Milwaukee

Images of America: Wisconsin

by Richard Prestor

In April 1834, the Green-Bay Intelligencer newspaper reported that a sawmill was being erected in a new settlement on the Milwaukee River. Less than one year later, the paper reported that “Milwaukey [sic], which 10 months ago, had only a single trading house, has now some 20 or 30 houses, and two or three saw mills.” Yankee settlers and land speculators had moved in and were here to stay. The steady growth of Milwaukee was never wholly due to the influx of ambitious Easterners though. In ever-expanding numbers, Europeans also made their way here, not merely as settlers, but frequently as hard-working business owners, skilled laborers, and artists. They were determined to make Milwaukee their home, and in this new homeland they surrounded themselves (and influenced the entire community) with their old traditions and languages. Thirty years after its first newspaper write-up, Milwaukee was a well-established city brimming with potential.

Genres: History

128 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 1999

Reviews

[MaryannC Victorian Dreamer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 actual stars

Nice historical book about Milwaukee and it's people. Always neat to see familiar landmarks from the past that are still present today.

[Maria Rowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed looking at the photos - most of which I'd never seen. This is the first "Images of America" book I've read. It's about what I expected: a hodgepodge of photos and writing. The writing was a bit colloquial for my taste but the writer clearly loves Milwaukee.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice collection of photos of early days in Milwaukee. Good reading on a cold winter’s night. Realistic, at the same time nostalgic. Life was a little harder in “the good old days.”

[Art · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting slice-of-life photographs. Among a dozen music photographs, my favorite shows a parlor piano with Gertrude (Baumgaertner) Damrau looking at sheet music. She played piano and organ for silent films at The Riverside Theater. She also played honky-tonk bars and worked as a song plugger for sheet music customers at the downtown Boston Store. Gertie lived from 1899-1983.

This is a formula book, one of six thousand titles in the series with each one featuring a couple hundred photographs on 128 pages for a standard $22. The quality of writing, editing and varies from title to title. This one suffers from a lack of editing and chronic immersion of the author in the captions. Nonetheless, this book offered some photographs not seen in other history books.

Two and a half stars.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed looking at all the wonderful photos of Milwaukee's past.