1837 was the year of the initial great migration to the site of Beloit and Lucius Fisher was among that group of New Englanders to arrive that year. A Vermonter by birth, born in Derby, August 17, 1808, he was 29 years old when he first came to Beloit, “a man of stately appearance, with modest and agreeable manners,” as Sereno T. Merrill recalled him. As with many New Englanders, hard land and a growing economic recession urged Fisher toward the opportunities in the West.

His schooling had taken place in Vermont and he had taught school for a time before moving from Vermont. For a period, he worked for the Fairbanks family of St. Johnsbury, selling their newly invented platform scales, but it was his fruitless attempt to collect debts due the company that impelled him to turn his back on the panic conditions of 1837 in New York State and seek his fortune in the West.

As Fisher himself recalled in his Pioneer Recollections, in western New York “I was with but little money and all business prostrated….I had nothing in Vermont to return to. I was lonely and desolate.” In this mood Lucius Fisher set out for Wisconsin Territory, going first to Milwaukee, even-tually to Watertown, coming down from that place by dugout with another Beloit pioneer, Charles F.H. Goodhue. In mid-June of 1837 Fisher invested $400 in land in Beloit, viewing it initially as speculation, for he had no intention at that moment of settling in Beloit.

However, neither Chicago nor Milwaukee captured his imagination and in time he returned to Beloit to give almost thirty years of his time, his talents and his energies to the making of the city. Committed to Beloit, few of the pioneers equaled Lucius Fisher in his work for the growth and betterment of the city. In March of 1838 he purchased a building lot and assisted his father in erecting a house on Pleasant Street near the river. The year following, he built a house for himself to the south of his father’s. Along with James Lusk he opened a hardware store and from Milwaukee brought the first stoves to be sold in the village.

For several years he was a manufacturer of lumber and also engaged in real estate speculation, managing the extensive interests of Major Philip Kearney among others. Self-interest was not Fisher’s commanding concern; the well-being of the growing village was paramount. He was the agent who represented all the land claimants at the sale of government lands in Beloit in March of 1839 and seventeen years later secured the legal counsel of Abraham Lincoln to defend successfully those interest against the claims of Paul Billingham and Matt Carpenter.

In the Beloit College archives rests Lucius Fisher’s Day Book, noting his personal contribution of twenty dollars toward Mr. Lincoln’s fee for his brief. In 1839 Fisher had also been elected “pathmaster” to layout and supervise all roads in the southern half of Rock County. From 1839 to 1844 he served as Sheriff, in 1857 he was a member of the State Legislature and served Beloit both as postmaster and as alderman on occasion.

In the business world, Lucius Fisher’s accomplishments were beneficial and personally profitable. For a time, he engaged in the manufacture of reapers and other farm implements. He was a stockholder and director of one of the local paper mills, served as President of the Rock River Bank and was a major partner in the mercantile firm of Fisher Bundy and Cheney, located in the “Stone Pile” at the northwest corner of State and Broad Streets, where the Eagles Lodge is now located. The “Stone Pile” as that business block was for a long time called, became a synonym for the Puritan element in the growing village – the “cranks who were building a college, the party that favored the abolition of slavery and suppression of the saloons.” The origin of any movement, S.T. Merrill recalled, looking to the welfare and real prosperity of the growing town was attributed by the saloon party to the “Stone Pile” of which in a sense Mr. Fisher was the cornerstone.

Early in the seventeenth century “New England thought upon a college,” and those New Englanders who founded and peopled early Beloit were of the same persuasion and Lucius Fisher was foremost among those Beloiters who thought upon those institutions for the education of future generations. A co-educational seminary had been chartered in late December of 1837, although it did not come into operation until some six years later.

In 1844 Lucius Fisher was one of the trustees of this Beloit Seminary, serving until 1849. In that year the Seminary was merged into the new college as a Pre-paratory Department, under the control of the College. When the College was chartered on February 2, 1846, Mr. Fisher was among that initial band of sixteen trustees. He gave of his time, his ideas and of his means. Of the $7,000 subscribed for the College by the citizens of Beloit, Lucius Fisher was the first and the largest subscriber to that fund. Moreover, it was Lucius Fisher’s resolve to give his choice bluff lots overlooking the river land, as Prof. Emerson stated, “which should be a hearth of home for a large region of kindred minds and souls.” On the college campus today the old Smith Gymnasium, now the Student Union, stands on Fisher’s bluff lots and Eaton chapel stands on the four lots along College Street that he generously donated toward the college site.

At the close of the Civil War, Lucius Fisher moved to Chicago and prospered there as he had in Beloit. He remained a Trustee of the College until 1884. In his thirty years in Beloit he had been sage adviser to both city and college. Of the men of the First Congregational Church who have by their lives of outward activity related the church to civic affairs….the mind turns naturally to Lucius G. Fisher. At his death he was returned to Beloit to lie in Oakwood Cemetery, one of the pioneers who ensured that Beloit would grow and that Beloit would prosper.