Edgerton: Tobacco City USA

Edgerton, Wisconsin calls itself Tobacco City USA, and it earned that name. The city was founded in eighteen fifty-three as a railroad stop, renamed for two prominent local brothers, Elisha and Benjamin Edgerton. Within a few years its location between Dane and Rock counties made it the natural warehouse hub for southern Wisconsin's tobacco trade.

Tobacco was first grown commercially in the state in the eighteen fifties, and when the Civil War cut off southern supplies, demand surged. By the eighteen eighties, the crop spread across three counties. Edgerton eventually held fifty-two tobacco warehouses, with the first built in eighteen sixty-nine by a New York firm.

At the industry's peak in nineteen eighteen, the city processed more than sixty-two million pounds of tobacco in a single year. The industry is gone now, but the legacy is visible in the Queen Anne mansions built by tobacco merchants and in the remaining warehouse buildings that still line the downtown streets.