2WIS0104SD_Wisconsin_Stories_Building_A_State

- Wisconsin Stories is a partnership of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Television.

- Wisconsin's early settlers came here to find work. And they found it. With incredible labor and astonishing speed they transformed a wilderness and created a modern economy. On the farms, and in the forests, in the factories, and in their homes, Wisconsin's people work dawn to dusk taking on the tremendous task of building a state.

- Bob Nesbitt talks about shoveling coal off the ships and they take three or four men and you would shovel a hundred tons of coal in six hours, a level of effort that leaves one speechless.

- Wisconsin's workers weathered booms and busts, wage labor struggles that tore whole communities apart and adapted huge changes in the economy. With strength, courage and tremendous endurance. They put in the long hours, raised families, informed communities, made the farms and developed industries, building the state we call Wisconsin.

Major funding for Wisconsin Stories was provided by: AT&T, providing business and residential long distance service throughout Wisconsin; S.C. Johnson Wax, a Wisconsin manufacturer of home cleaning and home storage products; the Credit Unions of Wisconsin, serving the financial needs of two million Wisconsinites and their families; and the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Commission, celebrating 150 years of Wisconsin statehood. Funding also provided by: Firstar Corporation; Harley-Davidson, Incorporated; Marshall and Illsley Corporation; The Outdoor Advertising Association; The Philip Morris Companies; W.H. Brady Company; Weber-Stephen Products Company; and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

And now, Wisconsin Stories.

Early settlers in Wisconsin work to their own rhythms and to the rhythms of the natural world.

Bound to no master, they relied on muscle power, their own and their animals. And on the bonds of family and neighbors nothing moved faster than a horse.

- If the immigrant has acquired an old improved farm, it will not be difficult to operate it. If however, he is bought wild woodland out of which to make a farm that will indeed be hard labor and requires strenuous exertion and grim endurance, as I have found through personal experience.

As soon as a certain area of woods has cut down, the brush that has been piled up is first burned off, then the farmer obtains the assistance of several strongman and one or two yokes of strong oxen. The oxen dragged the logs together and the men roll them in piles, after which they're burned. Often as many as twenty or thirty acres are in flames at the same time, which gives to the night a peculiarly brilliant appearance, and seen from a farm is not unlike a military camp. For such first breaking of the land only oxen are used, for horses are too fast and would soon destroy both harness and plow. One can readily imagine however what pains and labor it cost to break up such new land because of the many stumps and roots, which aside from the oak, do not run deep but live very near the surface. Observing it, one can hardly tell whether the farmer is more to be pitied or his poor cattle: 
[Christian Trogit Ficker]
- Basically all members of the family would be involved in developing a pioneer farm, even children as early as, say, six years old. There were certain things that they could do to help and everybody contributed. And they were literally Jacks and Jills of all trades.

- On a farm outside of Kenosha, Carolyn Davison kept sheep, spun wool and dyed and knitted it. She made all of the family's clothing, then made soap out of lye and ashes, collected rainwater in barrels and boiled it to wash them. She kept a fire in the stove, picked and dried apples, and made pork sausage in the fall. When the wheat threshing crew arrived, Carolyn, and a hired woman, prepared hams, pork and beans, baked bread, rows of apple pies, and dozens of doughnuts. For cash she collected eggs, raised chickens, and churned butter, and over 14 years, Carolyn Davison gave birth to seven children.

In southwest Wisconsin, miners carved out a living by digging the lead ore out of the ground, an enterprise that saw Fox and the Ho-Chunk Indians had already begun. Miners established settlements on Indian land in Dodgeville, Mineral Point and Platteville, as well as Hardscrabble, New Diggings and Gracchus Grove.

Miners ship millions of pounds of lead south down the Mississippi, but large ox drawn wagons called prairie schooners also hauled lead overland to the trading center of Milwaukee for shipment east.

- When I first set foot on the soil some 30 years ago, I little thought I should behold such a sight it now presents itself. Here we behold a city of 12,000 inhabitants, when eleven years since the soil was unbroken: 
[Solomon Juneau]
- One of the messages about Wisconsin development: it was so rapid. Maybe thirty thousand people lived here in 1840. By 1850, there are 300,000.

- In Milwaukee and other Wisconsin towns, shoemakers, and other craftsman, tailors, blacksmiths, wagon makers, Coopers, and woodworkers, all found steady demand for their work.

