In the early 19th century when the first white settlers arrived in Southeastern Wisconsin, the
Potawatomi and
Menominee Native Americans inhabited the land now occupied by the Town of Wayne. In 1831, the Menominee surrendered their claims to the land to the United States Federal Government through the
Treaty of Washington. The Potawatomi surrendered their land claims in 1833 through the
1833 Treaty of Chicago, which (after being ratified in 1833) required them to leave the area by 1838. While many Native people moved west of the Mississippi River to
Kansas, some chose to remain, and were referred to as "strolling Potawatomi" in contemporary documents because many of them were migrants who subsisted by
squatting on their ancestral lands, which were now owned by white settlers. Eventually the Native people who evaded forced removal gathered in northern Wisconsin, where they formed the
Forest County Potawatomi Community. The first white settlers arrived in 1846, when the land was part of the
Town of Addison and largely covered with dense hardwood forests. The Town of Wayne incorporated on March 11, 1848, and was named for General
Anthony Wayne, who served in the
American Revolution. The first settlers were mostly Yankees and Irish immigrants, but beginning around 1850 many German immigrants began to settle in the town, and by 1880 the population was almost entirely of German descent. The town population remained small throughout its history. Unlike neighboring towns, Wayne never had any railroad connections, and the hamlets of Kohlsville, St. Kilians, and Wayne Center remained rural communities that served the local farmers, unlike hamlets in neighboring towns which grew and prospered with construction of new railroads. Beginning in the 1970s, Wayne's population began to increase, nearly doubling from 1,214 in 1970 to 2,169 in 2010. However, as of the 2010s, Wayne has the second-lowest housing density in Washington County, and more than 60 percent of the land is zoned agricultural. ==Geography==