WISCONSIN BLUE BOOK 1989-1990


primarily from Lake Michigan fishing stations. Market demand far exceeded
the supply. Fishermen responded to that demand in 1880 when they took a
recorded 23 million pounds from Lake Michigan, and there is good reason to
believe that the figure is conservative. Through the Chicago fish wholesalers,
the harvest from Wisconsin's Great Lakes waters found national distribu-
tion. These fisheries grew virtually without regulation although restrictions
went onto the statute books beginning as early as the territorial years.
The
fish were free to all comers. Unbridled competition, market demand, failure
to enforce lawful restraints on the harvest, and the fishermen's urge to
earn a
reasonable income led to overfishing. The depletion of the resource, so obvi-
ous in the 20th century, had its roots in the first quarter century of harvest.

       IX. CHANGING WATERS IN A CHANGING ECONOMY
1. Economic Expansion
  When lumbermen and mining entrepreneurs opened the riches of timber
and iron ore in northern Wisconsin's Lake Superior region in the late 19th
century, the state's last frontier of virtually untapped natural resources
rap-
idly vanished. Interestingly, that development coincided with the 1890 report
of the superintendent of the U.S. Census which stated that the frontier in
the
continental United States, defined as a line of settlement beyond which fewer
than 2 persons per square mile lived, had disappeared. While Wisconsin's
natural waterways still carried massive amounts of logs and lumber to mar-
ket, a rapidly changing economy in the southern two-thirds of the state
wrought substantial change in the character of waterways and in the uses
to
which they were put.
  The population had grown enormously since the era of the lead mining
frontier. Estimated at 3,245 in 1830, it jumped to three-quarters of a million
by the outbreak of the Civil War. It topped one million in 1870 and 2 million
in 1900. Economic growth in the late 19th century came from an enormous
expansion in Wisconsin agriculture and industry. Land in farms grew from
11.7 million acres in 1870 to 19.8 in 1900 with most of that land improved.
Wisconsin industry grew dramatically, especially in the Milwaukee area and
in other Lake Michigan cities such as Kenosha, Racine, Manitowoc, and
Sheboygan, and in the Fox River and Rock River Valleys. These industries
employed an ever larger percentage of Wisconsin's total labor force. Reflect-
ing that increased industrialization, the percentage of urban population
mounted from 20 percent urban in 1870 to 38 percent in 1900, but not until
1930 did the urban population outnumber the rural.
  While the triumph of dairy farming as the most profitable and stable type
of production for Wisconsin farmers invariably draws much attention in
Wisconsin's late 19th century development, the industrial sector made giant
strides as well, producing ever more for a national and even an international
market. It was the age of entrepreneurial leadership when J.I. Case's agricul-
tural implement business at Racine blossomed; when Edward P. Allis built
a
fortune from machinery to serve Wisconsin's lumbering and mining indus-
tries; when at Sheboygan John Michael Kohler established a general foundry
business and manufactured agricultural implements and enamelware. It was
the era when the Milwaukee beer barons, Val Blatz, Fred Miller, Jacob Best,


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