Prostitution in the 19th Century Midwest

Earlier this year I had the sad duty of informing readers that Green County’s criminal case archives had been denuded. The archivist at UW- Platteville was as shocked as I was; their intake records reported the collection to be complete, but nobody had checked this prior to the archivist’s preparation for my visit. Interested readers can get the details here.

My reason for consulting the archives was to attempt to prove a “hunch” I have about crime in our county’s earliest decades: I suspect that organized prostitution existed in Monroe, WI. Now that the criminal case files have been (presumably) lost/destroyed, proving that hunch has become more difficult… but not impossible.

Some secrets are too big to keep hidden and the nature of fin-de-siècle prostitution in the American Midwest is such that signs exist as to its one-time presence. My hunch is motivated by the following information:

1) From 1857 Monroe became one stop along the railway connecting Milwaukee and Mississippi. (Brooks Dunwiddie was secretary to that railway company’s stock subscribers.) More railway plans soon followed, with Arabut Ludlow acting as treasurer for a line connecting Monroe with the heavy industry of Freeport, IL. (As in the ‘Lincoln-Douglas Debate’.) In short, Monroe was a multi-line ‘railway town’ when it was still “becoming a village”.

Entry for the Chicago-Milwaukee-St.Paul railroad agent in the Monroe, WI section of the 1875 Gazetteer and Directory book for the same railroad. St. Paul’s red light district will play a large role in this post.

2) Our first two-story building was a saloon and hotel specializing in the sale of whiskey (1836); by 1857 our historic square was infamous for copious liquor sales and drunkenness. There was a well-established ‘rough element’ in our town in its early history.

The first whiskey saloon/hotel in Monroe was located near the site of this bridge, a previous incarnation of which was a railway bridge, but is now part of the Badger State Trail.

3) We had a large number of hotels, at least six by 1884 and that’s not counting the boarding houses for single men. (The town and surrounding farmland was not densely populated and had no heavy industry.) This was not an easy living and these premises frequently changed hands— incentives existed to find other ways to earn.

4) The railroad brought with it an influx of wealthy Chicago vacationers— often men on hunting trips— who built picturesque lodges and splashed cash in other ways too.

1205 13th Avenue, Monroe was built as a hunting lodge for a wealthy Chicago vacationer sometime prior to 1890, possibly before 1848. A beautiful home with exquisite detailing, but far too small for the large families of this period. It would comfortably sleep a single man and one or two servants. That tree on the right is the Wisconsin State Champion Ginko.

5) In the 1850s, when the town was first being settled, far more women who were given a tombstone were interned in our cemetery than men. “Dr. Ball noted that of the 45 adult persons buried in the Village Cemetery, whose graves had tombstones, 36 were those of females.” [Monroe Sentinel, October 13th 1858. See Matt Figi Becoming a Village: Monroe WI in the 1850s] Tombstones were public displays of wealth/luxury. Typically, far more men were immigrants to frontier towns than women, while exceptions to this rule occurred among certain demographics (Eastern European Jews for one) involved in organized prostitution, the result being more equal male:female ratios. Monroe’s 1850s death demographics are anomalous.

6) A healthy population of young women (16-35 years old) in the 1875 census survey reported their trade as “seamstress” or “dressmaker” and “servant”; meaning Monroe had a large demographic of women who were typically targeted by pimps and traffickers. Often these women were foreign-born (Irish, German, Norwegian). Poor women exposed to luxury via their employment were particularly vulnerable.

As regular readers know, the Galician international prostitution syndicate, the dominant global syndicate, tended to follow the railroad as tracks branched out into frontier territory. It would be remarkable if our community escaped this phenomenon.

I’d like to bring some of the other clues (2-6) into perspective by looking at two papers, Joel Best’s Careers in Brothel Prostitution: St. Paul, 1865-1883 [Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xn:4 (Spring 1982), 597-619] and K. Anne Ketz et alia’s Public Image and Private Reality: An Analysis of Differentiation in a Nineteenth-Century St. Paul Bordello [Historical Archaeology , 2005, Vol. 39, No. 1, Sin City (2005), pp. 74-88]. By focusing on St. Paul, a city less developed than the major metropolises of Chicago and San Fransisco at this time, their findings are more comparable to the contemporary situation in Monroe, WI. As Best explains:

As a river city, St. Paul had a regional reputation for vice, but its "under the hill" district was far smaller than the Barbary Coast or Storyville. The city grew rapidly during this period, from 10,401 in the 1860 federal census to 41,473 in 1880, but the sex ratio was nearly balanced (49.5 percent of the population was female in 1870). There was no severe shortage of women to inflate the demand for prostitution. In contrast to the famous vice districts in major seaports and on the frontier, prostitution existed on a modest scale in St. Paul. In this respect, it was typical of many other cities.

