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 Appleby 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.