Edgerton

Edgerton became a city in 1853. It was named after a modest railroad engineer, Benjamin Hyde Edgerton, who warned people to wait until after I'm dead, because I might do something in the meantime to discredit the name. In the 1880s, Edgerton was the Wisconsin birthplace of Pauline Pottery, still sought by antique collectors. For more than 100 years, Edgerton was the Midwest king of tobacco. The hometown of Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era author Sterling North, Edgerton is now a city of festivals, including Tobacco Days, Chilimania, and the Edgerton Book and Film Festival.

Mark Wilson Scarborough, whose maternal family has lived in rural Edgerton since the 1850s, has collected images and stories about his hometown for more than four decades. These photographs and tales serve as the main source of materials for this book. After a 34-year career working as a writer for newspapers around Wisconsin, Scarborough now works as a journalist and photographer for the Edgerton Reporter. His 150th birthday book for an Adams County, Wisconsin, town (There's No Place Like Rome) was published in 2007. Holding degrees in journalism and history, Scarborough was the youngest-ever trustee of the Rock County Historical Society and a founding member of Edgerton's Sterling North Society.