- So that it's, it's boom times. I mean, this is a classic frontier boom mainly because of the tremendous demand for wheat.

- Raising wheat for cash swept the new state of Wisconsin like wildfire, fed by high demand and high prices. It was said that a grain farmer from biblical times would have felt at home on a Wisconsin wheat farm harvesting by hand with a scythe and a cradle. Flailing the grain to separate it was a slow and back-breaking process.

- In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came to our help, almost everything connected with wheat raising abounded in trying work, and it often seemed to me that our fierce, however industrious way, of getting the green from the ground was too closely connected with grave digging: 
[John Muir]

- In 1842, J.I. Case arrived in Wisconsin with six horse-powered threshing machines. Threshers revolutionized the processing of wheat. Farmers could now thresh as much grain in an hour as they could flail by hand in a day.

Case began to build threshers in a small shop in Racine and a new industry was born. He soon put up his own factory and was building a hundred machines a year. By 1849, wheat growing was booming and new settlers harvested four million bushels.

Every Wisconsin stream soon powered a mill, and milling wheat into flour had become the leading industry in the state.

In the 1850s, new immigrants and farmers began the work of building the first railroads out of Milwaukee. With each new mile of track, more bushels of wheat flowed into Milwaukee's warehouses for shipment east. And by 1862, Milwaukee overtook Chicago to become the greatest wheat shipping port in the world.

After the Civil War, the value of Milwaukee's industries: meatpacking, leather tanning, iron and steel working, and brewing, increased rapidly each decade. The work of skilled crafts workers like the barrel-making coopers began to give way to mass production.

The craft shop, with a few employees, began to die out and plants began employing workers by the hundreds. At the biggest plant, the rolling mills in Bayview, a thousand workers produced iron rails for the expanding railroads to the west. The huge plant marked Milwaukee's turn from commerce, as the foundation of its economy, to manufacturing.

As Milwaukee joined the national industrial economy, workers found themselves caught up in the harsh working conditions that existed throughout the country.

- In the late '70s and '80s, the conditions of the workers were very severe. It is said that as many people died in industrial accidents between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the century, were killed in the Civil War. That's speaking in the terms of maybe 600,000 people. In addition, many got injured. Now the workers at that time worked 10 to 12 hours a day and then had a walk maybe an hour each way to get to and from their particular work, so they almost had no time at home. Work six days a week at least, sometimes a half a day and Sunday with relatively low wages. Then if they got injured, there was no protections with them. If you got hurt on the job that was too bad for you, and too bad for your wife and your children. It was on that basis that the labor movement started, largely influenced by German immigrants who had the experience of organizing in Germany, to bring those ideas over of a shorter workday, workers vacation, workers benefits, and so on. In the spring of 1886, thousands of Milwaukee workers, fed up with working 10 or more hours a day, join the Knights of Labor and prepare to take part in a national strike for an eight-hour day. And they wanted a general strike to close down all the manufacturers on the 1st of May, Mayday. In two hundred workshops and factories workers made the demand for the eight-hour day. Most of the owners refused precipitating a wave of strikes.

- By the morning of May 3rd, you had about 15,000 workers off the job and that was roughly half Milwaukee's workforce at the time, so the city was literally shut down. Nothing was moving and the only major employers who were still left became the targets of a group of strikers who were determined that this would be, not just a general strike, but a universal strike in Milwaukee.

400 Polish workers marched up the railroad tracks of the Menomonee Valley and stormed through the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad shops.

This was a shop complex that employed roughly 2,000 workers at the time and they made and repaired all the rolling stock and the locomotives for one of the major American rail systems. So by a combination of persuasion and intimidation, the marchers prevailed and this plant became one of those that shut down completely.

- Alexandra Mitchell, who was one of the truly great entrepreneurs in Milwaukee had had a shop closed down, his railroad car shop closed down because of the general strike. And he called the governor and arranged for the governor to come over, free of course, on his railroad, and put him up in the Plankinton Hotel, because he was concerned about what was going on. And the governor, being a former Civil War officer and holding the rank of general after the war, was quite prepared to send the troops. And so the state militia was positioned there. Governor Rusk ordered 31,000 rounds of ball cartridge ammunition sent to Milwaukee and placed several companies of the National Guard on alert. On May 5th 1,500 strikers gathered at St. Stanislaus Church and marched toward the Bayview Rolling Mills carrying the flag of the eight-hour movement. The National Guard was now stationed inside of plant gates around the city. As the crowd approached the Bayview Mills, Major George P. Traumer telephone governor Rusk to report that the mob was approaching.

