Milton - Wisconsin - a special section on cultural geography

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1988 by Barbara Rubin Hudson

Milton

TO THE CASUAL OBSERVER, Milton, Wisconsin is just another small, midwestern town, the kind of nonentity that, two blindsk beyond the highway sign, "Milton, Pop. 4092," and the billboard, "Home of the Redmen, State Champions, 1986," dumps you at its opposite boundary, gateway to cornfields.

Anyone who has lived in a cosmopolitan, urban community, but who has yearned for small-town pace or small-town picturesqueness, wouldn't slow down here. Milton is small but not quaint; its houses are serviceable but not classic. Its commercial core is nowhere to be found; there is one-half of a shopping street on the east side of town, and another half on the west. In Milton's case, the two halves do not constitute a whole. Nor are there monuments, cultural or otherwise, which might give focus to the town or the community, and the issues that galvanize the populace -- drug and alcohol abuse in the high school, spot zoning for a fast-food franchise, what to do with community block grants, allocation of beer and liquor licenses -- are the sort of issues you find anywhere. In short, Milton is not the kind of place you're likely to encounter yuppies doing a rehabbing number, or potters and weavers waiting for summer, or intellectuals taking R and R from the heterodyne charge of city life.

Stop. Slow down a bit. Linger awhile. There's more than meets the eye. There's always more than meets the eye.

First off, the townscape begs a question: why are there two halves of a shopping street separated by a distance of approximately one mile? Easily answered: Milton originally was not one town, but two.

Go downtown (on the east side of town) and talk to Julie Lukas, who runs the Milton Historical Society, and you find out more. She's got books, files, filing cabinets, brochures, a vault filled with documents, atlases, diaries, special exhibits and the artifacts of one hundred fifty years of local settlement, crammed into the Goodrich House, an elegant, yellow-brick residence, where she maintains her winter office. and then there's the Milton House, the Society's summertime museum, across Highway 26. Julie is the first and only full-time employee of the Historical Society, a vivacious, slim, brown-haired woman in her mid-forties and the wife of a prominent realtor in town.

"I'm still an outsider," she cautions. "I've been here not quite thirty years, so what I say about Milton won't reflect how a lot of people feel."

Julie comes from Janesville, the county seat, population 51,091, six miles south down Highway 26. "Milton and Milton Junction merged only twenty years ago -- 1967," she explains, "that's why we've got two shopping districts. Before the two villages joined, if you lived in Milton, you shopped there and for big stuff, you went to Janesville. And if you lived in Milton Junction, you shopped there and also in Janesville. And each place had its little post office where everyone went to get their mail. It was only when the possibility of home delivery arose that the two towns saw mutual benefit in merging. Of course what they had to do was build the new post office in between, on Hilltop Drive. So before, while we lacked home delivery, at least most of us had a post office within walking distance. Now the post office is inconvenient for everybody; if you need to mail a package, you have to drive over."

This is busy season at the Milton House Museum. Julie oversees eighteen part-time employees who conduct tours in 19th century period costume, do maintenance work, answer phones, work the exhibits. The museum is a thick-walled, whitewashed, three-story hexagon, built in 1844 to serve as an inn. The materials from which it was constructed are native to the region, extracted locally from glacial till -- sand, broken stone, gravel -- all mixed with water and slaked lime. Reportedly the first poured-grout building in the United States, the Milton House Museum is being considered for National Landmark status. "It will help in terms of interest," Julie says. "Right now, we're in the Exxon Travel Guide, which brings tourists in. And the National Geographic article in 1984 -- the one which had a picture of us -- that helped too. We had a noticeable rise in traffic."

Seven thousand people tour the building in an average summer season. "In the first five weeks of our season this year, two thousand schoolchildren came through on booked tours. Wisconsin requires state history in the curriculum at the fourth-grade level, which is good for us, but we also get tours from Illinois schools. And just this morning, we had a car from Florida and one from West Virginia. Of course, when it gets a real hot, it's bad for business; people wold rather go to the lake."

There is a tap on the door and an elderly couple peer in. "Can you tell me about that house across the way?" the gentleman asks. "I'm wondering if they might be interested in selling those old screens piled up along the side." "I'll give you their phone number," Julie smiles.