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...
Wisconsin is geographically unique. It’s the only state that contains the point at 45 degrees north latitude, 90 degrees west longitude, marking the center of both the Northern and Western Hemispheres. But where, exactly, is it?
There’s a geographical marker in Marathon County known is the “Poniatowski Marker" that claims to be this point. The marker states that the location is (a) midway between the Equator (the baseline for latitude, at 0 degrees) and the North Pole (at 90 degrees north) and...
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic…that form ever follows function.
- Louis Sullivan, 1896
In many ways, Columbus (Columbia County) looks like a lot of other small Wisconsin cities. The area of modern commercial and industrial development, with its car dealerships and fast-food establishments, straddles the intersection of Highways 16 and 151. Less than a mile to the east, the historic commercial buildings downtown have been converted to modern uses – restaurants,...
History is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood.
- Carl Jung
This is the third and final post in a series on fatal airplane accidents in Wisconsin. [Read Part 1 and Part 2.]
The deadliest military airplane accident in Wisconsin occurred on November 18, 1966, when a B-52 bomber crashed fifteen miles south of Hayward, in Sawyer County, killing all nine crew members.
The bomber was on a ten-hour training mission from Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana, and had...
“To live without risk for me would be tantamount to death.”
- Jacqueline Cochran
Nearly a decade before Otis Redding (see Oddsconsin 39), Lake Monona was the site of another fatal airplane crash. Although the loss of life was not as great, the story is still a tragic one.
On May 5, 1958, Lt. Gerald Stull was on a routine training flight in an Air Force F-102 Delta Dagger, a single-seat fighter/interceptor. [1] At 1:30 pm, three miles south of the runway at Truax Field in Madison, Stull radioed...
Lake Monona, one of the four lakes in the Madison area, has been the scene of more than one fatal airplane crash. It’s a small lake, only about five square miles in size, but it’s on the flight path for airplanes landing at Madison’s airport, now called Dane County Regional Airport, but once known as Madison Municipal Airport.
The most famous of these crashes took the lives of Otis Redding – a Soul artist from Macon, Georgia – and most of his band members. The accident occurred on December 10,...
The City of Cedarburg (Ozaukee County) has one of only a handful of remaining Wadhams pagoda-style gas stations, which once dotted the region. Capitalizing on the increased popularity of the private automobile in the early 1900s, the Wadhams Oil Company built more than a hundred stations between 1917 and 1930 in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Upper Michigan. [1][2]
Wadhams was one of the first oil companies to build roadside stations to pump gas directly into vehicles from underground tanks, making...
Before Bucky Badger, there was Numen Lumen.
Numen Lumen was the University of Wisconsin’s first official seal. [1] It is now considered historic and is used only in special circumstances. UW-Madison’s current logo, a crest emblazoned with a “W” inside a shield, is a representation of an architectural element found on the university’s Field House. [2][3]
The Numen Lumen seal was designed in 1854 – six years after the university was founded – by John Hiram Lathrop, UW’s first chancellor. It...
Does Wisconsin have a lot of churches? The GNIS (Geographic Names Information System), the official federal repository of geographic feature names, listed 3,578 of them in 2021. [1] That’s fifty churches per county, or one for every 1,650 people.
Churches have since been removed from GNIS, due to the cost of keeping the listing current. Determining the exact number of churches is complicated. In the 2020 US Religion Census, a “church” is not necessarily a single building, but a religious body...
The old Bayfield County courthouse in the city of Bayfield – now home to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore Visitor Center – has an interesting and unexpected history. A series of photos hanging on the walls of the first floor tells the story.
The first picture shows the courthouse in 1888, a few years after construction. At this time, Bayfield was the county seat. The courthouse looks much the same today, except that the clock tower is now gone.
A second picture shows the courthouse after...
This is the 3rd part of a 3-part series. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
After the magnetic experiments ended, UW-Madison’s underground observatory lay dormant until 1896, when Professor Harry L. Russell was given permission by the UW Board of Regents to use it to conduct experiments on cheese curing. [1]
Russell, a native Wisconsinite, came to the University of Wisconsin in 1893 to head dairy-related bacteriological work at the Agricultural Experiment Station. In 1896, William A. Henry,...
This is the 2nd part of a 3-part series. Read part 1 here.
UW-Madison’s dermestarium was not always full of beetles. It was built in 1876 as an observatory to conduct measurements of the earth’s magnetic field. In 1875, the US Coast Survey – a federal scientific agency – approached the University of Wisconsin about establishing the observatory. What attracted their interest was Professor John E. Davies and his work on magnetism. Davies (1839-1900) taught science at Lawrence College, his alma...
Since 1950, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has operated a dermestarium in a small underground chamber on campus. What’s a dermestarium? The word is derived from Latin and roughly translates into “a place for eating skin.” The university’s dermestarium is home to a colony of thousands of dermestid beetles, whose job is to clean animal skeletons so that they can be preserved for study and research.
The existence of the dermestarium is hardly a secret. [1][2][3][4][5] What makes the facility...
Nineteenth-century water towers still stand in several Wisconsin communities, including Sun Prairie [1], Clinton [2], Beloit [3], Benton [4], Monroe [5] and Burlington [6], to name a few. These towers were built to supply the water needs of growing communities, including fire-fighting, steam locomotives and residential and commercial uses.
These towers typically consisted of a large, elevated tank containing thousands of gallons of water. Water was pumped into the tank from a nearby source,...