It was a generous gift made with a selfish motive. When Milwaukee County’s first courthouse was built in 1836, the future city was a loose confederation of three competing settlements: Juneautown on the east bank of the river, Kilbourntown on the west side, and Walker’s Point a half-mile downstream from both.
All nursed grand ambitions, but Walker’s Point faded quickly, leaving its upriver rivals to struggle for supremacy. They did so with a vengeance, starting newspapers, making strategic gifts of land, and lobbying for public buildings in a determined effort to draw attention – and settlers – to their respective sides of the river.
Tell us who you’d pick to be a Betty this year!
Thanks to the close partnership between Solomon Juneau, the East Side’s founder, and Morgan Martin, a well-connected Green Bay lawyer, Juneautown had the early lead. The partners secured the federal land office, the post office, and then the courthouse for their settlement.
Even though West Side impresario Byron Kilbourn had offered prime lots for the county’s seat of justice – an offer preserved in the name of Court Street – the plum went to a single donated block bordered by what’s now Jackson and Jefferson streets between Wells and (ironically) Kilbourn.
The new Courthouse Square had a few disadvantages, notably the presence of a pond deep enough to serve as a pioneer swimming hole. Juneau and Martin quickly filled it in and built the pleasant little Greek Revival structure pictured here, which housed county offices until 1873, when a towering brownstone edifice was built on the site.
That landmark served the community until the present county courthouse opened on Ninth Street in 1931, a long belated victory for the former Kilbourntown. Stripped of its signature building, Courthouse Square’s most prominent landmark became the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, which had been standing on the square’s east edge since 1847. And so the park was given a new name that it still bears today: Cathedral Square.
Take a closer look…
-
Elms were the tree of choice in many Northern cities until the Dutch elm devastation of the 1960s.
-
The county jail adjoining the courthouse was the scene of Joshua Glover’s dramatic rescue from slavery in 1854.
-
Hitching posts were the 1836 equivalent of parking spaces.
-
A stout fence kept out the cows and pigs that roamed the streets of pioneer Milwaukee.
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MILWAUKEE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