From the 1970s onward, scholarship of fin-de-siècle prostitution tends to fall somewhere along a spectrum of apologist-celebratory with respect to the role of pimps, often presenting prostitution as a regular job and an economic choice, glamorized with vignettes from the lives of women like La Belle Otero. The role of child grooming, deception and slavery in the industry is downplayed. Best describes the academic situation in the 1980s:

Few women took this career path [prostitution], but authorities disagree over whether the typical prostitute died in misery or returned to respectability. Sanger, drawing on his pre-Civil War survey of 2,000 New York prostitutes, argued that women entered prostitution in fashionable brothels and proceeded through a series of progressively shabbier establishments, dying, on the average, within four years. Finnegan's recent study of York streetwalkers supports Sanger; she concludes that women entered prostitution because they were poor and that they found drink, disease, and destitution, rather than opportunities for improvement. This model, also advanced by Victorian moralists, holds that prostitutes' lives inevitably led to misery and death. In contrast, Acton, Victorian England's leading authority on vice, believed that most prostitutes "return sooner or later to a more or less regular course of life”.

Check out the Tight Lacing: Glamor shots/pornography from Agustina Otero Iglesias’ (a.k.a. “La Belle Otero) days working as a high-class prostitute. This is the image of prostitution which it behooved recruiters and madams to promote.

Another glamorous image of prostitution promoted by Otero’s pimps/loan-sharks to both potential johns and ladies of fashion who wished to ape bordello chic.

An elderly Otero poses for the press in April 1965. No longer saleable and likely heavily in debt, Agustina Otero lived in increasingly straightened circumstances until her death in a hotel room/bedsit.

Both Sanger’s and Acton’s observations hold for some groups of prostitutes. In 1920s-30s Warsaw, the leading police woman in charge of child welfare, Chief Commandant Stanislawa Paleolog noted a discrepancy between the fates of Christian Polish and Jewish women who entered into Jewish pimping networks: the Jewish women usually were able to reintegrate into their community and raise a family after their stint as prostitutes, while the Christians were broken people unable even to look after their own children. [Paleolog, The Women Police of Poland 1925-1939.] Writing in the 1970s, Edward Bristow confirms Sanger’s observations and even modern scholars must admit that premiums were paid for youthful prostitutes over aged ones. If the gender anomaly in Monroe’s cemetery is due to older prostitutes succumbing in an end-of-the-line town, it would fit contemporary conditions in the sex trade.

In 1860 a census-like ‘Population Schedule’ for Monroe was conducted and has been published as part of Matt Figi’s book Becoming a Village: Monroe, Wisconsin in the 1850s. (This will be for sale shortly on the Green County Historical Society website.) There are two professions listed which tended to be held by young women: “sewing/seamstress/dress-maker” and “servant”. Almost all servants were between 15-25 years old and immigrants from Europe (Norway, Germany, Ireland); Monroe’s seamstresses for the most part were between 16 and 35. The tailors on the other hand were men in their mid-thirties to forties.

Readers will remember from my post The Miseducation of Leon Goetz that Leon’s father John Conrad was involved with one Pearl Blount, a “dressmaker” who made yearly migrations to a bedsit inside a “girls boarding school” in Chicago “during the season”. In Chicago, Pearl associated with the owners of an assignation house; her relationship with John Conrad was not favored by the Goetz family. Monroe women were not immune to the attractions of organized vice.

Best has these observations on alternate professions claimed by prostitutes in St. Paul:

Prostitution in St. Paul was not restricted to the city's brothels. Some prostitutes claimed that they were legitimately employed, often in the needle trades. In the 1880 census, the two young women living with George and Sarah Kimball-a notorious couple with a long history of arrests for managing brothels-listed themselves as dressmakers. This alibi was common enough that the city's leading newspaper sometimes used "plain sewing" as a euphemism for prostitution. Cigar stores provided another common cover for vice: "In front of the dirty little shanties, a beggarly display of cigars and fruits is made while behind is a sitting room containing some gay furniture and a wheezy organ, or jingling piano is found, while several asthmetic [sic] painted females are prepared to sing or play cards." Although "sewing girls" and "cigar stores" existed, brothels housed the major portion of the city's prostitutes. A physician, lecturing about venereal disease in 1874, estimated "that there were six regular houses in St. Paul with thirty-six inmates, and six irregular ones, such as cigar stores, with nine inmates who have rooms by themselves, and from forty to fifty 'kept women.'" … Brothels played the most prominent role in St. Paul's demimonde because city politics let them operate openly.

