The notion of creating a waterway to run from Green Bay to the Mississippi River via the Fox and Wisconsin river received attention after Wisconsin was established as a state in 1848. Plans called for a land grant to be sold to interested parties to generate funds for improving the two rivers and building a canal between them.
However, the land sales did not provide enough income to finance the project and development was turned over to private hands under the name of the Fox-Wisconsin Improvement Company in 1853. Adverse economic conditions, coupled with inadequate local resources, led to domination of the company by eastern capital. With its shifting sand beds, the Wisconsin River was difficult to make navigable and the private company failed despite an enlargement of the land grant through legislative promotion. By 1866, both the Wisconsin legislature and the court decided to reorganize the corporation under government control.
Between 1866 and 1872, little was done on the project and efforts were aimed at spurring federal development of the waterway. However, due to the anomaly of the federal government paying expenditures for the benefit of a private company, an 1870 law provided for a company buy out. The deal was concluded in 1872, when the company accepted an 145,000 dollar award from the federal government for water power rights from the dams on the lower Fox River. After 1870, improvement on the waterway dwindled even further. Persistent damage claims and disputes between the federal dam owners and the private water power companies hampered efforts to create an east-west navigational highway.
In 1925, Army district engineers gave an unfavorable report on the plan to improve the Fox and Wisconsin rivers for navigation. They found that there was no appreciable commerce on the Wisconsin River below Portage and that it would be impossible to navigate through the Wisconsin River without very expensive carriers or more expensive attempts to halt the shifting sand banks of the Wisconsin River. In any case, interest in the project by manufacturers decreased as railroad connections spread. In the end, U.S. Engineering Office maintenance of the dams on the Lower Fox River was the only remnant of the project.
