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Lead rush happened in Wisconsin. The demand for lead caused the population in southwestern Wisconsin to explode to gain a stake in the riches. Due to human population increases and industrial revolution, the landscape, watershed, and water runoff drastically changed.

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The logging industry in Wisconsin started. At the time, the mass majority of the state was covered in trees that no one thought could ever come to an end. By the Great Depression, that thought became a reality with the mass clear cutting. This changed the landscape that caused natural resources to be altered from human population increases.

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Wisconsin officially becomes a state. Population increases cause strain on natural resources while more cities are established.

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John Muir attends University of Wisconsin-Madison. This gave the environmental philosopher additional tools of knowledge of conservation.

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First U.S. fish hatchery opens in Madison, Wisconsin. This helped push the idea of protecting our wildlife by attempting to help the fish population in the waters.

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Newspaper/BA8429

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Madison fish hatchery first in U.S. | Newspaper Article/Clipping | Wisconsin Historical Society

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Robert Lafollette is governor of Wisconsin. Lafollette comes up with the "Wisconsin Idea" which became a huge idea during the Progressive Era. This caused many people to focus on the problems rising from the Industrial Revolution about the health and quality of the human population. With the University of Wisconsin-Madison, him and Charles Van Hise wrote the first textbook on conservation.

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-033/?action=more_essay

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Between 1850 and 1920, concern for the natural world emerged as a complex and broadly popular political and cultural movement in the United States. Newly urbanized Americans were becomingly increasingly aware of the importance of nature as an economic, aesthetic, and spiritual resource, especially as they became convinced that nature's resources were imperiled by industrialization. This movement led to unprecedented public and private initiatives to ensure the conservation of natural resources and the preservation of wildlife and of land. By the turn of the twentieth century, Wisconsin had become a center of conservation thinking and activity in the United States.

Increase Lapham is generally considered the founder of the conservation movement in Wisconsin. Arriving in Milwaukee three days before Wisconsin became a territory in 1836, Lapham kept careful records on the environment that served as models for those who followed him. In the 1850s, when Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh were advocating similar concepts in New England, Lapham began to argue for an ecological point of view toward the Wisconsin frontier. In 1855 he urged the state legislature to authorize a natural history survey before any more of Wisconsin's native species became extinct under the brunt of white settlement and industrialization. He also warned about the devastation of state forests, fifty years before it became an issue of national importance. Lapham's book, Report on the Disastrous Effects of the Destruction of Forest Trees, Now Going on So Rapidly in the State of Wisconsin , published in 1867, was one of the first books to stress the importance of natural resources. He wrote other books about the state's native grasses and Indian effigy mounds.

During the same decade, Wisconsin's best-known environmental thinker was immersed in farm chores near Portage. Though he would achieve his greatest fame for his years in California, John Muir spent his formative years in Wisconsin. In 1849, the Muir family immigrated to the United States from Scotland. Until he entered the University of Wisconsin in 1861, Muir worked from dawn-to-dusk on his family farm near Portage, roaming the fields and woods whenever he was allowed a short period away from the plow. Muir was also an inventor, creating an alarm clock that would tip up his bed and dump him on the floor at the appointed time. He showed this "early-rising machine" at the 1860 Wisconsin State Fair. Muir later wrote that his strenuous years in Wisconsin's outdoors prepared him for his later wilderness ramblings.

In the second half of the 19th century lumberjacks swept across the central and northern portions of our state. Saving some of Wisconsin's forests from the lumber industry was one motivation for the first state parks. In 1878, the legislature approved "The State Park," a 760-square mile state area in northern Wisconsin. The proposal was ill-fated from the start though, because the state owned just ten percent of the total land within its boundary and the population was too small to support the project. Lumber barons who opposed its provisions were the primary power brokers in the region, and the state eventually sold two-thirds of its land to private interests in 1897.

At the turn of the century, Robert La Follette's progressive politics influenced the rise of conservation concerns on the state level. Rebelling against the political influence of the lumber barons, La Follette led the fight to protect Wisconsin's natural resources from complete economic exploitation. He also worked closely with professors at the University of Wisconsin, including geologist and University president (1903-1918) Charles Van Hise. Van Hise chaired the State Conservation Commission, provided conservation advice to Teddy Roosevelt, and wrote the first textbook on conservation in 1910.

