Iowa County and the Lead Rush: America's First Mining Boom

Long before California's gold rush of eighteen forty-nine captured the American imagination, there was an earlier rush into the upper Mississippi valley, and its prize was lead. The Ho-Chunk and other Native nations had known for centuries where chunks of galena, lead sulfide, sat near the surface in the Driftless hills, and they traded it with French fur merchants as far back as the sixteen eighties. By the eighteen twenties, American prospectors were flooding into what is now southwestern Wisconsin.

Iowa County sits at the heart of what became the Upper Mississippi Valley Lead Mining District. By eighteen twenty-nine, more than four thousand miners were producing thirteen million pounds of lead per year. For a generation, this region was the most important source of lead in the entire United States, supplying the metal for bullets, paint, and plumbing across a rapidly expanding nation. The city of Mineral Point, the county seat, grew from a mining camp into a proper town in the eighteen thirties, attracting skilled Cornish miners from the tin and copper mines of southwestern England who carved stone cottages into the hillsides.

The Driftless geography made the lead accessible. Unlike the rest of Wisconsin, this region was never scraped flat by glaciers. The ancient limestone and dolomite formations are close to the surface, and the galena deposits are visible in the ridges and bluffs. Miners called their shallow diggings badger holes, and they wintered in them like animals. That habit gave Wisconsin its nickname, the Badger State.

The lead boom peaked in the eighteen forties and then faded as California gold pulled miners west and as surface deposits ran thin. Zinc mining extended the district's commercial life into the nineteen twenties. The last mines closed in nineteen seventy-eight, capping nearly three hundred years of continuous mineral extraction on the same geological deposit. Iowa County today preserves more of that Driftless landscape than almost anywhere in Wisconsin, with stone buildings and ridge-top roads that look more like rural England than the agricultural Midwest surrounding it.