In 1904, workers paused in Zion, Ill., as the North Shore line pushed south from Milwaukee. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photo)
Milwaukee historian John Gurda on Milwaukee's rail past:
Proposed rail link to Chicago through Racine and Kenosha has historic roots and future challenges
By JOHN GURDA
Posted: Feb. 3, 2007
Chicago is getting closer. We're already linked to our southern neighbor by air, freeway and Amtrak service, and now Milwaukee is considering yet another connection: a new rail line feeding into Chicago's Metra system.
The proposed commuter line would run along existing freight tracks from downtown Kenosha through the heart of Racine and into Milwaukee's business district, with several stops along the way. Proponents of the KRM Commuter Link, as it's formally known, argue that the project would create jobs, reduce pollution and encourage economic development all along the corridor - a winning proposition for everyone.
Our ancestors once harbored similar hopes. In the 1850s, when trains began to replace lake ships as our region's dominant transportation mode, Milwaukee looked to railroads as the key to its future. The city gladly lent money to any enterprise with a locomotive and a business plan - so much money, in fact, that by 1858, railroad bonds exceeded one-fourth of Milwaukee's assessed valuation.
Although the practice would eventually push his city to the edge of bankruptcy, Mayor James Cross saw nothing wrong with it. "The advantages resulting to the city from its liberal policy cannot well be foretold," Cross told the aldermen in 1855. "Already we begin to feel the magical, life-giving influence which it is exerting upon our trade and commerce."
The first leg of Milwaukee's pioneer railroad was completed to Waukesha in 1851, but Chicago was considerably farther along. The first trains from the east reached the foot of the lake in 1852, and the Windy City became a national rail hub almost overnight.
Local promoters were soon pushing for a Chicago-Milwaukee connection. It took shape as the Green Bay, Milwaukee and Chicago Railroad, a city-supported venture better known as the Lake Shore line. In 1855, the Lake Shore was completed to Kenosha, where it connected with another railroad to Chicago. The KRM Commuter Link would start at the same place and follow the same route north.
A delegation of Milwaukeeans rode down to Kenosha for the "last spike" ceremony on May 19, 1855, joining a group of 400 Chicagoans. Though a lawyer by trade, Cross himself wielded the sledgehammer, driving the spike, reported the Milwaukee Sentinel approvingly, "as if he were used to it."
Cross invoked the spirit of regional cooperation in his remarks. "We have come hither this morning to meet you in a common cause," the mayor told his neighbors, "for the purpose of formally uniting the cities of Chicago and Milwaukee and the sister cities along the line, by bands of iron - and at the same time unite the hearts of their citizens - by the indissoluble bonds of social and commercial intercourse and friendship."
The Milwaukee Sentinel was just as hopeful: "This road will place us within three hours' distance of Chicago and its connections East and South, and thus, until the direct route Eastward is in operation, take the full tide of trade and travel, to and from the East. It must pay, from the start."
Beneath the enthusiasm was an undercurrent of deep concern. During the heyday of lake shipping, Milwaukee lay 90 miles closer to the eastern seaboard than Chicago. With the advent of rail service, the city was 90 miles farther away. Our ancestors were vulnerable, and they knew it.
The wisdom of a rail link to Chicago was self-evident, but Milwaukee desperately wanted an eastern connection of its own - the "direct route Eastward" mentioned in the Sentinel story. Even as Cross was driving the last spike, a group of local promoters was trying to develop cross-lake ferry service between Milwaukee and the railhead at Grand Haven, Mich.
That idea was a few decades ahead of its time, but Milwaukee was determined to preserve its independence. The city's homegrown railroad, famous in later years as the Milwaukee Road, became a stubborn rival of the Chicago & North Western, the Lake Shore line's successor.
The Milwaukee company laid its own tracks to Chicago and declined to share terminal facilities with its adversary. That's why two grand railroad depots were built in downtown Milwaukee: one on the lakefront for the North Western and a second on 3rd and Clybourn streets for the Milwaukee Road. Both, unfortunately, met their demise decades ago.
An independent railroad network made all the difference in the world - or at least in southeastern Wisconsin. It was Milwaukee's excellent rail connections and superb harbor that kept the city from withering in the deep shade of Chicago. By 1862, Milwaukee was the largest shipper of wheat on the planet, and it was developing the critical mass that enabled it to keep growing even as its neighbor to the south became America's Second City.
The tracks between the two cities have remained busy ever since. More than 150 years after the first trains clattered down the line in 1855, it's fascinating, and more than a little ironic, to watch the same hopes and some of the same fears come to life on the same route connecting the same lakeshore cities.
I support the KRM Commuter Link. Chicago, after all, is a great place to live 90 miles away from, and getting there by train is infinitely more pleasant than traveling by car.
But we need to proceed with our eyes wide open. I take it for granted that a megalopolis will one day sprawl from southwestern Michigan all the way to Milwaukee and then on to Madison and Sheboygan, with Chicago at its epicenter. It won't happen in my lifetime, but it may in my children's.
When you fly over southeastern Wisconsin at night, there are still bands of relative darkness separating Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and that vast ocean of light that is Chicago. Year by year, those bands are growing brighter, and the KRM Commuter Link would hasten the day when they finally coalesce.
The threat to Milwaukee is not economic subjugation, as it was in the 1850s, but cultural annexation. Chicago has been spreading like an amoeba for decades, and its reach now extends across the state line.
I have friends who compete in the Chicagoland Women's Triathlon each year. The event is held in Pleasant Prairie - Wisconsin.
Milwaukee is hardly a quaint little village on the verge of being overrun by uncaring outlanders. Chicago's mushrooming influence isn't much different, in truth, from the impact Milwaukee's outward expansion has had on Waukesha or West Bend.
But Milwaukee has always been a place apart, relating to Chicago in much the same way that Canada relates to the United States. Losing some of that distinctiveness may be inevitable, and it may not be all bad.
But as we look down the tracks to Chicago, let's be careful what we wish for.
Link: JS Online: Bands of iron.
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