1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Waukesha

WAUKESHA, a city and the county-seat of Waukesha county, Wisconsin, U.S.A., about 19 m. W. of Milwaukee on the Little Fox river. Pop. (1S90) 6321; (1900) 7419, including 1408 foreign-born; (1905 state census) 6949; (1910) 8740. Waukesha is served by the Minneapolis, St Paul & Sault Ste Marie, the Chicago & North-Western and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul railways, and by interurban electric railways connecting it with Milwaukee, Oconomowoc and Madison. The medicinal mineral springs (Eethesda, White Rock, &c.) are widely known. Among the public buildings are the county court house and the public library. Waukesha is the seat of the State Industrial School for Boys (established as a house of refuge in 1860) and of Carroll College (Presbyterian, co-educational, 1846). Waukesha was first settled in 1834, was named Prairieville in 1839, was incorporated as a village under its present name (said to be a Pottawatomi word meaning " fox ") in 1852, and chartered as a city in 1896. In 1851 the first railway in the state was completed between Milwaukee and Waukesha, but the village remained only a farming community until the exploitation of the mineral springs was begun about 1868. About 15 m. S. of Waukesha, near Mukwonago (pop. in 1910, 615), in 1844–1851 there was an unsuccessful communistic agricultural settlement, the Utilitarian Association, composed largely of London mechanics led by Campbell Smith, a London bookbinder.