100 years on the Chain

WAUPACA – They called them the roaring twenties, with a post-war attitude, a jazz takeover in full swing, and a stock market crash to round out the decade, so much was happening around the world.
But tucked away in Waupaca was Katherine Laudert, whose maiden name is Beelan, and she did something different and bought herself a cottage on Long Lake in 1925 for a total of $650.
Romy Rupnow, Laudert’s daughter, said her mother saved the money by working as a bank teller in the Fox Valley. She was the first female bank teller to work in Appleton.
Coincidentally, women were unable to take out a loan at a bank without a male co-signer, but Laudert was able to save the money from her bank teller job to pay for the cottage in full for herself and for future generations of her family to enjoy.
A single woman buying a cottage in 1925 was not common.

“She was a woman ahead of her time for sure,” Rupnow said.
Laudert first started coming to the Chain O’Lakes in 1919, renting the very cottage she would buy six years later from the Bushy family who owned a business college in Appleton.
Her journey would start in Appleton, where she would take a train to Neenah, from Neenah she would get on the Soo Line Railroad, which would drop her off at the train depot, which was located on Oak Street.
After Laudert disembarked at the depot, Rupnow said she would take a trolley to the Grand View Hotel, which was previously located on Grandview Road.
According to Tracy Behrendt, the director of the Waupaca Historical Society, the trolley was owned by the Waupaca Electric and Light Railway Company and would stop at the Wisconsin Veteran’s Home, the Electric Dock and the Grand View Hotel before turning around.
Once Laudert was at the Grand View Hotel she would walk to Bessie Merriam’s boat business where she would either rent a boat to row to her Long Lake cottage, or she would get a boat shuttle that would drop her off down the shore from the cottage.
Behrendt said Bessie Merriam and her parents had a boat business, where they purchased the Lady of the Lakes in 1901 and they would stop at a variety of places on the Chain.
Merriam married Edward Nelsen in 1919 and they continued the boat business calling it Nelsen’s Boat and Dock Livery. They had a boat rental business as well.
Eventually she decided to buy a car, another first for women in Appleton, to cut down the travel time to get to her lakeside paradise.
Laudert started dating (with a chaperone) her future husband, Roger Laudert, while staying on the Chain and Roger proposed marriage on the bridge between Bass and Long Lake.
After they married they renovated the cottage and started spending weekends there in the summer.
In 1928, the family grew and a new member of the family was introduced to the Chain O’Lakes as Rupnow was born.
In 1991, Rupnow was looking to add a loft to the cottage, but still wanted to keep the original integrity of the cottage.
Rupnow said they carefully built the loft, while keeping the layout as best they could to its original state, most notably the half circle window facing the lake, which was part of the original cottage.
This year marks 100 years of Laudert breaking with the norms of society, being a woman ahead of her time, and through her hard work she was able to secure a northwoods retreat that future generations are able to continue to enjoy.