Stumpton, Wisconsin

For the town of the same name in Marathon County, see Stumpton (town), Wisconsin.

Stumpton is a city in Dane County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 24,187 at the 2010 census, making it the fourth-largest municipality in the county. Stumpton is located on the Sugar River approximately 14 miles (23 km) southwest of Madison and is part of the Madison Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Founded as a sawmill settlement in 1846 and incorporated as a city in 1871, Stumpton developed through the nineteenth century as a milling, tanning, and shoemaking center serving the surrounding agricultural townships. The Stumpton Shoe & Boot Company was the city's largest employer for most of the period between 1900 and 1965, and the closure of the shoe works in 1971 and of the Wachtel Foundry a decade later together ended more than a century of manufacturing in the city. Since the 1990s Stumpton has grown rapidly as a residential and commercial suburb of Madison, with employment concentrated in health care, health information technology, and education.^[1]

Etymology[edit]

The origin of the city's name is disputed. The traditional account, recorded in the 1880 History of Dane County, holds that the settlement was named for the field of oak stumps left standing after the original mill crew cleared the river flat in the winter of 1846–47, and that the name was applied derisively by travelers before it was adopted by residents.^[2]

A second account, advanced by local historian Margarethe Bohl in 1954 and since repeated in city publications, derives the name from Wilhelm Stumpf (1809–1878), a Hessian immigrant who held the mill's original water rights. Bohl noted that Stumpf's name appears in the Dane County register with the terminal -f struck through, suggesting an anglicization in progress. No contemporary document uses the spelling "Stumpftown," and most historians regard the derivation as unlikely.^[3]

The Ho-Chunk name for the river bend, recorded by a Board of Geographic Names surveyor in 1908 as Waką́ Hažú and translated at the time as "where the snakes gather," is no longer in local use.^[4]

History[edit]

Indigenous settlement and cession

The Sugar River valley was occupied seasonally by the Ho-Chunk, who maintained garden beds and burial mounds along the terraces above the floodplain. Six conical mounds and one effigy mound in the shape of a bird survive within the boundaries of Ridgeview Cemetery, which was platted around them in 1867; a seventh mound was destroyed during construction of the Wachtel Foundry in 1884. The mound group was surveyed by the Wisconsin Archeological Society in 1911 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.^[5]

Ho-Chunk title to the area was ceded under the Treaty of 1832, and removal was carried out in stages over the following two decades. A number of Ho-Chunk families returned to the valley repeatedly through the 1850s and 1860s; a settlement at the mouth of Hollis Creek appears on county plat maps as late as 1873.

Founding and incorporation

The first permanent structure was a water-powered sawmill built in 1846 by a partnership of Wilhelm Stumpf and the brothers Ansel and Peter Hollis. A gristmill followed in 1849, and the village was platted in 1851. Norwegian settlement began in the same decade, concentrated in the eastern wards, and by 1870 more than a third of residents were Norwegian-born or of Norwegian parentage.

The arrival of a branch of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad in 1857 shifted the commercial center a quarter mile north to the present Main Street. On September 3, 1868, a fire that began in a livery destroyed thirty-one buildings on the east side of Main Street, including the original village hall and its records; the reconstruction that followed is responsible for the uniform Italianate storefronts of the 400 and 500 blocks. Stumpton incorporated as a city on April 11, 1871.^[6]

Tanning, shoemaking, and foundry era

The Ellery Tannery opened in 1873 and by 1890 employed roughly 240 men, drawing hemlock bark by rail from northern Wisconsin. The Wachtel Foundry, established in 1884, produced agricultural castings and, after 1917, municipal water fittings. The two firms together accounted for a majority of industrial employment in the city until the Second World War.

Ryerson Brothers Shoe Company was organized in 1889 to use tannery leather locally rather than shipping it east, with capital supplied by tannery partner Nils Halvorsen. The firm was reorganized as the Stumpton Shoe & Boot Company in 1911 and became the city's largest employer by 1914. The company specialized in heavy work boots and, under contracts let in 1917 and again in 1942, in military footwear; employment peaked at approximately 1,400 in 1944, of whom slightly more than half were women, concentrated in the stitching and fitting rooms.