In these early years of land conservation, the creation of each new state park required separate legislative action. The First State Park Board was appointed in 1907 and John Nolen, a noted landscape architect, was hired to draft a feasibility plan for a State Park System. Nolen's report, published by The State Park Board, provided guidelines for a park system and recommended the creation of four state parks: Devil's Lake, the Dells of the Wisconsin River, Fish Creek in Door County, and the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers. All but the Dells of the Wisconsin River became state parks soon after. In 1915, the State Park Board merged with the State Board of Forestry, the Fisheries Commission, and the State Game Warden Department to form a new agency, the State Conservation Commission.

Forest conservation was also essential to Wisconsin's Indian populations. For centuries, the Menominee had practiced extensive forest management, even as logging became a major industry and source of income for the tribe in the 19th century. Unlike many other areas of the state, the forests on the Menominee reservation were not clear-cut and burned. Today, the Menominee are known worldwide for their sustainable forestry practices, maintaining forest land on 220,000 of their 235,000 acres.

These early conservation efforts would inspire a later generation of Wisconsin environmentalists, who would breathe new life and introduce new goals to the movement to protect the state and the world's resources.

[Source: The History of Wisconsin vol. 5 and 6 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin); Kasparek, Jon, Bobbie Malone and Erica Schock. Wisconsin History Highlights: Delving into the Past (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2004); "State Parks History" Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (online at http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/parks/Centennial/chronology.html); "John Muir Exhibit" Sierra Club (online at http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/)]

Original Documents and Other Primary Sources

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Between 1850 and 1920, concern for the natural world emerged as a complex and broadly popular political and cultural movement in the United States. Newly urbanized Americans were becomingly increasingly aware of the importance of nature as an economic, aesthetic, and spiritual resource, especially as they became convinced that nature's resources were imperiled by industrialization.

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The first Earth day is officially conducted in Madison, Wisconsin.

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The Dane County watershed study found that there is significant pollution happening due to Wisconsinites turning watershed into farm land. The airport is also found to have a majority of the pollution into this watershed. Solutions must be found in order to make transportation in Madison both efficient and self sustaining to the environment.

https://starkweatherfriends.org/about-us/a-brief-history/

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The Friends of Starkweather Creek is a citizen's group dedicated to the enhancement of the watershed's environmental quality. We seek to raise public awareness and appreciation of the creek through education and outreach to watershed residents, businesses and landowners and we will serve as advocates for sound watershed planning and management practices.

The mission of the Friends of Starkweather Creek is to work for a healthy urban stream and to benefit the community through stewardship, education, and advocacy.
The Watershed
Covering 23.9 square miles (15,300 acres), Starkweather Creek Watershed is the largest in the City of Madison.

The watershed includes parts of the Towns of Madison, Burke & Blooming Grove. It drains into Lake Monona. The Starkweather Watershed, created by the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age, likely evolved into prime oak savannah uplands with extensive wetlands.

Starkweather Creek Watershed Map

Between 1911 & 1922, large sections of the creeks were channeled, straightened, and dredged for farming, industrial, commercial, and eventual residential purposes.

Draining the wetlands, straightening the channel, and paving large areas of the watershed changed the nature of the creek. The landscape is no longer able to absorb rainfall or snow melt, so floods happen more frequently and with greater intensity. When it is not raining, the base flow rate is lower than it once was because most of the springs that once fed the creek are not being replenished. However, with the closure of the Oscar Meyer plant recently, the baseflow has improved.

For information on our most recent events on the creek, please view our 2019 Annual Meeting Slideshow. We are proud of all the work our active board and volunteers do for the creek. Enjoy!
Friends of Starkweather Creek Bylaws

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The Friends of Starkweather Creek is a citizen's group dedicated to the enhancement of the watershed's environmental quality. We seek to raise public awareness and appreciation of the creek through education and outreach to watershed residents, businesses and landowners and we will serve as advocates for sound watershed planning and management practices.

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The city of Madison updates into its current sustainability plan outlining the plan of balancing the environment, society, and economy around the community.

https://www.cityofmadison.com/sustainability/documents/SustainPlan2011.pdf