Boundaries...................

For Kewaunee County residents who fish, hunt, enjoy the casinos or have cottages in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, it is not far away. Why that part of Michigan isn’t Wisconsin is a mystery to many. But, it was "politics." What any mother calls two-year-old behavior was reflected in the politics of the time. Some things never change.

Wisconsin’s boundaries were laid out in the Ordinance of 1787, although there was no name for the place then. As territorial residents began to plan for state governments years later, they began to think boundaries were unjust. To give Illinois outlets to Lake Michigan, that state’s northern boundary was moved 50 miles north of the line set down in 1787. Then Michigan got the slice of land south of Lake Superior that should have been Wisconsin's. That was the inducement offered to settle Michigan’s southern boundary dispute with Ohio.

The Wisconsin Territory was in need of internal improvements and offered in 1834 to stop agitating about boundaries if the Federal Government would build a railroad from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, would improve the Fox River waterway and provide harbors on Lake Michigan. Today we would say the offer was blown off, though the drive for statehood continued. In 1846 Congress authorized Wisconsin to prepare for admission to the Union. When the Federal Government found that the line separating Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula could not be run, it laid out a new line. The new line, however, did not really affect anything.

Wisconsin became a state in 1848, after the people voted on it at least twice. The state had an area of 56,066 square miles but it would have been more, and have counted two lakes as boundaries, if politicians had just left things alone.

 

The map is from The Abandoned Shore-Lines of Eastern Wisconsin by James Walter Goldthwaite, Assistant Professor of Geology at Northwestern University. The book was published at Madison, Wisconsin in 1907. It came from Bulletin No. XVll, Scientific Series No. 5 of Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. The book is in the author's collection.