What Was Here Before: Kohler, Wisconsin

The Potawatomi and Menominee peoples shared the Sheboygan River valley for generations. The eighteen thirty-three Treaty of Chicago stripped the tribes of their Lake Michigan shoreline lands, and though many Potawatomi resisted removal, most were forced from the area. German and Dutch farmers settled the land and worked it through the rest of the nineteenth century.

At the turn of the twentieth century the Kohler Company, which made plumbing fixtures and enamelware, built a new plant on those same farmfields along the Sheboygan River. Walter J. Kohler, son of the founder, later hired the Olmsted Brothers, successors to Frederick Law Olmsted, to design a model workers' village beside the factory. Incorporated in nineteen twelve, Kohler offered workers tree-lined streets, a community center, and well-built homes. The company maintained strict control over who lived there, but the physical environment was genuinely beautiful. The village remains one of the best-preserved early planned industrial communities in the country, and the company later built the Whistling Straits golf course nearby on the Lake Michigan shore.