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Dane County Wisconsin |
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The Town of Perry occupies the southwest corner of Dane County and when one considers that Dane County contains the city of Madison, the state capital, and that this city is also the second largest in the state of Wisconsin, it is not surprising that the history of Madison and the county in which it is situated has been the subject of numerous publications, beginning as early as 1851, with the pamphlet published by Carpenter & Tenney of Madison entitled "Statistics of Dane County, Wisconsin; with a Business Directory in part, of the Village of Madison." The first comprehensive histories of Dane County that also specifically mention the Town of Perry were entitled A History of Madison, the Capital of Wisconsin; Including The Four Lake Country, With an Appendix of Notes on Dane County and its Towns, which was written in 1874, by Daniel S. Durrie and which was followed by a second history in 1877, edited by William J. Park, entitled Madison, Dane County and Surrounding Towns. Subsequent comprehensive county-wide histories that treat the history of the Town of Perry include the History of Dane County, Wisconsin: Containing an Account of its Settlement, Development, and Resources, edited by Consul W. Butterfield and published in 1880, and the History of Dane County, edited by Elisha W. Keyes, and published in 1906. The most recent history, Forward! A History of Dane: the Capital County, by Allen Ruff and Tracy Will, was published in 2000 and brings the history of the county up to the present day. By far the most important publication related to the history of the Town of Perry, however, is The Historic Perry Norwegian Settlement. Daleyville, WI: The Perry Historical Center, 1994, which was compiled by the members of the Perry community and edited by Mary Yeater Rathbun. This 247-page illustrated and indexed history contains not only an extensive general chronological history of the Town but also histories of its industries, institutions, organizations, businesses, families, and individuals, and it is an invaluable resource that goes far beyond the possible scope of an intensive survey in describing the history of the Town. Consequently, no attempt will be made here to cover the ground that has been so expertly covered by so many others. Instead, the history that follows will attempt to provide a general framework within which the historic resources in the Town can be understood. The earliest permanent Euro-American settlement in the southwest part of Dane County occurred in 1829 when Massachusetts-born Ebenezer Brigham settled in what is today the northwest corner of the Town of Blue Mounds on the far west edge of the county, this being the township that is located immediately to the north of the Town of Perry. Brigham was drawn to this area by its proximity to the already established lead mining region in the southwest corner of what is now Wisconsin and his faith was quickly rewarded when the first shaft he sank struck a vein of lead. Brigham then built a furnace to process the lead into portable and salable bars and the dwelling he built became the first trading post/general store/hotel in what is now Dane County. Among the first visitors to "Brigham's Place," as it was typically called, was James Duane Doty, who was then a federal district judge and land speculator living in Green Bay. Doty, along with two others, was then making his first overland trip from Green Bay to the village of Prairie Du Chien on the Mississippi River on a route that took them past the four lakes district that is situated in the center of what is today's Dane County. It was on this trip that Doty first conceived of the idea of developing the four lakes site as a future city, but any plans relating to the settling this area had to wait until the Native American tribes who then occupied most of southwestern Wisconsin were rendered harmless. In the meantime, Doty and others set about planning the route of a future military road that would connect the U.S. Army forts located at Prairie Du Chien, Portage, and Green Bay. Work on this route was interrupted by the Blackhawk War, a short conflict fought in the summer of 1832 between Native Americans led by Chief Blackhawk and Euro-American settlers and militia. This conflict began in northern Illinois and culminated in what is commonly known as the battle of Wisconsin Heights for its location in northwestern Dane County overlooking the Wisconsin River. Wisconsin Heights was a defeat for Chief Blackhawk and his followers, and their subsequent slaughter at the Battle at the mouth of the Bad Axe River in Vernon County was a major turning point for both the Native Americans and those wanting to settle in Wisconsin. The end result of the War was the removal of all Native American tribes in the lower Wisconsin area to lands west of the Mississippi River, which in turn opened up the vacated land to the east for settlement. With the land made safe for settling, Doty and other speculators began to give more concrete thought to the future ownership of the land, which was then entirely owned by the Federal government. An important event that would effect all future land transactions occurred in 1834, when the Federal government began the official survey of its land. Another important event that would aid in future settlement occurred in 1835, when work on the Military Road began, the route of which Doty had made sure would pass not far from the four lakes district he had seen in 1829. Two more seminal events occurred in 1836, when the Wisconsin Territory was separated from the previously established Michigan Territory and when the first Territorial Legislature decided that the future capital of the future state of Wisconsin would be