Kenosha Wisconsin History & Facts

Kenosha is a city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the seat of Kenosha County.Per the 2020 census, the population was 99,986 which made it the fourth-largest city in Wisconsin. Situated on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, Kenosha is part of the greater Chicago metropolitan area (Chicagoland) as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. It also has longstanding connections to the Racine and Milwaukee areas to the north. Interstate 94 connects Kenosha to the Chicago and Milwaukee metro areas, and Kenosha itself is situated about halfway between each city.

Kenosha was once a center of industrial activity; it was home to large automotive factories which fueled its economy.Like some other Rust Belt cities, Kenosha lost these factories in the late 20th century, causing it to gradually transition into a services-based economy.In recent years, the city and surrounding county have benefited from increased job growth, and the city has worked on repairing roads and other infrastructure. It is home to the headquarters of the Fortune 1000 tool manufacturer Snap-on Inc., as well as the clothing company Jockey International. Kenosha is home to multiple educational institutions including the University of Wisconsin–Parkside, Carthage College, and Gateway Technical College. Residents of the city are called Kenoshans.

The Potawatomi originally named the area Kenozia (also transcribed ginoozhe, kinoje) "place of the pike", while the Menominee referred to the place as Kenūsīw, meaning "Northern Pike". The early Ojibwa name is reported as Masu-kinoja "trout (pike) come all at once". These refer to the annual spawning of trout, in which thousands of fish entered the rivers from Lake Michigan, providing food for the coming months.

Sites of early human habitation have been discovered in the Kenosha vicinity. It remains unclear if any sites pre-date the Clovis Culture but, if so, those sites would be contemporaneous with the Wisconsin glaciation.Paleo-Indians settled in the area at least 13,500 years ago.

The first European settlers, part of the Western Emigration Company, arrived in the early 1830s, from Hannibal and Troy, New York, led by John Bullen, Jr., who sought to purchase enough land for a town. Thwarted in Milwaukee and Racine, the group arrived at Pike Creek on 6 June 1835, building log houses and later homes of frame, native stone, and brick. The first school and churches followed, with platting completed in 1836. As more settlers arrived and the first post office was established, the village was known as Pike Creek, then renamed Southport in 1837, a name which lives on as a southeast-side neighborhood, park, and elementary school, and has been adopted by several businesses.

The area became an important Great Lakes shipping port. In 1850, the village changed its name from Southport to Kenosha which is its current name. The name Kenosha was adapted from the Chippewa word kinoje (pike or pickerel).

Between 1902 and 1988, Kenosha produced millions of automobiles and trucks including makes and models such as Jeffery, Rambler, Nash, Hudson, LaFayette, and American Motors Corporation (AMC). In May 1954, Nash acquired Detroit-based Hudson and the new firm was named American Motors Corporation. A 47-acre (190,000 m2) west side park and an elementary school are named for Charles W. Nash.A prototype steam car was built in Kenosha by the Sullivan-Becker engineering firm in 1900. Two years later, the Thomas B. Jeffery Company, builders of the Sterling bicycle, began production of the Rambler runabout. In 1902, Rambler and Oldsmobile were the first cars to employ mass-production techniques. The 1903 Rambler was also the first US-built production automobile to use a steering wheel, rather than the then-common tiller-controlled steering. Auto executive Charles W. Nash purchased Jeffery in 1916 and the new company became Nash Motors.

In 1973, residents in the Town of Pleasant Prairie sought to have territory annexed and rezoned to allow for the industrial development of agricultural property. In the ensuing legal battle between Kenosha and Pleasant Prairie, the town accused the city of improperly coercing or bribing agricultural property owners to file for rezoning and annexation in order to obtain city water and electric services that could not be provided by the town. The town argued that industrial development would jeopardize the town's residential nature. The court found the annexation proper, with no illicit bribes or improper conduct by the city.

In partnership with French automaker Renault, AMC manufactured several models in Kenosha in the early 1980s, including the Alliance, which won the 1983 "Car of The Year" award from Motor Trend. Two decades earlier, AMC's 1963 Rambler Classic had also received the award. In 1987, Renault sold its controlling interest in AMC to Chrysler Corporation, which had already contracted with AMC for the production of its M-body midsized cars at the Kenosha plant. The AMC Lakefront plant (1960–1988), a smaller facility, was demolished in 1990 (a chimney-demolition ceremony that June drew 10,000 spectators) and was redeveloped into HarborPark. The area now hosts lakeside condominiums, a large recreational marina, numerous parks and promenades, sculptures, fountains, the Kenosha Public Museum, and the Civil War Museum, all of which are connected by the Kenosha Electric Railway streetcar system.

From the beginning of the 20th century through the 1930s, Italian, Irish, Polish, and German immigrants, many of them skilled craftsmen, made their way to the city and contributed to the city's construction, culture, architecture, music, and literature.

Famous Peoples From Kenosha Wisconsin

William Bast

William Bast (April 3, 1931 – May 4, 2015) was an American screenwriter and author. In addition to writing scripts for motion pictures and television, he was the author of two biographies of the screen actor James Dean. He often worked with his partner Paul Huson.

Bast was born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, the son of Gilbert Bast and Bernice Fleischmann. He began his early education in Milwaukee, transferring to Kenosha when his family moved there. Moving back to Milwaukee, he graduated from Wauwatosa High school, then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin.

When his family moved to Los Angeles, he transferred to UCLA, where he majored in Theater Arts, rooming with a fellow Theater Arts student from Indiana named James Dean who would later on become an actor. The two became close friends and Dean nicknamed Bast "Willie". In 1952 he moved to New York to join Dean and pursue a career in radio and television. There, he initially worked in press relations at CBS and subsequently, in 1953, wrote his first scripts for the NBC television sitcom The Aldrich Family.

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