Doveland, Wisconsin - You Can Never Go Home Again

Originally published October 16th, 2023 on Cohost (RIP)

Doveland, Wisconsin is the purported name of a small town in Wisconsin- where in Wisconsin? Uh, we're not sure- "the heart of the state", is the best you'll get. And don't check maps either, because it's gone. Believers insist Doveland was wiped from existence sometime in the 1980s or 90s, leaving behind almost nothing but memories in the minds of those who lived nearby, an alleged photograph, and oddly enough, merchandise. This is apparently what sparked many memories of the town- Facebook advertisements for t-shirts, hoodies, and mugs branded "Doveland, Wisconsin"

One of the main pieces of "evidence" of Doveland is the seemingly widespread merchandise you can buy bearing it's name. Whether on Redbubble or Etsy you can buy generic looking graphic t shirts that say Doveland. Many other people will claim to have vintage merchandise bearing Doveland's name, but the Redbubble stuff is conveniently the only stuff where pictures exist.

The other main piece of evidence often trotted out is this photograph of a photograph, blown out and with a convenient lack of restaurant name. It's purported as a picture taken in a restaurant in Doveland, though because there's no visible text or name referencing it, we just have to take this anonymous author at their word.

So why did Doveland disappear? And how?. Well, there's a bundle of typical answers that all also fall apart under scrutiny- freak storms or earthquakes, floods environmental or man made, sinkholes, great fires, economic depression, etc. All of these are perfectly good ways to create a ghost town, but none are sufficient to send one down the memory hole wholesale. From experience, you can find at least passing reference to every 12 person cattle town and railroad stop throughout American history. To erase a town as late as the 1990s you'd need a lot of power- perhaps the power of the biggest navy in the world.

Project Sanguine was the kind of batshit American endeavor that could only be born of the early cold war era. In the 1960s, the US Navy had a problem- radio communications just don't really work underwater. Radio waves scatter as they go through water, and over relatively short distances they would spread out so much they turned to unintelligible noise. The solution was obvious- just make the waves bigger, damnit. And so, Extremely Low Frequency ("ELF") transmission was born. ELF waves were thousands of miles long, and could go as deep as the US Navy needed them to go. The teensy tiny little problem was that your transmitters had be correspondingly massive. Like comically, exponentially large. Project Sanguine was not just a plan to make a little transmitter for ELF- it was to lay 6,000 miles of cable underneath an approximate 41% of the state of Wisconsin. If any military project could unperson an entire small town, it'd be the US government turning over 41% of Wisconsin's land to bury cables underneath, but unfortunately for Doveland truthers, there was a hitch.

Project Sanguine never happened. Unsurprisingly, Wisconsinites didn't take kindly to outsiders digging up the ground on innumerable acres of otherwise wild land, and the rest of the US government didn't want to dispense the eye watering amounts of money required for such an endeavor. Sanguine languished, and eventually collapsed entirely, with little but a small testing site, closed in 73', to show for it. The prospect of ELF waves for Navy communications was however revived in the 80s by Reagan (Its always Reagan!), resulting in Project ELF, coming online in 1989. And hey, for the Dovelanders, this fits even better- Doveland disappeared in "the 90s", and ELF was switched on in 89', it all lines up! However, ELF only consisted of some 84 miles of above-ground cable, now spread between two sites in two states, both attached to the very small but very much existent towns of Clam Lake, WI and Republic, MI. Photos exist of the more contemporary sites, not turned off until 2004, and combined they barely make up the land area of a shopping mall, more or less an entire town.

That about wraps up the case of Doveland, Wisconsin- and to be honest, as the author here, as much as I love this idea of a disappearing town, even just this post was squeezing blood out of a stone. Doveland, Wisconsin is pretty purely internet myth, one drummed up seemingly as filler for early mystery "icebergs" in their beginnings on /x/. Project Sanguine is the most interesting connection to reality it has, even as tentative as it is, with the only other tentative link being a news article from 2015 on disappearances in Wisconsin- scattered over more than a decade in the entire state, somehow "evidence" for the loss of a town's worth of people disappearing in the blink of an eye. Until next time, friends.