The starlake.org page on the World Wide Web

The home page for www.starlake.org reads "An ideosyncratic Web Page devoted to the history, geography, and ecology of Star Lake, Wisconsin." That is a tall order, and the page makes no pretentious claim to throughly cover those subjects. Rather, the goal of the page is to collect, organize and make available to anyone interested a collection of information and images that has grown from one person's lifelong relationship to Star Lake.

Your Webmasters are Charles Forbes and Craig Forbes. Charles (that's me) is responsible for the content and Craig (my son) is responsible for making the page work and actually delivering the content to you.

My love of Star Lake continues a family tradition begun by my grandparents in 1908 when they first were guests at the Hotel Waldheim now North Star Lodge. I first arrived in Star Lake in 1941 at 9 months old. Sometime in the 60's or 70's I began to take an interest in the history of Star Lake, and began collecting articles, books, artifacts, postcards, magazines, etc. relating to Star Lake and the Northwoods region. My interests were broad, and a fairly massive amount of stuff was collected but not systematically. I am still striving to get it all organized!

The problem soon became: How to share the information? Naturally, my first thought was to write a book on the history of Star Lake: I even had a title, "Star Lake: The Ghost Town that Wouldn't Die." But there are three very serious drawbacks to a book: It would have to be published privately at considerable expense; putting the book in final form requires bringing the research and collecting to some kind of conclusion; the book does not provide space for presenting the mass of original data that I would like to be able to share about Star Lake. Then CD's came on the scene: drastically lowering the cost of publishing (do it yourself is possible), and allowing inexpensive updates. I began to outline what a CD history of Star Lake would look like and include. But then the World Wide Web exploded upon the scene. It is the perfect medium to present my materials. The WWW allows for a very wide breadth of materials, it allows me to start presenting material long before research is finished, and best of all, it allows others to participate in the project, as it allows additions at any time, furnished by anyone.

The scope of what is presented in the Web Page is, at the beginning, defined by my interests. They are broad, and certainly not limited simply to Star Lake and its history. The subjects covered grow out of my experience as a summer visitor to Star Lake. If we like to visit the "Mystery Light" in Michigan, then there will be an entry for the Mystery Light. If birds are not of great interest to me then there are many fewer entries for birds than for mammal wildlife which does interest me.

As time goes on, and this page develops, I hope others will provide information. It is very simple to add topics to the topic list, and if you would like to share all you know about bald eagles, flying squirrels, or speakeasys in Vilas County, I will be glad to put it on the page, or add a link to your page that contains the data.

Start by reading "Using This Site" which will help you move around www.starlake.org, and read "Adding Your Data" to find our how to contribute. The section on Current Research will let you join with me in my current research interest.

Have fun, enjoy the page, and let me know what you think of it. You can send email to webmaster@starlake.org.

Charles P. Forbes
October 2002