located on the isthmus that separated the two largest of the four lakes that were located in the center of what was to become Dane County. As it happened, this land was owned by James Doty and Gov. Stephen Mason of Michigan, and it was Doty who named the future city "Madison" after James Madison, the former U.S. President, and it was also Doty who suggested that the county be named "Dane" after Nathan Dane, the framer of the ordinance that created the Northwest Territory in 1787, of which Wisconsin was long a part. On December 7, 1836, the Wisconsin Territorial legislature passed an act creating Dane County and naming Madison as both the state capital and as the judicial seat of Dane County. These events all acted as a spur to land speculation, but this did not immediately translate into settlement. Truly significant settlement and growth trailed actual county formation by almost two decades. In the 1830's, when Dane County was in its earliest stages, speculators gobbled up much of the land as soon as it was put up for sale by the U.S. government. Speculators, however, were rarely farmers. They were merely temporary landholders, who waited for others to arrive, then sold their land to them at a profit. They counted on Dane County's future as a center of government and education, and they were not disappointed.(1) Even though work had begun on the first capital building in Madison in 1837, it would still be almost eleven more years before the building was finished and the 1840 Federal census of Dane County found only 314 inhabitants in the whole of the county. Never-the-less, settlers did begin to arrive as word spread about the rich farmlands the county contained, and the 1840s were to witness an enormous growth in the county's population. The county's first settlers were a remarkably diverse group, being composed not only of Yankee transplants from the eastern and northeastern states, but of immigrants from much of western Europe as well. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 generated a boom in western agriculture, providing western farmers with an opportunity to compete with farmers in the East and sell their goods in eastern markets. The canal also provided a quick route for westbound emigrants, helping to move large numbers of farmers and villagers from the Hudson Valley of upstate New York and nearby Vermont. Many of these people would later seek new opportunity on the fertile lands of southern Wisconsin. The panic of 1837, the major economic calamity of the era, uprooted groups of Yankees and propelled them westward to start new lives. Conditions in Ireland, Norway, Germany, England, and France in the 1840s gave rise to an exodus of emigrants in search of economic opportunity, political and religious freedom. Some were driven by political upheaval and agricultural dislocations. Some fled famine and other hardships. Others were lured by the promise of land agent's promotional literature or by letters from friends and family already settled on Dane County's rich farmland.(2) Some of these settlers came alone, some came as families, and some came in groups. The lucky ones had someone already on hand to sponsor them and help them settle into this sometimes strange and frightening new land. Most of the county's rural settlement was the result of a random, even haphazard pattern of development. At first, newcomers tended to settle where earlier arriving members of their particular ethnic group or place of origin had already settled and this resulted in certain parts of the county becoming especially associated with these groups. Not surprisingly, Yankee settlers were typically the earliest to arrive and they can be identified as the earliest settlers in the majority of the county's townships, but were especially numerous in the central parts of the county in the townships surrounding Madison, townships that contained land that was rich and readily farmed. Such settlers were also the first to make permanent homes in what was to become the Town of Perry. The town [of Perry] was first settled in the spring of 1846, by John Brown, a native of Indiana, who settled on section 27. John Hobart and Anton Kellar, from Germany, came later in the year, and located on sections 3 and 10. The next year, Shute Rudy and John Sears, from Kentucky; John Eastman, from Ohio, and S. H. Campbell settled mostly on the southern border. In February, 1848, B. F. Denson, a native of North Carolina, moved in and settled on Section 34.(3) While Yankee and German settlers were the first to arrive, it was settlers from Norway that were to give the Town its distinctive ethnic character. Norwegian immigrants were among the most numerous of the early settlers in Dane County and while individuals and families could be found in most of its townships they were concentrated most heavily in the southeast part of the county, on the Koshkonong Prairie, in the townships of Deerfield, Albion, Dunkirk, and Christiana, and in the southwest part in Perry, Primrose, Blue Mounds, Vermont, and Springdale townships. Over 7500 Norwegians migrated to Wisconsin between 1840 and 1850. Nearly 2700 lived on the Koshkonong Prairie, and about 2000 had settled in the towns of Blue Mounds, Springdale, Perry, and Primrose by 1850.(4) The earliest Norwegian settlers in what would become the Town of Perry arrived in the summer of 1848. Prominent among them was Hans Johnson, on section 20; Lars Halverson, on section 17; T. Thompson, on section 17; and Ole O. Bakken, on section 4. The last named bought out a Norwegian who had arrived the year before. The above named individuals may rightfully be considered the pioneers of the town.