- And when the militia was called out on May 4th, they were stationed inside the plant gates. And it was on that rise around where the cottonwood tree stands today where they were standing in the morning of May 5th. And from that rise, they had a sweeping view of both the mill proper, that whole complex of factory buildings, and more especially. They had a clear view of Bay Street just for that. Police cars coming out of Lincoln Avenue onto Bay Street is the intersection where the marchers stood. And from here, that's a distance of at least two hundred yards and might even estimate more. Major Traumer signaled the crowd to stop. Now this was before bull horns, before public address systems, and the crowd at that point was probably 1,500 strong and the chances that they heard or even saw him are fairly slim. The soldiers had been instructed to use deadly force. There was one of the militia companies' commanders who said pick out your man and kill him. 
(Repeated gunshots)

- A schoolboy following the crowd fell dead on his books. A half mile away, a 69-year-old man struck down as he fed his chickens. At least three marchers were killed outright. And an untold number of others injured in the bloodiest labor incident in Wisconsin's history.

The shootings ended the clamor for the eight-hour day and workers returned once again to the 70-hour week.

- The obvious significance of the movement back in 1886, is that what we take as a basic right was something people marched and died for. When we punch in, punch out, put in the eight-hour days and think of that as having been something of a birthright. So the obvious message is that that birthright was won at great price.

In the mid-1800s, waves of immigrants settling into the treeless prairies to the south and west created an insatiable demand for lumber for building homes and towns. To a farmer out in the Dakota Prairie, a white pine board was an essential. And it all began back in a pinery in northern Wisconsin.

- Wisconsin's pinery or pine forests, covered most of northern Wisconsin. Through the forests, ran streams and rivers which became highways for logs, and flowing outward, connected Wisconsin with the great lumber markets to the east and west.

- I don't like to say many things are inevitable but it seems to me that cutting down the trees in Wisconsin was pretty inevitable. Somebody was going to do it, because there was a market for it. And they did it, and the surprising thing is how fast they did it.

- During its peak years, lumbering employed, in the woods and the sawmills, more workers than any other Wisconsin industry and produced more than 60 billion board feet of first-rate lumber. At the core of the industry were the lumberjacks. Men cut down the trees, one at a time. With their own peculiar language, the songs, stories, the myth of the lumberjack remains the Wisconsin version of the cowboy. But in reality, the work of the lumberjack was among the most dangerous, difficult and poorly paid in the country.

Many Lumberjacks were farmers who left their wives behind to take care of family and farm while they earned some much-needed cash. Others were rivermen and itinerant laborers, tough and desperate men, capable of handling long hours of hard labor, held in place for a season by the severe winter and the isolation of a logging camp miles from the nearest town. At first lumber men were only drawn to the big white pine. Its wood was light and workable, ideal for construction. And unlike hardwood trees, it would float to the mill and to market.

- In the fall, they would send a team in, like a reconnaissance team, and they would plan the tactics of the winter operation. You'll set up the main camp and then make roads and so forth. Then when freezing came and the snows came, then they'd get into the serious business of logging.

- The sawyer was the king of the camp. He could size up the lay of the land, spit a few times to see where the wind was blowing from, and drop a tree that would drive a stake into the ground when it fell. Sawing was dangerous in some ways. Tree might kick back when it fell. Might hit another tree on the way down and the butt would jump back awful fast. If the sawyer didn't get out of the way pretty quick he'd be killed dead as a doornail: 
[Louis Blanchard]

- A log never did anything you wanted it to do. Plus it was huge. And so, to get this log from that site to the stream that was bone labor for a man and oxen or horses.

- Camps would often vie with one another over the size of their loads. Large loads might require hitching several teams of horses to pull it up a hill.

- It was dangerous to ride on a big load, since he could get squashed to death of a chain broke. I've seen them break, too. One broke over on Mud Brook, and a hell of a good man was on top of a big load when it broke. He was coming down a grade pretty fast and logs went off in all directions. He was crushed to death and the team went on down to the landing all alone with what was left of the sleigh.

