Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
naturally come together. A rival community, Kilbourn—expediently named after a railroad
magnate—got thetrainstostopthere,andNewportshriveledupandeffectively blewaway.
Stopover rail passengers soon discovered the multihued striations of the sandstone, and
by the 1850s, individual rowboats were carrying well-to-do passengers up and down the
river between train stops. In the 1870s, George Crandall started the first riverboats and
steamshipsupanddownthewaters.Bythe1880s,encroachingdevelopment threatened the
shoreline.
Crandall may have started the whole touristic expansionism of the Dells, but he is also
credited with applying the first preservation pressure to protect this stretch of magical
beauty. He used the tourism money he'd amassed and began making wholesale riverfront
purchases, letting the land revert to its natural state and planting trees where settlers had
clear-cut. He also established a conservation trust to see that others didn't muck it up later.
Crandall more than likely saved the day, although he was aided by the fact that newspa-
persnationwide werepublishingphotosoftheareabyHenryHamilton Bennett, theinvent-
or of the stop-action shutter. The pictures included the legendary first freeze-frame photo-
graph—of Bennett's son jumping the crevasse at Stand Rock.
