The 1825 opening of the Erie Canal brought settlers to lands along the Great Lakes. Pioneers looking for sites with potential ports along the western shore of Lake Michigan started towns where rivers or streams entered the lake, including Racine at the Root River and Port Washington at Sauk Creek. Although a swamp when Yankees arrived, Milwaukee Bay and the Milwaukee River, fed by the Menomonee and Kinnickinnic Rivers, was quickly identified as the most important— even more so than Chicago, which was then considered something of a dead end at the southern tip of the lake. Land speculation at Milwaukee rose to a frenzy by the mid-1830s and a city was born.
Rival promoters launched separate townsites on the east and west bluffs of the Milwaukee River, inland from the marsh, and at the mouth of the river at Walker’s Point on what is now the South Side. Due more to politics than geography, the downtown grew up away from the river mouth with the East and West Sides battling it out, refusing to build bridges over the river until ordered to do so by the territorial legislature in 1840. The two different street grids left a legacy of misaligned streets and bridges set at an angle still obvious in today’s downtown, now knit together with an extensive network of bridges. The three towns finally united and were chartered as a city in 1846.
The first German immigrants came to this most German-American of U.S. cities in 1839 and established a neighborhood near what is now Third St. and Juneau Ave. A flood of Germans followed in the 1840s and by the 1860s, German immigrants and their American-born children constituted a comfortable majority. Beer soon followed with breweries and bierstube cropping up all over the city.
Agricultural development brought wheat farming to the area and Milwaukee served as its port with the first boatload of wheat clearing the harbor in 1841. This prompted harbor improvements that had been bogged down by politics for years. To protect ships from rough weather, a straight cut was made through the peninsula at the mouth of the Milwaukee and completed in 1857. This also moved the harbor away from the South Side and nearer the business district.
The Milwaukee & Waukesha, the first of Wisconsin’s railroads was chartered in 1847 and the first rails were spiked into place on September 12, 1850 under a new name, the Milwaukee & Mississippi. Shortly thereafter, a second Milwaukee-based road, the La Crosse & Milwaukee, was incorporated. It went on to expand rapidly west as the Milwaukee & St. Paul and to gobble up regional competitors after the Civil War to finally become the great Milwaukee Road.
With its new harbor and rail lines, and Mississippi River trade shut down during the Civil War, Milwaukee surpassed Chicago as the largest shipper of grain in the world, but by 1886, with the rise of Minneapolis as a milling center, Milwaukee’s prominence as a wheat center was a thing of the past.
The Army’s appetite for pork and beef during the Civil War stimulated Milwaukee’s meat-packing industry which supported a host of ancillary industries. Meat scraps were turned into sausage, fat into lard, feet into glue, bristles into brushes, and bones and blood into fertilizer. Tanners were busy processing hides using the local hemlocks as a source of tannin. This in turn spawned several local shoe and boot manufacturers.
The first heavy manufacturing was founded in 1866 with establishment of The Milwaukee Iron Company on the South Side to take advantage of Upper Michigan’s iron and provide rails to the Milwaukee & St. Paul. Even more important to choosing this site, was the iron ore deposits at nearby Iron Ridge which yielded an ore that, when mixed with other softer Lake Superior varieties, produced an iron of unusual strength
By 1918, Milwaukee’s top four industries were machinery, packed meats, leather and beer. Prohibition knocked beer out of the running and tanning soon followed as autos eliminated the need for saddles and harnesses and electric motors eliminated leather belting. However, by 1929 Milwaukee was turning out more tractors than any other city in the world and heavy machinery, from mining hoists to steam shovels to overhead cranes, was being built in “The Machine Shop of the World.”
There are still a large number of foundries, sausagemakers, manufacturers of mining machinery and motorcycles, a few brewers, and at least one tanner in this region that “glories in a forest of factory chimneys.”
For more information, contact SIA's Events Coordinator, Mary Habstritt, at events@siahq.org or 212-769-4946.
