Beloit: Gateway to Wisconsin, Cradle of the Speedometer
Near Rockford, Wisconsin
Beloit sits on the Rock River just a breath north of the Illinois state line, and it has been a crossing point since well before Europeans arrived. It was Ho-Chunk territory, a trading hub on the river, when New Englanders began buying claims along the river in the eighteen thirties. Settlers from Colebrook, New Hampshire, founded the village in eighteen thirty-six.
It was first called New Albany and renamed Beloit in eighteen thirty-eight, a name coined to sound like Detroit. The New England Emigrating Company followed, bringing settlers determined to transplant Yankee institutions to the frontier. They chartered Beloit College in eighteen forty-six, two years before Wisconsin even became a state, making it the oldest continuously operated college in the state.
Its Middle College is Wisconsin's oldest academic building still in use. The Rock River's reliable water power drew manufacturers, and Beloit became one of Wisconsin's early industrial cities. Fairbanks-Morse built engines here.
And Beloit lays claim to the automotive speedometer, developed by Arthur P. Warner. In nineteen seventeen, housing called the Fairbanks Flats was built for Black workers moving to Beloit from the South.
The company built four two-story buildings with six apartments each, apart from the development called Eclipse Park where its white employees lived. Six families arrived in nineteen fifteen and about two hundred fifty by nineteen seventeen. The flats are on the National Register of Historic Places and have been called the nucleus of Beloit's twentieth century Black community.
