The story of Milwaukee's feuding founding fathers

saying happy birthday just a couple minutes ago Milwaukee is about to turn 177 right now the Milwaukee Press Club is celebrating its birthday we are here at the Grain Exchange in downtown Milwaukee as we celebrate another year in the hi

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of this city that we wanted go back and see how this city came about, that's right, and we knew who to talk to. I met with Milwaukee historian John Gerder. Now the city looks a little different today than it did in 1846, but he tells me one characteristic. of the city that still remembers that time are right in the heart of downtown, take a look, okay John, so you're here to share with us some little-known hi

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about Milwaukee's beginnings, the birthday is January 31 is approaching and the most important.

The surviving antiquity from that period are these bridges in the center. You'll notice that they're drawing the east and west sides at an angle, yes, and what that means is that there were settlements on both sides that didn't get along particularly well. The west side was Byron. the settlement of Kilbourne The town of Kilbourne and this side was Solomon's general settlement, which was Junortown, so Byron Kilbarn was not a guy who played well with others, he tried to deny Juno access to the rest of the world and The way he did it was he tried to deny them the bridges. so you have Solomon Juno on this side because we are on that side and Kilburn presents his free system with no intention of looking up to link with Jonathan, so you have these offset grids, yes, the East and West sides, yes, and it What happened was the East.

Side needed access to the world, so in 1840 they built a bridge around Juno Avenue. I like it so much that they built two more. Downstream and the West Side suffered in silence for a time, but one warm night in the summer of 1845 west side the westerners took axes and hatchets to their side of the Juno Avenue Bridge. Bayside left and the next morning they discover that they can't get out to the west side, so they retaliate by clearly cutting the bridges on the west side to the south. There had to be some kind of meeting for that, there had to be a lead-up and it was very much Kilbourne saying no, you know, I'm not going to give you access to the world, I see there had been up to that point.

There was no real fighting, but in 1845 they actually called it the Great Bridge War of 1845 and what they finally realized was that in 1845 they were scaring people, you know, who would have come to Milwaukee and said what a great place exactly because It was Wright who tried to settle and grow at that time, so they began to talk and finally, on January 31, 1846, they joined forces in both Unit Town, Kilborn Town and Walker's Point, which was the third settlement in Milwaukee South Side, so now you have this kind of three cornered. uh a trio of settlements becoming one, so how did the merger finally happen and we became not uh Juno town and this town and Walker's Point, but Milwaukee common sense prevailed?

Very simple, sometimes it's that simple and it had been Milwaukee, you know, let's go back to Native. sometimes that was their name, good land is what it means in algorithmic languages, but you have these subsets of communities, you know Juno Town Walkers Point and Silver Town, so finally you know they realized they weren't going to grow unless that they had a type. of unified settlement and you could see people coming to Milwaukee, not to Kilmerton or Walker's Point, of course, yes, and I like that our bridges are still crooked. Cassandra, I mean, bridges would just be boring.

I think it's so special.