Odd Wisconsin Archives: Odd Lives
Pope Benedict XVI canonized five new saints Sunday, including Jozef De Veuster (1840-1889), a 19th century priest more commonly known as Father Damien. St. Damien worked with ostracized leprosy patients on Molokai, an isolated Hawaiian island, until he contracted the disease himself and died in 1889. By then he had been joined by Joseph Dutton (1843-1931) of Beloit, who carried... :: Posted on October 11, 2009
Nathaniel Tallmadge (1795-1864), Wisconsin's third chief executive, just missed being the tenth president of the United States. Born in Chatham, N.Y., he was admitted to the bar in 1818 and served in the New York legislature before going on to two terms in the U.S. Senate (Mar. 1833-June 1844). In 1840 Tallmadge was offered the nomination for vice-president, as running... :: Posted on September 17, 2009
"I am trying as you will perceive, to make the most of this fearfully wearisome summer. . . I live in a retired manner in a private house on the outskirts of the town where there are no other boarders and have all the advantages of the country. . . . I am so miserable over my great sorrows, that... :: Posted on June 30, 2009
Eleazar Williams (1787-1858) is surely one of the oddest characters in Wisconsin history. He was born and raised among the Mohawk Indians and as a teenager attended the missionary school that would later become Dartmouth College. He became a Protestant missionary himself, and his intelligence and eloquence gave him entry into both Indian and white communities during the opening decades... :: Posted on March 9, 2009
"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,... :: Posted on March 5, 2009
Born into slavery in North Carolina on Jan. 1, 1829, Hattie Pierce, of 1442 Williamson St. in Madison, personally experienced the social upheavals that most of her neighbors had only learned about in school. Before the Civil War, she always belonged to same family, who had also owned her parents. "I was never sold at auction or any other... :: Posted on February 24, 2009
Wisconsin's first doctor, in the sense of someone paid to heal the sick, was a woman of color known simply as Aunt Mary Ann to her Prairie du Chien patients. Her full name was Mary Ann Menard, though she had had two previous husbands before marrying Charles Menard, and raised more than a dozen children from the three marriages. Near... :: Posted on February 18, 2009
By all accounts, Charles J. Agrelius (1831-1915) was quite a charmer. The son of a Swedish clergymen, Agrelius settled in southwestern Wisconsin about the time the Civil War broke out, and served with a cavalry unit in Kansas. After the war, he returned to Wisconsin and set up shop in Mount Vernon, Dane Co., as a harness maker --... :: Posted on January 14, 2009
Don Quixote may have tilted at windmills, but octogenarian handyman Willard L. Standish (1845-1938) made a living by climbing and repairing them. And that wasn't his only trick. Standish told inquirers, "When I was 13 years old I came out to Wisconsin from Rutland Co., Vermont, and was left to shift for myself. And I did some shifting. This was... :: Posted on December 28, 2008
Columbus has been much romanticized over the years, as in this 1893 catalog art and in annual parades on innumerable main streets like this one. Communities all around the nation even named themselves after him to celebrate his role as a great hero. But in recent years the dark side of his career has become better known, and some communities... :: Posted on October 11, 2008
This weekend marks the anniversary of Gov. William A. Barstow's birth. Barstow (1813-1865) was the only Wisconsin governor thrown out of office for election tampering, in 1856. Unfortunately his challenger and successor, Coles Bashford, was little better. The scandal unfolded this way. Democrats had controlled the state for years, and when incumbent Democrat William Barstow ran for re-election as governor... :: Posted on September 11, 2008
170 years ago this week, James Duane Doty (1799-1865) was elected by Wisconsin voters to represent them in Washington. Doty had already served in the Michigan territorial legislature (1833-35) and finagled having Madison chosen the territorial capital. He went to Washington in 1838 to represent not only the voters but also absentee landowners, Eastern speculators, and capitalists trying to exploit... :: Posted on September 8, 2008
If you ask most people about African-American history in Wisconsin, they're likely to think of Milwaukee's civil rights struggles in the 1960s. In fact, black settlers had been living here for nearly two centuries by then, and perhaps the best-known early African-Americans in the state were two generations of fur-traders in the Lake Superior region. Jean and Jeanne Bonga are... :: Posted on July 8, 2008
No one did more to create modern American poetry than Ezra Pound (1885-1972). At a time when poetry in English had more in common with greeting card verses than with the intimate insights of Anne Sexton, Pound and a small group of confederates demanded reform in their 1913 Imagist Manifesto. Pound was the first, or nearly the first, to discover,... :: Posted on May 22, 2008
After the Civil War, Belle Boyd was as famous as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are today. Boyd was a Virginia teenager when the war broke out, and her sympathies naturally lay with her homeland. Union troops soon occupied her town and tried to raise the stars and stripes over the Boyd family home. Her mother protested, and when one... :: Posted on May 15, 2008
Did You Know?
The Wisconsin Historical Museum is currently featuring Odd Wisconsin objects in the latest exhibit: Odd Wisconsin. And don't miss the Odd Wisconsin book by author Erika Janik published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
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