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- As large crews of Irish construction workers
began work on the canals and dams
of the Fox-Wisconsin waterway,
settlers began venturing up the river
and casting their lot
with the developing communities of Neenah and Menasha.
- The river's always central to the story.
It's what drew people there.
It's what carried them there.
It's what fed their dreams.
- The thing I always say to people
is that settlement is not Little House on the Prairie .
This a very, very hard life,
harder than anyone can possibly imagine.
There were no roads.
There were no utilities.
There was nothing.
But the thing that they saw here,
and was the thing
that made them willing to go through the hardships
was that they saw this as the next Chicago.
- Like Chicago's highly successful canal,
the Fox-Wisconsin waterway
would also connect the Great Lakes
with the Mississippi River.
- It was the same arrangement,
same transportation type of hub that Chicago was,
but there was a difference--
and that fundamental difference was
that this was a location with water power
and free power.
And I don't have to speak to any industrialist
to be able to say you could start up an industry
and not have to pay for the power.
That is a phenomenal draw.
- Dams at Neenah and Menasha captured the flow
of both the Wolf River and the Fox River watersheds,
turning Lake Winnebago
into a large and powerful mill pond.
- This whole waterway system that came down through here
provided a limitless supply of water.
It wasn't just seasonal.
It never froze solid,
and so it could go all year.
So anybody who was thinking that they wanted to make something
would go, "This is the place to be."
- John R. Kimberly and his brother, Harvey,
bought some of the first lots in Neenah.
And together, they built a double house--
one half for each brother--
which stands today,
as one of Neenah-Menasha's oldest homes.
Using Durham boats, they hauled milling machinery
up the Fox River, and built the Neenah Flour Mill,
to grind wheat for the area's frontier farmers.
- Because they didn't have a lot of cash in the western frontier,
they needed a crop that they could sell
for goods and supplies and for food,
and that turned out to be wheat.
Wheat was the great western crop
that was fairly easy to raise.
Wheat was certainly labor-intensive,
but it wasn't nearly as labor-intensive
as animal husbandry.
Wheat, you simply had to clear the land,
sow the seed, and then sit back and watch it grow,
and hope that there was a good harvest
and the weather cooperated.
- The frontier crop soon gave rise
to a thriving frontier industry.
More mills went up,
and production grew to become second only to Milwaukee.
- At the same time, sawmills in Neenah and Menasha
began producing wooden goods,
like barrels for flour.
- The sawmills ultimately, as they grew,
grew more numerous in Menasha,
because at the outset, there was a forest
in the northwestern corner of the township.
- In Menasha, a dry goods store owned by Elisha Smith,
sold locally-made wooden pails, tubs, and butter churns.
- The company that was supplying them
ended up having financial problems.
And so, as the supplier to him, he thought,
"Well, maybe I could make a go of this."
So he ended up figuring out a way, with some other investors,
to buy the Menasha Woodenware business.
- Smith shipped his goods to Chicago
on a plank road built from Menasha to Kaukauna,
and then by boat,
on the newly-completed Fox-Wisconsin waterway.
But the hopes and dreams for the big waterway project
would soon come to an end.
- Here they were,
drawn to the water transportation,
spending the first almost two decades
trying to get this underway and built,
and while it was underway,
the railroads come in,
and, essentially,
overnight make that technology obsolete.
For us, the railroad builders,
who were primarily the flour-millers of Milwaukee,
did not want to build a railroad up to this area,
because it was going to bring the competition
down into their market.
Who came up to this area
was the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad.
The railroads offered
one of the first and only opportunities for cooperation
that the competitive villages had,
and that was when the railroad was first laid
right before the Civil War.
The railroad said, "Well, you've got all these
"channels and canals and river branches
"and all these bridges.
We're not paying for that."
And the two cities--
villages rather--
got together at that point in time
and said, "Oh, we'll pay for it."
And they actually agreed to pay for those rail trestles
and all of the connection that was necessary
to bring the railroad into town
right at the manufacturing center
right through the water powers
so that they could really make the most
out of this transportation opportunity.
Suddenly, the Menasha Woodenware,
with the wooden tubs,
which was the earliest form of product packaging,
went gangbusters,
because they could ship these things down,
they were lightweight, they weren't heavy,
the wood source was up here.
And the city of Chicago
was and is a national distribution center.
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- Easy access to Chicago by rail,
and to the Great Lakes by boat,
fueled the growth of both communities.
And the coming of the Civil War
created high demand for both wooden goods and flour.
With waves of European immigrants
arriving to do the work,
and with the Fox River powering the mills,
industries grew in a spectacular fashion.
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- By the 1870s, Menasha and Neenah
had become thriving manufacturing towns,
each with a retail center.
The two villages grew toward each other
and functioned as one place.
But old feelings died hard
and attempts to combine the two governments
and make one bigger, more efficient city
failed.
