Epoxy

Lake Wissota

Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, USA

Also known as Wissota Flowage, Chippewa River, Chippewa County

In Titanic, Jack Dawson tells Rose about ice fishing on Lake Wissota. The lake did not exist yet.

The ship went down in April 1912. This water was not here until 1917, when the Wisconsin-Minnesota Light and Power Company finished a hydroelectric dam on the Chippewa River and backed up more than 6,000 acres behind it. Seven hundred workers built it, housed in a temporary village east of Chippewa Falls with its own hospital and school.

The name is not Ojibwe, which people also assume. An engineer on the project, Louis G. Arnold, was working late over the final maps for the bank financing the dam and found the new lake had no name on them. He took the front of Wisconsin and the back of Minnesota.

It is technically an impoundment rather than a lake. The Chippewa flows in and out of it, and the Yellow River, O'Neill Creek, Stillson Creek and Paint Creek were all backed up when the gates closed.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Maple
Colour: Caribbean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: December 2024

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Lake Wissota map by Keyway

How this one was made

Walnut, and not wall to wall. The dam follows the waterline about half an inch out, so the flood runs along the shore rather than over the whole face. That keeps the pour contained and the staining exposure narrow, which matters on a board with this much bare wood left showing.

It also means a lot of dam. Wissota is a reservoir, and drowned river valleys leave a coast full of narrow fingers and sharp inlets rather than the clean sweep a natural lake gives you. Every one of those arms gets dammed on both sides at half an inch out. The Chippewa carrying on east as a thin channel across half the board is the same job again, and there the two dam lines run close enough together to be most of the width of the thing.

Two colours, the water and the engraved text. The compass rose points have outline borders too fine to dam at that size, so they were filled by syringe before the main pour.