Anticipating railroad workers and later commerce, Louis and Frank Rivers built a rough two-room hotel/tavern/store out of logs in a clearing just north of the right-of-way, on the spot that is now the parking lot behind Casa Amigos.

Other businesses had sprung up selling groceries, ready-made clothes, crockery, jewelry, beer, fresh-baked bread, furniture, and coffins.

[2] Naturally, many buildings in the new city were built of wood; Central Avenue was lined with frame stores with boomtown fronts and wooden cornices.

The day was hot and windy, the fire got into Upham's piles of drying wood, and the limited firefighting tools were no match for it.

Men tried dynamiting a few stores to create a break in the fuel, but the fire swept through the rubble and jumped the gaps.

Learning from the fire, the city required that new buildings on Central Avenue must be clad in fireproof materials - not wood.

[2] Reconstruction began almost immediately, with some businesses throwing up temporary wooden shacks in the street in front of their lots from which they could sell while their stores behind were rebuilt in brick.

[5] Local cheesemaking had begun in 1885 at Nasonville, and proved to be profitable, so other cheese factories began to pop up in the neighboring country.

[17] All of these, together with the rail connection, made Marshfield a hub for shipping cheese from the area to markets like Milwaukee and Chicago.

Most interesting was the Baumann Building at 101 N. Central, a 2-story Italianate with wide overhanging eaves built between 1891 and 1898, which housed a saloon and Saenger Hall, where the Marshfield Mannerchor met, and in 1915 the Deutscher Krieger Verein.

Around the same time, Central became part of Wisconsin's state highway system, meaning more traffic through town.