5 files on the desk from Fitchburg, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
Menominee leader who won tribal restoration; first woman to head the BIA; late-life Fitchburg resident
$116,000
Ada Elizabeth Deer led the fight that restored the Menominee Nation after federal termination, then became the first woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Late in life she lived in Fitchburg, served on the city’s Commission on Aging and pushed its rename to Commission on Aging Well, and died there on August 15, 2023, at eighty-eight—eight days after the governor proclaimed Ada Deer Day on her birthday.
She grew up the oldest of five surviving children—four other Deer children died in infancy—in a one-room log cabin on the Wolf River at Keshena, with no running water and no electricity. Mother Constance Wood Deer, a Philadelphia Quaker nurse from a well-to-do family, had worked in Appalachia and at Rosebud before marrying Joseph Deer, a Menominee mill worker. Constance took Ada to tribal council meetings at four. Ada attended Shawano High School and Badger Girls State. In 1957 she became the first Menominee to graduate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; in 1961 she was the first Native American to earn a social-work master’s at Columbia. Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico followed. Then came DRUMS and the Menominee Restoration Act, signed by Richard Nixon on December 22, 1973, after a House vote she later recalled as 404–3. She became the first woman to chair the tribe.
President Clinton put her in Interior from 1993 to 1997 as the first woman to run the BIA. She had already run for Wisconsin secretary of state and for Congress, sat on Common Cause and Girl Scouts national boards, and later taught social work and American Indian studies at Wisconsin. Fitchburg’s mayor wrote that she “called Fitchburg home,” and an alder said she stayed keyed into the city’s legislative fights. She grew up on the Menominee reservation at Keshena; Fitchburg was where she spent her final years and did local civic work.
Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
Raised in Fitchburg; Verona Area High and Wisconsin swimming star; NCAA champion; Badgers assistant coach
$152,000
Beata Nelson is the Fitchburg-raised swimmer who rewrote the collegiate backstroke record book at Wisconsin and later returned to the Badger deck as a coach. She learned to swim at a neighborhood pool in Fitchburg and never stopped: club teams, Verona Area High School (the public school Fitchburg kids attend), class of 2016, and national public-high-school butterfly marks. Her father, Andrew, class of 1990 and JD 1993, had lasted one season on the Badger team before law school; she came home to eat dinner and talk her sister through freshman year. She labeled her own freshman college season disappointing. As a sophomore she split 49.78 on a medley-relay backstroke leg and went under Natalie Coughlin's 49.97, the mark that first broke a minute.
She became the only woman with three NCAA swims under 50 seconds in the 100-yard backstroke, then the record-holder at 49.18, plus the collegiate 200-back record of 1:47.24 (later surpassed by Claire Curzan). Three NCAA titles in 2019, CSCAA Swimmer of the Year, and thirteen-time All-American followed. She swam for the Cali Condors in the International Swimming League. On the 2023 World Cup circuit she collected a haul the Verona Press put at nine gold and three silver and $152,200. Three U.S. Olympic trials ended without a team berth; in Indianapolis in 2024 she was 0.72 seconds from Paris in the 100 butterfly.
Verona papers call her a Verona native. The UW alumni magazine, when she was still driving south for dinner, called her a kid from Fitchburg. Both are true. She returned to the Badger deck as a volunteer, then as an assistant coach in 2025. The pool came first.
Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
Madison-born, Fitchburg-raised industrial microbiologist; UW full professor; Syene Road farmhouse on the National Register
$250,000
Elizabeth McCoy turned a Fitchburg farm childhood into industrial microbiology. Born in Madison on February 1, 1903, she grew up just south of the city on the family farm in the Town of Fitchburg. Her mother, Esther, had been a professor and a nurse and taught canning and household hygiene; her father, Cassius, talked pasteurization and bovine tuberculosis after health forced him off a professorship. A septic pony bite, scarlet fever, pneumonia, and the 1918 flu left their mark. She studied agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin, turned down a USDA offer in 1925 to stay with E.B. Fred, and wrote the taxonomy of the acetone-butanol clostridia that wartime industry needed for rubber and munitions. She earned her Ph.D. in 1929 and became a full professor in 1942, one of the first women to hold that rank on the campus.
