Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Post-Civil War: Immigrants, Dairy, and Industry
After the Civil War and through the turn of the 20th century, Wisconsin began getting
its economic bearings while politicians wrestled over issues as disparate as temperance,
railroads, and immigrants' rights. The latter hot potato galvanized enormous enclaves of
German Americans into action; they mobilized against anti-immigration laws sweeping
throughthelegislature. Despitethemandates(banningtheGermanlanguageinschools,for
one), successive waves of immigrants poured into the state.
The first sawmills had gone up in Wisconsin at the turn of the 19th century. Yankee
and British settlers put them up to use the timber they were felling in clearing farmland.
One area of the Chippewa River possessed one-sixth of all the pine west of the Adiron-
dacks—and Wisconsin pine was larger and harder than that in surrounding states. Easily
floated down streams and rivers, pine became an enormous commodity on the expanding
plains. In Wisconsin, even the roads were fashioned from pine and hardwood planks. By
1870, more than one billion board feet of lumber was being churned out through the state's
1,000-plus mills each year, easily making Wisconsin the country's largest timber producer
(it represented one-fourth of all state wages). In time, more than 20 billion board feet were
taken from the shores of Green Bay alone; one year, 425 million board feet were shipped
through the town of Superior. Wisconsin wood was used in other parts of the expanding
country to make homes, wagons, fences, barns, and plank roads. As a result, by the turn of
the 20th century, more than 50 million acres of Wisconsin (and Minnesota) forest had been
ravaged—most of it unrecoverable. By 1920, most of the state was a cutover wasteland.
Land eroded, tracts of forest disappeared and weren't replaced, and riparian areas were
destroyed to dam for “float flooding.” But far worse, the average pine tree size was shrink-
ingrapidly,andthelumberbaronsexpressedlittleinterestinpreparingfortheultimateerad-
ication of the forests. The small settlement of Peshtigo and more than 1,000 of its people
perishedinafuriousconflagrationmadeworsebyloggingcutoverin1871,andinthe1890s
vast fires swept other central and northern counties.
Badgers began to diversify. A handful of years after the Civil War, the state kicked its
wheat habit (by 1860, Wisconsin was producing more wheat than any other state in the Un-
ited States) and began looking for economic diversity. Wheat was sapping the soil fertility
in southern Wisconsin, forcing many early settlers to pick up stakes once again and shift
to the enormous golden tracts of the western plains states. Later, when railroads and their
seemingly arbitrary pricing systems began affecting potential income from wheat, farmers
in Wisconsin began seriously reviewing their options. Farmers diversified into corn, cran-
berries, sorghum, and hops, among others. Sheep and some hogs constituted the spectrum
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