- These were big trees and so there were injuries there. And then of course, when you're working with axes and sharp saws, you're courting danger. And then working around large animals is always dangerous. They tried to provide for medical care. And there were in fact little hospitals set up across northern Wisconsin whose primary purpose was the logger. But the biggest problem was the isolation and getting sick or hurt person to a place where he could be treated.

- Lumberjacks awoke before dawn, ate a huge breakfast and were at work with the first light. Lunch would be brought out to the men, who would then work until dark, and then head back to the logging camp.

- The logging camp wasn't exactly a fancy hotel, but it was home to a bunch of men for several months every winter. The shanty boss never scrubbed the floors, but he did sweep up now and then. The spittoons are made of nail kegs, cut in half and filled with dirt. And you'd spit in them and the shanty boss would empty them once in a while when they got messy. Everybody's clothes got wet from the snow every day and so we needed a lot of racks for drying. When the socks begun to send off steam at night you sure knowed you was in a logging camp and you mix the smell of wet socks with the smell of baked beans and chewing tobacco, you have a smell the lumberjack never forgot even if he lived as long as Methuselah.

You made your own bed of marsh hay or balsam boughs covered with blankets. Now and then you'd add some more boughs. When the lice got awful itchy, you had to take the better part of Sunday to boil the blankets. No lumberjack ever took a bath. Somehow, he just never got dirty. But you'd take off your clothes and boil them every three or four weeks or something like that.

- The cook was the most important man in any camp. Camps with a poor cook were said to have two crews: one coming and one going.

- There was always plenty of grub in camp and he baked and cooked enough for everyone. We had salt pork and beef and plenty of potatoes, and baked beans to dress it up. Sometimes we had big barrels of sauerkraut, dried prunes, dried apples, dried currants, and always plenty of flour. The cook baked pies by the hundreds, maybe thousands. We used to wolf 'em down like it was the last food left in the world.

- At the end of the season, the lumberjacks broke camp and headed off in different directions.

- Though there was a part of the crew who would help move the logs downstream, the driving crew. And this was an exciting time for these guys.

- The logs were set loose and rolled into the fast-moving water. Bearing the stamp of the logging company, they made their way through bends, rapids, over dams, to the mill. Driving logs was a wet, cold and difficult job. The crew walked for miles freeing the unruly logs, gathering up logs that had drifted into back waters and venturing out in boats to masses of logs that were jammed up.

Even the most skillful rivermen fell occasionally, and if caught under a mass of logs in a whirlpool his comrades were helpless to save him. He drown before their very eyes.

- Over on the St. Croix River where the river narrowed up at the falls, it took a good many men to keep the logs moving through there. In 1886, there was a jam that was about as dangerous as anything could be. They're hard to break up and the logs kept piling up behind. The longer he worked at the front of the jam looking for that one log that held up the whole works, well when she went, she went with a bang, tearing out trees on the banks. And you had to be pretty good on your feet or you'd get a foot smashed or a leg broke.

- As the drivers delivered the logs to the milling company, the mill would then pay the logging camp operator, who could then pay the lumberjacks for their season's work.

- We know that when they got paid in the spring that a lot of them were rowdies and drank up, gambled, and did other things with their money, but I think that most of them headed home with their money in their pocket and glad to be headed home.

- The life of a lumberjack was a good life. It was a hard life, but if I had to live my life over, I'd be a lumberjack again and ride the logs down the Chippewa: 
[Louis Blanchard]

- In the 1870s while lumberjacks were cutting the forests to the north, steam-powered threshers took their place in the fields of southern Wisconsin. Farmers could now harvest more wheat than ever, but the enthusiasm for planting a single cash crop also planted the seeds for an agricultural disaster.

- What happened is that various kinds of insect, pests, got into it. For instance there was rust and there was smut, and then there was this terrible chinch bug. Then in addition to the insect problem, if you keep putting the same crop on the same field, year after year, you destroy the qualities of the soil, the till, the fertility, and all the rest. And so your yields go down, down, down, and you're making less and less money. And that's what happened to southern Wisconsin.

- Few thought of dairy farming as an alternative to wheat. Many farm families kept a cow or two and drank the milk or churned the cream into butter. But the cows often roamed the woods eating whatever they could find including wild onions and garlic which added peculiar flavors to the milk.