(5) These settlers were just the first of what would soon be a large wave of Norwegian settlers into this area. The most successful of those areas in Wisconsin that first received large numbers of Norwegian immigrants had been the Koshkonong settlement in southeast Dane County, which was founded in 1840. By 1850, it [the Koshkonong settlement] covered twelve townships in two counties (Dane and Jefferson) and had a population of 543 Norwegian families, including 2670 people. The next major Norwegian immigrant settlement in Wisconsin after Koshkonong was the Blue Mounds Settlement of which the historic Perry Norwegian Settlement was a part. Established in 1848, the Blue Mounds Settlement encompassed some 250 square miles. It extended from Black Earth [south] to Blanchardville and from near New Glarus [west] to Barneveld [in Iowa County]. By the time it reached its apex in the 1880s, the Blue Mounds Settlement was home to about 6000 Norwegians and was organized into eight Norwegian state church-oriented congregations: Perry, Springdale, Primrose, East Blue Mounds, West Blue Mounds, Vermont (initially known as North Blue Mounds), Adamsville (now Hollandale), and York. Unlike the overall Blue Mounds Settlement, each of the individual parishes was small enough that settlers at the southern end knew farmers at the northern end yet [were] inclusive enough that most of an individual's social relations occurred within the parish.(6) Part of the reason that such dense concentrations of Norwegian settlers evolved were to be found in circumstances that were particular to this ethnic group. Many of those wishing to emigrate from Norway were members of extended family groups who were associated with, but not bound to, farms in Norway. In Norway, several households — some related to each other and others not — all lived on one farm. There would be the landowner's household, the household of tenant farmers renting parcels of the farm, and the households of sharecroppers who worked the land the owner retained. In addition, servants, day laborers, the parents of the landowner, and some paupers lived on most farms. All told, on a large farm, this could easily add up to 80 to 100 people living in a dozen separate households.(7) This situation was also to be found in other parts of Europe as well and was true in Italy, to name just one example, up until the end of World War II. What made Norway unusual was the contractual relationship that non-land-owning farm residents had with their land owners. The easily understandable, natural tendency, common throughout the nineteenth century, for family groups to emigrate together was reinforced in rural Norway by the fact that almost everyone wishing to emigrate was available to go at the same time. While most of the rest of Europe was evolving and dissolving the feudal system, Norway was developing what might be called a contractual system. The people who worked the land in Norway were never bound to that land. They could, and did, move freely from one place to another. By the nineteenth century, non-landowning rural Norwegians worked under the terms of six-month "contracts." This practice was so widespread that tradition set two annual moving days, April 14th and October 14th. On those days farm laborers, domestic servants, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers could, if it was agreeable to both them and their employer or landlord, extend their employment or lease for another six months or they could move to a new place. … As non-landowners were the most likely to emigrate, this meant that all those most likely to emigrate could easily arrange to be free to leave on April 14th.(8) Thus, Norwegians tended to arrive in Wisconsin as part of large groups of related persons instead of singly or as part of a small family group, which meant that they arrived having a built-in support network. Once here, the new immigrants then typically gravitated towards places that had already been settled by other Norwegians, some of whom might well be members of their own families or of families that had once been neighbors in Norway. All of this gave them a better start than many new arrivals, but this did not exempt them from the hard life of the pioneer. These first settlers were, out of necessity, a self-sufficient lot who supplied most of their own needs. Most of the food that they ate they raised themselves, many of their simple tools had either been brought with them when they arrived or were made on the farm, and even the clothing they wore was often made by members of the family who sometimes even utilized materials derived from the animals they raised. Part of the attraction of Dane County for the new arrivals coming from Norway in the 1840s and 1850s was the abundance of cheap land that was then available. Norway, in the nineteenth century, had experienced a population boom similar to the one that had occurred in Ireland during the same period, with the consequence that the amount of arable land that was available to support a non-landowning farming family's upkeep had shrunk to the point where some families were cultivating farms of just two or three acres. With 40 acres being the size of a large farm in Norway at that time it is not hard to imagine the attraction that buying a similar size or much larger piece of land in Wisconsin would have had to these land-starved immigrants. Many of these new arrivals first lived with Norwegian families that had arrived earlier and they often hired themselves out as laborers until they had saved enough money to buy land of their own. Almost invariably, the first houses they built were built out of logs, but these houses came out of a different tradition than those of other settlers, who typically looked upon them as a necessary expedient until they could build something better. From the 1840s until the turn of the century, log houses were the norm in the Perry Norwegian Settlement. … Unlike most other American pioneers, the Norwegian immigrants to the Perry Settlement were not