During the Second World War she isolated a Penicillium mutant that industrial labs scaled; descendants of that line still make penicillin. She also found oligomycin, too toxic for the clinic but later a tool for studying mitochondria. She trained 47 Ph.D.s and 110 master's students. With Fred and Ira Baldwin she published the long "root nodule bible" on nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the early 1930s, and she patented phage-resistant Clostridium madisonii after serving as an expert witness in the fight over Chaim Weizmann's acetone-butanol process.
In 1949 she bought the cream-brick Italianate house at 2925 Syene Road because her grandfather James had owned it. The house is on the National Register. She left it to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Covering a 1946 patent, the New York Times called her a "Wisconsin University Girl"; she was already a full professor. She died in that Syene Road house on March 24, 1978. Madison was the birth; Fitchburg was the farm and the adult home that ties her here.
Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
AACM co-founder and Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist; 2020 NEA Jazz Master with a longtime Fitchburg house
$25,000
Roscoe Mitchell is the Chicago-born saxophonist, composer, and painter who co-founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago and keeps a Fitchburg house where mornings start at four with news, then the sunroom, then paint until the windows stop being black. The NEA named him a Jazz Master in 2020 and listed Fitchburg; he is not Fitchburg-raised, but the Wisconsin residence is real and long.
Born in Chicago on August 3, 1940, he grew up on brother Norman’s 78s of Parker and Miles, took clarinet at twelve because they would not hand him a saxophone yet, and found his professional decision in an Army band in Heidelberg, where he met Albert Ayler in parades and sessions and jammed at Cave 54. Back home he played Monday nights with Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band at the C&C Lounge. In 1965 he was an original AACM member; his sextet cut the first AACM record, Sound, and became the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Paris in 1969 brought face paint, toy percussion, and the motto “Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.”
He taught a 500-student survey at Wisconsin, held the Darius Milhaud Chair at Mills College for twelve years while keeping the Fitchburg house the whole time, and was back in the sunroom by 2018. More than 85 recordings and more than 250 compositions sit beside circular breathing that took a year to learn and a first solo painting show at 82. Uncle Charles Commodore Carter used to draw neighborhood kids as people from outer space; Mitchell’s canvases pursue the same interruption of silence. The horn and the paint are one project.
Profile · Fitchburg, Wisconsin
Founder and longtime leader of Promega Corporation; Fitchburg headquarters and principal residence
$4 million
William A. “Bill” Linton is the biotech founder who put Fitchburg on the map with a private company that sells the picks and shovels of genetic research. He did not inherit the city. He built the part of it that has a skyline along Woods Hollow Road.
He studied biochemistry and biology at Berkeley, then pharmaceutical chemistry in Madison, shaped by a father who took car engines apart on the floor and grandparents who had been missionaries in the Far East. In 1978 he started a garage company—then Biotec, later Promega—that sold restriction enzymes to scientists splicing DNA. The firm never went public. Fitchburg became home: hundreds of jobs at 2800 Woods Hollow Road, a subsidized childcare center he put on his land in 1991 so Promega parents would stop worrying, and a $1 million library pledge with his wife, Mary, before the referendum even passed. His separately owned 400-acre Fitchburg Center still holds the Promega campus and City Hall.
He fought Roche for thirteen years over a DNA-replication patent and did not settle until the Swiss giant came to him. The DNA IQ kit helped identify victims of September 11. He still runs Promega and the neighboring Usona Institute and talks about a hundred-year plan for a private company. A former Fitchburg mayor said he put the city on the map. The downtown he once sketched on those 400 acres never quite arrived. The campus did.