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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
Last week we featured a father-son senatorial team. This week we highlight married partners working as a political team. Our state's first female sheriff was elected in 1924 in Burnett County. This event, which on the surface seems like a huge step for women's rights, was actually just the latest twist in a clever ploy that male sheriffs had been...
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Posted in Odd Lives on June 11, 2013
According to the U.S. Senate's history site, the first and only father and son to serve in the Senate at the same time were Henry Dodge of Wisconsin and his son Augustus Caesar Dodge of Iowa. The elder Dodge represented Wisconsin in the Senate from 1848 to 1857. When he arrived in Washington, he joined his son, who was already...
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Posted in Odd Lives on June 5, 2013
Tornado season has arrived in full force with this week's hot, humid and volatile weather. 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...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 30, 2013
Many cities and towns claim to have held the first Memorial Day ceremony. But where did this holiday really begin? And how did it evolve in the public mind from a solemn commemoration of military sacrifices, to a general display of public patriotism, to the unofficial launch of summer, and finally back to its solemn roots? Here's the answer, with...
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Posted in on May 22, 2013
"Accordingly, on the 17th day of May, 1673," Fr. Jacques Marquette wrote in his diary, "we started from the mission of St. Ignace at Michilimakinac, where I then was. The joy that we felt at being selected for this expedition animated our courage, and rendered the labor of paddling from morning to night agreeable to us... we joyfully plied our...
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Posted in Odd Lives on May 16, 2013
In 1828, the Ho-Chunk Chief Dandy was passing through Galena with some companions. White settlers had only recently started moving into the lead region of southwestern Wisconsin, and the Indians were interested in the strange newcomers and their customs. This was before the widespread occupation of Indian lands that would produce the Black Hawk War four years later. "While strolling...
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Posted in on May 8, 2013
No, not the UW's Red Gym but a real castle. In 1861, a melancholy Englishman named Benjamin Walker brought his family across the Atlantic to settle on what were then the outskirts of Madison. No one seems to know why he left home or why he chose our capital, but in 1863 he erected a medieval castle on E. Gorham...
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Posted in Madison on May 1, 2013
That was how commissioner of fisheries Brayton O. Webster put it, at the height of Wisconsin's Progressive Era. But presumably he didn't consult the fish. The 1887 institution that gave its name to Madison's Fish Hatchery Road, shown here in a somewhat romanticized lithograph, was among the first fish hatcheries in the nation. Read about a visit to it in...
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Posted in Animals on April 25, 2013
"Growing crops cut off and chopped up. Orchards and groves riddled. Pigs and chickens killed and windows beaten in." So ran the headline in a Madison paper on July 10, 1878, describing a thunderstorm that passed across southern Wisconsin the previous day. April 15-19 is Severe Weather Awareness Week in Minnesota and Wisconsin, so let's have a look at Ghosts...
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Posted in Curiosities on April 16, 2013
This week public television aired the first episode of a new British series dramatizing the life of Wisconsin native Harry Gordon Selfridge. The producers call him, "the flamboyant entrepreneur and showman seeking to provide London's shoppers with the ultimate merchandise and the ultimate thrill." That may be hyperbole, but in fact much of the consumer culture that surrounds us began,...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 31, 2013
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