July 2005 Odd Wisconsin
"Mrs. Murphy came over to our house first thing in the morning, and she says to my father, 'Hitch up the horses and take me to town. I seen my son Mike in a dream,' she says, 'standing at the foot of my bed when I wake up in the...
read more.
Posted in Bizarre Events on July 28, 2005
Every state that ever floated a log to a mill has claimed Paul Bunyan as part of their unique heritage. But, as every resident of the Badger State knows, he and Babe the Blue Ox really belong to Wisconsin. Need proof? This article published in the Vilas County News in...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on July 25, 2005
Before the Civil War, Wisconsin's politics generally mirrored the nation's. Democrats rode a wave of popularity that began with Andrew Jackson, and as tensions heightened nationally in the 1850s over slavery and states rights, most residents of Wisconsin were too busy trying to create homesteads or fortunes to care very...
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on July 21, 2005
Today we tolerate a wide range of domestic arrangements. Most families are simply too busy to sit down and eat together regularly, much less clean, dust, or do the laundry according to prescribed standards. In fact, most of us would object to having any authority try to tell us when...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on July 19, 2005
This weekend marked the 60th anniversary of the birth of the atomic age. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded at the "Trinity Site" on the White Sands Proving Grounds, 20 miles east of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and 45 miles north of El Paso, Texas. Three...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on July 17, 2005
Required ingredients for a July weekend, aren't they? And both have a proud heritage in Wisconsin. Corn was grown in fields like this for hundreds of years and stored by Indians in ceramic pots such as this one. Indians put it into stews, or dried and ground it to make...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on July 16, 2005
In the fall of 1935, Wisconsin State Journal cartoonist David Seltz produced a panel every day showing strange episodes from our state's past. He called them "Badger Curiosities" appropriately enough, though today we might call them urban legends (or not-so-urban, given that this is the dairy state). Some of the...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on July 14, 2005
July of 1850 marked the high point in one of Wisconsin's oddest stories. James J.Strang (1813-1856) was an early Mormon leader in the years before the Latter Day Saints emigrated to Utah. After the death of founder Joseph Smith in 1844, Strang forged a document claiming that he had been...
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on July 8, 2005
Photography has become ubiquitous, with digital cameras hidden in cell phones and bulging from shirt pockets. It's easy to forget that having one's picture taken was once an important event; and of course for most of the 20th century, everyone set in front of a camera was instructed to smile....
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on July 8, 2005
In the 19th century Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were paid so little that some of them had to go into debt merely to keep house in Madison. The city’s chief banker, Lucien Hanks, who started as a humble teller in 1860, revealed this in an article published in 1923. We...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on July 6, 2005
In 1890 a northwoods train crew, realizing they'd hit a pedestrian on the rails in the middle of the forest, ran back to see if he had survived the impact. They found a drunken lumberjack who had mistaken the charging mail train for an adversary in a brawl and ......
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on July 4, 2005
|