The plant was the site of a sit-down strike in February 1937 over piece rates in the lasting department. The occupation lasted nine days and ended in recognition of Local 214 of the Boot and Shoe Workers' Union. The settlement is the subject of a Wisconsin Historical Society marker at the corner of Mill and Water Streets.^[19]

Employment declined steadily after 1955 as domestic footwear manufacturing consolidated in the South. The company was acquired by a Missouri holding company in 1967 and announced in June 1971 that production would be transferred to Lawrenceburg, Tennessee; the plant closed that October, eliminating 780 jobs in a city of fewer than 11,000 residents. The closure is generally treated by local historians as the dividing line in the city's twentieth-century history.^[20]

The five-story brick shoe works on the west bank of the river remains the largest building in the city. Its lower two floors were converted to apartments and self-storage in 1998; the upper three floors are vacant. The riveted steel water tower on the roof, which carries the company name, is a protected feature under the city's historic preservation ordinance and appears on the city seal adopted in 1976. The building was purchased in 2012 by Halvorsen Bend Holdings LLC, a local investor group, which has proposed a phased residential conversion of the upper floors contingent on state and federal historic tax credits.

Both operations discharged directly into the Sugar River. A state Board of Health inspection in 1902 described the river below the tannery outfall as unfit for stock watering, and the resulting litigation, Krebs v. Ellery Tanning Co. (1904), was cited in later Wisconsin water-quality cases. The tannery closed in 1931. The foundry site was designated an EPA brownfield in 1994; remediation of the eastern parcel was completed in 2007, and the western parcel remains fenced.^[7]

Twentieth century

The Ashgrove Sanatorium, a county tuberculosis facility, opened on a bluff northwest of the city in 1911 with 60 beds and was expanded to 190 beds in 1929. During the influenza pandemic of 1918 the sanatorium and the Odd Fellows Hall on Center Street were both used as emergency hospitals; the city recorded 214 deaths between October 1918 and February 1919, the highest per-capita toll of any municipality in the county. Ashgrove was converted to a county home for the aged in 1957 and closed in 1974. The main building, a three-story brick structure with two surviving open-air wards, is privately owned and vacant.^[8]

The flood of March 1936, following an ice jam below the Third Street bridge, inundated eleven blocks of the west side and destroyed the 1849 gristmill. The Sugar River flood-control levee was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers between 1958 and 1961, and the neighborhood inside the former floodplain was rebuilt as light industrial.

Lindqvist Quarry, which supplied dolomite for regional road construction from 1922, ceased operation in 1968 when its pumps were shut off; the resulting 90-foot-deep pit filled within four years and is now Quarry Lake, a city park. Swimming is prohibited. Three drownings were recorded at the site between 1971 and 1989, after which the eastern face was fenced.^[9]

On October 14, 1978, two Stumpton High School students, Renata Vogel and Christopher Aal, were reported missing after leaving a homecoming bonfire at the quarry. Neither has been found. The case remains open with the Dane County Sheriff's Office and is periodically reviewed; a 2004 excavation of the quarry's south shelf recovered no evidence.^[10]

Recent history

The closure of the Wachtel Foundry in September 1981 eliminated 610 jobs, and the city lost population between the 1980 and 1985 estimates for the only time in its history. Growth resumed after 1990 as the Madison metropolitan area expanded southwest along County Highway PB. Between 1990 and 2010 the city's population increased by 72 percent, and four subdivisions were annexed from the surrounding Town of Ashgrove, a process contested in circuit court in 1997 and 2002.

Meridian Health Informatics, founded in Stumpton in 1997, became the city's largest private employer by 2006. In 2011 Stumpton Community Hospital, independent since its founding in 1949, affiliated with Cardinal Rivers Health, a regional system headquartered in Rockford, Illinois. The affiliation agreement transferred the hospital's real property to the system and was approved by the hospital board on a 7–4 vote.^[11]

Cardinal Rivers Health was acquired in March 2013 by Ostmark Capital Partners, a Chicago private investment firm, in a transaction reported at $2.1 billion. In June 2013 Meridian Health Informatics confirmed that it had received an unsolicited acquisition proposal from an Ostmark affiliate and that its board had retained outside advisors to evaluate it. No agreement had been announced as of August 2013.^[23]

Geography[edit]

Stumpton is located at 42°57′N 89°37′W, on both banks of the Sugar River at its confluence with Hollis Creek. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 11.94 square miles (30.92 km²), of which 11.51 square miles (29.81 km²) is land and 0.43 square miles (1.11 km²) is water.

