Sheboygan County Historical Documents

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About the Collection

The above is a correct representation of the residence of Wm.
Payne, the first settler in Sheboygan County built in 1834 on
Sec. 28 town of Sheboygan

G. A. Randall and Co.
An illustrated historical atlas of Sheboygan County, Wisconsin (1875) pp. 18

This collection provides snapshots into the social, economic, and political history of Sheboygan County. The Sheboygan Centennial and Homecoming Souvenir booklets provide historical information from the period of the early Native American settlements to the mid-twentieth century. In addition, these items, along with a number of other titles, include historical photographs of the county with an emphasis on the City of Sheboygan. Sheboygan County Plat Maps from 1875 to 1920 also offer unique glimpses into the development of this county.

Sheboygan County men and women rallied to arms just as in other communities in support the country’s war efforts. The following war histories document Sheboygan County’s involvement in some the greatest wars this country has fought:

• A History Of The 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment In The War Of The Rebellion, 1862-1865
• History of the Evergreen City Guard resp. the Co. “C” of the 2 regiment of the Wisconsin National Guard. From the founding of the Company till its reception into the Federal Army
• Co., C, 127th Infantry, in the World War; a story of the 32nd Division and a complete history of the part taken by Co. C
• Sheboygan’s part in the World War.

The City of Sheboygan was once known as the “City of Cheese, Chairs, Churches, and Children – the 4 ‘C’s”. Furniture manufacturers played an important role in shaping the local economy. Many of these companies produced annual sales catalogues to promote and sell their products. Although very few of these catalogues are still in existence a number of them are included in this collection. The collection includes catalogues’ from the following companies that once existed in Sheboygan, Wisconsin:

• American Chair Company
• Bemis-Riddell Fibre Company
• Crocker Chair Company
• Dillingham Manufacturing Company
• Garton Toy Company
• George B. Mattoon Furniture Manufacturer
• George Spratt Chair Company
• Phoenix Chair Company
• Sheboygan Chair Company
• Sheboygan Fibre Furniture Company

This collection will provide researchers, students, genealogists, and the general history buff the opportunity to explore a wealth of historical information about this county. It also provides an understanding of how this history contributed to the historical development of this state and country.

Funding

The Sheboygan County Historical Documents Collection was funded, in part, through a 2006 Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant. This grant provided financial support for public libraries to digitize and make available online, their local library resources. For more information about LSTA grants in Wisconsin, contact the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Division for Libraries, Technology, and Community Learning or visit the LSTA grant Web site at http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dltcl/pld/lsta.html.

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.