CITY OF PRESCOTT HISTORY

For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, the site of the city of Prescott attracted humans to it. The east bank of the St. Croix River just north of its confluence with the Mississippi River is sloping to flat, supported by limestone, and conveniently close to clear, cold, navigable water with abundant fish. A sand bar now known as Point Douglas, Minnesota, extends from the west bank of the St. Croix, making an ideal point for a river crossing.

When European explorers arrived in the 1600s, the site had long been used as a camp site by both Dakota and Ojibwe Indians who hunted game in nearby prairies and forests. Later traders and soldiers recognized its potential for becoming a trading center and supply depot, but it wasn't until the arrival of steamboats in the 1830s, increasing river traffic, that what was named Mouth of the St. Croix would show promise of becoming a major river port in the Northwest Territory.

Army officers stationed up the Mississippi River at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, attempted to benefit from land speculation by staking a large claim at Mouth of the St. Croix and asking Philander Prescott, a river trader, to be their stakeholder. With money they gave him, Prescott built a cabin and trading post on the site in 1839.

Joseph Monjeau (Moshier), his Dakota wife, Ann Lamarche Labathe, and their five children arrived at the claim that same year, which might have encouraged Prescott to bring his Dakota wife, Nag-hee-no-wenah, and their four children to live there in 1840, the year that St. Croix County was organized. Prescott was granted a ferry operator's license that year, and in 1842, was elected as one of three county commissioners.

But life at Mouth of the St. Croix was a struggle. After three years of failing at farming and trading, Prescott took an interpreter's job at Fort Snelling and moved there with his family. Returning infrequently, he allowed the Monjeaus to work his land and live on his property.

Development at the small settlement was slow throughout most of the 1840s. George Schaser (Shaser) arrived in 1841, staked a claim and built a cabin. He left the next year and returned in 1844 with his wife Christina. Before the year was over, their daughter Eliza was born and the settlement became known as Elizabeth in her honor, as was the adjacent township. Schaser also built the settlement's first frame house.

A few other settlers followed Schaser. William Lockwood arrived in 1844 and built a trading house before his untimely death the following year. Hilton Doe began a long and profitable career in area real estate. Lewis Harnsberger and George McMurphey arrived in 1846 followed by George Rissue (Rishew), who built a lime kiln north of Elizabeth near the St. Croix River, the location of which became known as Rissue's Landing. McMurphey homesteaded just outside Elizabeth. His marriage to Maria Rice in 1848 was the settlement's first. In 1847, Willard Thing and Thomas Finch arrived. Thing bought land from Philander Prescott and Finch stayed long enough to build a house from locally quarried limestone four and a half miles north of the city and a mile south of the Kinnickinnic River in Clifton Township. Known as the Old Stone House, it still stands prominently above the St. Croix.

Though Elizabeth would ultimately benefit from Wisconsin statehood in 1848 and the opening of homestead land in the northwest in 1849, the tax rolls at the time listed just 11 families in all of Elizabeth Township. Only three families were listed in the village of Elizabeth. An official plat was drawn in 1850 and the village renamed Prescott in 1851 in honor of its founder. Still, Prescott had just four small buildings, one being the first general store built by New Yorker Orrin T. Maxson and his wife Eunice.

It took until the spring of 1854, after all of Elizabeth Township became Pierce County with the village of Prescott as its county seat, for a building boom to occur. Homesteaders and entrepreneurs arrived in such numbers that the village lacked adequate accommodations. Warehouses, stores, hotels, shops, and houses were in various stages of construction. Three steam-driven sawmills were completed the next year to provide locally sawn board for additional building.

Another turn of events occurred in the summer of 1855. Up until that time, Prescott had been the primary supply center for county farmers and businesses. Now, farmers were beginning to produce enough surplus crops to sell. The "port" of Prescott was suddenly filled with wagons bringing to the levee produce destined for northwestern and southern markets. The transformation was astounding. On the undeveloped land of a decade earlier, two hundred buildings now stood. The population had reached 843.

The village's year-old newspaper, the Transcript, reported on September 13, 1856, the following village businesses: eleven groceries, eight dry good stores, six storage and forwarding houses, six saloons, four blacksmith shops, four sawmills, three hotels, three doctors, two hardware stores, two boot and shoe stores, two drug stores, two carriage makers, two bakeries, two tin ships, two livery stables, one harness shop, one bookstore, one cabinet and furniture shop, one gun shop, one printing shop, one billiard parlor, and one bowling alley. In addition, Prescott had five lawyers, three doctors, three ministers, two editors, two church buildings, one schoolhouse, one post office, and one courthouse with jail.

In 1857, Prescott became an incorporated city with two wards, one mayor, six aldermen, two justices of the peace, a council clerk, a city attorney, a surveyor and a school superintendent. Its government was independent of Prescott Township, the former Elizabeth Township. What followed as its population grew to more than 1000 were civic improvements and growing pains. In the next decade, city streets were graveled, a public well was dug, a public park was fenced, a hook and ladder company and pubic library were organized, the block long levee was paved, and a cemetery was plotted.

