Fromm Brothers Fur and Ginseng Farm

About this property

The Fromm Brothers Fur and Ginseng Farm is a farm complex in the Town of Hamburg, Marathon County, Wisconsin where four brothers pioneered ginseng farming starting in 1904, and used the profits to develop silver fox farming. By 1929 they were the world's largest producer of both products. The farm was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, considered significant at a national level because of the brothers' innovations in ginseng farming and in fur production and marketing. By 1901 the Fromm/Nieman family had been farming in Hamburg for decades. While farming, some of the sons had been trapping red fox for supplemental income. Furs of wild animals were a popular part of fashionable clothes at the time, and they brought a good price. More valuable than red fox was the silver fox, a sport of the red fox. In 1901, the brothers read in Hunter Trapper magazine about a silver fox pelt that sold in London for $1200, the price of many Wisconsin farms at the time. Four of the brothers made a pact to raise silver foxes. They were Walter, Edward, John and Henry Fromm, and these eight to thirteen-year-old boys began calling themselves "The Company." But to get fox-breeding off the ground, they needed money. Wild ginseng had been collected in the forests of North America for hundreds of years, for sale to China. Reinhold Dietsch, a neighbor of the Fromms, was experimenting with cultivating it, and he shared with the brothers how to plant the roots in beds and how to build lath arbors over the plants to simulate the shade of the forest. In 1904 the brothers planted some wild roots they had found in their mother's garden. When their father refused to give them lath to use for their crazy scheme, they bought it themselves. When they asked for more land to plant on, he offered them only a rock pile. They moved the rocks and planted. To grow more ginseng, the brothers needed to plant seeds, rather than the few roots they found in the forest. This required a tricky process of germinating seeds in layers of sand buried in boxes for a year, which they learned from Eastern ginseng growers. Ginseng roots take about five years to mature, and the first crop grown from seeds was finally harvested in 1912. In 1915 they harvested a half acre, and it sold for $3,500. The silver fox is not a separate species, but is a genetic variant born occasionally to red foxes. Since the silver is rare in the wild, it is more valuable than red fox. In the 1880s some men on Prince Edward Island tried breeding silver fox to each other in captivity, and managed to produce more silver fox pelts to sell. Their production technique was kept a secret until one of the silver foxes escaped, and led hounds back to their secret farm. By 1909, other fox farms were operating on Prince Edward Island.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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