…

Although St. Paul's madams and their brothels remain visible in historical records, less can be determined about the brothels' inmates. Besides the madams, several hundred other people were arrested on prostitution charges between 1865 and 1883, including madams of minor, short-lived establishments, brothel inmates, independent prostitutes, pimps, servants, and customers. Unfortunately, it is frequently impossible to determine the category in which an individual belongs. In particular, since visiting a house of ill fame was an all-purpose prostitution charge, brothel inmates cannot be distinguished from independent prostitutes or those in "cigar stores." Positive identification of brothel inmates is only possible in two sources: structured arrest records, where prostitutes were listed beneath their respective madams, and manuscript census schedules.

The demographics of prostitution in St. Paul are not unlike those of the young women employed as seamstresses or servants in Monroe:

Demographically, the inmates resembled the madams. Their ages ranged from sixteen to thirty, with a median of twenty-two; twenty-three were under twenty-one, fifty-one were between twenty-one and twenty-five, and ten were over twenty- five (ages were unrecorded for five women). Of the fifty-six for whom marital status is known, fifty-five were single. Over three fourths were native-born: United States-sixty-seven; Canada, Ireland, and Sweden-three each; Germany-two; England, France, and Italy-one each; with eight unknown. Census schedules gave the state of birth for twenty-four native-born women; eighteen of these (75 percent) came from only five states-Minnesota, New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. (The same states accounted for 79 percent of the native-born residents in the 1880 federal census of the city.) Compared to their madams, brothel inmates were slightly younger, somewhat less likely to be married, but about equally likely to have been born in the United States. If geographical and cultural differences are taken into account, this pattern resembles those found in other studies of nineteenth-century prostitutes.

… The news stories about parents hunting for their young daughters spoke of girls from Faribault, Shakopee, Mankato, and other towns in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Others moved to St. Paul after becoming prostitutes; the register of prostitutes kept by the police was unsystematic, but it occasionally listed the places of origin or, less often, the destination of women leaving St. Paul. Although some of these women may have been newcomers to vice, many probably came from brothels elsewhere. Many entries named towns in Minnesota or the surrounding region, but some women were on the move to or from major cities in other states. Only one woman's origin was listed as outside the country— Norway.

It should be noted that just because Monroe’s seamstresses and servants are demographically similar to St. Paul’s prostitute population, it does not mean that all these Monroe women/teens are prostitutes, just that Monroe had a healthy cohort of the type of person targeted by pimps and madams.

In the Monroe census schedule, it was rare to have more than two servants or one seamstress listed as resident at an address, the exception being the Gleissner family hotel (“Glessner House”) which in 1860 employed three ladies from Germany (2) and Norway (1) between the ages of 18 and 22. Best says this of conditions in St. Paul:

Brothels fluctuated in size from month to month, but a typical establishment had four to six inmates in residence, plus the madam. Sometimes brothels were small; the Kimballs had only two "dressmakers" living with them in 1880 and Cora Webber had only one prostitute (as well as a handful of other men and women) in her house in 1870. At the other extreme, Robinson had ten inmates with her in 1870 and Hattie McBride had nine in 1880.

Prostitution was not openly legal in Wisconsin nor Minnesota, so the trade often ran cover under other businesses, for instance:

The establishments "under the hill" were on or near Eagle Street, a few blocks southwest of downtown. Both neighborhoods offered other forms of vice; in addition to brothels and "cigar stores," they contained notorious saloons, gambling "hells," and assignation houses. Public drunkenness and fights were commonplace.

What seems to be common to red-light districts the world over is their synergy to bars, gambling dens and locales with a bad reputation for public drunkenness and mayhem. Organized vice had several “ins” to our community beyond the railroad: there were at least five saloon operators and a cigar manufacturer. (Wisconsin used to be a noteworthy tobacco growing state.)

High mortality among our early female inhabitants is not inconsistent with organized prostitution. The life of a prostitute was dangerous and crushing, Best:

St. Paul's newspapers gave detailed reports of the deaths of several prostitutes. These accounts suggest the array of risks faced by madams and brothel inmates. One inmate died from the complications of an abortion. Fights and other disorders broke out frequently in the brothels. Although there were no reports of women dying in these incidents, some suffered serious injuries. Suicide attempts were common.

