Malted milk and the garbage disposal both came from one Wisconsin town
A Lake Michigan factory town of under 80,000 people gave the world malted milk in 1887 and the kitchen garbage disposal in 1927. Racine, Wisconsin also built one of the earliest automobiles, printed Little Golden Books, and talked Frank Lloyd Wright out of moving a famous headquarters elsewhere.
Malted milk was the work of William Horlick, an immigrant from England, and Horlicks is still sold worldwide. Malted milk balls were first developed at the same factory. Forty years later, local architect John Hammes invented the garbage disposer and founded InSinkErator, which still turns out millions of them a year in the city. J. W. Cathcart built one of the world's first automobiles there in 1871 or 1872, and names like Case, Mitchell, Dremel and S. C. Johnson grew up alongside it.
Racine was industrial from the start. Its first factories made fanning mills, machines that separate wheat from chaff, and its harbour was central to Wisconsin shipping in the late 1800s. The town began in 1834 as Port Gilbert, founded by Captain Gilbert Knapp of Massachusetts at the mouth of the Root River, and New Englanders soon filled the area with log cabins. Much earlier, in November 1674, Father Jacques Marquette and his companions camped at the river mouth, the first Europeans known to visit.
The town had a defiant streak. In 1854 federal marshals seized Joshua Glover, a man who had escaped slavery and settled in Racine, and jailed him in Milwaukee. A hundred local men, and in the end some 5,000 people from across the state, broke into the jail and freed him, and he got away to Canada. The legal fight that followed led the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 unconstitutional.
Wright designed the Johnson Wax headquarters in 1936. He urged company president Hib Johnson to build outside a city he considered backwater, but Johnson refused, and the building, admired despite its rainwater leaks, stayed put. Racine also has North America's largest Danish population, which explains its fame for kringle pastry.
Source: Racine, Wisconsin
