THE TRUE GINSENG PIONEER
John Koehler credited with Marathon County industry start
Common understanding is that it was four industrious Fromm Brothers early in the 20th century who originated the central Wisconsin ginseng industry on their farm in the town of Hamburg.
The conception is nudged along by a passage in Bright with Silver, a book about the Fromm’s silver fox farm business success by young adult novelist Katherine Pinkerton, which depicts the brothers finding ginseng berries in their woods and discussing how Reinhold Dietsch, a neighbor, planned to make a fortune selling ginseng roots to the Chinese.
Ben Clark, historian at the Marathon County Historical Society, says this tale is popular enough, but not quite true.
The Fromms were an important early ginseng producing family, he said, but credit for starting the industry should go to John Koehler, Wausau, who did not only pioneer ginseng cultivation but wrote a book about it.
American ginseng was exported to China as early as 1713, Clark said, but this was all wild ginseng found in wooded forests.
In the 1870s, various horticulturalists in the United States started working on cultivation of the traditional Asian medicinal plant. A key researcher was George Stanton, a New York ginseng hobbyist, who learned that ginseng seed germination is unusually long and that the plant, to ward off a multitude of diseases, needs sandy, well-drained soil.
Koehler summarized this and other research in his 1912 book, The Ginseng
Growers and Goldenseal Growers Handbook. The volume was published in Wausau and was translated into German.
With his book, Koehler led the Wisconsin Ginseng Growers Association. It was members of this association who eventually perfected the techniques for growing cultivated ginseng in central Wisconsin.
Koehler did not just provide a manual for growing ginseng, said Clark, but was a robust cheerleader for the industry. In his book, Koehler exclaimed that a Wisconsin farmer could get up to $8.25 a pound for “good quality” ginseng root and that a vast international market was ready to be exploited.
“It would be impossible for Americans to glut the market with ginseng for the next 50 years,” he wrote. “Ginseng is used by every Chinaman no matter how poor. The ginseng market is as stable as the market is for tea or coffee, and not subject to change as every other article of commerce. Unless America cultivates it, there is going to be a great scarcity of ginseng …” Clark said that Marathon County farmers took up ginseng farming at the same time homesteaders were transitioning to commercial farming, good roads connected wilderness settlements to Wausau and international trade expanded with industrialization.
Early west county families who were ginseng farmers were the Volhards, Hornungs and Buchbergers from the Marathon City area.
The Fromms were also a pioneering ginseng family and, perhaps, the most persistent. When the market for ginseng bottomed out following the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, the Fromms, unlike other families, continued to produce ginseng. Clark reports that the Fromms stored barrels of ginseng for a decade until World War II ended.
“They were stubborn and shrewd Germans who got lucky,” said the historian about the four business oriented Fromm brothers -- Edward, Walter, Henry and John.
Clark said the Fromms quit Koehler’s association and declined to share ginseng growing information with other local farmers.
The historian said today’s ginseng business in Marathon County did not start with one family’s genius, but with many ginseng growers, both here and across the country, slowly understanding the mysterious plant well enough to cultivate it.
“It was a cooperative effort,” he said.
GINSENG INDUSTRY FOUNDER - John Koehler, Wausau, was instrumental in forming the Wisconsin Ginseng Growers Association and pioneering today’s ginseng industry in central Wisconsin.
THE BOOK OF GINSENG- Wausau ginseng enthusiast John Koehler published in 1912 The Ginseng Growers and Goldenseal Growers Handbook, a manual of both growing and marketing ginseng to what was believed to be a vast Chinese market.
