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From its footings on the southern edge of downtown, the Daniel Hoan Bridge rises in a graceful arc over Milwaukee's harbor, descends the entire length of Jones Island and finally comes to rest again on the foundations of Milwaukee industry.
There are no structures to mark the site, no relict sheds or crumbling smokestacks, but the Bay View end of the bridge lies squarely on the buried ruins of a pioneer iron mill. For nearly 60 years, its gigantic blast furnaces lit the nighttime sky over the southern lakeshore with a fiery red glow. Those furnaces fed a phalanx of long, narrow mill buildings that rolled the red-hot iron into everything from rails to nails.
The rest of the 30-acre complex was a soot-blackened maze of machine shops, warehouses, engine rooms and ore docks. Chartered by the state legislature in March 1866, the Milwaukee Iron Company was the region's first heavy industry and, in a longer view, the fulcrum on which Milwaukee turned from commerce to manufacturing as the foundation of its economy.
A humbler institution was founded in March 1866: St. Stanislaus Catholic Church. Polish immigrants had been trickling into Milwaukee for years, but it was not until 1866 that they were numerous enough to organize a parish.
Thirty families strong, the Poles bought a small brick church on 5th and Mineral streets, in the Walker's Point neighborhood, from a German Lutheran congregation that had moved to larger quarters. Raising the $4,000 purchase price required genuine sacrifice (one member raffled off a cherished gold watch for $225), but the effort made history: St. Stanislaus Church was the first Polish congregation in urban America.
Its members were among the earliest immigrants to arrive during the industrial period and, within a generation, they and the Poles who followed were challenging their Yankee, German and Irish neighbors for a fair share of political power and economic clout.
The Milwaukee Iron Company and St. Stanislaus Church neatly symbolize two pillars of the post-Civil War years: industries and immigrants. They were opposite sides of the same coin, mutually dependent outcomes of two radical and related shifts, one technological and the other social.
The first was driven by the steam engine, which emerged as a new source of cheap,...