During World War II the Door County economy was a mixed bag. Ship building was running at top speed with three shifts a day – seven days a week. The men went off to war and the women were working in the shipyards in Sturgeon Bay.
The wartime economy also afforded better-paying factory jobs for migrant workers who would ordinarily work in the orchards. As a consequence there was no one to pick the cherries or perform other agricultural work. The solution to the problem was to bring prisoners of war to do the work previously performed by migrant laborers.
Wisconsin was home to roughly 20,000 POWs during the war. Camp McCoy in Wisconsin and Fort Sheridan in Illinois were the two closest base camps with another 36 smaller branch camps were scattered across the state. Wisconsin’s agricultural needs were sorely stressed by the wartime labor shortage. When the army realized that POWs could pay their own keep by working and get the harvest in they sent them into rural areas where they were needed.
Wisconsin - and Door County in particular – would have suffered greatly were it not for the POW worker program. At its peak Wisconsin had three times the number of POWs in the fields than neighboring Minnesota. They were largely credited with saving the crops during the 1944 and 1945 growing seasons.
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