What Goes Around Comes Around

He took us for rubes. Figured he’d make a grand entrance, slap on a cheesehead, flash a roll, have his way with us. This foreigner miscalculated. Didn’t bone up on Wisconsin’s ways.

If Elon Musk had bothered to crack a history book or two, maybe he’d have discovered what happened long ago when another wealthy outsider went to bossing people around in these parts.

Byron Kilbourn had immense ambitions and dabbled in a little bit of everything but had a particular passion for transportation. He was born in Connecticut, the son of a colonel in the War of 1812 who moved his family to Ohio where he was elected to Congress representing the Columbus area.

Young Byron went to work constructing canals in the 1820s, then turned to surveying, landing a job to help plat the Michigan Territory’s western expanses, a region soon to be known as Wisconsin. He entered Green Bay and worked his way south along the great lake’s shores, restless and eager to make his fortune, eventually reaching a sprawling se…