- The butter, that was coming out of individual farms, was terrible stuff. It was known in the New York market as "western grease."

- And in Chicago, it is said that Wisconsin butter was used to lubricate wagon wheels, wasn't fit for consumption.

- A few dairy farmers from New York State began to build small cheese and butter processing plants, but most wheat farmers wanted nothing to do with dairy production, which tied a farmer and his family to an endless round of hard work.

- With wheat farming, you put it in the ground. There was a long period of time when you didn't really have to worry about it very much until harvest, but with your dairying you have to be there every day and you have to milk at set times. You have to feed at set times.

- William Dempster Hoard came to Wisconsin in 1857 from New York, a state that had already made the change from wheat farming to dairying. Hoard began promoting dairying in his farm newspaper advising Wisconsin's farmers devastated by declining wheat harvests to substitute the cow for the plow.

- And so he thinks he can, by his newspaper editorship, and then later by founding Hoard's Dairyman, he can help these people out. And he's a character, let's face it. He loves to get up in front of an audience and he was given to a very colorful language and he said that he was going about the countryside preaching the gospel of the dairy cow. That's the way he put it.

- Hoard traveled the state to whip up enthusiasm for dairy farming, to convert farmers, to convince them to take a leap of faith that the relentless effort of dairy farming would pay off in cold hard cash and restore fertility to the depleted soil.

In 1872, Hoard and other dairy leaders established the Wisconsin Dairy Association to develop markets and convince farmers and processors to cooperate, to improve the quality and reputation of their dairy products.

- That's how cooperation gets involved in it, and believe me, it was needed. If you're just weighing what comes in or measuring it by volume,

you do better if you stop at the creek and get a couple of buckets of something and throw them in. The only trouble is you also picked up minnows and there were many those who are running cheese factories and creameries who complained about the minnows that certain farmers brought in.

- Blocks of ice harvested from Wisconsin lakes were used to cool a new invention: the refrigerated rail car. The Dairy Association negotiated low freight rates shipping cheese on these trains to the large markets of the East Coast.

The Dairy Association sponsored experience meetings across the state. Traveling shows where farmers swapped ideas and took part in spirited and entertaining discussions with Hoard and other dairy leaders.

- There was for example of one speaker who had a speech titled: "The cow, America's queen." And then there was another famous New York dairyman and his famous saying is: "Speak to a cow as you would to a lady."

- With its first Farmers' Institutes, the University of Wisconsin carried on the tradition of the experience meetings around the state. In 1885, 50,000 farmers attended anxious to hear about the university's early attempts to use science to unravel the mysteries of feeding, breeding and milk production.

In 1880, the university hired its first full-time agriculture professor, William Henry. Henry turned the University Farm into a laboratory testing different types of cattle feed and measuring the effect on production. He proved the advantages of storing feed in a French invention, the silo, which would extend the milking season into the winter months.

In 1886, the University started its Farm Short Course and soon added a Dairy Short Course which provided practical information to farmers and milk processors in a special winter session.

Professor Stephen Babcock devised the first measurement of milk quality by perfecting an easy and reliable butter fat test. Shown here performing the test forty years later, Babcock refused to patent the device, which was immediately used in dairy plants all over the world and worth millions of dollars. The test he said belonged to the people.

Wisconsin farmers found that feed grains, grasses and hay were well-suited to Wisconsin's climate and soils. Applications of manure began to restore the worn-out soil and bring the farms back to life. Neat dairy barns, higher producing dairy cows began to dot the landscape. Nearby towns and villages began to grow benefiting from stable incomes of dairy farmers. At local creameries and cheese factories farmers begin showing up with more cans of milk. In 1890 Wisconsin produced 44 million pounds of cheese. The hard work and cooperation began to pay off. The vision and faith in dairy farming, scientific agriculture came to pass and Wisconsin is well on its way to becoming America's Dairyland.

In the 1890s, the railroads were hauling out the last of the big white pines and Northern Wisconsin faced the future without a booming lumber economy. Loggers had taken only the prime timber, carelessly leaving the treetops and branches to dry as fuel on the forest floor. Fires swept through millions of acres leaving a devastated landscape. None of the North escaped the cutting, leaving a wounded environment and steadily declining economy.