The city lies within the Driftless-margin transition, and the bluffs north and west of the river were not glaciated during the Wisconsin glaciation. Elevations range from 838 feet (255 m) at the river to 1,046 feet (319 m) at Ashgrove Bluff. The surrounding uplands are dominated by dairy and cash-grain agriculture, and remnant oak savanna is preserved at the 340-acre Hollis Creek Conservancy on the city's northern edge.

Climate

Stumpton has a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb) with warm summers and cold, snowy winters.

Climate data for Stumpton, Wisconsin (1981–2010 normals)

Month	Jan	Apr	Jul	Oct	Year
Average high °F (°C)	26.9 (−2.8)	57.8 (14.3)	82.1 (27.8)	60.3 (15.7)	56.7 (13.7)
Average low °F (°C)	10.4 (−12.0)	36.2 (2.3)	61.0 (16.1)	39.1 (3.9)	36.8 (2.7)
Precipitation in (mm)	1.15 (29)	3.44 (87)	4.31 (109)	2.42 (61)	35.24 (895)
Snowfall in (cm)	12.6 (32)	1.9 (4.8)	0.0 (0)	0.3 (0.8)	50.8 (129)

Demographics[edit]

Historical population

Census	Pop.	%±
1860	704	—
1870	1,212	72.2%
1880	1,894	56.3%
1890	2,466	30.2%
1900	3,118	26.4%
1910	3,940	26.4%
1920	4,617	17.2%
1930	5,208	12.8%
1940	5,776	10.9%
1950	6,921	19.8%
1960	8,844	27.8%
1970	10,903	23.3%
1980	12,466	14.3%
1990	14,038	12.6%
2000	19,275	37.3%
2010	24,187	25.5%
2013 est.	25,410	5.1%

At the 2010 census there were 24,187 people, 9,304 households, and 6,388 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,101.4 inhabitants per square mile (811.4/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 88.1% White, 3.9% African American, 3.4% Asian, 0.6% Native American, 1.7% from other races, and 2.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino residents of any race were 5.8% of the population.

Of 9,304 households, 36.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them. The median age was 34.8 years. The median income for a household was $61,904 and the median income for a family was $76,220. About 7.9% of the population was below the poverty line.

Persons of Norwegian and German ancestry together account for a majority of reported ancestries. The Sons of Norway lodge, chartered in 1902, remains active, and Norwegian-language services were held at Vår Frelsers Lutheran Church until 1961.

Economy[edit]

Health care and health information technology are the largest sectors of the local economy. A substantial share of the resident workforce commutes to Madison; the 2010 census reported a mean travel time to work of 24.6 minutes.

Largest employers (2013)

#	Employer	Sector	Employees
1	Meridian Health Informatics	Software	1,180
2	Stumpton Community Hospital (Cardinal Rivers Health)	Health care	840
3	Stumpton Area School District	Education	610
4	Hollis Valley Cooperative	Agriculture, retail	395
5	Bremer Plastics	Manufacturing	268
6	City of Stumpton	Government	241
7	Kroeger Bros. Construction	Construction	190

Meridian Health Informatics develops clinical scheduling and billing software for mid-sized hospital systems and occupies a campus of four buildings on the former Wachtel Foundry parcel east of the river. The company has been the subject of recurring acquisition reporting in the trade press since 2011, and confirmed an unsolicited offer from an affiliate of Ostmark Capital Partners in June 2013.^[12] Ostmark's acquisition of Cardinal Rivers Health earlier the same year made the firm, indirectly, both the owner of the city's hospital and a bidder for its largest employer; the Common Council adopted a nonbinding resolution in July 2013 requesting that any transaction preserve local employment.^[24]

Government[edit]

Stumpton operates under a mayor–council form of government. The mayor is elected to a four-year term and the ten members of the Common Council to staggered two-year terms, all in nonpartisan spring elections. Dolores Achterberg, first elected in 2009, is the city's third mayor since 1990 and its first woman mayor.

