812 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
local circumstances, so that in the returns as finally made to 
the state it is impossible to give percentages. 
For the appraisal of the value of a right of way through city 
property, the work done by the officials of the Chicago and 
Northwestern railway in the city of Milwaukee may be taken 
as an example. In this work, representative pieces of property 
were selected in each block lying near the company’s right of 
Way, and their market value was carefully estimated by two to 
four men familiar with land values in the vicinity. The aver¬ 
age of these estimates was taken as the market value. The 
market value so determined was compared with the assessed 
value. The assessed value of the property adjacent to the right 
of way was then obtained, and the market value was found, 
assuming that the ratio of assessed to market value for all the 
property adjoining the right of way was the same as that for 
the representative piece of property. 17 
The first results obtained for some of the more important 
cities by the two methods, differing only in slight details, are 
interesting. The following table will show how great the dif¬ 
ferences were. 
Table showing comparison of results obtained by stale appraiser 
and the Chicago and Northwestern Railway company for the “ or¬ 
dinary value ” of the latter's right of way through the principal 
cities of Wisconsin. 
Population, 
1900. 
Ordinary value 
per acre as given 
by state ap¬ 
praiser. 
Ordinary value 
per acre as given 
by C. & N. W. 
appraiser. 
Milwaukee. 
285,000 
$20,266 
$16,119 
Fond du Lac. 
15,000 
1,282 
1,080 
Oshkosh . 
28,000 
2,005 
2,469 
Marinette. 
16,000 
2,940 
845 
Racine. 
29,000 
3,906 
2,883 
Kenosha. 
12,000 
17,888 
2,858 
Manitowoc. 
12,000 
6,097 
1,758 
As will be seen, the difference in the city of Milwaukee was 
more than $4,000 per acre, or, in round numbers,, about 20 
per cent of the state appraiser’s figure. For the 170 acres 
it For this information, which does not appear in the company’s re¬ 
ports, I am indebted to Mr. C. D. Cleveland, land commissioner for the 
•Chicago and Northwestern Railway company. 
