shop products ($10,232,723); iron and steel ($7,010,793); flour and grist-mill products ($6,320,428); slaughtering and meat-packing products ($5,958,515); men’s clothing ($4,759,548); boots and shoes ($2,929,405); electrical machinery, apparatus and supplies ($2,257,229); chewing and smoking tobacco ($1,966,930) and cigars and cigarettes ($1,540,019); furniture ($1,767,290); trunks and valises ($1,623,310); hosiery and knit goods ($1,535,176); confectionery ($1,379,668); stoves and furnaces ($1,288,931); leather gloves and mittens ($1,207,633); structural iron work ($1,037,217); wooden packing boxes ($1,024,750); and paints ($1,015,774). Among Milwaukee’s largest industrial establishments are: the Pabst and the Schlitz breweries, on the west side of the city, the machine shops (35 acres) of the Allis-Chalmers Company at West Allis, employing about 5000 men and making engines of all kinds; and the plant of the Illinois Steel Company, at Bay View on the south side, which covers 154 acres. The flour mills of Milwaukee have a capacity of about 12,000 barrels a day. Two of the city’s tanneries are among the largest in America. In the Menominee river valley the peculiar cream-coloured Milwaukee bricks are made. North of the city on the Milwaukee river are extensive cement works.
Newspapers.—The first newspaper in Milwaukee, the Advertiser, began publication in 1836. The first German newspaper was established in 1844. In 1909 there were eleven daily newspapers, as follows: Evening Wisconsin (1847; Republican), Free Press (1901; Independent Republican), Journal (1882; Independent Democrat), News (1886; Independent), and Sentinel (1837; Republican), the oldest paper in continuous publication, Daily Commercial Letter (Commercial), Reporter (legal and commercial), Dziennik Milwaucki (Polish), Kuryer Polski (1888; Republican; Polish); Germania Abendpost (1872; Independent; German); and Der Herold (1854; Independent; German). Of more than a hundred other publications thirty-two, 10 monthly or quarterly and 22 weekly, were published in German. There are 5 Polish weekly publications, 3 Bohemian, 1 Italian and one periodical for the blind.
Population.—The population of Milwaukee in 1840 was only 1712. During the following decade there was a steady flow of immigrants from the eastern states and from Europe, with the result that in 1850, two years after the admission of Wisconsin to the Union, the population was 20,061. The population at the succeeding decennial censuses was as follows: (1860), 45,246; (1870), 71,440; (1880), 115,587; (1890), 204,468; (1900), 285,315. In 1905, according to the state census, the population was 312,948. The fact that out of a population of 285,315 in 1900, 88,991 were foreign-born, and 235,889 were of foreign parentage, that 53,854 were born in Germany, that 124,211 had both parents born in Germany, and that 26,834 additional had one or the other parent born in Germany, stamps the character of Milwaukee’s population. The negro population in 1900 was only 862. The proportion of illiterates is small. Of the male population, aged 10 years or more, only 3206 (2968 foreign-born whites; 194 native-born whites) were illiterate in 1900.
Government.—Milwaukee is governed under a city charter of 1874, providing the form of city government most common in America, a mayor (elected biennially) and a single board of aldermen. There are the usual administrative boards whose members are appointed by the mayor, some of them with the approval of the board of aldermen, though the board of school directors is elected by direct popular vote. Two boards of civil service commissioners, one for fire and police departments and one for all other departments, have supervision over the city’s civil service.
The assessed valuation of taxable property, in the city, in August 1906 was $201,585,127, of which $157,611,560 represented realty and $43,973,567 personality. The valuation is about 60% of the actual value. The tax rate for all purposes in that year was $2.26 per $100. According to a special report of the census the cost of the city government of Milwaukee in 1906 was smaller per capita than that of any other city in the country with a population of over 300,000. At the close of the year 1906 the total debt was $8,835,049, and the funded debt was $8,106,500.