Prostitution was a hard life and many women turned to drink or drugs. Drunkenness was an everyday occurrence in the brothels, contributing to the frequent disorders. The testimony at the Robinson arson trial, which offers a glimpse of a typical evening in a brothel, revealed that several of the inmates had been drinking or were drunk. Many prostitutes preferred using morphine or laudanum; they accounted for most of St. Paul's narcotics users. Alcohol and drugs probably contributed to deaths by natural causes. At least four madams died from disease-three before they were thirty-five. Unfortunately, the newspapers were less likely to cover brothel inmates' or independent prostitutes' deaths from disease.

I have it on good authority that the local paper in the 1850s, the Monroe Sentinel, never published any journalism directly relating to any local sex trade issues— this paper was printed out of the second floor of Arabut Ludlow’s store building. My hope for visiting the criminal case and civil case archives in Platteville was that I’d see patterns in the people brought before the court which signified organized prostitution, like the situation Best describes in St. Paul, MN:

From 1865 to 1883, St. Paul's city government adopted a de facto system for regulating prostitution within the city. Prostitution was illegal under both state law and city ordinance, but enforcement took the form of arresting each of the city's madams at monthly intervals and fining them according to the number of inmates in their houses-in effect, taxing their operations. This system was openly acknowledged by city officials and the newspapers often covered the madams' courtroom appearances. As a consequence, Robinson and her colleagues were familiar figures. There was no need to keep the brothels secret. At the same time, the police and courts prohibited streetwalking, levying heavy fines or jail sentences against independent prostitutes whose activities were visible to the public.

…As a consequence of this policy, madams can be identified by their regular appearances in the court records. If a madam is defined as a person who was, on at least three occasions during one calendar year, either charged with keeping a house of ill fame or charged with violating ordinance No. 10 and fined more than $10, then forty madams can be identified between November, I865 and May, 1883.

Best’s work is from the 1980s and like most modern scholarship it seeks to place fin de seicle prostitution in the context of economic choice, where profit-maximizing, high-information women (not children) choose the career. It is refreshing therefore that we can turn to work like that of Ketz et alia, who rely on archeology to reconstruct what the life of St. Paul’s highest-class prostitutes was really like. Their summary reads:

In spring 1997, during preparation for construction of the new Science Museum of Minnesota, the brothel of an infamous St. Paul madam and other "boardinghouses" were uncovered. This archaeological area was designated the Washington Street District. Subsequent data recovery revealed a wealth of archaeological data that contradicted official government documents and addressed some of the many myths and legends surrounding Nina Clifford's bordello. Differences between the artifacts used by the customers and the residents are apparent in vessel types, faunal remains, and other artifact types. Conclusions reflect the relation ship between the brothel's public image and the reality of the day-to-day lives of the residents. The preponderance of the archaeological evidence for poor health conditions of the residents contradicts the myths of the glamorous sporting life of Nina Clifford's establishment. While the women may have enjoyed higher incomes and better food, it was at a high price.

“Page 26 from the March 27, 1997 issue of the Star Tribune” minnesotagoodage.com

The reality of “toleration” policies is that the police become enforcers for pimps and madams who are favored by corrupt politicians. (And the intrepid journalists who expose this corruption are almost always smeared as “muckrakers”!!) Ketz offers a different perspective on the toleration system described by Best:

After 1900, St. Paul's so-called regulation of prostitution became part of the "O'Connor system" of crime regulation. John J. O'Connor served as chief of the St. Paul Police Department during the first two decades of the 20th century. His system allowed known criminals to stay in St. Paul as long as they did not commit crimes within the city limits. The prohibition against crime within the city limits did not apply to vice; prostitution, gambling, and alcohol dealers operated with impunity. Madams were brought before the municipal court every other month and fined $100 for keeping a house of ill fame (St. Paul Municipal Court 1900).