learning a new construction technique. Rather, they were using skills that had been honed to perfection in Norway and which they brought with them. Regardless of how much the log cabin has become a symbol of America's past, it is, in reality, a cultural carry-over from Scandinavia. Norwegians were better prepared to cope with the problems of housing in a wilderness that had a least some trees than settlers from most other countries. Log houses had been part of Norwegian culture since pre-historic times when tribes driven out of northern Germany and across the Skagerrak into the pristine forests of the Nordic peninsula invented the construction technique. The vast majority of rural Norwegians continued to live in simple log homes until the later part of the 19th century and the early twentieth century — just about when house styles began to change in the Perry Settlement.(9) And yet, however self-sufficient the new settlers of the Town were, they still needed some goods and services that they could not supply themselves and this meant first, that they needed a means of getting from the farm to the place where these goods and services could be had, and second, that there needed to be some place for them to go to. The led to the creation of the Town's first system of roads and the establishment of the Town's first hamlets. As was noted earlier, the first statewide road system in Wisconsin was the military roads system developed in territorial days to improve the passage of goods and soldiers between the various U.S. Army forts in the territory. These roads left almost everything to be desired but they still formed the basis of the road system that would eventually evolve into the state and the national highway systems of today. During the territorial period and the years following statehood, other roads branched off the military roads, running from various settlements along Lake Michigan to the Wisconsin River as well as to Mineral Point and the lead region. As the population grew in southern and eastern Wisconsin, public demand for more and better roads for travel and transporting agricultural products to market increased. Between 1836 and 1848, the territorial legislature authorized the establishment of 249 territorial roads. Following statehood in 1848, roads laid out and opened by authorization of the legislature were designated "State Roads." … Responsibility and costs for road care, however, were delegated to the local units of government—a condition that was to last until the early twentieth century.(10) Fortunately for future settlers in the Town of Perry, one of the state's military roads already passed through the northwest corner of the county and another was later developed between Madison and Milwaukee.(11) Thus, overland access to this vicinity was already available as early as 1837. The Army had constructed the first real road in Wisconsin on the Military Ridge, extending 85 miles from the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers near Prairie Du Chien to just west of where Madison is now. This road passed right through the Blue Mounds Settlement. After 1838, spurs connected it directly to Madison and Monroe and from there on to the port of Milwaukee. By 1840, stage service to and from Madison was available on this route. By 1848, travel time from Boston or New York to the Blue Mounds Settlement via Milwaukee was 15 days by a combination of train, boat, stagecoach, private wagon and foot.(12) Up until 1851, the land that now makes up the Town of Perry had been a part of the adjacent Town of Primrose, but in that year its population reached the point where it was large enough to justify setting it off as a township of its own. This was done on April 4, 1851, and the new township was named Perry in honor of Commodore O. H. Perry, who had been one of the heroes of the War of 1812. This event also coincided with the establishment of several other institutions that were to have a lasting impact on the Town's citizens. The creation of places at which settlers could purchase goods and sometimes services that they could not provide for themselves was a natural byproduct of the process of road-building. The most typical kind of place that evolved to serve settler's needs in this period was a "crossroads" community. As its name suggests, a crossroads community is a place where two or more roads intersect. Such a place has a natural advantage over a place located on just a single road because it has traffic coming to it from three or more directions rather than just two. Usually, the establishment of such a community had to wait until at least two intersecting roads had been created before it could come into being, but there were exceptions. Occasionally, a community came into being after a business, church, or mill was established at a particular location. For instance, the hamlet of Daleyville in the Town of Perry, evolved around the place where a pioneer entrepreneur decided to build a general store. What would become Daleyville was established in 1853, when Onun B. Dahle established his first store at this location. This was the second building to be constructed there, the first having been the Town's first school, a log building that was located close by. The mere fact of the existence of these two new buildings and the traffic they generated was enough cause others to build residences there as well, and in 1856, construction also began on a new church nearby for the Perry Lutheran congregation. Thus, by the time the 1858 Christmas Day service was held in what is now Perry Lutheran Church, Daleyville consisted of the partly finished church, O. B. Dahle's store, his log cabin, the log school down the hill east of the store, two Norwegian immigrant families' farm houses on either side of the school — the Hans Johnson Dales' and the John O. and Guro Dahlby's. It also included, west of Dahle's store, the Gulbran Pederson Renden family's house and, southwest of the store, a "Yankee" family farm, the Prindables.