The city is served by the Stumpton Police Department (41 sworn officers) and a combination fire department. For state legislative purposes the city is divided between the 79th and 80th Assembly districts and lies within the 27th Senate district. At the federal level it is in Wisconsin's 2nd congressional district.

Education[edit]

The Stumpton Area School District enrolls approximately 4,300 students in five elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school. Stumpton High School, opened at its present site on Ashgrove Road in 1968, enrolled 1,462 students in the 2012–13 school year.

The school's athletic teams are known as the Stompers. The origin of the nickname is disputed locally: the district's official history attributes it to the stump-clearing ordinance of 1853, while a competing account traces it to the lasting department of the Stumpton Shoe & Boot Company, whose workers were known as stompers and whose company team competed under that name from 1922. The nickname was adopted by the high school in 1931, during the period when the shoe works was the city's largest employer.^[21] The teams compete in WIAA Division 1 as members of the Big Eight Conference, which the district joined in 1994. In the fall of 2012 the school won state championships in both football and girls volleyball, the first Big Eight member to take both titles in the same season. A referendum to fund a replacement field house and to renovate the 1968 gymnasium failed in April 2012 by 214 votes; a private fundraising campaign was announced by the Stumpton Athletic Booster Club the following November.^[13]

Madison Area Technical College operates a satellite campus on East Main Street offering associate degrees in nursing and information technology.

Culture and landmarks[edit]

Five properties in Stumpton are listed on the National Register of Historic Places:

• Merrick Block (1893) — a three-story Richardsonian Romanesque commercial building at Main and Third, listed 1982. The upper floors were vacant from 1979 until 2012, when the building was purchased by Halvorsen Bend Holdings LLC, an investor group organized in 2011 by local business owners to acquire and rehabilitate vacant upper-story space downtown.
• Halvorsen House (1889) — Queen Anne residence built for tannery partner Nils Halvorsen, on North Bluff Street. Privately owned; not open to the public.
• Vår Frelsers Lutheran Church (1874) — Norwegian Gothic Revival frame church, listed 1978.
• Ridgeview Cemetery Mound Group — six conical and one effigy mound, listed 1979.
• Stumpton Shoe & Boot Company Factory (1891, expanded 1913 and 1941) — five-story brick factory with rooftop water tower, listed 1996.
• Stumpton Public Library (1913) — Carnegie library, listed 1984; still in use.

Kessler's Tap, at 118 South Third Street, has held a Class B license continuously since 1912 and is generally identified as the oldest tavern in the city; the building housed a soft-drink parlor during Prohibition. The tavern's back room served as the meeting hall of the Stumpton local of the United Foundry Workers from 1938 to 1981.

The Sugar River State Trail passes through the city on the former Milwaukee Road right-of-way. The Stumpton Courier, a weekly newspaper founded in 1868, is the city's only locally produced news outlet; it has been owned since 2009 by a regional chain based in Dubuque, Iowa.

Stump Days[edit]

Stump Days

Genre	Community festival
Frequency	Annual
Location	Downtown Stumpton and Wachtel Fairgrounds
Years active	1953–present
Dates	Last full weekend in September
Attendance	c. 62,000 (2012)
Organized by	Stump Days Association

Stump Days is an annual three-day community festival held in Stumpton on the last full weekend of September. Organized by the volunteer Stump Days Association, the festival draws attendance well in excess of the city's population — an estimated 62,000 visitors in 2012 — and is the largest fall festival in south central Wisconsin by attendance.^[14] Since 1968 its dates have been fixed to coincide with the Stumpton High School homecoming game, and the Friday of the festival is a scheduled early-release day in the Stumpton Area School District.

History

The festival began in 1953 as "Stump Day," a one-day event organized by the Stumpton Junior Chamber of Commerce to mark the centennial of the 1853 stump-clearing ordinance, under which property owners along Main Street were required to remove or level the remaining oak stumps at their own expense. The ordinance had been widely ignored, and the last documented stump was removed in 1891; the anniversary was chosen, according to Association records, "for lack of a better one."^[15]

The event expanded to two days in 1959 and three in 1966. In 1968 the Association moved the festival from mid-July to late September at the request of the school district, which had objected that summer scheduling drew families out of town before the start of the football season. The change was contentious at the time and is credited with the festival's subsequent growth, as the parade, the homecoming game, and the coronation now occur within a thirty-hour period.

