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Our Motto: Strange but true.
Our Mission: Amuse, surprise, perplex, astonish, and otherwise connect you with your past.
Our Method: Lower a bucket into the depths of Wisconsin history and bring to light curious fragments of forgotten lives.
Odd Wisconsin
For Mother's Day, here's a peculiar story about a humble woodchuck that won the heart of a rugged lumberjack named John Nelligan. Nelligan was a tough character who braved death many times, punched out more than his share of bullies and brawlers, and demanded unquestioning obedience from his crew. He once drove a bear from his camp by sneaking up...
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Posted in Animals on May 10, 2012
John Till was not your typical doctor. He wore farmer's overalls rather than a white lab coat, and he couldn't show you a college degree or even a medical license. But at the start of the last century, people came from far and wide to be healed by his miraculous treatment. Unfortunately, the medical profession and state regulators were not...
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Posted in Odd Lives on May 2, 2012
As spring unfolds and campers, hikers, and cyclists fan out across our north woods, encounters between Wisconsin's bears and humans will start making headlines again. Long ago our ancestors lived in much closer contact with bears, and run-ins between people and bruins were a simple fact of life. Close Encounters In 1855, a bear tried to carry a pig off...
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Posted in Animals on April 26, 2012
Tornado season has begun. Click over to Ready Wisconsin to learn how to protect yourself (and see some amazing pictures and video). You can also follow Ready Wisconsin on Twitter for local severe weather alerts as they happen. Many local media outlets will send a text message to your phone when severe weather approaches. To sign up, look on their...
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Posted in Curiosities on April 18, 2012
For months the mass media has been ramping up for the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic. A new 3-D version of the blockbuster 1997 film will be released this weekend, 14 different television programs will air, and hundreds of news stories have already appeared. So we decided to join the crowd and look for Wisconsin connections to the...
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Posted in Strange Deaths on April 10, 2012
This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburgh Landing, at which unsuspecting Union forces narrowly escaped a surprise attack from their Confederate foes. For hundreds of young men from Wisconsin, it was the first exposure to combat. For nearly 300 of them, it was also their last. Caught by Surprise About 65,000 Union soldiers had...
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Posted in Strange Deaths on April 5, 2012
On the evening of March 31, 1918, Prof. E.A. Schimler of Northland College was kidnapped by a mob of masked men. They took him to a lonely spot outside Ashland, stripped him naked, beat him, covered him in tar and feathers, and left him in the woods. Schimler limped back to his boarding house, where friends helped him clean himself...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 26, 2012
We grow up with the idea that all our pioneer ancestors were church-going pillars of the community. That's because those were the people who wrote the histories. But they actually shared the world with disreputable bullies, gamblers, thieves, and drunks, just like we do. Like every frontier town, Madison attracted disreputable characters fleeing from civilized society back East. One of...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 21, 2012
In his memoir Old Times on the Upper Mississippi, steamboat pilot George Merrick recalled some St. Patrick's Day hijinks in the river town of Prescott, Wis. They took place during the late 1850s, when hundreds of side-wheelers fueled commerce in the heart of the continent. Assistant Engineer Billy Hamilton of the 'Fanny Harris' Merrick described Billy Hamilton, the assistant engineer...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 15, 2012
March is Women's History Month, and this year we're focusing on the lives of women who didn't make headlines — the silent majority of women who worked on farms, in shops, on assembly lines, at telephone switchboards, or at home. Their voices are preserved in candid interviews, dull government hearings, hand-written diaries, minutes of community meetings, yellowed newspaper clippings, and...
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Posted in on March 7, 2012
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