In Menasha's National Hotel,
George Reed, brother of Menasha and Neenah founders,
Curtis and Harrison Reed,
organized the Wisconsin Central Railroad.
The federal government promised to grant the railroad
over 800,000 acres of land
if it could build a line
from Doty Island to Stevens Point,
and through the northern wilderness
to Lake Superior.
Once completed, the Wisconsin Central carried
an abundant supply of wood
to the drying yards of the Menasha Woodenware Company,
which now spread out on both sides of the river channel.
Elisha Smith's factory continued to make a variety
of turned wooden containers for shipping products.
- And at that point,
butter, you know, it was very different back then,
was transported in wooden buckets
of various different sizes.
And they ended up making those
that they would supply to the dairies
that would then put the churned butter into these tubs.
So he ended up turning into
the largest wooden butter tub manufacturer in the world.
- In Neenah, flour millers
faced fierce competition from Minneapolis,
where former Wisconsin Governor Cadwallader Washburn
purchased the water power rights
at St. Anthony Falls.
There, he built an enormous flour mill,
equipped with the latest milling technology
that produced huge quantities of high-quality flour.
In Neenah and Menasha, most mills remained small
and used traditional grindstones
that produced a lower quality flour.
To make matters worse,
yields from area wheat farms steadily declined.
- Wheat growing was easy because it was basically
kind of an extractive industry, almost like coal mining.
It tapped the natural advantages in the landscape,
particularly the nutrients in the soil.
So what farmers tended to do,
because they didn't have a lot of money,
is they would farm a couple of acres of land
for a couple of years until the yield went down
and then they would move on
and they'd settle a new piece of land,
farm that for a few years,
but eventually you ran out of land.
- And pretty soon, it wasn't economically viable.
What took its place was paper--
paper production.
And they had the power to do it.
But they also needed clean water, itself,
in the manufacturing process of paper.
They needed to be able to rinse the pulp
to make sure the pulp was clean.
And water was used throughout the manufacturing process.
- Taking a chance on the promise of a new industry,
Neenah entrepreneurs purchased some papermaking machinery,
and built the city's first paper mill.
- That was the first financially successful paper mill
in the state of Wisconsin.
And so, there were local investors
who really took serious note of this.
- Four investors pooled their money
and formed a venture called Kimberly, Clark and Company
to build a second paper mill.
- It was Alfred Kimberly
and his business partner, Havilah Babcock,
C.B. Clark, a hardware store owner,
and Frank Shattuck,
a traveling salesman out of Chicago.
They purchased a water power site on the Fox River,
tore down a flour mill,
and constructed the Globe Paper Mill.
- Initially, they were creating paper primarily out of rags.
- They brought rags up from Chicago,
and they had picking rooms where you pick out
the pockets and the buttons and all those other things
and these were all ground and dissolved.
- Processing rags into pulp
made a paper of the highest quality.
- They marketed this as a source of making newsprint.
Every municipality worth its salt
had at least two newspapers
and very often four or more.
- Newspapers were expanding, magazines were expanding,
print catalogs, things like that,
and this required
so much paper
and there just weren't supplies.
They were able to go into markets
like Chicago and Milwaukee,
these big metropolitan centers
that were really expanding rapidly.
- It was for the company,
it was for the community,
and this part of the state, an economic perfect storm.
- Kimberly-Clark expanded into Appleton,
partnering with a mill
that used a new technology to grind wood for pulp.
They built the Atlas Mill
and produced the first paper in the Midwest made from trees.
And there, papermakers experimented with new methods
to make new kinds of paper
and pioneered a new process
to use chemicals to break down wood.
- And it was after that
that they expanded again and again and again and again
because they really found that they had it down.
- Success in papermaking required a great sales force,
required innovation in terms of technology,
and it required research and development.
And those three things are money intensive.
- They funneled all their money back into operations.
They took almost nothing out themselves for pay
or living extravagant lifestyles or anything like that.
They could buy timber rights and they could buy water rights
and these were the keys to their future success.
- The Neenah-based company expanded rapidly,
building new mills at several water power sites
in the Fox River Valley.
- A couple years later, they built the Vulcan Mill
next door to the Atlas Mill.
And they also bought the Genesee Flour Mill,
and they changed that over to the Tioga Paper Mill.
- Back in Neenah, they constructed the Badger Mill.
After that, they tore down the Neenah Mill
and reconstructed that into a very large mill.
They built the Telulah Paper Company,
and then they ran out of water power
in Appleton and Neenah.
And then, they bought more water power
in what was called "The Cedars,"
and they built a company town
and named it Kimberly.
- They built a very large pulp mill there.
After that, they bought more water power at De Pere,
and there they created the Shattuck and Babcock Mill.
- Other companies also built paper mills
in Menasha and Neenah,
drawing large numbers of immigrant workers,
who kept the mills running day and night.
- So it was so successful
that it spread outward
and shaped the entire region.
And so,
although Neenah and Menasha had remained small,
its impact on northeastern Wisconsin
has been enormous.
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