In the latter half of the 1850s, crop production became a driving force in Prescott's economy. The Transcript wrote in the spring of 1859 that some 12,000 bushels of oats and several thousand bushels of corn were warehoused near the waterfront, awaiting shipment. By November, 75,000 bushels of grain were in storage. In the previous six months, 29,536 bushels of wheat, 15,172 bushels of oats, 3,725 bushels of potatoes, 400 bushels of barley, 40 barrels of flour, and 2,000 bushels of cranberries left the levee for markets to the south.

The first Pierce County Fair was held in Prescott in 1859 and the following year, the Prize Banner won by Pierce County's produce exhibit at the State Fair in Madison was proudly displayed in the city. Growth seemed without limits as the 1860 Federal census counted 1,032 residents. Twenty percent had been born in Wisconsin, 32 percent were from New England or New York State, and 20 percent were foreign-born, with the majority from the British Isles and German states.

Despite the involvement of many Pierce County men in the Civil War, agricultural production and shipments from Prescott grew, the war creating new markets. In 1867, wheat shipments totaled nearly 300, 000 bushels; three years later, nearly 590,000 bushels. Some of the productivity was due to farmers' investment in technologically advanced agricultural machinery that increased the acreage that could be planted and harvested. During 1874, one Prescott implement dealer sold 20 threshers in a month, and six reapers and a threshing machine in one day.

Few Americans in the Upper Midwest were preoccupied with slavery or disagreements between northerners and southerners regarding states rights and social policy. But when 1860 brought the threat of the Union's dissolution, Prescott residents responded in support of no succession. Military veteran and merchant, Daniel J. Dill, organized the volunteer Prescott Guards, 83 men of whom 31 were Prescott residents. They departed in June 1861 for Camp Randall in Madison.

The Guards would not see battle for another year, and then, as Company B of the 6th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry under the command of Prescott volunteer, Captain Rollin B. Converse. Captain Dill had accepted an assignment as Colonel of the 30th Wisconsin Infantry, assigned to duty in Dakota Territory after the Sioux Uprising of 1862. The 6th Wisconsin would go on to be part of the famous Iron Brigade, engaging the Confederate army at Antietam, South Mountain, Gettysburg, Wilderness, and Petersburg.

The Lyon Guards, which included 45 Prescott men, left for Camp Randall four months after the Prescott Guards. They were assigned to Company A of the 12th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. The regiment would come to be called the "Marching Twelfth" after covering more than 3,300 miles in three years, a Union Army record. The men engaged the Confederates at Vicksburg, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Bentonville. Twelve of the volunteers who had listed Prescott as their place of residence died in the war as the result of battle wounds, injury, accident, or illness.

By the end of the war, county farmers were prepared for continuing good fortune with their wheat crops, but reversal came in the form of a tiny insect. The cinch bug, a common but usually controllable pest of grain crops, irrupted in successive years in the late 1870s and early 1880s, thinning the wheat crops to such an extent that farmers were forced to diversify for survival. By the end of the century, production of corn, oats, barley, rye, alfalfa, and hay had increased substantially.

Prescott and surrounding townships had been hoping for another boon to the economy ever since 1857, when the Wisconsin legislature designated the city as the terminus of a land grant railroad. Land speculators jumped on the bandwagon urging investors to buy land adjacent to lands set aside for rail lines. But by 1880, the odds of desire becoming a reality weren't favorable. The closest freight line was built across the St. Croix connecting Stillwater and Hastings, Minnesota.

Finally, after 28 years of disappointment, word came that two St. Paul, Minnesota, men had been contracted to build a railroad bridge between Prescott and Point Douglas. The Burlington Northern railroad, which had track running between Chicago and La Crosse, Wisconsin, had decided to extend its line up the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River and into St. Paul, Minnesota. Swing bridge construction began in 1885 and the first BN (soon to be the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy) passenger train pulled into Prescott on May 30, 1886.

Railroad and bridge construction had brought new jobs and a new mode of freight and passenger transportation to the community. But the rail line was a mixed blessing, leading to the demise of the regional water transport that for fifty years had put Prescott on the economic map. Although improvements in the Mississippi River channel were 40 years in the future, they simply took barge traffic past the "port" of Prescott.

In October 1898, the Prescott Tribune announced that Charles and H..F. Mercord had purchased a dynamo for producing electricity to the city. They would furnish eight 2,000 candle power arc street lamps to light up Broadway from dark to midnight for $40 dollars a month. Power was supplied by firing a boiler connected to the dynamo in the stone building that still stands in Mercord Park. The Mercords eventually sold the plant to Interstate Light and Power Company. The once bustling port city was moving steadily into the 20th century.

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