Oddsconsin Blog

When I'm worried and I can't sleep
I count my blessings instead of sheep
- Irving Berlin, Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep)

Wisconsin once had a lot of woolen mills. Most were built after 1860 and some continued operations for a century. There were mills in Appleton [1][2], Baraboo [3], Beaver Dam [4], Chippewa Falls [5], Janesville [6], Monticello [7], Reedsburg [8], Waterford [9] and Waukesha [10]. And this is only a partial list. By 1871, there were fifty-four woolen mills in the...

A map, a map, my kingdom for a map!
– King Richard in William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”

This week’s Oddsconsin post is this map.

Last week’s post looked at Wisconsin’s first Carnegie Library, built in Superior in 1902. This week, Oddsconsin maps out the other Carnegie libraries across the state. This includes libraries that are still libraries, libraries that are still standing but are no longer used as libraries, and libraries that have been demolished.

In the early years of the twentieth...

I resolved, if ever wealth came to me, that it should be used to establish free libraries.
- Andrew Carnegie, 1889

Andrew Carnegie believed in the power of libraries. By the late 1800s, the Scottish-born industrialist had become one of the richest people in America thanks to the success of his business ventures – especially the Carnegie Steel Company. But wealth alone was not his goal. In The Gospel of Wealth – which Carnegie published in 1889 – he asserted that the rich are merely trustees of...

Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things.
- Booker T. Washington

Wisconsin has a lot of round barns. Dale Travis, well known for his website on round barns and covered bridges, lists 96 of them. There are examples from almost every county.

According to Travis’s statistics, Wisconsin leads the nation in the total number of round barns. Indiana and Iowa both have 90, Illinois and Ohio have 63, Minnesota has 51 and Missouri has 43, but other...

BIRGing (Basking In Reflected Glory) – The tendency to enhance one’s self-esteem by heightening one’s association with a successful or prestigious group. The opposite of this is cutting off reflected failure (CORFing), or distancing oneself from an unsuccessful or low-status group.
- American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology [1]

This week, I want to look at misinformation on the web by focusing on famous people who are allegedly from Wisconsin. No one really knows why it’s...

“Give it some welly” is a British slang phrase dating from the 1970s. It refers to “Wellies” – an abbreviation for Wellington boots [rubber boots, named after the First Duke of Wellington]. The phrase is often used in car racing where it means to press down hard on the accelerator. Give it some Welly, mate! - Source: World Wide Words [1]

A 2017 study by a group called Drive Human found Wisconsin drivers to be among the worst in the country. [2] Wisconsin scored a D- and ranked as number 46,...

Lots of states have their own songs. There are the old sentimental standards everyone loves, like Georgia on My Mind. [1]

Georgia, Georgia
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind

Or Sweet Home Alabama, possibly the best-known song about that state. [2]

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are blue
Sweet home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you

This one’s a bit controversial. Some people think it supports former governor George Wallace’s segregationist policies, although...

The historic marker is easy to miss. It sits adjacent to the South Towne Mall parking lot in Monona, in a small grassy area next to West Broadway. The marker, set by the Wisconsin Historical Society in 2005, has two sides. One side reads,

ROYAL AIRPORT
The site of an airplane landing field, hangars, flying schools and stunt shows, this field was the center of Madison aviation from 1926 to 1938, mainly through the efforts of Howard Morey and his founding of the Madison Airways Corporation. Later...

“How many can we preserve for the Tricentennial in 2076? This would require a determined effort to keep them alive and well along with a willingness to allow a place for them in an environment rapidly filling with asphalt and concrete developments.”
-Walter Scott

By Matt Noone

Soon after Winston started kindergarten at Schenk Elementary in Madison, I arrived at school to collect him for our daily bike ride home. As I stood waiting, Winston came out of the building with his classmates in their...

“From the finest and best oaks wise persons will secure acorns for planting”
- Walter Scott

By Matt Noone

Though I’d been a Big Tree Hunter for many years, it was the enthusiasm of my then four-year-old son, Winston, that motivated me to pursue the Heritage Oak Project. The two of us spent the next few years measuring and mapping over two hundred of these trees. The opportunity to share my passion for forests and trees with my little boy was a highlight for me.

We discussed the different...

By Matt Noone

I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 2013 and began working in the Forest Landscape Ecology Lab within the Forest Ecology and Management Department (Now Forest and Wildlife Ecology) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Through this experience, I gained a deep appreciation for the Wisconsin landscape and an understanding of historical ecology. I was responsible for running a computer mapping lab where a 1930s historical forest inventory was converted to a digital Geographic...

For the next four weeks, Oddsconsin welcomes guest blogger Matt Noone, Senior Environmental Planner at the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission in Madison. In a four-part series, Matt will discuss how hunting for big trees with his son Winston led to four hundred kids growing one thousand heritage oak trees at schools across Dane County, Wisconsin.

As Matt says, "This is a story about connecting people to their natural world and historical context, and fostering care for remarkable places...

Many roadside attractions make exceptional claims – the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota, the oldest church in the US, the world’s largest muskie statue. Do you ever wonder if these claims are accurate? Karl Popper, the twentieth-century philosopher of science, wrestled with this type of question. For Popper, such claims would not have been assertions of fact, but propositions waiting to be falsified by counterexamples. Confirmation was impossible, since unknown counterexamples might exist....

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...