Wisconsin Hometown Stories

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. 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. 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.