Oddsconsin Blog

Archaedromosology is a portmanteau [a word made by combining two or more other words] referencing the study of ancient pathways and routes. The prefix comes from the Greek arkhaios (ancient), combined with dromos (road) and -ology (the study of). It generally describes the archaeological and historical study of ancient roads, trade networks and infrastructure.
- Google AI Overview

The next time you’re in Waukesha County, take a minute to pay homage to the oldest stretch of Interstate Highway in...

Looks like this town is finally going to die away
Leaving nothing but broken promises
Where there once were small town dreams
- The Cowboy Junkies, The Last Spike (1992)

It’s the mid-1800s. A small settlement emerges in rural Wisconsin. New residents build homes. Businesses – a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, a hotel – are established to serve the needs of travelers and local farm families. A post office begins operations in the general store. The population reaches a few hundred. Then, the...

And ain't it just like you and me
To be down here on the ground
Going down an old plank road
To the bar in a one-horse town
- The Deslondes, Old Plank Road (2024)

Before asphalt and concrete, roads were made of wood planks. Or, at least, some of them were.

In Wisconsin, plank roads flourished in the mid-1800s. They were an alternative to dirt roads, which were slow and hazardous. A particular problem with dirt roads was mud, which bogged down wagons and sometimes made roads unusable. Plank roads...

He would perceive, Mr. Bonds, that time is like a freeway with an infinite number of lanes – all leading from the past into the future. But not into the same future. A driver in Lane A may crash, while a driver in Lane B survives. It follows that a driver, by changing lanes, can change his future.
- Quantic, Infinite Regression (2001)

You’ve probably driven right by Wood National Cemetery in Milwaukee. It’s more likely, however, that you drove right through it, perhaps not fully aware of its...

On the road again
Just can’t wait to get on the road again
- Willie Nelson

After spending the last six weeks in Science Hall at UW-Madison, it’s time for Oddsconsin to get back on the road. Since this blog started in January 2025, we’ve visited over fifty unique sites in about twenty-five counties. If you started at Oddsconsin 1 (Wisconsin Memorial Hospital) and drove to every other site in a continuous loop, you would have travelled about 8,360 miles. That’s equivalent to one-third of the way...

This is the final part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here.

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What is the truth, and where did it go?
- Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul

We can’t be sure exactly what went on in Science Hall’s fourth floor dog rooms back in the First World War. That was over one hundred years ago, and the rooms – like the rest of...

This is the fifth part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here and part 4 here.

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Why participate in a system that is killing itself? It seems counter-productive. Counter-evolutionary, if you will. Unless there is a hand guiding evolution, and it wants us to be eliminated.
- Pyotr Engel, Dog 137

Some of the toxic gas experiments...

This is the fourth part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Masters own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnotic'd all his worth,
Deny'd in heaven the Soul he held on earth.
- Epitaph to a Dog, Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron), 1809

...

This is the third part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

The gas defense work [at the University of Wisconsin] involves investigations of gas warfare abroad, the methods of manufacture of gases in quantity to be used in attack, the physiological effects of the gases, and the remedies for them, and gas mask protection. Fifteen members of the faculty are devoting themselves to different aspects of...

This is the second part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.
- Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

The first use of poison gas in the First World War was a German chlorine attack against British and French troops in April 1915. Gas was a new...

Note. The Dogs of Science Hall was originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. As Tone is no longer in operation, I am making the article available here, in a series of posts over the next month.

Progress is a storm blowing the angel of history back into the future. As the wreckage of history piles up, the angel wants to go back, wake the dead, and repair the things that have been broken. But of course, this is impossible.
- Philosopher Walter Benjamin, reflecting on Paul Klee’s...

On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot US President James Garfield at a train station in Washington, DC. Garfield, the twentieth President, had been elected only a few months earlier. Guiteau was clearly mentally disturbed. Born in Freeport, Illinois – just south of Green County, Wisconsin – Guiteau as an adult developed a passion for politics. He was a member of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party, who advocated for a political spoils system in which supporters were rewarded with...

As we saw last week in Oddsconsin 68, the City of Waupun (Dodge County) is home to Wisconsin’s first state prison, established in the 1850s. Now known as Waupun Correctional Institution, it is a maximum security facility, one of six in the state. Just south of the prison and also in Waupun is Dodge Correctional Institution, another maximum-security prison, which began its life as the State Hospital for the Criminal Insane. It remains the only hospital in Wisconsin designed exclusively for the...

Wisconsin began building its first state prison at the time it abolished capital punishment in 1853. The two events are causally linked. Without capital punishment, a prison became a necessity, since local jails were not designed for long-term confinement of criminals who would otherwise have been executed. After the 1851 hanging of John McCaffary, convicted of murdering his wife Bridget, no further executions were carried out under the authority of the state. Going forward, the state prison...

All we want are the facts, ma'am.
- Sgt. Joe Friday, Dragnet

The facts are sometimes hard to find when it comes to the origins of Wisconsin county names. This is especially true for names of Native American origin, where scholars never seem to agree on the interpretation. But even names that come from French trappers and traders have been obscured by history. The only county names whose origins are certain are those named after presidents, governors and other officials, where the historical...

This week’s post is a bit of a departure from the standard fare. It’s a reader challenge, testing your knowledge of the origins of Wisconsin county names.

Below is an outline map of Wisconsin counties (courtesy of the State Cartographer’s Office).

Click here to download a copy of the map.

Wisconsin has 72 counties. They are listed alphabetically in the table below.

The columns in the table represent one possible source for...

It’s a common occurrence in Wisconsin. You’re driving along a small country road, still miles from your destination, when around the next bend in the road you find a historic church standing alone next to a field of corn or a herd of dairy cattle. There are hundreds of rural churches in the state, many still in use and others closed and shuttered.

Zion Old Stone Church sits along Amity Road, a few miles north of Alto, an unincorporated community in the Town of Alto in Fond du Lac County. Fond...

Before it housed a World War II Prisoner of War camp, Fort McCoy had a more notorious facility on site – an internment camp for “enemy aliens” deemed to be a threat to national security and incarcerated without due process.

The internment camp period in US history is well documented. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that authorized the forcible removal of selected civilians from militarized zones on the west coast of the United States. Arrests and...

It’s not widely known that Fort McCoy (Monroe County) served as a Prisoner of War (POW) camp in World War II. Soldiers from Japan, Germany, Italy, Poland and Korea were imprisoned here between 1942 and 1945, with the total number of POWs reaching almost 3,000. By some accounts, it was the largest Japanese POW camp in the country.

Before World War II, Fort McCoy was not as developed as it is today. The area came under government control in 1909, when the War Department purchased over 14,000...

It’s a few hundred feet from the Lake Michigan shoreline on the east side of Washington Island in Door County. It’s the trunk of a long-dead tree. It sits on a crumbling concrete foundation, surrounded by a wire fence and capped with a roof to keep off the rain and snow. A monument to a tree? [1]

A plaque nearby says it’s a witness tree, one of thousands designated in Wisconsin (and other states) in the nineteenth century to demarcate the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Conceived by...