BARABOO, Wis. – Paddling through the Baraboo Rapids in his canoe, John Exo remembers the commotion he caused a half-dozen years ago by suggesting the Waterworks Dam be removed.

"People thought the river would disappear," he said, straining to steer his boat around a mid-river logjam. "They absolutely thought the water would go away. And you couldn't laugh because people were sincerely worried. Their concern was legitimate, but it was not true."

Indeed, Exo and a clutch of friends meet each Friday night during the summer to ride the Baraboo River through their southern Wisconsin hometown. Where three modest dams blocked passage in 1995, three similarly modest rapids now ensure a quick downriver trip.

A river basin educator for the University of Wisconsin Extension Service, Exo weathered all three of Baraboo's dam removals. By the third, last October, there were no objections.

"Many of the people who were opposed actually became proponents of dam removal," he said during one of his Friday night sojourns last June. "With each removal, the opposition waned."

Thirty women in Baraboo bought kayaks during the past year. The beginners meet after work on Wednesdays at nearby Devil's Lake. A number have graduated to the river.

"We just enjoy one another's company," said Karin Exo, wife of the extension agent and principal of the high school in nearby Portage. "We talk more than we paddle."

"There are all kinds of canoes in back yards around Baraboo, and more and more of them are coming out to see what the river is like," John Exo said. "One gentleman is starting a rafting business. There's a lot more activity related to economic development that takes advantage of the river."

Because the Baraboo River drops 45 feet in the four-mile stretch through the city, a gradient rare in southern Wisconsin, it was quickly dammed by settlers. Midway through the 19th century, dams were the life and economic engine of Baraboo's economy, powering grist and lumber mills.

While there was talk of river restoration and fish passage over the years, it was economics that led to the first dam removal decision. The city of Baraboo owned the Waterworks Dam and was paying $5,000 a year in liability insurance.

In 1995, state dam inspectors ordered a series of relatively expensive repairs at the dam, and city officials were faced with an economic decision. Pay for reconstruction and repair. Or pay for removal.

When Exo and others advocated the dam's removal, the outcry was substantial. The dam no longer provided an economic benefit, but its 47-acre impoundment was much-loved. Circus World Museum, which celebrates Baraboo's history as winter quarters for the Ringling Bros. Circus, feared the water that flowed – slowly – past its grounds would be reduced to a trickle.

"Where will the elephants bathe?" circus owners asked. They weren't joking, Exo told visitors from Missoula County a few months back. The elephants housed in the historic circus barns are quite a tourist attraction, particularly when they lumber down the riverbank and into the water each evening.

"Over and over again, I urged people to go upstream and downstream of the dam," Exo said. "You get a real good idea of what the river is going to be like. That's what you can expect. The springs and streams upriver are the source of water. They don't go away because the dam goes away."

In the end, economics prevailed, said Baraboo Mayor Dean Steinhorst. Repair the dam for $694,000 to $1 million, or remove it for $214,000. City officials chose the latter.

Breaching began in December 1997; workers used a jackhammer mounted on a backhoe. By the next April, the 9-foot-high, 220-foot-long dam was gone.

"Engineers can build or destroy just about anything," Exo said. "They've got it figured out. These removals all went really smoothly."

Contaminated sediment – tar produced by a coal gasification project in the late-1800s – was removed from the river before the Oak Street and Linen Mill dams were demolished. When workers carried the last timbers away late in October 2001, the Baraboo River became the longest length of main-stem river to be restored by dam removal, at 120 miles.

Historically, there had been 11 dams on the river.

"I equate dam removal to the grieving process," said Sue Josheff, a dam specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. "It's pretty classic. You always get denial and then anger, sometimes lots of anger. But almost always, people reach some level of understanding and acceptance, and many of your staunchest opponents often become your supporters."

Such was the sentiment in Rockdale, where the owner of the town's 14-foot-high, 70-year-old dam said he wanted out of the dam-owning business. His family had long since given up on grist milling. And dams are difficult to sell and expensive to maintain.

Because the Rockdale Dam was privately owned, the state was just one of 11 partners that helped find the money and supply the expertise to safely and soundly remove the structure. "We actually wrote for grants," said Josheff. "And I got the state to volunteer some backhoe time."

Seven hundred dams have been removed in Wisconsin during the past century, most within the past 50 years, she said. "We started recognizing as far back as the 1960s that we had dams on cold-water streams – and that the dams were harming some pretty desirable habitat. Cold water isn't our dominant riverine habitat, so the ones we had, we wanted to protect and enhance."

Removing a dam is the easy part, in Josheff's experience. The Rockdale Dam came down in three days last June. A state operations crew arrived on Wednesday with two dump trucks and a backhoe. They knocked out the cement and underlying timber crib, loaded the debris into the trucks and drove away.

By midafternoon Friday, the structure was gone.

"I actually had to make them wait to start work on Wednesday morning," Josheff said. "I knew people wanted to watch, and I had told them to come at 9:30. We had to wait. It's all part of the process."

The dam had been breached in September 2000, so the 72-acre mill pond could drain and Koshkonong Creek could relocate its channel. Workers promptly seeded the pond bottom with winter wheat, then returned in the spring with more desirable species: big blue stem, switch grass and rice-cut grass.

Dane County and the village of Rockdale have plans for mountain bike trails and wildlife watching pullouts in and around the wetlands. No one has money for the improvements, but – again – Josheff is writing for grants.

"Restoration is where you spend your time and money," she said. "We spent about $50,000 to take out Rockdale Dam. We'll spend considerably more on the park. It just doesn't cost that much to take out a dam. I think we removed the Mounds Dam for $200,000, and it was 50 feet high and 150 feet long – and was in a canyon."

Everywhere, though, it is the loss of the lake that most worries the locals, Josheff said. "Everyone worries that we'll leave them looking out over a bunch of stinking mud flats."

But mud flats, she said, are very fertile. Three weeks after the Rockdale Dam was breached, the soil was tinted green. A week later, grass began to sprout. Ten months later, the former pond was a lush wetlands, serenaded by dozens of songbird and waterfowl species.

"The pond was Rockdale's historic identity," Josheff said. "It was all people here had known. So it had an important aesthetic and sentimental place in people's minds. But the creek and these incredible wetlands are no less beautiful, and ducks live on rivers as well as ponds."

"Life," she said, "goes on."

The proof is in the paddling, said Exo, having rollicked through the largest of the Baraboo Rapids. Downstream from town, the river slows and widens for a while, and passes the elephant-sized circus barns – mammoth structures of stone, heated with wood for the African creatures' comfort during the long Wisconsin winter.

"I am really pleased with the results, and for a lot of reasons," he said. "There is less flooding because of the dams being removed. They had no flood-control capability. They merely ponded the water at a higher level. Now that the river is at its lower, natural elevation, the flood plain actually narrowed slightly in several places."

And fish, Exo said, undeniably are better off.

Eighteen months after the Waterworks Dam was removed, state fisheries biologists counted 24 species of fish in the Baraboo River upstream from the former dam site, up from 11 species. Already notable were populations of smallmouth bass, walleye, catfish, lake sturgeon and paddlefish.

The survey also indicated that water quality had improved; the number of smallmouth bass, a species that cannot tolerate poor water quality, increased from three to 87 in the former impoundment.

"You know, the name Baraboo comes from a combination of the French 'Riviere a la Barbeau,' or Sturgeon River, and the native American name 'Ocoochery,' which means plenty of fishes," Exo said. "Now we may actually know the river that inspired the name."

Last year, he said, sturgeon again were seen in the Baraboo River. Swimming past the elephants.