Granville: The Town That Milwaukee Ate
Near Milwaukee, Wisconsin
In eighteen forty, when it was formed as its own Wisconsin township, Granville covered thirty-six square miles north of Milwaukee. Yankee-Yorker settlers, Protestant families from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, named it after a town in Washington County, New York. For over a century it was an agricultural community, distinct from Milwaukee.
Then the city started growing. Starting in the late eighteen hundreds, neighbors began annexing Granville's edges. After World War Two, the annexation wars accelerated.
Brown Deer, River Hills, and Glendale all carved pieces off. Milwaukee itself took about sixteen square miles of the remainder in nineteen sixty-two, the largest land acquisition in city history. Granville still exists as a Milwaukee neighborhood.
But the town is gone.
