Potosi — Lead, Beer, and the Oldest Road in Wisconsin

The village of Potosi sits at the far southwestern corner of Wisconsin, on a main street that local historians call the longest main street without an intersection in the world, a single road that follows a narrow valley for three miles without a cross street, hemmed in by bluffs on both sides. That geography explains everything about the town: it grew where the lead was, not where a planner would have chosen.

Lead had drawn people to the region long before American settlers arrived. Native Americans mined galena ore from the hills around here for centuries. French traders knew about the deposits. But the American lead rush of the eighteen twenties and thirties brought a different kind of extraction, faster, more industrial, and utterly transforming. An early settler named Willis St. John began digging near Snake Hollow in the late eighteen twenties, pulling hundreds of thousands of pounds of ore from the hillside in his first year alone.

By eighteen forty-five, Potosi was a boomtown of thirteen hundred people, a significant settlement for the Wisconsin frontier, drawing miners from the Rhine Valley in Germany, from Cornwall in England, and from older American mining regions to the east. The community that formed here was polyglot and rough, the kind that springs up wherever sudden mineral wealth concentrates men far from existing social structures.

The lead boom faded as the richest veins were exhausted, and Potosi shrank. But it reinvented itself twice more. Beer was first brewed here in eighteen fifty-two, in the building that became the Potosi Brewing Company. The brewery got through Prohibition by making nonalcoholic beer and closed in nineteen seventy-two, but a non-profit foundation revived it, and it now operates both a working brewery and the National Brewery Museum on the old Main Street.

Potosi's name may have come from Potosi, Missouri, where some early miners had lived, a town itself named for the famous silver mines of Bolivia. Sources differ on the origin.