Milwaukee: Where the Road Splits
Near Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Interstate Ninety-Four runs through Milwaukee, having split from Interstate Ninety near Madison, and carries on south toward Chicago. The city itself is not a junction in the way that makes it seem incidental. Milwaukee was one of the largest cities in the United States in nineteen hundred, a position it held because of Great Lakes commerce, German immigration, and the beer industry.
The Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller breweries all operated here simultaneously in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Milwaukee beer was shipped by rail across the country in a volume that made the city's commercial identity inseparable from lager. The German immigration that fueled this industry also built the densely organized working-class neighborhoods of the north and south sides that gave Milwaukee its political culture, it elected Socialist mayors for decades in the early twentieth century. The Potawatomi people's territory included the Milwaukee River valley.
The word Milwaukee derives from the Algonquian Millioke, which has been translated as the gathering place by the water or the good land. The Potawatomi were removed from Wisconsin to Kansas and Oklahoma in the late eighteen thirties. The Milwaukee Public Museum, chartered in eighteen eighty-two and opened in eighteen eighty-four, is one of the oldest and largest natural history museums in the country.
It contains more than four million specimens. The beer industry it rose alongside is much reduced. Miller Brewing is now part of a multinational conglomerate.
