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Milwaukee Timeline - 1800's
The Founders
Solomon Juneau came to Milwaukee from Montreal in 1818 to work as an assistant to Jacques Vieau who was the local agent for the American Fur Trading Company. A few years later, Juneau married Vieau's daughter and took over many of the older man's trading post duties. A wealthy Green Bay lawyer and businessman, Morgan Martin first saw the potential for town development on the site of Juneau's trading post. Martin convinced Juneau, who held the rights to the land on the east side of the river to join with him in a business partnership. Realizing that the days of the fur trade were nearly over, Juneau took on his new role as a real estate developer with enthusiasm. He reluctantly became the first mayor of Milwaukee in 1846.
Byron Kilbourn was a ruthless businessman from Ohio who saw promise for Milwaukee as a port city but was forced to focus his sights on the west side of the river outside of Juneau's claim. This land technically belonged to the Potawatomi. In collusion with a crooked surveyor, Kilbourn had this land included on an 1835 federal survey. He was then able to take control of this area. He developed the west side (Kilbourntown) as a separate community from that on the east (Juneautown). Kilbourn became mayor of the incorporated Milwaukee in 1848.
George Walker is known as the father of Milwaukee's south side (Walker's Point). 
Unlike the other founding fathers, Walker didn't have access to eastern capital. Early on, Walker had a series of financial and legal troubles which resulted in his losing his claim in 1835. There is speculation that Juneau and Martin may have been behind some of Walker's troubles. The south side of Milwaukee remained undeveloped for years as ownership was tied up in legal wrangling. Walker became mayor in 1853.
The Bridge War
By the 1840s, the rivalry between the east side (Juneautown) and the west side (Kilbourntown) had grown intense. Much of this was due to Byron Kilbourn who was trying to isolate the east making it more or less a satellite of Kilbourntown. In 1840, the Wisconsin Legislature required Milwaukee to build a drawbridge to replace an inadequate ferry system. 
Kilbourn and the west siders saw the bridge as a blow to their independence. It all came to a head in May of 1845 when Kilbourn decided to drop the west end of the bridge into the river. An east side mob gathered at the river. Violence was averted for at least two more weeks when an east side vigilante group destroyed two smaller bridges in an attempt to cut the west side off from the south and the east. A skirmish broke out between the west and east. Several people were seriously injured but there were no deaths. After the smoke cleared, Milwaukeeans on both sides realized that they would have to learn how to cooperate and live as one community. The following year, west and east joined to become the City of Milwaukee.
A City Joined
In the first ten years of its existence, there were really two Milwaukees -- Juneautown on the east side of the Milwaukee River and Kilbourntown on the west. In the aftermath of the Bridge War in 1845, nearly everyone, including Byron Kilbourn, agreed that the two communities needed to collaborate in order to survive. A committee was appointed in December of that year to draft a charter and by January, 1846, the charter was approved. This took place two years before Wisconsin became a state. Juneautown, Kilbourntown and Walker's Point were now one city. Milwaukee's population was about 10,000 at the time of the charter.
The Germans
Beginning in the 1840s, Milwaukee began to take on a definite German flavor. A wave of immigration from Germany headed to the new state of Wisconsin and especially to Milwaukee which had a reputation out east as a "boom-town". Religion 
was another reason why Germans migrated to Milwaukee. The city had become a national center for German Catholicism. Another group fleeing Germany were the "forty-eighters", German intellectuals and revolutionaries who were forced to leave Germany for political reasons.
By 1860, German immigrants and their American-born children constituted a considerable majority in Milwaukee. By 1880, native Germans made up 27% of the city's population, the highest concentration of a single immigrant group in any American city. Most Germans could easily feel at home in the city with its beer gardens, fish fries, German newspapers, music and recreational societies. German immigrants undeniably had a tremendous influence on the culture and character of Milwaukee, which was called the "German Athens".
Beer
Milwaukee became synonymous with Germans and beer. The Germans had long perfected the art of brewing beer. They didn't waste any time setting up breweries when they arrived in Milwaukee. By 1856, there were more than two dozen breweries in Milwaukee, most of them German owned and operated. Among these were Pabst, Miller, Schlitz and Blatz breweries. It wasn't long before Milwaukee had a national reputation for beer. By the turn of the century, led by Pabst, the big breweries of Milwaukee were the country's leaders in beer production.
Besides making beer for the rest of the nation, Milwaukeeans enjoyed consuming the various beers produced in the city's breweries. As early as 1843, pioneer historian James Buck recorded 138 taverns in Milwaukee, an average of one per forty residents! Beer halls and taverns are abundant in the city to this day although only one of the major breweries --Miller-- remains in Milwaukee.
Wheat
Milwaukee's founding fathers had a vision for the city. They knew it was perfectly situated as a port city, a center for collecting and distributing produce. Many of the new immigrants who were pouring into the new state of Wisconsin during the middle of the 19th century were wheat farmers. By 1860, Wisconsin was the second ranked wheat-growing state in the country and Milwaukee shipped more wheat than any place in the world. Railroads were needed to transport all this grain from the wheat fields of Wisconsin to Milwaukee's harbor. Improvements in railways at the time made this possible.
There was intense competition for markets with Chicago, and to a lesser degree, with Racine and Kenosha . Eventually Chicago won out. Due to its superior position on major railroad lines connecting east and west, Chicago had the definite advantage over Milwaukee. The wheat market though, guaranteed Milwaukee's place as the commercial capital of Wisconsin.
