'Northern WI: A Hand-Book for the Homeseeker'
At the end of the 19th century, the forests of northern Wisconsin were disappearing before the logger's ax. Experts believed that they would naturally be succeeded by prosperous farms, as had happened in Europe centuries earlier. So in 1895 the state Legislature ordered the University of Wisconsin's College of Agriculture to prepare a handbook to help new settlers establish homesteads on the cutover lands. University staff traveled all across the region that fall, taking photographs for the 200-page guide, "Northern Wisconsin: A Hand-Book for the Homeseeker." It contained 88 pages with crude half-tone photographs, many cropped or reduced to small sizes, printed on cheap paper. This gallery contains those photographs scanned from their original 6-by-8-inch glass-plate negatives, as well as some not used in the book (113 images in all).
A Brief History of the Hand-Book
William Arnon (W.A.) Henry, Dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Wisconsin from 1880-1907, produced the book. Henry intended it to promote a rich agricultural future for northern Wisconsin, which he loosely defined as the land north of a line from Hudson to Green Bay. Harvey J. (H.J.) Perkins, a local photographer in Madison, took the photographs.
In the summer and fall of 1895, Henry and his team of assistants (F.H. King, E.S. Goff, J.A. Craig, and F.W. Woll) traveled to every county in northern Wisconsin. They observed the abundant crops, forests, livestock, homes, farms and families of interest in northern Wisconsin. Their research, which included many pages of statistics, appeared alongside the photos taken by Perkins. Their text bordered at times on hyperbole as they sought to portray a coming Golden Age for agriculture in what had only recently been ancient forests.