History. The first Europeans known to have visited the site of Milwaukee were Father Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit missionary, and his companion, Louis Joliet, who on their return in the autumn of 1673 to the mission of St Francis Xavier at De Pere from their trip down the Mississippi, skirted the west shore of Lake Michigan in their canoes from Chicago northward. Milwaukee Bay is distinctly marked in the map attributed to Marquette, the original of which is now in the Jesuit College at Montreal, Canada; it was discovered in a convent in Montreal by Felix Martin (1804–1886), of the Society of Jesus, and was copied by Parkman. In 1679 La Salle and his party probably stopped here on their way south, and in the Jesuit Relations of that year the name Milwaukee first appears, as “Millioke.” This, and the various other spellings of the name, attempted to reproduce the Indian name of the village here, which Kelton thinks was pronounced Minewagi and meant “there is a good point” or “there is a point where huckleberries grow,” in allusion to the fertile soil. Doubtless the coureurs du bois who at this time began to frequent the Wisconsin forests, touched at the bay many times within the succeeding years as the place was known to be a favourite rendezvous of the Fox (or Outagamie) Indians. In 1690–1700 Father St Cosme, a Recollet friar, was here, finding bands of Mascoutens, Fox, Winnebago and Potawatomi. He called the river “Melwarik,” “Melwarck” and “Meliwarik.”
For more than half a century no definite reference to the place can be found. In 1760 its advantageous situation attracted the adventurous trader, Alexander Henry, the first Englishman known to have visited the spot. Three years later (1763) there was a French fur-trading post here, but it is uncertain just when it was established or how long it was maintained. In 1795 Jacques Vieau, a Frenchman in the employ of the North-Western Fur Company, established a permanent post here, which seems to have continued, under his direction, with practically no interruption until 1820, when it was superseded by that of Astor’s American Fur Company. Vieau built a dwelling and a warehouse and conducted extensive trading operations. In 1818 there joined the settlement a young Frenchman named Laurent Solomon Juneau (1793–1856), who married one of Vieau’s daughters and eventually bought out his business. Juneau and several others who arrived at about the same time built homes on the east side of the river near the foot of the present Wisconsin Street. Vieau’s house and store was at this time on the south side. Milwaukee was on the direct route of travel between Fort Dearborn (Chicago) and the flourishing settlement at Green Bay, and at once after the treaties between the United States and the Menominee in 1831 and 1833 for the extinguishing of the Indian titles, settlers began to come to the neighbourhood. A map of 1830 shows a small settlement on “Milwalky Bay”; and the treaty of the 8th of February 1831 speaks of the “Milwauky or Manawauky River.” Morgan L. Martin (1805–1887) of Green Bay, a lawyer and judge, and a delegate to Congress in 1845–1847 from Wisconsin territory, explored the harbour facilities in 1833 and made a map of the place which he called “Milwaukie.” He entered into an agreement later in the same year with Juneau and Michael Dousman for its development. A saw-mill was built in 1834, and settlers began to arrive. The east side was platted in the summer of 1835, and very soon afterward the plat of a settlement on the west side was also recorded, Byron Kilbourn being the chief projector and proprietor of the latter. The rival settlements, officially known as Milwaukee East Side and Milwaukee West Side, bore the popular designations of “Juneautown” and “Kilbourntown.” A third settlement, begun on the south side by George H. Walker and known as “Walker’s Point,” was subsequently platted independently. The rivalry between the east and west side towns was intense, the plats were so surveyed that the streets did not meet at the river, and there were bitter quarrels over the building of bridges. Milwaukee county was set off from Brown county in 1834, and in 1836 the establishment of townships was authorized. Under this act the east and west sides were independently incorporated in February 1837. A realization that the continuation of independent and rival corporations retarded growth eventually led to a compromise by which the two were united as two wards of the same village in 1839, the autonomy of each being still recognized by an odd arrangement whereby each maintained practically independent management of its finances and affairs. Walker’s Point, the south side, was annexed as a third ward in 1845, and in 1846 the three wards were incorporated as the city of Milwaukee, of which Solomon Juneau was elected first