Part of the glamor being sold to johns, and part of the glamor used to recruit children/teens to the business (always a challenge for pimps and traffickers), was the myth that prostitutes enjoyed the “high life”. Smart madams went out of their way to make their establishment fashionable for this reason:

The number of non-prostitute employees indicates that the prostitutes were bringing in plenty of money. In addition, many of the brothels were well appointed. Clifford's architect-designed building cost her $12,000 to construct in 1888. The women were said to be the best-dressed prostitutes in town, and there was a waiting room furnished with lounges and decorated with "expensive draperies" and "imported rugs" (Guilford [1915]:8; St. Paul Pioneer Dispatch 1963; Maccabee 1995:13-17). The building was a handsome, two-story brick dwelling with a large, round-arch window on the first floor, a bay window surmounted with a pedimented parapet, three full-height pilasters topped with carved finials, and a cut-stone entry arch resting on freestanding Doric order columns (Figure 2)….

Much has been written about Clifford, and her bordello was the site of many legends (Macca bee 1995:13-17). While many of these claims will probably never be verified, it is known that by 1895, Clifford was running the largest brothel on South Washington Street, with 11 "sports," two chambermaids, and a cook (Minnesota State Population Census 1895). Five years later, Clif ford was listed again as a landlady with nine prostitutes, a cook, a housekeeper, three chambermaids, a musician, and a porter (Minnesota State Population Census 1905). The 1905 state census was not as specific; it listed Clifford and 16 other boarders at 147 South Washington. In the 1910 federal census, the address is listed as a male boardinghouse (USBC 1910). While Clifford is listed again in 1920 (USBC), only four boarders are identified. Other sources indicate that Clifford resided at this address and regularly paid fines for "keeping a house of ill fame" through 1913 (Polk 1905, 1910, 1915; St. Paul Municipal Court 1904-1913). Her brothel remained busy through at least 1923 and probably until the end of her life (St. Paul Pioneer Press 1923).

“Nina Clifford’s brothel at 147 S. Washington St., St. Paul, circa 1937. Photos courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society” minnesotagoodage.com The ornate architecture of the bordello would signify wealth and luxury, as would publicly displayed gravestones of deceased “sports”. All this glamor was both an advertising and recruiting tool.

Image from K. Anne Ketz et alia’s Public Image and Private Reality: An Analysis of Differentiation in a Nineteenth-Century St. Paul Bordello [Historical Archaeology , 2005, Vol. 39, No. 1, Sin City (2005), pp. 74-88]

Ketz analyized two data sets: artifacts from the front of the building where punters entered and artifacts from the rear of the building, which the authors say “appeared to have great potential for comparative analysis between the public image of the brothel and private reality”. Where the men entered a great deal of glass entertaining ware was found:

The overwhelming majority (91.3%) of glass vessels from Feature 3 [street entrance] belong to the domestic group, followed in decreasing frequency by vessels from the medical group (6.7%) and the personal group (2%). Many of the bottles from Feature 3 were complete or nearly complete, and one recovered bottle still contained beer. Dates derived from the bottle glass indicate that the deposition of Feature 3 began when the brothel was built in 1888 and continued to the turn of the century.

There was also a deposit layer in the rear, which like the beer bottle deposit above, was formed when the brothel housed the greatest number of prostitutes and servants:

Comparison of the glass assemblages from the front entrance (Feature 3) and the backyard (Unit 5) points to some interesting differences between the types and frequencies of materials discarded near the front entrance versus the backyard of Clifford's brothel. ... Domestic-group vessels are more frequent within the front entrance assemblage than in the sample from the backyard. In contrast, medicine bottles occur over six times more frequently in the backyard than in the midden near the front of Clifford's brothel…

In the backyard deposits, the overall trend is dramatically reversed, with domestic bottles occurring eight times more frequently than food serving and consumption glassware (88.9% and 11.1%, respectively). The glass data suggest that food-consumption and serving vessels were used and discarded far more frequently near the more commercial-oriented front entrance area of the brothel and that drinks constituted a large part of what was served.

…

Utilitarian ceramics typically associated with stoneware and coarse earthenware are much more prevalent in the household deposits in the backyard. Feature 3 [front door] contained no coarse earthenware or stoneware ceramic vessels, and all ceramics were associated only with the food-consumption and serving group….

The food consumed by the customers and the residents is quite different. Little food was served to the customers of the brothel, whereas the residents were eating poultry and beef…

Food served to patrons of Clifford's brothel included oysters, reputed to be an aphrodisiac, and poultry, some of which was probably reared on site. The poultry from Feature 3 contained a high percentage of wing and leg elements, indicating what is called today "finger food." The small number of animal bones recovered from near the entrance to Clifford's brothel suggests that relatively little food was being served to customers.