In Porter's Mills, like many mill towns, sawmills employed almost half of the people. The mills were the heart of the whole economy, supporting blacksmith shops, stables, a shoe shop, a hotel and two candy stores. The town built a school and a church and had survived floods and fires. But when the timber to the north gave up the town of Porter's Mills died. The church and some other buildings were hauled away. Others were abandoned and Porter's Mills disappeared from the map.

It seemed inevitable that farming would father logging, that the plow would follow the axe just as it had in Wisconsin and States to the East. Lumber companies began to advertise often in foreign language papers for Polish, Finnish, Norwegian and other immigrant settlers to buy land and begin farming the cutover.

- For the settlers who are coming it's an opportunity. They see it as a place where they can develop farms and be sort of small farmers, yeoman farmers, the kind of farming they've seen is successful in southern and central Wisconsin.

- It soon became a land boom. Hundreds of speculators, large and small, jumping in. Land dealers employed agents on commission, armed with optimistic literature that took little account of the true potential of the land, but instead provided idyllic images of prosperity and happiness.

- This is the American way, to be optimistic, to anticipate that things are going to be good in the future, and that spirit just, I think, caught up public officials, land salesmen, the farmers themselves look at the bright side. They did not literally look at the land, often before they bought it.

- The settlers began the difficult process of clearing the land of giant white pine stumps that were all too slow to decay. Horse-drawn contraptions could extract these stumps only with great difficulty.

Those that could afford it, used well-placed sticks of dynamite to blast the stumps out of the ground.
(repeated explosions)
 
With relentless effort, the settlers yanked and blasted out enough of the enormous stumps to plow their fields. Thousands of modest farms were carved out of the cutover. Settlers planted crops and milk cows. Got married and raised children. Schools were built. Towns sprang up.

But in the 1920s, the high crop prices that had supported all their efforts and paid all the bills, collapsed.

The price drop held on becoming a long-lasting agricultural depression that pushed farmers on poor land to the breaking point. Taxes went unpaid. Land companies could no longer attract new settlers to buy their land. And like the farmers, the county governments in northern Wisconsin stared into the face of bankruptcy.

- And so new laws are passed, zoning to restrict areas that could be farmed, to encourage reforestation, to encourage tourism. And so, there's a real shift.

- In northern Wisconsin the trees have grown up now and you have to search hard for evidence of the struggle to make farms out of the Northwoods. But in some places you can still make out the outline of a barn where a dozen cows were kept. You can still see the foundation of a house where a family worked for years to make a new life, where a community formed to share life together. But it was a place where the hard work of wrestling crops from the soil was not enough. For the dream of a farming frontier, in the Northwoods, came to an end.

- Sometimes I feel a bit sad when I drive past our farm thinking of the labor that my father put into it, but then I think that he made our living out of it while he needed to. And now since it never could be really good farmland, it's only fitting that it goes back to doing what it does best, growing trees: 
[Mary Bouvanovich]

- The turn of the century saw huge changes in the way Wisconsin's people lived and worked. In the 1880s the average workman could trade one hour's wages for a pound of cheese or pound of bacon. A plane suit cost $14, about a week and a half's wages. But over the next 20 years skilled workers of industries like Allis-Chalmers found their wages rising and prices for goods falling.

- Wages rose sharply that is in terms of buying power in the late 19th century. And while there was a lot of endemic unemployment, that is, you'd be briefly unemployed, these could be steady jobs. You could be part of that core that worked there for a long period of time. You could bring your kids in. You could hire them, bring them in for jobs. These were really good jobs.

- With the introduction of new machinery factory owners began hiring more women, though employers considered most of the jobs off-limits.

- Certain occupations were clearly and exclusively for men. They tended to be the skilled work and the higher paying jobs so that women tended to be concentrated in very few types of manufacturing establishments, such as garment work or boots and shoes.

- Most women found work and other growing fields as telephone operators, as sales clerks, or in clerical work using a Wisconsin invention: the typewriter. And since few families could survive on only one income, married women often carried on much less visible type of work within their homes.

- They took in laundry. They took in piecework from factories. They made artificial flowers. They took in boarders, as many as 40 or 50 percent of families sometimes took in boarders and the maintenance of the boarding business was essentially women's work.

- As wages rose and factories became more productive, business leaders realized giving into labor's long-standing demand for a shorter work week would actually expand the economy by giving workers more time to shop for the products and expanding consumer economy. By the 1920s, prices for consumer goods of all kinds: radios, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators, were dropping and with installment loans even the automobile was within the reach of a growing number of families. The consumer economy opened up new opportunities for service businesses and supported a comfortable middle class that began to seek out new ways to spend their money and newfound leisure time.

