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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...

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...