Oconomowoc: Newport of the West

The name comes from a Potawatomi word, variously translated as waterfall or where the waters meet. It fits: Oconomowoc sits in the middle of Wisconsin's lake country, surrounded by dozens of glacial lakes connected by rivers and channels. In the late nineteenth century, that landscape made it one of the most desired summer addresses in America.

In April of eighteen thirty-seven, a New Yorker named Charles Sheldon staked a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre claim on what is now Fowler Lake, registering it with the Land Office in Milwaukee. Oconomowoc incorporated as a town in eighteen forty-four. A plank road to Milwaukee arrived in eighteen fifty, and the town grew quickly: by eighteen fifty-three it had two hundred and fifty residents, ten stores, three hotels, a grist mill, and a sawmill.

The railroads changed everything. When the rail line reached Oconomowoc, wealthy families from Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Louis, and other Midwestern cities discovered that the lake country was an easy trip from the city. Over the following decades, some of the most prominent names in American business built summer estates on the shores here. Philip Armour, the Chicago meatpacking baron, built here. Montgomery Ward, whose catalog business had made him one of the wealthiest men in America, built here. The lakes filled with sailboats and the shorelines with boathouses and long verandas.

Guidebooks began calling Oconomowoc the Newport of the West, a comparison to the Rhode Island resort where America's richest families built their summer cottages. Between the eighteen seventies and the Great Depression, seven sitting presidents are said to have visited, earning the main commercial street the nickname Avenue of the Presidents. Ulysses Grant came, and Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Calvin Coolidge.

The Depression ended the era of great summer estates. Many of the mansions were demolished, converted, or sold to institutions. The lakes are still beautiful. The houses that remain are smaller than what came before.