In 1838 the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature organized the four northeasterly townships of Milwaukee County into the Town of Milwaukee. In the following decade the Legislature split off from the town two western townships to create the Towns of Wauwatosa and Granville and sliced off the southern sections of another township for the newly incorporated City of Milwaukee. Until the 1890s the Town of Milwaukee governed the remaining territory except for a few areas annexed by the expanding city on the south.
During this half century the town's population grew gradually. German immigrants comprised a substantial proportion of the farmers attracted to the fertile soils and to the location on the Milwaukee River. Town government in these years carried out the basic functions of tax collection, support of elementary schools, construction and maintenance of bridges and unpaved roads, conduct of elections, and enforcement of town ordinances.
In 1892 citizens of the more densely populated southeastern portion of the town incorporated two square miles of land as the Village of Whitefish Bay, the Milwaukee region's first suburban incorporation. Eight years later residents of the area between the new village and the city limits created another municipality, the fashionable Village of Shorewood, out of the Town of Milwaukee's territory.
Following these two incorporations the town's boundaries once again stabilized. Although the City continued to inch northward, no new villages or cities were created between 1900 and 1926. Like fringe areas surrounding other major American cities, however, the Town of Milwaukee did experience increasing urbanization and suburbanization during these years, especially during the 1920s. Despite the city's annexations, a large industrial area grew along the Town's southern borders while in other areas new subdivisions increased the density of population. A resolution passed at the Town's 1927 annual meeting expressed the problems created by these developments:
...there are continually arising conditions and situations, relief and remedy for which is demanded and required by the residents and taxpayers of these communities within the town which are thickly populated, which relief cannot be granted by the Town Board under the Town Law...
Although legal action halted a 1926 attempt to incorporate the town as a city, the 1929 annual meeting did vote to adopt the powers of a village government as permitted by State Statute. Acting on this new power the same meeting called for establishment of a police and fire service for the Town. In the late 1920s and 1930s the town also created sanitation and utility districts to cope with problems of sewage and water supply and in-creased its efforts to regulate dumps, trailer camps, and similar problems associated with urban fringe areas. The Citizen's Governmental Research Bureau's 1954 study of the Town of Milwaukee estimated that between 1928 and 1937 the total number of activities or functions undertaken by the town government increased from 51 to 91.
In the late 1920s a second wave of incorporation removed 3.5 square miles of prime residential land from the Town of Milwaukee. The creation of the Villages of Fox Point (1926) and River Hills (1930) gave the town the awkward physical shape which it retained until the 1950s. A narrow strip of land along the Port Washington Road linked the developing southern portion of the town with the still slightly settled areas in the extreme northern part of the County. Sentiment for maintaining even this remnant of the earlier Town, and for avoiding annexation by the city, expressed itself in the continuing consideration given to incorporation. State law, however, blocked this approach. As a 1941 citizen's study committee concluded, the town as a whole lacked “any compact center or nucleus,” lacked continuous development, and was predominantly agricultural, although its southern portions might qualify as a village.
The Depression of the 1930s and the World War temporarily halted the pace of development in the Milwaukee north shore area but by the late 1940s the forces of urbanization and suburbanization had reappeared with unprecedented strength and swiftness. The relatively light tax burden in the Town of Milwaukee made it especially attractive to industrial and residential development. The creation of the City of Glendale in 1950 from the southern half of the town was the decisive blow to its vitality, although the town did struggle on for several years. The new city not only took the bulk of the town's population and its industrial tax base, it acquired many of the town's former officials and employees. In the words of the Town of Milwaukee News, July 1954, these years saw “the town slashed to shreds by its incorporated neighbors.” From the viewpoint of the News what was “lauded by some as intercommunal planning” was in fact a case of “these neighbors snatch[ing] the choice bits they could use without asking townspeople where they would prefer to hang their hats.” In 1953 and 1954 the remaining northern portions of the Town of Milwaukee incorporated as the Village of Bayside reducing the town to less than a square mile and fewer than one hundred residents. After a final round of annexations the town ceased to exist in May 1955, although a court struggle over dissolution required a 1957 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision to affirm that action.