(13) Soon thereafter, the presence of this fledgling community generated enough traffic and commerce to justify the routing of a second intersecting road to the place, thereby creating a crossroads community. More typical, however, were communities that evolved once a crossroads had already been created. Very often, a few residences were already extant in these places before places of business were established, but generally it was the establishment of a store or perhaps a post office or school at these locations that was the critical element leading to the creation of a community.(14) Such a community would have typically consisted of just a few residences, a store or two, perhaps a small school, and perhaps also a church, resources that were the essence of a rural community in those days. For instance, Forward, the Town of Perry's second hamlet, possessed a school as early as 1853 but had little else for many years. A post office of this name was finally established here in 1872 and the first store was built in 1874 and was replaced by the present one ca.1908. By 1870, the population of the Town of Perry had reached 1051, the vast majority of whom were of Norwegian descent and Lutheran, with the remainder being of German descent and Roman Catholic. Almost all of these persons made a living from farming and up until the late 1860s most of the agricultural activity in the Town revolved around the raising of wheat, as was true elsewhere in the state. After the wheat market collapsed in 1872, however, farmers in the Town moved first to other cash crops such as corn and oats, and then turned to dairying, which was better suited to the unglaciated valleys of the Town. The sale of fluid milk itself was not practical until well into the twentieth century, however, due to transportation and refrigeration problems, so farmers turned instead to the production of butter and especially to the manufacture of cheese as a way of getting their produce to markets. By the 1880s, small cheese factories had begun to appear throughout the Town and they would continue to occupy an important place in the economic life of the Town until well into the twentieth century. Basic changes in the economic and social structure of Dane County were occurring in the 1870s, however, that would have a lasting effect on all of the county's communities and Towns and especially on its least populous ones. During the entire decade of the 1870's, Dane County grew by only 137 persons—a statistic which easily can lead the unwary to assume that nothing much of importance was going on. In fact a lot was: new buildings, a heightened sense of prosperity and accomplishment, and an agricultural technology that was advancing by leaps and bounds. The raw statistic of 137 persons masks a subtlety: important shifts in where people lived During the 1870's, Dane County's cities and villages were growing handily, while farm and rural populations were declining. Madison alone gained 1148 residents (for an 1880 total of 10,915), while Stoughton and Mazomanie, the two largest communities besides Madison, grew by 368 (to 985) and 97 (to 1143) respectively. Clearly change was afoot. The key to understanding this rural-to-urban shift can be found in the transformation of agriculture into a mechanized industry during the 1800's. Where many hands and hours of labor once had been required to harvest a wheat field, the reaper was doing the job. Everywhere new planting, cultivating, and harvesting equipment permitted fewer persons to do more farm work than platoons of workers had been able to accomplish a generation earlier. This soon led to a surplus farm population and to changes in population distribution, enabled by both natural and economic forces. First, many of the county's original settlers were aging and dying, never having left their farms. Second, some of the younger men and women were moving to nearby towns and cities out of sheer economic necessity.(15) These trends were also affecting the Town of Perry as well but it would continue to be predominantly rural and Norwegian in character until the middle of the twentieth century thanks partly to its lack of connections to a rail line. The Milwaukee & Mississippi road was the first to lay track in Wisconsin, beginning its existence as the Milwaukee & Waukesha Railroad, which received its charter from the state legislature in 1847. After changing its name to the Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad in 1850, the company laid the state's first track between Milwaukee and Waukesha and then began its long journey across the southern part of the state, its ultimate goal being to reach Prairie du Chien and the Mississippi River. By May of 1854, track had been extended as far west as Madison, an occasion that was greeted with jubilation by residents in that city who almost immediately saw 25-30 car trains loaded with wheat leaving the city for markets in the eastern part of the state and beyond. Early in 1856, the railroad began to lay track westward from Madison on a route that brought it to Prairie Du Chien in 1857.(16) The impact that the railroad had on Dane County cannot be overestimated. Eventually, significant numbers of settlers did arrive [in Dane County], but not until a suitable transportation network had been created. And that network did not come into existence until 1854 with the construction of a railroad line to link Dane County conveniently to the world of commerce. The railroad occasioned dramatic change in the county's population. In 1850 Dane County was home to 16,139 persons; in 1855 there were more than twice as many—37,714. The railroad had indeed made a difference.