James Duane Doty was appointed a federal judge for the newly created northern and western Michigan Territory (today’s Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula) in 1823 when he was just 23 years old. Doty was replaced as judge in 1832 and after that stood for election to represent western Michigan Territory as a delegate in Congress. He lost and turned his attention to land speculation, gobbling up thousands of acres in the district.
In 1836 when Wisconsin Territory was created, Doty hoped to be appointed territorial governor but President Andrew Jackson gave the post to Henry Dodge, a longtime political rival of Doty. Unable to lead the new territory, Doty settled on the next best thing - getting the new territorial capital located on his land. He lobbied hard, filling legislators with grand plans of railroads and canals for his city that existed only in a few sketches on maps. It worked. In 1836 an isthmus on the Four Lakes of the Yahar River was declared the permanent capital and named after the fourth President of the United States, James Madison.
James Doty would go on to win the seat in Congress that eluded him and then become the second territorial governor. He worked on the Constitutional Convention that resulted in Wisconsin statehood in 1848 and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin’s 3rd district. He retired to an island in the Fox River but was called back into government service by Abraham Lincoln to govern the Utah Territory where he died in office in 1865.
Meanwhile the town that he had founded, despite grumblings about relocation, made the transition to state capital in 1848 and the University of Wisconsin was established here at the same time. Even so, the thickets on the isthmus remained so dense that the village of Madison and its 1,672 residents were classified as an “inhabited forest.” But with the reliable economic engines of government and education firmly in place that was not going to be the way of the world for long. The first train arrived in 1854 and the streets were lit with gas a year later. By 1860 the population had climbed over 6,000 and hasn’t stopped since.
Madison’s growth has not been a boon for lovers of old buildings. There has always been money available to tear down the old and put up the new in the name of progress. Nonetheless there are still heritage buildings from the 19th century in downtown Madison where the explorer is never more than seven blocks from the lake. But our search for these souvenir structures will start with one that isn’t quite that old, having replaced its predecessor that burned in 1904...
The Milwaukee River formed the best natural harbor on the western shore of Lake Michigan and when the first wave of settlers from the East Coast arrived in the 1830s they had their pick of three towns in which to live. There was Juneautown between the lake and the river that was developed by Solomon Juneau, an ambitious French fur trader from Quebec who was to arrive, back in 1818. There was Kilbourntown on the west bank of the Milwaukee River that was the pride of Byron Kilbourn, a surveyor and engineer from Ohio who had purchased his land in 1837, And there was Walker’s Point on the south side of the Milwaukee River that was established by George H. Walker as a fur trading post in 1835.
All was not balloons and seashells among the three settlements. Walker spent most of his time fighting claim jumpers and Juneau and Kilbourn became bitter rivals in promoting their settlements,. Kilbourn’s maps of the area he distributed to potential newcomers did not even acknowledge the existence of Juneau’s older community on the other side of the area. Hostilities came to a head in 1845 over a bridge between Juneautown and Kilbourntown and the violence of the Milwaukee Bridge War led to a unification of the three towns. A charter signed on January 31, 1846, welded Juneautown, Kilbourntown and Walker’s Point into the City of Milwaukee. Solomon Juneau was elected the city’s first mayor. Kilbourn served a couple of later terms as mayor.
The new town grew rapidly on the back of its wheat shipments. More ships loaded with Upper Midwestern grain left Milwaukee’s harbor than any other port on earth. When the railroads arrived in the 1850s Milwaukee became a boomtown with thriving industries in shipbuilding, metal fabrication, meat-packing, leather tanning and, most famously, brewing.
German immigrants began arriving in great numbers in Milwaukee after a failed political uprising in the homeland in 1848. Soon one in every three Milwaukee citizen was a “forty-eighter” - many of them educated, talented and motivated. Milwaukee became known as the “Deutsches Athen” (German Athens) and the value of its manufactured goods tripled by 1869. The town reveled in its Bavarian heritage and institutions until the German influence was muted by World War I.
During the first half of the 20th century, Milwaukee was the hub of the socialist movement in the United States. Milwaukeeans elected three Socialist mayors during this time: Emil Seidel (1910–1912), Daniel Hoan (1916–1940), and Frank Zeidler (1948–1960), and remains the only major city in the country to have done so. Their influence made Milwaukee one of the best governed municipalities in the country, ranking among the leaders in health, safety and solvency among the nation’s large cities during that time.
Our walking tour will visit both sides of the Milwaukee River, in both old Kilbourntown and old Juneautown, and we will start at a building that was the tallest habitable building in the world when it was finished in 1895...