The shoe events were added in 1972, the first festival following the closure of the Stumpton Shoe & Boot Company, at the proposal of the Local 214 retirees' committee. They were intended as a one-year commemoration and have been held every year since.

The festival was cancelled in 1975 (flooding), 1985 (a fire at the fairgrounds exhibition barn), and 2001. Attendance first exceeded 25,000 in 1979 and 50,000 in 2004.

Events

The festival's schedule has been substantially unchanged since 1971.

• The Stump Pull. The festival's signature competition, held Saturday afternoon on Main Street. Six-person teams representing wards, businesses, and civic organizations drag a 1,100-pound white oak stump — the same stump since 1961, stored the remainder of the year in a shed behind the public works garage — over a 100-foot course against the clock. Teams compete in open and masters divisions. The course record of 41.2 seconds, set by the Wachtel Foundry team in 1977, has stood since the foundry's closure and is generally regarded as unbreakable.^[16]
• The Sit. An endurance contest in which entrants remain seated on numbered stumps in Veterans Park, permitted to stand for five minutes each hour. The last entrant seated is declared the winner and receives a nominal prize and the right to ride in the following year's parade. The record, 61 hours, was set in 1994 by Delmar Ahlgren, who has entered every year since 1981.
• The parade. Saturday, 10:00 a.m., running the length of Main Street. Approximately ninety units, led by the high school marching band and the current homecoming court. The Stump Days Association maintains a written route that has not changed since 1987 (see below).
• Coronation. The Stump Days royalty are selected by written examination on local history, administered by the Stumpton Historical Society, together with a public interview. The format has been in use since 1955 and is unusual among Wisconsin festival pageants in excluding both talent and appearance from judging.
• Friday bonfire. Held at the Wachtel Fairgrounds preceding the homecoming game. The bonfire was held at Lindqvist Quarry until 1978 and was relocated by order of the Common Council the following year.
• Fish boil and lumberjack competition. Both held at the millpond Saturday evening; the lumberjack competition includes log rolling, the underhand chop, and a two-person crosscut sawing event.
• The Boot Toss. A distance throw held Saturday morning in the fairgrounds infield, using a size 12 work boot manufactured at the shoe works, one of a lot of forty acquired by the Association at the 1972 liquidation sale. Eleven of the original boots remain in use. Separate divisions are held for adults and for entrants under sixteen; the adult record of 141 feet 4 inches was set in 1996.
• The Shoe Scramble. A children's event in which participants place their shoes in a single pile at the center of the millpond lawn, walk to the far edge barefoot, and race back to find and put on their own. Held continuously since 1972 and the most heavily attended of the shoe events.
• The Lasting Contest. A timed hand-lasting of a leather upper over a wooden last, using tools donated by the company in 1972, judged by former employees of the lasting department. Entry is open, but the contest is scored against a standard set by the judges, and no entrant has met it since 1998. Three entrants competed in 2012.^[22]
• Courier pie judging. Sponsored by the Stumpton Courier since 1957. Entries are judged blind; the paper prints the winning recipe the following Thursday.

Reception and attendance

Stump Days has been the subject of periodic regional feature coverage, including in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Midwest Living, and Wisconsin Public Radio, and was named one of the state's top ten fall events by the Wisconsin Department of Tourism in 2007 and 2011. A 2012 study commissioned by the Stumpton Area Chamber of Commerce estimated the festival's direct economic impact at $4.3 million, with lodging demand extending to Verona and western Madison.^[17]

Coverage has generally emphasized the festival's resistance to modernization. The Association has declined to relocate the Stump Pull off Main Street, to introduce carnival rides, or to permit vendors not based in Dane County; a 2011 Journal Sentinel feature described the result as a festival that has grown large without becoming a fair.

Controversies

Parade route (1987). A proposal to shorten the parade route by four blocks to reduce overtime costs for the police department was withdrawn after a petition drive collected 3,100 signatures, more than a fifth of the city's population at the time. The Association subsequently adopted a bylaw requiring a two-thirds vote of the membership to alter the route.

Title change (2009). The Association voted to replace the titles "Stump Queen" and "Stump King" with the gender-neutral "Stump Days Royalty," a change opposed by a minority of the board and by the Stumpton Historical Society, which administers the examination. Two board members resigned. The examination format was unaffected.

