Pieffer-Bennett Building,
1840s

Huntington-Wellers Building,
1850

The 1829 "Chandler Map" identifies Fox and Winnebago (Hochunk) villages, lead mines, and sites notable to miners and travelers.  Click on the map to enlarge it, or click inside the orange oval for a closeup view including notations of four Lead Region Historic Trust sites:  Prairie Spring Hotel, Gratiot, Shullsburg and Mineral Point.

Large deposits of lead were well known in the 18th century to southwestern Wisconsin Indians, who mined it near the surface and smelted it in primitive furnaces.  The Indians then bartered the lead with the French fur traders who were operating in the Upper Mississippi River Valley.  Word of these mineral deposits quickly spread eastward with the traders.

By 1788, Julien Dubuque, a French-Canadian trader, was extracting large quantities of lead from his Mines of Spain, at the site of the present-day Iowa city that bears his name.  In 1822, Colonel James Johnson of Kentucky, under a lease from the U.S. government, began to work the righ deposits of lead across the Mississippi from Dubuque, near Galena, Illinois.  Scores of Eastern and Southern miners and speculators soon joined Johnson in the large-scale exploitation of lead in northwestern Illinois—and America's first metal rush was underway.

Within two years, a party of miners left the Galena diggings, crossed the border into Michigan Terriroty (present-day Lafayette County, Wisconsin), and began to successfully mine and smelt lead at a location that came to be known as New Diggings.  The news of their success led thousands more to enter the terriroty and establish mining operations, smelters, mills, and other supporting businesses.

Chief Black Hawk, Sauk leader during the Black Hawk War, 1832, from a color lithograph published in Volume II of "History of the Indian Tribes of North America" by McKenney & Hall (1842).  Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Before 1830, permanent settlements had already been established at Benton, Dodgeville, Hazel Green, Mineral Point, Platteville, Potosi, Shullsburg, and Wiota.  In fact—with the exception of remote fur trading and military posts at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien—the Euro-American settlement of Wisconsin began with the establishment of these southwestern mining towns in the 1820s.  When Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836, 46 percent of the state's population was located in the three present-day counties that comprise the lead region:  Lafayette, Iowa and Grant.  So strong was the political influence of the region that the first capital was located in the recently platted town of Belmont in Lafayette County.

By the late 1840s, the prominence of lead mining in the region began to fade as other parts of the state became populated, as many miners left for the California Gold Rush, and as mining gradually gave way to agriculture.  Today all the mines are closed, and virtually all physical traces of lead mining—most prominently, the tall wooden headframes and the tailings and rock piles—have disappeared.  Furthermore, the number of men who have worked in the mines, those who have firsthand knowledge of the most important period in this region's history, is rapidly dwindling.

Soon all that will remain to mark the mining era—if we have sufficient foresight and determination to save them—will be a handful of homes and commercial structures built in the mid-19th century, at the height of lead mining in southwestern Wisconsin.