Communities Transplanted: Immigrant Pathways to Wisconsin

This section discusses the links between communities immigrants left behind and those they founded or joined in Wisconsin. The three videos at the end introduce a set of Google Earth ‘placemarks’. After watching them, you should explore the areas around each placemark yourself, using Google Earth.  The phrase “communities transplanted” is borrowed from the title of a book by Robert Ostergren, Professor Emeritus of Geography at UW-Madison, on a community of immigrants in Minnesota “transplanted” from Sweden (the 1988 book is called A Community Transplanted: The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West, 1835-1915). Note: One of the videos in this section refers to immigrants from Slovenia who ended up in Willard, Wisconsin. There was a reading made up of recollections by these immigrants and their children that we no longer use in the course. You should still be able to follow the discussion of them in the video, however.

Immigrants to Wisconsin from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world have had a very important and ongoing role in shaping the cultural geography of Wisconsin. In this set of slides and lecture videos, we look at links between the communities immigrants left behind in their countries of origin, and the new communities they created or joined here in Wisconsin. Especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s, rural areas, small towns, and city neighborhoods in Wisconsin were often populated mainly by immigrants from particular countries, and their US-born descendants. Places of worship, social clubs, newspapers, restaurants, and grocery stores all provided people in those communities a connection with the “old country” even as many other aspects of life and work in Wisconsin were very different than in their countries of origin. We can still find signs of those connections in Wisconsin towns and cities today. These photos are from the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Do you recognize any of the places they portray?

Sometimes, the influence of immigrant communities is dramatic, as in the city of Milwaukee, where large numbers of German immigrants settled in the late nineteenth century. As a result, Milwaukee became a major center of German-American culture and political activity, as well as a center of beer-making. This history is still reflected in landmarks of downtown Milwaukee. From left to right, the buildings shown in the two photos below are: 1) the Pabst Theater, 2) City Hall (built to resemble city halls of Germany), and in the second photo 3) the former Blatz brewery (now condominiums).

In other cases, the signs of old immigrant communities are more subtle, and easy to drive by unless you’re looking for them. This next photo shows the Belgian Club in a settlement of Belgian immigrants in Allouez, on the shore of Lake Superior. Just down the road is a Polish immigrant neighborhood in the East End of the city of Superior. Other parts of Superior were home to Finnish immigrants.

One of the most remarkable patterns of immigration to Wisconsin was that people from particular small areas in their country of origin settled together in particular places here in Wisconsin. The photo below shows Polish immigrants in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in the late 1800s. Not only did most settlers around Stevens Point come from Poland, but they came mostly from a fairly small area in northwestern Poland, as we’ll see later. After the earliest arrivals from that area settled near Stevens Point, they were followed by relatives and neighbors who heard of that growing Polish-American community. There, they joined people who spoke the same dialect of Polish, went to the same church, ate the same specialty foods, and so on. Scholars studying immigration have often called this process chain migration, that is, later immigrants following earlier ones to the same locations in the US, because of social ties that go back to their country of origin. Recently, the same term has been used in a much narrower and more negative sense to refer to US policy allowing immigration of the family members of current residents. It’s worth noting that many immigrants to Wisconsin in the 19th century were followed by their siblings or other relatives, along with acquaintances from the same area in the “old country.”

In the following video we introduce the set of Google Earth placemarks chosen to illustrate chain migration and the concept of “communities transplanted” (borrowed from Robert Ostergren, UW-Madison Professor Emeritus of Geography, whose book A Community Transplanted is about a similar case involving Swedish immigrants in Minnesota). These examples also illustrate the great variety of immigrant communities in Wisconsin, including some that are still developing today. We start with the case of immigration in the nineteenth century from Rengstorf, Germany, to Reeseville in Dodge County, Wisconsin.

Here we continue the story with immigrants from northwestern Poland to Portage County, Wisconsin (Town of Sharon and City of Stevens Point). This is followed by a look at immigrants from Belarus and the community they established in the city of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, along with the more recent arrival in Sheboygan of Hmong refugees from Laos.

This third and final video covers the stories behind the remaining Google Earth placemarks: First, the pathway followed by immigrants from Tanca Gora, Slovenia, to Ely, Minnesota, and finally to Willard, Wisconsin. Second, the links between Cheran, Mexico, and Norwalk, Wisconsin.

As the example of Norwalk illustrates, many if not most rural landscapes, towns, and cities in Wisconsin have actually been shaped and reshaped by various groups of people: Native Americans, early settlers from older states to the east and south, European immigrants in the late 19th century, people who migrated from the South to find better jobs in the mid-20th century, and late 20th- or 21st-century immigrants from Latin America and Asia. Sometimes even a walk down the street in a small town reveals some of this complex and interesting history.