Those who could afford it now began hitting the road savoring the beauty of the Wisconsin countryside...

...in areas like Lake Delton and Kilbourn, which was later renamed Wisconsin Dells. Scenic attractions provided the basis for new businesses geared to the freewheeling tourist.

Resorts and hotels, catering to the new automobile traffic, sprang up. Towns offered free campgrounds to keep rambling tourists from camping on the side of the road.

With farmers and other businesses calling more and better roads, the State Highway Commission began work on a plan to connect every county seat and every city with more than 5,000 people. By 1926, over 10,000 miles of paved well-drained gravel highways began to knit the state together and fuel the growing tourism industry.

As roads stretch to the north, towns in the cutover Northwoods began to advertise themselves as tourists and recreation havens. Tourists soon discovered that though the big trees were gone the cool north lakes still had plenty of fish.

Old resorts expanded, and new facilities appeared to serve growing numbers of travelers. And many vacationers from busy cities like Chicago and Milwaukee discovered the solitude of a rustic northern cabin.

As tourism grew, it brought an injection of much-needed cash to northern Wisconsin. "The tourist crop," said one northern newspaper, "was becoming one of the most profitable crops "raised in the state."

In 1929, the United States economy crashed and the country was plunged into The Great Depression. Banks closed their doors. Jobs disappeared, wages were slashed, precipitating waves of labor unrest. In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill to begin a government program to create jobs with the growing numbers of unemployed young men. During The Great Depression the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC would transform the Wisconsin landscape and employ over 90,000 young men who had few other prospects for work.

- There'd be a job in the want ads like for somebody to wash dishes at a restaurant. And I go to answer that ad and I'd find when I get there that there was a line of applicants going way around the block about three or four abreast. I think it was a real blessing that the CCCs came along.

- In Wisconsin, the CCC would be put to work to solve the state's worsening conservation problems, like soil erosion that was eating away the land. in some agricultural areas. In the cutover North, the failure of farming showed the need for a massive reforestation effort.

What some called "Roosevelt's forest army" started tree nurseries and planted trees in the new state and national forests. They protected the forests that had survived by fighting fires during the drought years of the 1930s. The CCC constructed nearly 500 bridges and more than 4,000 miles of fire lanes, truck trails and roads.

In agricultural areas, the young men put in place water diversions, terraces, and other erosion control structures.

The government gave the new recruits uniforms, a haircut, a medical exam, three square meals a day and a bunk in a tent or a barracks. In return they agreed to abide by the strict discipline of the camps, which were run by the U.S. Army.

- We earned a magnificent sum of $30 a month of which we received five dollars in the camp, and $25 was sent back to our family.

- The CCC set up camps in eight state parks and began work to develop them, building the trails and roads we now enjoy today.

- Wyalusing became a state park in 1917, but was left pretty much natural. It wasn't really until the CCC provided the labor force to provide a lot of the development that things really took off within the park.

At Wyalusing and other parks the CCC cleared trees and brush and smoothed out the land for miles of hiking trails. The corps cored stone and hauled it by hand for steps and other trail structures.

The CCC built rustic park shelters and other structures with the strength to stand the test of time using native materials and a lot of hand labor. The young men of the CCC transformed the Wisconsin landscape and in turn were transformed by the work.

- We went in boys and came out young men. We learned a lot about discipline. We learned a little bit about handling money and we learned how to get along with other people, and we learned an occupation. So, it was really a wonderful experience, I would say.

- In our state parks, in hiking trails, cut and smoothed out of the woods, in the steps made of stone quarried and carried and laid by hand, in the unique old stone shelter buildings, in the beauty of a reforested northern Wisconsin, we can all enjoy the legacy of the work of thousands of young men brought together by adversity who work shoulder-to-shoulder for the good of us all.

In 1943, Superior greeted the arrival of the Dionne quintuplets who caused a sensation when they traveled from Canada to take part in the launching of the last of 18 ships built for the British Navy. With the outbreak of war in Europe, contracts for shipbuilding and other products began to lift Wisconsin industries out of the Depression of the 1930s.

- Then all of a sudden Pearl Harbor comes and wham, it was off to the races.

