Beginning in 1844, nearly 700 settlers 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.