The Cultural Landscape of Wisconsin's Ethnic Settlement Trail

The Cultural Landscape of the hundreds of square miles of Wisconsin's Ethnic Settlement Trail is best found where "development" or "progress" is minimal. Ethnic features stand in contrast to the modern "Anywhere U.S.A. Look" that is so prevalent today.

The Cultural Landscape is found in miniature versions of ethnic groups' homeland villages within cities. Distinctive house types on narrow city lots still focus on street intersections. Churches, church schools and taverns provide social centers. Grocery stores, bakeries, drugstores and meat markets or clusters of flats or cottages such as those found on the south side of Milwaukee have been essential to the urban or village Cultural Landscape.

Countryside landscapes include stone fences or hedgerows that outlined property holdings. Vegetarian groupings still surround old cemeteries or former farmhouse sites or cheese factories. Crossroad villages with small hotel/tavern/dance hall, blacksmith shop, wagon shop and livery barn, or a mill or a railroad depot are found all over Wisconsin. The farm complex with its tightly clustered pattern of farm buildings and 90 degree barn placement for cattle shelter speaks silently of rural efficiency. One room school houses, once numerous, or rural town halls and meeting houses are still common country sights.

And barns-there are 1850s log threshing barns and cattle barns, 1860s German all-in-one barns, 1870s Dutch drive-through barns and 1880s universal Wisconsin timber frame basement barns. We can find 1900s wood stave silos, bank barns, ramp barns, extended bay barns, barns with dormers or gambrel-roofed barns. We see Luxembourg stone barns, German or Irish stone and frame cattle barns, corn cribs, milk houses, gable roofs with lightning rods. Other ethnic architecture such as Belgian roadside chapels or barns with gable stars, Polish roadside shrines and cemetery grottos, Bohemian roadside shrines, German halftimbered houses-each has its own story!

Big city and small country churches with cemeteries, outhouses, water pumps and an interesting array of ethnic family names and sculptured grave markers show some of the spiritual history of early Wisconsin settlements and families.

Look within this A Visitor's Guide to Wisconsin's Ethnic Settlement Trail. Then look without! Discover Wisconsin's Cultural Landscape!