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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
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
According to local legend, fur trader Michel Brisbois (1759-1837) had himself interred high on a bluff over Prairie du Chien so he could look down on his rivals forever. A Fierce Competition Brisbois was a fur trader who arrived in Wisconsin in 1781 and thumbed his nose at the rich and powerful for the next four decades. He undercut more...
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Posted in Strange Deaths on March 28, 2013
Back in 1950, the irate owner of a Wisconsin summer resort "accosted the executive secretary of the Governor's Commission on Human Rights, shook his finger in her face, and demanded to know the names of the legislators who were responsible for the state's civil rights act." He was angry that he couldn't decide for himself who to serve or not...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 20, 2013
"In my boyhood days" recalled Augustin Grignon* in the summer of 1857, "there was an aged Chippewa woman named 0-cha-own. She was a great huntress, and spent each winter with her dogs in the woods the same as any Indian hunter, and was quite as successful in killing bear, raccoon and other game. Beside a gun,which I presume she used,...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 14, 2013
Here's a story for Women's History Month about a Wisconsin woman who was once well-known but is now all-but-forgotten. She embodied New Age spirituality a century before that term was invented. Here are her own words describing how it all began. "I was crossing the kitchen with a basin of water when, suddenly, some unknown Force pressed me down upon...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 7, 2013
March is Women's History Month, so for the next few weeks Odd Wisconsin will occasionally focus on the lives of Wisconsin women. American Indian women, of course, have been making history here for thousands of years. Passing references to them occur throughout the 17th-century Jesuit Relations, but one of the earliest detailed accounts occurs in this 1702 letter by outraged...
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Posted in Curiosities on February 28, 2013
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