KEWAUNEE

A short history of Kewaunee

Kewaunee was the site of a Potawatomi village at the time of European contact in the seventeenth century. French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette celebrated All Saints Day at the Potawatomi village in 1674. Later, French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle visited the village in 1679, and Canadian Jesuit Jean-François Buisson de Saint-Cosme stopped in September 1698. The Potawatomis moved south and east along Lake Michigan in the eighteenth century, and the area was reclaimed by Menominee people. Trader Jacques Vieau established a short lived trading post for the North West Company in the area of Kewaunee in 1795. The United States acquired the land from the Menominee nation in the 1831 Treaty of Washington.

The current settlement at Kewaunee began in 1836, when false rumors of gold deposits in the Kewaunee River triggered a minor gold rush of Yankee settlers. Land speculator Joshua Hathaway surveyed and platted the settlement. When no gold was found, the settlers who remained established a sawmill and developed the local harbor for the lumber industry. Kewaunee became the county seat of Kewaunee County at the time of the county's formation in 1852. In the late nineteenth century, the community attracted many Czech and German immigrants.

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Kewaunee, Wisconsin, revision 1374451513 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.