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...
Oddsconsin 59 and 60 explored several historic lime kiln ruins in the southeast of the state. Today, we focus on the Western Lime and Cement Company ruins in High Cliff State Park (Calumet County). The park is a Department of Natural Resources (DNR) property and the kilns are easily accessed by road from the park office. However, they lie behind a chain link fence due to their advanced state of decay. [1][2]
The site includes three kilns, a chimney and the shell of a two-story building. A...
Last week, Oddsconsin 59 looked at the Milwaukee Falls Lime Company kiln ruins in Grafton. This week, we’ll take a quick tour of other lime kiln ruins in the state. Some of these are on public land, which means you can visit them yourself.
Lime production was once big business in Wisconsin. At the industry’s peak in 1911, the state had over fifty lime plants and was the third largest producer of lime in the US. [1] Lime kiln sites and ruins are scattered throughout the eastern part of the...
The lime kiln ruins in the Village of Grafton (Ozaukee County) are the footprints left behind by an industry that was once prevalent in eastern Wisconsin. Built in the 1890s by the Milwaukee Falls Lime Company, the kilns were in operation until 1926, but then rapidly fell into disrepair.
Three kilns remain of the original six. Several kilns collapsed in the 1940s and the village later used the site as a dump. In the 1970s, a local citizen group, the Lime Kiln Preservation Society, saved the...
For me tonight there'll be no sleep until the dawn
Neon sign from paradise hotel across the street
Is blinking on and off and on and off and on
- Eliza Gilkyson, Paradise Hotel
Wisconsin has lost many of its old resort hotels – The Fountain Spring House in Waukesha (opened in 1874, burned down in 1878, rebuilt in 1879, demolished in the 1950s), the Mirabel Caves Hotel in Manitowoc County (built in 1900, burned down in 2013), the Lake Geneva Hotel (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, built in 1912,...
A stone monument stands in Wyalusing State Park (Grant County) overlooking the bluffs of the Mississippi River. It’s a memorial to the passenger pigeon, once abundant throughout the continent, but now extinct.
The monument was erected in 1947 by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, which first conceived of the idea in 1941. A brass plaque depicts a passenger pigeon based on a sketch by Owen Gromme, then Curator of Birds at the Milwaukee Public Museum. The bird is perched on the limb of an...
This is the second part of a series on the shooting of Charles Arndt by James Vineyard in the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison. For part one, see Oddsconsin 55.
The shooting took place in the third Wisconsin Capitol, the first one built in Madison. The first capitol was established in a small wood-frame building in Belmont (Lafayette County) in 1836, before Wisconsin was a state. Burlington, Iowa, was home to the second capitol (also a small building) from 1837-38. After the building burned down,...
Wisconsin was one of the first states to abolish capital punishment. In 1853, the legislature passed a law stipulating that “for the crime of murder in the first degree, the penalty shall be imprisonment in the state prison, during the life of the person so convicted; and the punishment of death, for such offence, is hereby abolished.” [1]
The state prison had been established at Waupun only two years earlier, with the first permanent building completed in 1854. [2] The creation of the state...
This is the final installment in a series on Wisconsin’s boundaries. The previous posts are Oddsconsin 50 (Illinois boundary), Oddsconsin 51 and Oddsconsin 52 (Minnesota boundary) and Oddsconsin 53 (Michigan boundary, part 1). This post ends the series with a final look at the Michigan boundary.
It seems Michigan was never completely satisfied with the boundary description in Wisconsin’s 1846 Enabling Act and 1848 constitution. Even though the boundary was surveyed and monumented in 1847,...
This is the penultimate installment in a series on Wisconsin’s boundaries. Oddsconsin 50 examined the Illinois boundary, while Oddsconsin 51 and Oddsconsin 52 looked at the Minnesota boundary. This post focuses on Wisconsin’s boundary with Michigan, a topic that will conclude next week in Oddsconsin 54.
The map that accompanies this post shows the boundary between Wisconsin and Michigan in different shades of gray. This depiction is in agreement with Article II of the Wisconsin Constitution [1...
