It's a time capsule of stories from their archives dating-back ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred and a hundred and twenty five years.
Published are all sorts of useful tidbits including stuff like tax assessments, who built a new shingle factory, the going price for a barrel of pickled fish a hundred years ago, who got kicked by their horse, shot-off their finger, or the random cow that was struck by lightening. Marriage, birth and death records are included.
What has always struck me is a glitch in the birth records a couple of generations ago.
Namely a disproportionate number of Hispanic-surnamed parents. Mostly clustered about the summer months and hardly ever during the winter.
This would make sense.
Migrant laborers arriving for the seasonal harvest of orchard crops.
Traveling about the peninsula you'll still find outposts of crumbling housing.
Poking around inside you'll find rusted bed springs and dilapidated furniture.
I wonder what kind of stories these dwellings would tell?
During the war there was a general shortage of labor.
Temporary housing was built in Sturgeon Bay to house the thousands of shipyard workers. With military recruitment for the war effort and the boom in manufacturing farm help was hard to come-by.
Solution?
Prisoners of war. Believe it or not - German POWs were placed with farm families and orchard growers to fill the gap.
By the way - unemployment on the peninsula is not anywhere near as high as many places around the state. It's actually shown some improvement lately.
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