Dover, Wisconsin - Ghost Towns on Waymarking.com

Text of marker:

VILLAGE OF DOVER

Beginning in 1844, nearly 700 setters were brought into this area by the British Temperance & Emigration Society, organized the previous year in Liverpool, England.  By 1850 Dover boasted a hotel, post office, cooper, blacksmith, shoemaker, wagon shop and stores.  When the railroad chose Mazomanie for a depot site and made no stop in Dover, Doverites moved their houses into Mazomanie and Dover faded away to become a ghost town.  A local boy who made good was John Appleby, inventor of the knotter on the grain binder.  The idea came to Applyby as he watched the monotonously regular movement of his mother's hands in knitting.  In 1867 he successfully demonstrated his revolutionary "contraption" in a wheat field east of the cemetery.