Showing 401-420 of 440 Entries
Author: Jenna Himsl
Located along LAKE MICHIGAN, about twelve miles north of downtown MILWAUKEE, the Village of Bayside occupies the northern end of MILWAUKEE COUNTY’s lakeshore and extends into OZAUKEE COUNTY. The Village had a population of 4,389 in 2010 and a median estimated home value of $325,600 in 2014. An AGRICULTURAL and summer home region in the…
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Author: Jenna Himsl
The Village of Big Bend is located along the Fox River within the Town of Vernon, southwest of MILWAUKEE. Like much of WAUKESHA COUNTY, Big Bend and Vernon began as farming communities. The Town of Vernon was founded in 1839, while the Village of Big Bend was incorporated out of Vernon’s land in 1928. In…
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Author: Michele Saltzman
The Village of Butler lies on WAUKESHA COUNTY’S eastern border, surrounded by Menomonee Falls, Brookfield, and Milwaukee. The small, industrial village owes its existence to the railroad industry. In the twenty-first century, residents continue to celebrate that connection. In 1909, the Milwaukee, Sparta, and North Western Railway built a railroad yard on Milwaukee’s 124th St. border…
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Author: Niles Niemuth
The Village of Chenequa is centered on Pine Lake in the LAKE COUNTRY area of WAUKESHA COUNTY, approximately 30 miles west of the city of Milwaukee. In 2010 Chenequa’s population was estimated to be 590. The POTAWATOMI were the last native peoples known to have inhabited the area, with villages established on the eastern and…
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Author: Michele Saltzman
Dousman is a small village located about 35 miles west of Milwaukee in Waukesha County’s “Lake Country.” It was named after Talbot C. Dousman, a prominent local politician who settled there in in the mid-1830s. Historically a popular location for summer visitors to the Lake Country, Dousman was the most important community center in the…
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Author: Niles Niemuth
According to legend, in 1838 Stephen Warren, the first white settler of the Hartland area, walked from the city of Ann Arbor in Michigan to the WAUKESHA area in search of desirable farm land. Warren established a farmstead where his family joined him. The Warren family was followed by native-born migrants in addition to Swedish,…
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Author: William I. Tchakirides
Home to roughly 36,000 residents in 2010, Menomonee Falls is Wisconsin’s most populous village. Located approximately fifteen miles northwest of Milwaukee in WAUKESHA COUNTY, the settlement was named for the Menomonee River, a tributary of the MILWAUKEE RIVER. Native Menomonee people inhabited the area before white settlement, which began in earnest after 1840; the village…
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Author: Katie Steffan
Richfield is a village in south-central WASHINGTON COUNTY. In its early history, the future Village of Richfield was part of the Town 9, Range 19 survey township, which was the standard size of 36 square miles. This township contained farmland and several small hamlets, including Colgate, Hubertus, Lake Five, Plat, Pleasant Hill, and Richfield. The…
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Author: William I. Tchakirides
Located approximately thirty miles northwest of Milwaukee between Highway 41 and the Pike Lake Unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest, the WASHINGTON COUNTY Village of Slinger has blended agricultural production and heavy manufacturing with community engagement since the late 1840s. Officially incorporated as Schleisingerville in 1869, the village’s population rose slowly through its first…
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Author: Michael Gonzales
The Visiting Nurse Association of Milwaukee originated in 1906 when Milwaukee businesswoman Sarah Boyd hired Maude Tompkins, a nurse with the Visiting Nurse Association of Chicago, to live in her home and provide free health care to nearby low-income residents. In 1907 Boyd, Mariette Tweedy, and other civic leaders incorporated the Visiting Nurse Association of…
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Author: James K. Nelsen
Wisconsin’s organized system of vocational education began in 1911. By 2016, it consisted of sixteen technical colleges and forty-nine campuses under the mantle of the Wisconsin Technical College System. It offers more than four hundred programs designed to train students to enter the workplace, and it is especially known for its offerings centering on manufacturing…
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Author: Alan Borsuk
Milwaukee attracted national attention, beginning in 1990, when it became the first city in the nation where elementary and high school students could enroll in private schools, using public money to support their education. The Wisconsin legislature had approved a law, signed by Governor Tommy G. Thompson, which allowed private school “vouchers.” Over the next…
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Authors: Karen Kehoe and Kevin Abing and Daryl Webb
The United States has fought three major wars since Milwaukee became a city. Milwaukee’s wartime history reflects its evolution from a frontier town to an industrial center, highlights the city’s changing political priorities and gender roles, and provides a case study of the stresses and strains war has put on American cities since the mid-nineteenth…
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Author: John Gurda
The history of Milwaukee is anything but dry. Water, in fact, runs through it like a river, constituting an element so critical that imagining the community without it is virtually impossible. Whether for transportation, industry, recreation, sanitation, or simply as the backdrop for daily life, water is the fluid medium in which Milwaukee evolved from…
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Author: Kathleen Foss
Water policy in Milwaukee has evolved with both changes in scientific knowledge and federal law; as understanding of the ecological role of water systems and legal acknowledgement of hierarchical structures in the use of those systems has changed, so has the focus of Milwaukee’s water policy. Like other cities in the nineteenth century, whether extant…
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Author: Kathleen Foss
Cities supply water for domestic, industrial, and agricultural uses in response to concerns about quality and quantity. Milwaukee first implemented water supply for both domestic and industrial reasons; since then, quality and quantity demands have alternately dominated changes in the water system’s infrastructure. Water in Milwaukee was available from a private vendor as early as…
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Author: Michael Gonzales
Watermills, structures that rely upon water power to drive mechanical processes, were common features in 19th century Wisconsin settler communities. The earliest of these mills were often sawmills. In addition to processing wood for export, sawmills produced lumber for local use, allowing more ambitious structures to rise alongside the early log cabins. In 1834, Dr.…
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Author: Joseph B. Walzer
Waukesha County Technical College (WCTC) is a vocational training and general education school headquartered in Pewaukee. It is part of the Wisconsin Technical College System. WCTC emerged out of the vocational education movement of the 1910s. In 1911, Wisconsin passed pioneering legislation requiring fourteen and fifteen-year-olds to attend school at least part-time (a stipulation extended…
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Author: Brian Mueller
During its more than 155 years in print, the Waukesha Freeman has been the principal newspaper for Waukesha County and has a long career of journalistic innovation. Founded by Martin Cullaton, the first issue of the weekly Waukesha Freeman appeared on March 29, 1859 and was published in an office above the Waukesha County Bank.…
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Author: William I. Tchakirides
Headquartered in downtown Milwaukee’s PUBLIC SERVICE BUILDING, We Energies is Wisconsin’s largest electric and natural gas utility. The publicly-traded company serves eastern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A subsidiary of parent company WEC Energy Group, We Energies’ 21st-century portfolio includes coal, natural gas, nuclear, oil, and renewable energies. The firm dates back to THE MILWAUKEE…
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