March 2006 Odd Wisconsin
"Pshaw, talk about the time that tried men's soul, just as if a woman had none --- " That's the way Roseline Peck remembered the first Independence Day celebration in Madison. Only a few weeks after she'd arrived on the barren isthmus, the cornerstone for the state capitol was to...
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Posted in Madison on March 31, 2006
The spring after Madison was declared the capital, Roseline and Eben Peck headed for Madison from Blue Mounds, to establish an inn for the workers who would be coming to construct the capitol. "We were well aware what our business would be when settled," she recalled, and so "we provided...
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Posted in Madison on March 31, 2006
Madison's first house is usually considered to be the Peck cabin, built near the intersection of Butler and Wilson (a little uphill from the modern Cleveland's Diner), pictured here. But in fact that was the second house constructed in the newborn town. The first one was never occupied. When he...
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Posted in Madison on March 30, 2006
It was 22 below zero when officials arrived in Madison "to survey out some lots and blocks around the public square ... so that those persons who intended to build, could find their lots." When the territorial convention in Belmont ended, promoter James Doty hired Moses Strong to stake off...
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Posted in Madison on March 30, 2006
In 1836, James Doty named his imaginary city after former president James Madison, principal author of the U.S. Constitution, who had recently died. Doty named its main streets after some of Madison's colleagues from the summer of 1787 who had worked with him to frame the world's first blueprint for...
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Posted in Madison on March 29, 2006
The land that would be Madison passed from the Ho-Chunk to the U.S. in 1832, and was surveyed and mapped into parcels that settlers could buy in 1834 by Orson Lyon. Like nearly all newly surveyed land, it was sold for $1.25 an acre, which put a 40-acre farm within...
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Posted in Madison on March 29, 2006
On July 4, 1836, Wisconsin Territory was born. President Andrew Jackson appointed Henry Dodge as governor, with responsibility to conduct a census, hold elections, and convene a territorial legislature. Dodge acted quickly. The census was taken in August and found 11,683 non-Indian residents between Lake Michigan and the Dakotas. Elections...
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Posted in Madison on March 28, 2006
The first white residents of Madison were not the pioneers who came to build the capitol in 1837 but rather three fur traders who established posts about 1830. These were Wallace Rowan, who built a cabin where Gov. Nelson State Park is located on Lake Mendota; Olivier Ammel, who erected...
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Posted in Madison on March 28, 2006
The first visitor to leave an account of the land that would become Madison was Ebenezer Brigham, who crossed it in May of 1829 while returning from Portage to Blue Mounds. He later told an acquaintance that "The site was at the time an open prairie, on which grew dwarf...
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Posted in Madison on March 27, 2006
Madison enters the historical record during one of Wisconsin's great tragedies. In early April, 1832, the Sauk chief Black Hawk led roughly 1,200 people across the Mississippi River to re-occupy their homelands in northern Illinois. They were met by soldiers who forced them out of their former village and refused...
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Posted in Madison on March 27, 2006
Doesn't Madison date from 1836? Although it was chosen the capital in 1836 and founded in the spring of 1837, Madison remained a small village for its first twenty years. In the spring election of 1839, only 54 people voted. A year later, the village contained only two stores, three...
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Posted in Madison on March 26, 2006
"I was crossing the kitchen with a basin of water when, suddenly, some unknown Force pressed me down upon my knees, helpless," Mary Hayes-Chynoweth told her biographer. It was the spring of 1853, when she was a 27-year-old school teacher in Waterloo. "Of my own will I could not move...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 25, 2006
We like to think that hippies invented free love, utopian communes, and health food in the 1960s, but as the author of Ecclesiastes remarked, there is nothing new under the sun. Like most others, those ideas have a history, and some of their proponents are part of our Wisconsin heritage....
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 21, 2006
The toughest work in lumber camps was done by oxen, who hauled huge sleds of massive tree trunks out of the brush and over the snow to the nearest river. When spring came, their masters floated the winter's harvest downstream to the company mill. One lumberjack, however, was given the...
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Posted in Bizarre Events on March 18, 2006
This week La Crosse officially turned 150 years old, though like many Wisconsin communities its roots stretch back further than 1856. The first settler to take up residence there was 19-year-old Nathan Myrick (1822-1903), who arrived on Novermber 9, 1841, and built a log cabin from which he hoped to...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 15, 2006
In 1906, middle-aged Sarah Hardwick inherited five acres of remote woods alongside the Mississippi. No road led to the top of the bluff where she set up housekeeping in a crude shanty. She came and went from the river along a footpath worn through the brush. She went into seclusion...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 11, 2006
As a girl in the 1840s, Louise Westover joined her family in reforms centered around Milwaukee's First Congregationalist Church -- the so-called "Free Church." They welcomed into their congregation impoverished immigrants, sailors from the docks, and other social outcasts. "I can remember vividly at one service the portentious silence after...
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Posted in on March 8, 2006
Yesterday's New York Times reports that phone companies and entertainment giants have begun talks about streaming MTV, Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," and other video content directly to consumers' cell phones. That's just the latest development in a process that began more than a century ago. In 1908, Milwaukee entrepreneur...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 5, 2006
"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...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 3, 2006
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