The reality was that prostitutes, often hopelessly mired in debt to their madams or pimps, had very few material goods which were actually theirs:

There is a higher percentage (17.6%) of personal items in the Feature 3 ceramic assemblage than in the ceramic personal items in the backyard/ residence-related assemblage, reflecting the more public/commercial nature of activities within the brothel (Table 4)….

Artifacts associated with "recreation" included figurines, gambling pieces, marbles, dolls, and other toys (Figures 11 and 12). Three figurine pieces were recovered from Feature 3, and just one small fragment from Unit 5 (Figure 11). In the backyard, earthenware marble and porcelain doll fragments indicate the presence of children; however, the federal and state census records do not list the presence of children at this location. Their presence is not surprising given the nature of the activities; they may have been residents or visiting their mothers. Only one year of census records, the 1895 state census, lists a nine-year-old boy at another brothel further down the block; otherwise, there was no mention of children (Minnesota State Population Census 1895-1905)…Given the nature of the business of this active city block, it is unlikely that anyone would want to record the presence of children.

The unspoken presence of children in these bordellos is the dark underbelly of sex trade history, and is one more instance where archeology can cut through the hype:

The conflict between the archaeological data and the census records also occurred in the investigations for the Hooker's Division red light district in Washington, DC (Seifert 1991: 100-101). At the Washington, DC, household at 1359 Ohio Avenue, no children were recorded, yet toys were uncovered in the artifact assemblage, indicating children were visitors or residents of the brothel. Children are known to have grown up in the New Orleans brothels (Rose 1974:150).

Ketz’s findings confirm street-level observations in Galicia and elsewhere, which report that ‘those who are born into it go into it’. (See “Bombien” Czernowitz slavers in Bristow, 1976.)

While the high-class prostitutes at least had some meat to eat, this was not a significantly higher standard of living than the general population. What was markedly worse than the norm was their health: the medical situation of both punters and prostitutes was not good, as evidenced by the two respective middens:

The frequency of medicine bottles near the front of Clifford's bordello differs markedly from the frequency behind the building. Medicine bottles make up 43.7% of the total vessel assemblage yielded by Unit 5 in the backyard, while they make up only 6.7% of the assemblage found in Feature 3 near the front of the brothel. Most medicine consumption would likely have occurred in more private moments and settings, not in the area where patrons were received and initially entertained during business hours. No patent or proprietary remedy bottles were recovered from Unit 5, while approximately 40% (N=4) of the Feature 3 medicine bottles were of this type. Two of the proprietary medicine containers from near the front entrance were citrate of magnesia bottles, a treatment for gastrointestinal tract ailments that was made by several companies (Fike 1987:140). Other products represented in the Feature 3 collection include Dr. J. W. Bull's Cough Syrup, manufactured by A. G. Meyer & Company, Baltimore, and Jaundice Bitters, made by Moses Atwood of Georgetown, Massachusetts. The purpose of the cough syrup is self-explanatory, while bitters were taken for a variety of ailments. Like many proprietary remedies of the 19th and early-20th centuries, bitters frequently contained a high percentage of alcohol. Prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which required ingredient labeling, the temperance movement considered bitters an acceptable beverage and effective curative for alcoholism (Fike 1987).

In contrast, the majority of the medicine bottle sample from the daily household deposits in the backyard appears to be prescription containers. The prescription medicines discarded in the backyard suggest the relative seriousness of ailments suffered by the women who worked in Clifford's bordello. Reportedly, prostitutes in the Washington Street district frequently availed themselves of the low-cost services of physicians employed by the old county morgue across the street (Maccabee 1995:13). Venereal disease was the most obvious health risk for women engaged in prostitution, but intimate contact with a large number of patrons undoubtedly resulted in higher than average rates of infection with a variety of other transmittable diseases.

I discuss the importance of medical doctors to the sex trade in The Mutual Film Corp Shallenbergers. By the 1890s at the latest, policies of toleration and government-sponsored certification by venereal disease doctors resulted in these doctors taking control of the Galician network. In Austro-Hungary, home-base to the pimps, most venereal disease doctors were from the same ethnic milieu as the Galician pimps and traffickers.

None of the above information proves that Monroe, WI had an organized sex trade presence in its early decades; these clues only point towards the fact that such a trade was likely. We should ask ourselves, however, why our community would be any different to the other railway towns that popped up along the world’s track networks. It would be far more surprising if the Galician syndicate chose to bypass Green County than it would be to find they had representatives here. Stay tuned for more information on Monroe, WI’s remarkable history of organized crime…