This is the third post in a series on Wisconsin’s state boundaries. Oddsconsin 50 examined the boundary with Illinois, while Oddsconsin 51 began exploring the boundary with Minnesota. This post continues with the Minnesota case.
To understand why the Wisconsin-Minnesota boundary is where it is, we need to go back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which created the Northwest Territory from lands ceded by the eastern states. The Northwest Ordinance stipulated that no more than five states were...
This is the second part in a series on Wisconsin’s state boundaries. Last week, Oddsconsin 50 looked at the Wisconsin-Illinois boundary. This week, we focus on the boundary with Minnesota.
The Wisconsin-Minnesota boundary starts in Lake Superior, travels a few miles up the St. Louis River, turns due south in a straight line to the St. Croix River, follows the St. Croix to the Mississippi River, and then follows the Mississippi to the Illinois boundary. The last leg of the Mississippi River...
Maps do a poor job of conveying the complexity of political boundaries. Boundaries are often imprecise, ambiguous or disputed. By portraying such boundaries as precise lines, maps oversimplify political reality and obscure the often contested history of boundary definition and delineation.
Perhaps you’ve never thought much about Wisconsin’s boundaries with Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan. If so, it might surprise you to discover that some of these boundaries are in the wrong place,...
This particular one is a crooked, crooked beet
- The Clash, 1980
For part 1 of Sugar! see Oddsconsin 47. For part 2 see Oddsconsin 48.
Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, one of the biggest threats to the emerging US beet sugar industry was the production of cane sugar by the country’s newly acquired territories of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as Cuba, which was briefly a US protectorate. Cane sugar in these areas was cheaper to produce than domestic beet sugar, and thus...
‘Cause we got the beets
We got the beets
We got the beets, yeah
- The Go-Go's, 1980
For part 1 of Sugar! see Oddsconsin 47.
In the late 1800s, the largest beet sugar factories in the US were established in states that grew the most beets. In his 1899 book, Herbert Myrick gives some examples: a factory in Bay City, Michigan, with a capacity of 350 tons of beets per day and annual production of 7.5 million pounds of sugar per year; a factory in Oxnard, California, with a warehouse for 10 million...
It's all about the beets, 'bout the beets...
- Meghan Trainor, 2014
The Garver Feed Mill sits on the east side of Madison, close to the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and adjacent to Starkweather Creek. The renovated mill is a venue for events and home to a variety of commercial establishments. From 1931 to 1975, it operated as the Garver Supply Company and, under different ownership, as the Garver Feed and Supply Company until 1997. [1]
But the building was not constructed as a feed mill. It was...
There’s a fire in the boiler and she’s gonna blow
We’ve all got a ticket to the midnight show
- Kerry Livgren, Fire in the Boiler, 2022
This is the third and final post on Wisconsin Maritime disasters. [Post 1] [Post 2]
Despite the widespread fame of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Wisconsin’s deadliest maritime disasters didn’t happen on Lake Superior and didn’t involve big freighters carrying iron ore. They occurred on Lake Michigan, close to the Wisconsin shoreline, and involved steam-powered...
Unless you live in one of the state’s coastal communities, it can be easy to forget that Wisconsin has strong maritime traditions. It borders two of the Great Lakes, Superior and Michigan, that combined hold almost fifteen percent of the world’s fresh water. Lake Superior is the largest lake on earth by area. It is also very deep – over 1,300 feet – and very cold. [1]
Since the beginning of European settlement of the upper Midwest, Lake Superior has been a commercial shipping lane for iron...
Door County evokes images of fall foliage, quaint villages, cherry orchards, sky-blue waters and sandy beaches. It’s Wisconsin’s playground. The name Door must be short for Doorway to Heaven. Or perhaps it’s from the French d’Or, meaning golden.
Not so fast. The county’s name actually comes from Death’s Door, the treacherous strait connecting Green Bay to Lake Michigan across the northern tip of the Door Peninsula. Countless ships have been wrecked in gales that forced them onto the strait’s...