to be discarded and offered to store them temporarily in the UW–Madison Geography Department. The sizable collection of materials was organized and indexed by Tony Lattis, then a graduate student in the UW–Madison Information School who was also an assistant in the Robinson Map Library. Lattis sifted through every box and created detailed file manifests describing the contents—a key step that facilitated transferring the collection to an official archive. In 2023, a conversation between Professor Joe Mason (UW–Madison Geography) and David Mindel of the Murphy Library, UW La Crosse—on a field trip in the Driftless Area, no less—led to the plan to archive the Happ papers and make them available to the public, which is accessible here: Driftless River Initiative – Murphy Library | UW-La Crosse.
As part of a new Driftless River Initiative, Happ’s notes and maps have now joined other documents such as the papers of Dr. Stanley Trimble, who drew on Happ’s surveys in reconstructing effects of soil erosion on the valleys of Coon Creek in Wisconsin and the Whitewater River in Minnesota.
The Driftless River initiative will continue to grow at the Murphy Library as documents are digitized and new material is collected. At its core, this project will foster connection, research, and public access to Geography knowledge.
If you have any questions or believe you possess documents that could be added to this project, contact David Mindel at the Murphy Lab at 608.785.8945, or via email, dmindel@uwlax.edu.