Presenting sponsorship (2012). In February 2012 the Association accepted a three-year presenting sponsorship from Cardinal Rivers Health, the first corporate sponsorship in the festival's history, following a shortfall attributed to declining participation by local businesses. Under the agreement the system's name appears on the parade banner, the Stump Pull scoreboard, and festival advertising. The vote was 9–5. Opponents argued the sponsorship was inconsistent with the Association's vendor rules; supporters noted that the Association had operated at a deficit in four of the previous six years. A proposal to extend naming rights to the fairgrounds grandstand was tabled in November 2012 and remains before the board.^[18] The sponsorship agreement carried over unchanged following Cardinal Rivers Health's acquisition by Ostmark Capital Partners in March 2013, a point raised without resolution at the Association's April 2013 meeting.

Transportation[edit]

Wisconsin Highway 69 passes north–south through the city, connecting to U.S. Highway 18/151 at Verona and to Interstate 39/90 south of Belleville. County Highway PB is the principal commuter route to Madison's west side. Freight rail service on the former Milwaukee Road line ended in 1982 and the corridor was railbanked in 1986. Stumpton Municipal Airport, a single-runway general aviation field, is located three miles east of the city.

Notable people[edit]

• Elsa Wachtel Ryerson (1888–1971), suffragist and Wisconsin Assembly member, 1925–1931
• Margarethe Bohl (1901–1988), local historian and author of The Sugar River Valley: A Chronicle (1954)
• Harold "Bud" Petrie (1921–1998), Major League Baseball pitcher
• Dana Sorensen (born 1962), novelist
• Marcus Petit (born 1985), National Football League offensive lineman

References[edit]

1. "City of Stumpton Comprehensive Plan, 2010–2030". City of Stumpton Department of Planning and Development. 2010.
2. History of Dane County, Wisconsin. Western Historical Company. 1880. pp. 612–618.
3. Bohl, Margarethe (1954). The Sugar River Valley: A Chronicle. Stumpton Historical Society. pp. 22–29.
4. "Decisions of the United States Board on Geographic Names". Government Printing Office. 1909.
5. "National Register of Historic Places Inventory — Nomination Form: Ridgeview Cemetery Mound Group". National Park Service. 1979.
6. "Fire at Stumpton". Wisconsin State Journal. September 5, 1868. p. 2.
7. "Record of Decision: Wachtel Foundry Site, Stumpton, Wisconsin". U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 5. 1997.
8. Annual Report of the Dane County Board of Supervisors, 1919. pp. 88–94.
9. "Council votes to fence quarry face". Stumpton Courier. June 22, 1989. p. 1.
10. "Sheriff reviews 1978 disappearance". Wisconsin State Journal. October 14, 2003. p. B1.
11. "Hospital board approves Cardinal Rivers affiliation". Stumpton Courier. August 18, 2011. p. 1.
12. "Meridian draws outside interest". Modern Healthcare IT. March 2013.
13. "Field house referendum fails; boosters pledge private drive". Stumpton Courier. November 15, 2012. p. 1.
14. "Sixty years of stumps". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. September 21, 2013. p. 3B.
15. Minutes of the Stump Days Association, 1953–1970. Stumpton Public Library, local history collection.
16. "Foundry mark stands at 35 years". Stumpton Courier. October 4, 2012. p. 8.
17. "Economic Impact of Stump Days". Stumpton Area Chamber of Commerce. 2012.
18. "Association accepts Cardinal Rivers sponsorship, 9–5". Stumpton Courier. February 23, 2012. p. 1.
19. Zahn, Frederick (1988). "The Stumpton Sit-Down, 1937". Wisconsin Magazine of History. 71 (3): 194–211.
20. "Shoe plant to close; 780 jobs lost". Stumpton Courier. June 24, 1971. p. 1.
21. Bohl, Margarethe (1954). The Sugar River Valley: A Chronicle. Stumpton Historical Society. pp. 141–144.
22. "Three enter lasting contest". Stumpton Courier. October 4, 2012. p. 8.
23. "Ostmark closes on Cardinal Rivers". Modern Healthcare. March 19, 2013.
24. "Council asks for jobs guarantee in Meridian talks". Stumpton Courier. July 18, 2013. p. 1.