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New Lisbon, Wisconsin
(New Lisbon Chamber of Commerce Website.)"The village of New Lisbon...presents the appearance of a neat, thrifty village, well supplied with public institutions, societies and hotels, and all braches of business are well represented. It has a population of nearly 1,200, composed of all nationalities, the Americans and Germans being the leading elements." [History of Northern Wisconsin, 1881]
A fine piece of local New Lisbon art.
Amasa Wilson laid out the original plat of New Lisbon in 1855. Wilson may have been New Lisbon's father but its godfather was Andrew Dunn. He had some milling interests up the Lemonweir River but joined Wilson at New Lisbon in the mid-1850's. They later platted a subdivision south of Wilson's original on the route to the railroad depot.
Dunn was a merchant in Portage who also had a seat in the Wisconsin legislature. He persuaded the legislature to name New Lisbon the first county seat when Juneau County was being organized in 1857.
Other settlers arrived in the 1850's.
The most likely source for the name of New Lisbon holds that the County Clerk Larmon Saxton named it either in honor of his home town of Lisbon, Ohio or after the town of Lisbon near Milwaukee where his sister resided.
Downtown New Lisbon on a rather bleak winter day.
The most important event in New Lisbon's early history was the arrival of the railroad in 1857. New Lisbon became the headquarters for railroad workers who needed a good night's rest. In a few short years the village had roughly four hundred residents and no less than eight hotels.
The railroad combined with the sawmills and grain mills on the Lemonweir River to trigger a boom that brought and estimated 2,500 people to the New Lisbon area. Shops and stores, many of them housed in impressive two-story brick buildings lined Bridge and Water Streets.
Merchants and other citizens were so confident of New Lisbon's future and so aware of the railroad's importance that they built a half-mile long board sidewalk from the business district to the depot by means of public subscription rather than taxes.
The new addition to New Lisbon's Public Schools.
New Lisbon's sawmills ran out of Lemonweir timber in the 1870's but the village remained an important grain milling center.
New Lisbon incorporated as a village in 1870.
As northeastern Juneau county developed, New Lisbon became an important transportation center. Stage lines and wagon roads ran to Germantown on the Wisconsin River and to Necedah and beyond. In the late 1870's Necedah lumbermen, led by John T. Kingston, sought a railroad connection to their village and explored the possibility of building a line either to Camp Douglas and the Omaha Line or New Lisbon and the Milwaukee Road.
With the help of Assemblyman W.H.H. Cash, Kingston settled on New Lisbon and the Milwaukee Road. In 1878 the village became the terminal point for the Wisconsin Valley Division of the Milwaukee Road and a railroad center of even greater importance than it already was.
Although a railroad town, New Lisbon was also the home port of Juneau Counties only steamboat line. The thirty-six foot "White Queen" carried passengers and freight and made special excursions up river to Wigwam Point, Hog Island and the Buckley Bridge. The boat operated daily when the season permitted. The shallow-draft steamer was built only nine-feet wide so it could negotiate the curves and bends of the narrow Lemonweir River.
Another view of downtown New Lisbon (same bleak day!)
By 1880 New Lisbon's population was leveling off at roughly one thousand. Growth stopped after the railroad boom, and population figures changed little for forty years. Unless some great change occurred, New Lisbon had gone about as far as it would go for the time. Instead the city suffered from a string of accidents.
A flood on the Lemonweir River in 1899 threatened the New Lisbon dam and men worked day and night to sandbag the threatened spots. Though the dam held, the water table rose high enough to flood privies and contaminate shallow wells in the city. Typhoid fever broke out, infected over 120 people and took three lives in New Lisbon.
Fire destroyed much of the business district in 1903 and a new school built in 1900 burned to the ground in 1907.
Yet not all the news was bad. New Lisbon had its own phone exchange in 1900 and electric generators were installed at the dam shortly after. The school destroyed by fire was rebuilt and enlarged so it was able to accomodate the students of the normal school located there in 1916.
About this same time New Lisbon became home to one of Juneau county's most unusual business, the pearl button factory of Wallace McNeeley. He had learned his trade at Muscatine, Iowa, the pearl button capital of the Mississippi Valley, and found ample stock for his trade in the streams and river of Juneau and Sauk counties.
The Great Depression brought the end of the pearl button business to New Lisbon. Unemployment and business bankruptcies occurred and the bank was robbed, not once, but twice. In 1938 a new dam was erected across the Lemonweir River at New Lisbon. It maintained and enlarged the old millpond to give the city a recreational area.
A beautiful flower garden in New Lisbon is a gift for all who see!
The start of World War II saw the end of the depression. In 1943 Robert L. Walker moved to New Lisbon and started his Stainless Steel Equipment Company. Ten years later it made jobs for fifty-six employees who fabricated steel tanks for the dairy, chemical and paper industries.
New Lisbon has come a long way since the days when Sam Pilkington and John Kingston picnicked there in 1838. Click the link in this sentence for the Juneau County Economic Development Corportation's New Lisbon page.