(17) Another indicator of the impact that this railroad had on the county's communities is the fact that all of the already existing Dane County communities that were located on this line (Madison, Cross Plains, and Black Earth) and all those that were developed as a direct and immediate consequence of its construction (Stoughton, McFarland, Middleton, and Mazomanie) are still in existence today and have grown large enough to achieve village and even city status with the passing of the years. The construction of another railroad line westward from Madison by the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad in 1881 followed a route that took it through Mt. Horeb and Blue Mounds and it also contributed to the growth of both, but it especially affected Mt. Horeb, which would soon become the principal community in southwest Dane County. Mt. Horeb also then became the principal rail connection for citizens in the Town of Perry, which is located seven miles to the south. Changes in the size of the rural population of the county during the 1870s and 1880s were also accompanied by changes in the size and number of the county's farms. As the increase in the size of farms through the decade indicates, land passed into the hands of the more prosperous: the number of farms 20 to 50 acres in size was 1,482 in 1870 and 687 in 1880. Farms measuring 50 to 100 acres numbered 2,243 at the beginning of the decade but dropped to 1,577 at the end. In the same period, those ventures ranging from 100 to 500 acres increased from 1,327 to 3,258. By 1880, there were 43 farms over 500 acres. The average size was 128 acres. These figures reflect the concentration that accompanied the conversion process from wheat to dairy.(18) This trend certainly held true in the Town of Perry as well even though the predominance of its Norwegian settlers continued and even increased for a time. As non-Norwegians moved away or died, new Norwegian families replaced them and earlier Norwegian families expanded their holdings. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Norwegian community grew absolutely because of the arrival of newcomers. The percentage of Norwegians also grew as non-Norwegians left. As Norwegian families produced more children than the land could support, the surplus left to seek opportunities in other locations, but the pioneer Norwegian families continued to be represented in successive generations. Individual mobility was tempered by family persistence. About 40 percent of the 200 families in the community in 1856 had members still here in 1900 and just under 10 percent of those early families are still represented in the community in 1994. Although their numerical strength in the community had declined by 1900, these core families continued to hold nearly two-thirds of the land. They had become landlords as well as farmers. Nearly 25 percent of all the farmers in the Perry Norwegian Settlement were renters by the turn of the century. In addition, many of the core family owner-operators had live-in hired hands, most of whom were from Norway.(19) The increased concentration of the Town's farm land in fewer hands also represented an increase in the prosperity of those who owned them. Evidence of this increased prosperity could be seen on farms throughout the Town by the turn of the century, many of which now sported new, larger farmhouses and dairy barns that had been constructed as replacements for their pioneer equivalents; a trend that would continue until the end of World War I. The impact of these changes on Daleyville was also soon apparent. Town farmers who were looking to retire increasingly chose this place to build their retirement houses in these newcomers caused Daleyville to increase in size slowly but surely throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A few houses popped up [in Daleyville] in the 1880, but in the 1890s a real building boom commenced. Most of the houses in Daleyville were built between then and 1915.(20) Citizens in the Town of Perry and in Daleyville managed to survive and even prosper in the second half of the nineteenth century despite (or perhaps because of) their lack of a railway connection, and much that made this rural life a desirable one also managed to survive intact as well. Partly this was because of the sorry state of the county's rural highway system in the last third of the nineteenth century. The three decades between 1870 and 1890 proved to be a "dark age" in the development, improvement, and repair of rural highways throughout the state. The private road-building companies had for the most part passed out of existence. The state could give no aid or encouragement to road construction, because of the constitutional provision against aiding in works of internal improvement. The town was the unit of road administration, and practically all road improvement was done under town supervision in the form of statutory labor. It was an era in which, in thinking of transportation, the public thought in terms of the railroad. So far as highway traffic was concerned, it was the era of the horse-drawn vehicle, where the range of traffic was limited to meeting place, market, and mill, and when a highway of the most meager type seemed to suit the ordinary purpose of rural travel. Very little effort was made to develop the strictly rural highways so as to connect the various urban centers, so little consideration was given to the construction of a connected system of improved highways throughout the counties.