Odd Wisconsin Archives: Bizarre Events
This past weekend more than 1,000 Wisconsin residents leaped into the icy waters of Green Bay, Oshkosh, and Wausau to raise funds for the Special Olympics. This is a measure of how far Wisconsin has evolved, not just in creative philanthropic work but also in material comfort. Until recently, to fall into a lake or stream in mid-winter almost certainly... :: Posted on February 24, 2008
The current frigid conditions sent us searching the historical record for similar outbreaks of arctic weather. Here is Ebenezer Childs (1797-1864), describing a trip from Madison to Portage in the winter of 1836-37: "There were then but three other families in Madison. The doctor from Fort Winnebago [at modern Portage, who had been tending a Madison patient] designed to return... :: Posted on January 21, 2008
Were the airline ticket counter staff unfriendly? Security officers rude? Put them in perpective with this memoir of an 1843 voyage down the Great Lakes in a steamship commanded by a fire-breathing captain. The writer was a teenager when his family left upstate New York in the fall of 1843. It took 20 hours to be towed 40 miles along... :: Posted on November 25, 2007
It's Halloween, and yesterday the AP reported that a third of American's believe in ghosts. Not only that, but 25% of us say we have actually seen one (story). In honor of the holiday, here are a handful of Wisconsin ghost stories that we've reported in Odd Wisconsin. There's the horrible case of Monsieur Nadeau, hounded to death in 1830... :: Posted on October 26, 2007
James Buck came to Milwaukee in 1837 and helped construct many of its first homes and businesses. For decades he would also drop in on friends in the city's newspaper offices, who would give him fragments of papers with stories about local life. These he pasted into scrapbooks alongside other memorabilia which, combined with his memory, allowed Buck to ultimately... :: Posted on September 16, 2007
When Rev. Alfred Brunson (1793-1882) retired in 1873, his colleagues celebrated his career at their annual conference in Eau Claire. Brunson was a pioneer missionary who had spent several decades serving his faith. In 1837 he travelled 1,500 miles through the upper Mississippi Valley trying to prevent war between the Ojibwe and the Sioux. His account of the trip, including... :: Posted on August 27, 2007
There once was a real Harry Potter in Wisconsin. He was the Capital correspondent for the Milwaukee Journal, and afterwards the city editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, in the 1880s and 1890s. Thirty years later he told historian Fred Holmes about the remarkable method lawmakers had to limit debate. When the third Capitol was completed in 1869, its... :: Posted on July 22, 2007
For at least a century, Madison has been identified in the public mind with leftist politics. The nation's Progressive movement first stretched its muscles here in the opening decades of the 20th century. When the Depression paralyzed the nation in the 1930s, many of the country's remedies, including Social Security, were crafted by Madison-trained policy makers. After World War Two,... :: Posted on July 8, 2007
That was the name Rev. Samuel Peters (1735-1825) gave to his hypothetical 10,000-square-mile empire in northern Wisconsin. Like most dreams, it didn't come true. But it's an amazing story. It all began with Jonathan Carver (1710-1780), the first English-speaking traveler to journey through Wisconsin. Carver crossed from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien in 1766-1767 on reconnaissance for a military... :: Posted on February 4, 2007
In January of 1899 a resolution was introduced in the Wisconsin Assembly to prohibit tight lacing of women's corsets. Corsets were undergarments stiffened with whalebone that could be tightened by laces to reduce the size of a woman's waist. They had been worn for decades by the time this bill was introduced, with laces adjusted and re-adjusted to conform to... :: Posted on February 1, 2007
...then consider the first attempt to run a steamboat up the Fox River. This occured in the summer of 1843, when Capt. Peter Hotaling piloted the stern-wheeler Black Hawk across the Great Lakes from Buffalo in the hope of starting commercial service from Green Bay to Lake Winnebago. The Fox River falls about 160 feet as it rushes down from... :: Posted on December 11, 2006
In the summer of 1853, 10 families from Belgium settled just east of Green Bay. They were the first in a wave of 15,000 Belgian immigrants who would soon populate the region where Brown, Door and Kewaunee counties come together. Among them was Adele Brisse, a young peasant woman who came with her parents. The Brisse family established a remote... :: Posted on September 24, 2006
The source for today's Odd Wisconsin is a New York Times reporter who claimed (Dec. 7, 1902) only to "relate the tale as the Nashotah people tell it, and the reader can draw his own conclusions." The Nashotah Theological Seminary in Waukesha Co. was founded by Rev. James Lloyd Breck and three companions in 1842 as a center for the... :: Posted on August 6, 2006
In the spring of 1838, Martin Rowney, a discharged soldier who had been trading with the Indians on Puckaway Lake in Green Lake County, returned to Portage for a drunken spree that lasted for two weeks or more. At the end of it he took an oath before fellow-trader John De La Ronde that he wouldn't drink another drop of... :: Posted on July 30, 2006
That's the headline of a Wisconsin State Journal editorial from 1898, when a seemingly noble military intervention spawned a wave of blind, unthinking nationalism, and the U.S. quickly became embroiled in a messy foreign occupation with a Wisconsin soldier in charge. When the Spanish government set up concentration camps in 1896 to quash a rebellion in Cuba, thousands of the... :: Posted on June 6, 2006
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