Monday, October 10, 2016

Cumberland Wisconsin is peculiar

On a meandering drive home from a northern Wisconsin bike race I passed through the town of Cumberland Wisconsin.

It’s in the middle of nowhere.

Screen Shot 2016 10 10 at 10 33 20 AM

It’s a pretty town. Too pretty. Like something out of a Stepford Town movie. What’s going on with Cumberland?

The wikipedia article is what a small town (2,300 people) article should be — it reads as though it were put together by a local school. There are a few items that stood out for me…

… 34.2% German, 24.7% Norwegian, 14.1% Italian, 10.3% Irish, 9.6% Swedish and 8.2% English …

… 35.1% of all households were made up of individuals …

… median income for a household in the city was $32,661, and the median income for a family was $41,612… 

They have a fancy Carnegie library. From the history …

 … After the railroad began to operate, settlers quickly arrived in the area and by 1884 there were 24 saloons located in the area … In February 1893, the state board of health sent a representative to set up a quarantine on the Italian settlement due to unsanitary conditions … In April [1895], telephone lines were also erected in the city limits…  On March 15, 1905 a $10,000 donation from Andrew Carnegie established a Carnegie Library in Cumberland …

How common were telephone lines in 1895? Why did they gets such a big Carnegie donation in 1905? Does all this have anything to do with the what lives at the bottom on the lake?

2 comments:

MaysonicWrites said...

A severe male/female imbalance: "For every 100 females there were 89.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 82.2 males."

Extremely white: "97.54% white"[2224 of 2280 as of the 2000 census]

JGF said...

I've seen much bigger gender imbalances in wikipedia town stats when there's a prison nearby, but then the race is not 98% white (I checked, no minimum security/white collar prison in Cumberland).

I think this may be demographics -- over 70 has few males and is big part of town?

For WI and MN many small towns are 98% white ...