Growth
Milwaukee's progress in its first several decades can be measured by its dramatic population growth. At the time of its incorporation in 1846, the population stood at 9,508. Just four years later, the population more than doubled to 20,000. By 1860, Milwaukee's population increased to 45,246, making it one of the top twenty cities in the U.S.
As the city became increasingly industrialized after the Civil War, there was more demand for all kinds of workers. Immigrants flooded into Milwaukee. The Germans continued to come as well as Poles, British, Irish, Scandinavians, Serbs, Russian Jews and African-Americans.
By the end of the 19th century, Milwaukee was a very diverse city. Most ethnic groups were concentrated in particular neighborhoods. For instance, the Bay View area became predominantly British. Russian Jews settled on the northeast side. The Third Ward district went from being an Irish community to an Italian neighborhood.
Tensions between all these groups existed in the latter part of the century, but, for the most part, Milwaukee residents tolerated, if not respected, each other's differences.
Steel and Iron
By the middle of the 1870s, Milwaukee was beginning to lose its wheat trade market to Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. By 1880, the amount of grain passing through the Port of Milwaukee had greatly declined. Fortunately for the city, manufacturing had increased over the previous decades. The manufacture of steel and iron became the dominant industry in the city and remains an essential part of Milwaukee's economy today.
The steel industry in the city was mostly the result of iron-ore deposits that had been discovered in nearby Dodge County in the 1840s. The largest steel mill in Wisconsin opened in 1868. It was an enormous mill that employed over 1,000 workers and produced rails for the railroad. Iron foundries and manufacturing facilities were built at a tremendous pace. A 1889 census counted 2,879 manufacturing establishments in the city, up from 558 for the whole county in 1859.
Manufacturing companies weren't the only business in town. Meat-packing, tanning, brewing and flour milling were all very viable industries in Milwaukee during the last part of the 19th century.
Workers versus Owners
Milwaukee's rapid industrialization following the Civil War had positive as well as negative consequences for the city. People worked harder and for longer hours but received little pay. The disparities between rich and poor became more noticeable.
Working conditions were unsatisfactory and wages were very low in the iron mills, meatpacking plants and most other industries. The lowest paid workers in the 1880s worked ten-hour days, six days a week for $1.25 per day. There was a small labor movement in Milwaukee before 1865, but it wasn't until the Knights of Labor union began heavily organizing in the area after the war that the labor movement really took off. In 1886, half the city's blue collar workers were union members.
The union's big issue at the time was the eight-hour work day. Most of Milwaukee's employers resisted the demand for a shorter day at the same wage. Strikes and lockouts led up to a general strike that closed down the city in May. On May 4, a group of 1,000 Polish strikers marched on the Milwaukee Iron Company to shut it down. Governor Jeremiah Rusk called out the local militia to protect the mill. The mill closed, but the following day an even larger group descended on the mill. The strikers were fired on. There were from five to nine casualties including two bystanders. Another incident occurred the same day in the north part of the city involving German strikers and the Milwaukee police. Shots were fired but nobody was killed.
In the days and months following these violent confrontations, workers slowly went back to work at their old wages and hours. The working people of Milwaukee had to wait a few more years for an eight-hour working day and to earn a good wage under decent working conditions.
The Poles
Although the German presence in Milwaukee after the Civil War remained strong, other groups made their way to the city. Foremost among these were Polish immigrants. The Poles had many reasons for leaving their homeland, mainly due to poverty and political oppression by Germany (most immigrants came from the German part of Poland). Milwaukee offered the Polish immigrants an abundance of low-paying entry level jobs. Soon Milwaukee became one of the largest Polish settlements in the U.S.
St. Stanislaus Catholic Church and the surrounding neighborhood was the center of Polish life in Milwaukee. It was the first Polish church in urban America. The Polish community surrounding St. Stanislaus continued to grow. Mitchell Street was known as the "Polish Grand Avenue". Other Polish communities started in the east side of Milwaukee and Jones Island. Jones Island was a major commercial fishing center mostly settled by Poles from the Baltic Coast.
There were about 30, 000 Poles in Milwaukee by the late 1880s compared with over 50, 000 Germans -- a considerable number, placing the group in second place among the ethnic immigrant communities.
Socialist Era Begins
In May of 1886, striking workers in Milwaukee were fired on and killed by the state-sponsored local militia. Workers throughout the city, most of whom joined a movement organized by a national labor union, the Knights of Labor, condemned the action. The People's Party of Wisconsin emerged from this movement. The city's Socialists reluctantly joined forces with the People's Party. The Party experienced great success in the elections of 1886, winning many seats, including one in Congress. The next year the Socialists left the Party and the Democrats and Republicans joined forces against the People's Party. The Party disintegrated over the next few years.
Although Socialists and other populists were active in Milwaukee's municipal government over the next twenty years, it wasn't until 1910 that they made some real electoral progress, including the election of the city's (and the nation's) first Socialist mayor, Emil Seidel.
Many factors contributed to the electoral success of the Socialists in 1910:
- Milwaukee was an industrial city ripe for change, as evidenced by the bloody strikes of 1886.
- Milwaukee was a very German city and in this country Germans were generally supporters of liberal causes.
- Victor Berger, a Socialist with a national reputation, led the Socialist movement in the city.
- The administration of Mayor Emil Seidel's predecessor, David Rose, was tainted with numerous scandals. Milwaukee was ready to try something different. The Socialist experiment in municipal government lasted, almost uninterrupted, for the next thirty years.
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