In the late summer of 1948, truckloads of Black workers from Louisiana and Mississippi made their way home south from Door County, Wisconsin. The men and women had been recruited with promises of a bountiful harvest and a lucrative temporary work opportunity picking the region’s cherries. Instead, they encountered unsanitary camps, wage theft, and mistreatment in and out of the orchards. Perhaps worst of all, most of them left Wisconsin having made just a few dollars after spending a month in the area. Dejected, many promised to never return to the state. As nineteen-year-old Sam Quin of McComb, Mississippi, told his local newspaper: “I’ve had enough. I want to stay home now. I don’t like being a cherry-picking refugee.”1
In the years following World War II, Door County had become one of the world’s most prolific regions for cherry production, yielding twenty-five to forty million pounds of cherries each harvest. Local orchardists had come to depend on a growing number of migrant farm workers to pick during the short harvest season that lasted from July to August each year. By 1948, the overwhelming majority of the county’s migrant workers traveled from the US South and Southwest to spend this brief period of time in one of the northernmost regions of the country. Yet, despite being part of an essential workforce, many of these pickers—most of them Black and Mexican American—found dilapidated housing, low pay, and discrimination in Door County. Their situation was so dire in 1948 that the Milwaukee Journal dubbed this labor crisis “the Cherryland Problem.”2
Though they had transformed Door County into one of the Midwest’s most iconic tourist destinations, area locals did not extend that same hospitality to the workers who upheld their most famous agricultural industry. The histories of Wisconsin cherry pickers during World War II and the postwar years provide an important perspective on how the Door County community confronted rapidly shifting demographics during this tumultuous decade.
Long before Europeans settled in northeast Wisconsin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the area now known as Door County was the home of Native tribes that included the Potawatomi, the Menominee, the Ho-Chunk, the Ojibwe, the Sauk, the Huron, and the Petun. While many of these tribes were forcibly displaced from their homes by the federal government following the 1830 Indian Removal Act, members of the Menominee, Oneida, and Lac du Flambeau who had been relocated to nearby reservations remained an active presence. Following the founding of the state in 1848, the region’s vast lumber and fishing resources drew European immigrants to settle along the seventy-five-mile-long peninsula and forty-two islands that make up Door County.3 Through the late nineteenth century, lumberjacks clear-cut the area’s pine and locals discovered that the remaining alkaline, limestone-rich shallow soil was perfect for growing fruit trees. By the late 1910s, what had begun as dooryard plantings of fruit trees developed into full orchards blossoming across the peninsula. Turning to new techniques in cold fruit preservation, farmers converted the county’s existing pea canning factories into fruit packinghouses where thousands of pounds of cherries were processed. A small number of cherries were sent to fresh markets, while the bulk of the harvest was canned for use in pies and sauces, and the surplus was either pressed for juice or processed into maraschino cherries.4
In the industry’s early days at the start of the twentieth century, farming families and local workers handled much of the seasonal picking. When farmers needed extra labor to help with a large harvest, they paid young people from surrounding towns and villages, who would travel to the peninsula in horse-drawn rigs and set up temporary camps in nearby fields. Some families traveled from as far as Milwaukee and Chicago during the summer months, often picking cherries to supplement their income while on a rustic respite