- The U.S. entry into World War 2 created huge changes in nearly all areas of Wisconsin's economy but Wisconsin's historic strengths in both agriculture and industry served the country well. Wisconsin dairy farmers increased milk production during the war by 20%. Dairy plants produced millions of pounds of cheese and evaporated and dried milk to feed the troops. Packing plants turned out a wide variety of meats for military rations. Wisconsin led the nation in the canning of vegetable crops and it's 150 canning plants operated at full capacity processing peas, sweet corn, beets, beans, tomatoes and sauerkraut. Despite shortages of labor and machinery and materials of all kinds, Wisconsin's farm families working even longer hours than usual achieved or surpassed the government's wartime goals.

While the farmers fed the troops, Wisconsin's textile and leather industries clothed them, supplying uniforms, footgear, underwear, raincoats, socks, gloves, and blankets.

The military found the skilled workers of Wisconsin's metalworking industries capable of producing just about any commodity the Armed Services demanded. Wisconsin industries supplied parts needed to build land-based vehicles and the engines to power ships and planes.

Workers in the shipyards at Manitowoc, Sturgeon Bay, Superior, Milwaukee, Kewanee and Green Bay turned out a wide array of vessels including 28 submarines built by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company, which had never built a submarine before.

Near Sauk City, the government built a munitions plant on 10,000 acres of farmland and employed 7,500 workers producing ammunition for the war effort.

In Milwaukee, a large variety of manufacturing industries geared up for an almost total conversion to wartime production.

- One of the biggest impacts the war had was on industrial employment in Milwaukee. It went from roughly a hundred thousand at the start of the war to two hundred thousand in the middle of the war and most of the people, and it was men and women, were putting in long hours and long weeks.

I met a man named Les Greget who came down from rural Wisconsin to take a job in the Falk Company and the war hit and Les Greget was down working on his boring bar which drilled big holes in big gearboxes every single day of the week for the next five years without a single day off. And that was fairly typical. If there was a silver lining to the war, it was opening up opportunities for people who had not been part of the workforce, best known, of course, the women. And it was the women in many cases who supplied maybe a third to a half of the employment in a lot of the shops. There were also new opportunities for African Americans and shops like Falk and some of the other heavy industries in the Milwaukee area.

- The war meant not just an increase in the number of women working, but it meant really a mass migration of women into the kinds of work that had been set aside for men only. High-paying machinery work, mass production, in factories. The kinds of women who were working changed dramatically. Now women over 35, women who were married, women who still had young children at home, were taking these jobs.

- With selfless and patriotic commitment, while coping with shortages of food, fuel and housing, Wisconsin citizens gave of their work laboring day and night knowing that their efforts directly supported the soldiers on the frontlines.

- Without equipment, the supplies, the munitions and materials supplied on the Homefront, they wouldn't have been able to fight a war at all, so in a very important sense the war at home was the equivalent of war on the front.

- In the incredible process of gearing up Wisconsin's economy to meet the demands of the war, Wisconsin workers set the stage for another huge change: retooling for a post-war economic boom.

- Right after the war there were fears that the economy would just go right back into the tank again just as it had been before the war. What happened of course was quite the opposite. American industry just retooled and took off for the races. It was the longest sustained boom in American history, ending not until the late 1960s.

- Wisconsin's people in the day-to-day task of making a living, created an economy with great strength and diversity.

Each generation put in place new ways of living and working, learning new skills and building on the work of those who came before them.

Some created works of lasting value in (inaudible). 
[State Capitol carvers]

Others labored in dangerous jobs for long hours or in the endless, unpaid tasks of raising families and building communities.

But the work of all of them lives on in the world around us for through their work, they built the state we call Wisconsin.

- Major funding for Wisconsin Stories was provided by: AT&T, providing business and residential long distance service throughout Wisconsin; S.C. Johnson Wax, a Wisconsin manufacturer of home cleaning and home storage products; The Credit Unions of Wisconsin serving the financial needs of two million Wisconsinites and their families; and the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Commission celebrating 150 years of Wisconsin statehood. Funding also provided by: Firstar Corporation; Harley-Davidson, Incorporated; Marshall and Illsley Corporation; the Outdoor Advertising Association; the Philip Morris Companies; W.H. Brady Company; Weber-Stephen Products Company; and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.