EXPLORING WISCONSIN'S WATERWAYS: THE Fox - WISCONSIN


School's theater entrance, I-


)to by Margaret tlogue)


land brought some business to the lead smelting site. One year earlier the
settlement acquired a ferry to make it more accessible.
  By 1847 the population had risen to 50 persons "pretty thickly stowed
in a
few log houses". The village was surveyed and platted in 1850. The first
real
growth came with the building of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad in
1856, unfortunately about a mile from the original site of the village. Never-
theless Muscoda expected great things and planned accordingly. A local pa-
per boasted, "Muscoda will be, we think, the machine-shop and lumber-yard
of Grant County."40 Stores, hotels, blacksmith shops, wagon shops and
a
variety of other establishments went into business, but high prices for lots
tended to hold down development, and in the late 1850s efforts at milling
businesses failed during the general depression.
  Attempts to bridge the Wisconsin finally met with success in 1868, thus
making Muscoda's railroad connection available to people living on the
north side of the river. That development plus good times in the late 1860s
ushered in prosperous years of building and growth and a gradual transfer
of
much of the older town to the area surrounding the railroad depot where
another village had been platted. Competing with Boscobel and Avoca for
trade and commerce, Muscoda grew modestly, reaching a population of 733
in 1895, primarily German in ethnic origin. Modest growth seems to have
been a forgone conclusion once the dream of becoming a port town on a
heavily used Wisconsin River faded.
24. Boscobel, Hwys. US 61, Wis. 133
  The site of a short-lived logging operation in the mid-1840s, Boscobel
originated as the speculative town-site of a railroad civil engineer who
in 1854


293