© Dr. Galen Royer Frysinger
Fromm Brothers Fox Farm
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 Londonfor $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 1922 the operation at Hamburg was employing so many people that they
built the boarding house. In 1923 they built the dairy barn to feed their workers,
and in 1924 the bunk house.
Back in Wisconsin, in 1909 the Fromm brothers managed to buy or catch twelve
red foxes. They paired them up in pens, hoping they would produce pups –
maybe a silver pup.
In 1913 one of these pairs produced four red pups, and finally one silver! That
year two of the brothers chiseled in the rock at the top of nearby Rib Mountain:
John and Henry Fromm Pioneer Breeders of Silver Foxes 1913
The next year their farm produced seventeen silver fox pups, and 25 the next. By
the end of the war, prices were rebounding and they were producing more and more
pelts.
Dairy Barn
Bunk House
nearby ginseng farm
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