(21) The coming of the automobile changed all that. The county's railroads had already permanently changed rural shopping habits by making goods in city stores more readily available to the farming community and this was further reinforced by the advent of catalog shopping in the 1890s from firms such as Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co.. All of these goods ultimately reached consumers via the nation's railroad network, and, this economic activity tended to bypass merchants in places such as Daleyville. This relegated the general store in these places to a market niche that was increasingly restricted to selling only the most basic wants, a niche that continued to be a relatively secure one in horse-drawn days. Once automobiles began to arrive, however, farmers had improved access to larger stores in nearby villages and cities as well, not just to the limited selection of goods sold in the local general store. Not surprisingly, the ultimate impact on the rural general store was devastating. Another concurrent development that served to diminish the role of places like Daleyville in the life of the county's farming communities was the creation of the Rural Free Delivery mail system. The first such experimental rural delivery routes began in West Virginia in 1896 and it ultimately brought about a revolution in rural life nationwide. Today it is difficult to envision the isolation that was the lot of farm families in early America. In the days before telephones, radios, or television were common, the farmer's main link to the outside word were the mail and the newspapers that came by mail to the nearest post office. Since the mail had to be picked up, this meant a trip to the post office, often involving a day's travel, round-trip. The farmer might delay picking up mail for days, weeks, even months until the trip could be coupled with one for supplies, food, or equipment. The West Virginia experiment with rural free delivery was launched in relative obscurity and an atmosphere of hostility. Critics of the plan claimed that it was impractical and too expensive to have a postal carrier trudge over rutted roads and through forests trying to deliver mail in all kinds of weather. However, the farmers, without exception, with the new service and with the new world open to them. After receiving free delivery for a few months, one observed it would take away part of life to give it up. A Missouri farmer looked back on his life and calculated that, in 15 years, he had traveled 12,000 miles going to and from his post office to get the mail. A byproduct of rural free delivery was the stimulation it provided to the development of the great American system of roads and highways. A prerequisite for rural delivery was good roads. After hundreds of petitions for rural delivery were turned down by the post office because of unserviceable and inaccessible roads, responsible local governments began to extend and improve existing highways. Between 1897 and 1908, these local governments spent an estimated $72 million on bridges, culverts, and other improvements.(22) At first, the advent of Rural Free Delivery or RFD, as it is better known, probably did not have a negative effect on Daleyville, but as roads improved, mail was increasingly delivered from post offices in villages and cities rather than ones in hamlets with the result that post offices in the county's hamlets were gradually discontinued, giving farmers one less reason to go there. Better roads and the coming of the automobile also changed other aspects of rural life as well. The car had a complex impact on rural religious life. County congregations, long-time social as well as religious institutions and often unifying centers for rural neighborhoods, suddenly found themselves in competition with city and village churches. Some folded while others merged with congregations of kindred persuasion "in town." Consolidation, while often leading to improved facilities, a stable ministry and an increase in village church attendance, left many congregations to wither. Another institution directly affected by the automobile was the rural school. The local county schools, ill-equipped by urban standards, had long been a concern of educational reformers, eager to consolidate them. Local residents, however, resisted consolidation. Local control had real meaning. Many district schools served as neighborhood social centers. In some parts of the county the district boundaries had defined the neighborhood. … While the idea of consolidation and the related transport of area children to one central facility predated the automobile and bus, the latter facilitated the process by solving transportation concerns. Road improvements and the appearance of the school bus spelled the end of the country school, despite resistance by some counties that lasted into the 1950s and 1960s.(23) Thus, by the time the United States entered World War II, most of the institutions that gave places like Daleyville their original reason for being had been rendered obsolete. Good roads and the automobile brought the general stores and other retail enterprises in these places into competition with the much larger retail stores in the county's villages and cities and also into competition with nationwide retail chains, a competition that could have but one outcome. The result has been that historic rural hamlets like Daleyville have essentially lost their ties to the farms that still surround most of them and they are now primarily self-contained places where people live but do not work or shop. The consolidation of the schools located in the Town has also diminished the role that they once played in rural life. The Town's churches, however, are still active and continue to be the center of community life and the Town continues to be essentially a rural community even today and farming is still its principal occupation.
Endnotes: 1. Holzheuter, John O. "Introduction." Mandel, David. Settlers of DaneCounty: The Photographs of Andreas Larsen Dahl. Madison: Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission, 1985, p. 5.
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