In the early days of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, life was not as easy as we would like to assume or pretend. Getting from one place to another was troublesome and took days instead of the hours we can do it today. It was the Watertown Plank Road that made a big difference in traveling around the southeast of Wisconsin and helped grow Milwaukee’s economy.
In the early 1800s, many of the roads around Milwaukee followed old Indian trails or used them as a guide to form newer roads. The Milwuakee-Watertown road, which followed the old Madison Territorial Road, was completed in 1837 in an attempt to make travel between the two towns easier. It was a total of 1,063 miles that could take 4 days to travel when the weather was good and 6 days or more if the weather was not good.
Roads used over a hundred years ago were not made of concrete or asphalt. They were worn down paths made out of dirt. Even with landscaping to create a more even path, it was dirt and hard to travel down when the rains hit. Wet dirt becomes thick mud. This made travel extremely dangerous if not impossible. Personal travel as well as business travel suffered. But that was about to change in the mid-1800s.
A proposal was put forward to plank the Milwaukee-Watertown road. This was a process of where 8 foot boards were cut 2-inches thick and then nailed together to form a firm road. This cut the travel time to just 3 days. Though making personal travel so much easier, it helped increase the economy of the area immensely.
Businesses could now acquire their goods much faster without the delay of bad weather. Produce got to market faster. Dry goods did not have to wait for better weather to be shipped to their destinations. The economy of Milwaukee and Watertown profited greatly with the planking of the road.
This method of infrastructure improvement lasted for several decades. Most plank roads around the state were replaced in the early 1900s, but their memories still linger on.
Today, the portion of this road in Milwaukee is known as the Watertown Plank Road. You can find clothing stores, restaurants, flower ships, medical offices, churches, gift shops, and many more businesses on this road. This road that once helped increase the economy of two towns now is the home of even more economic prosperity.
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