Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 71, number 2, winter, 1987-1988

              Urban Services in Gilded Age Wisconsin
By Lawrence H. Larsen
B
Y 1880 Wisconsin had achieved a significant urban dimension. While much of the state remained forest and farmland, dotted here and there with small towns and crossroads hamlets, the very success of wheat, truck, and dairy farming, coupled with the rise ofthe lumbering and mining in¬ dustries and the advent ofthe railroad, helped stimulate the rapid growth of cities. A new ur¬ ban Wisconsin was rising on firm foundations. Ofthe state's 1.3 million people, 194,908 (or about 15 percent) livedinoneor another of its seven legally defined cities. (A population of 10,000 was the benchmark used by nineteenth-century demographers to differ¬ entiate between large and small places. At that time, there were 227 such places in the United States.) Over half of all the city-dw-ellers in Wisconsin lived in Milwaukee, the only city that seemed apt to achieve the status of a me¬ tropolis, ranking seventeenth among the na¬ tion's twenty "Great Cities" with its population of 115,587. No other Wisconsin city contained as many as 20,000 persons. Racine was the second-largest with 16,031 population; next came Oshkosh (15,748), La Crosse (14,505), Fond du Lac (13,094), Madison (10,303), and Eau Claire (10,119).'
author's note: In much different form this article was presented at the twentieth annual Northern Great Plains History Conference held in Moorhead, Minnesota, in Oc¬ tober, 1985. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments of John Cialid ofthe University of Wisconsin- River Falls.
Copyright © 1988 by llie State Historical Society uf Wisconsin All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
All of America's cities of 10,000 or more faced common municipal problems. Size was in most instances only a matter of degree; sew¬ age smelled the same in Madison as in Milwau¬ kee, and muddy, impassable streets were a universal problem. Hence, the practices fol¬ lowed in the new Wisconsin communities, building on what had been done in the older cities of the East, were much the same from place to place. A common approach that broke little new ground was especially the rule among emerging adolescent cities that had yet to develop distinctive personalities. Moreover, a truism ingrained in the American experi¬ ence continued to prevail: if private interests failed to act, taxpayers wanted the best possi¬ ble services for the least amount of dollars.
This did not necessarily mean that voters preferred private over public utilities. Mayor David ("Open Town") Rose of Milwaukee came to power in 1898 by successfully attack-
' Valuable data on the rise of Wisconsin can be found in Frederick Merk, Economic History of Wisconsin During the Civil War Decade (Madison, 1916); Alice E. Smith, The His¬ tory of Wisconsin. Volume I: From Exploration to Statehood (Madison, 1973); Richard N. Current, The History ofWis¬ consin. Volume II: The Civil War Era, 1848-1873 (Madison, 1976); Robert C. Nesbit, The History ofWisconsin. Volume III: Urbanization and Industrialization, 1873 — 1893 (Madi¬ son, 1985). More has been written about Milwaukee than other Wisconsin cities. The basic history of Milwaukee is Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison, 1948). See also History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Chicago, 1881); Early Milwaukee: Papers from the Archives of the Old Settlers' Club of Milwaukee County (Milwaukee, 1916); Wil-
83