Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

All told, Rufus King Jr.’s time in Milwaukee was relatively short, lasting from only 1845 to 1861. Yet his efforts in shaping the foundations of the city, which was granted its municipal charter in 1846, were significant. This is particularly true of his work developing Milwaukee’s first public, or “common,” school system, where his mark is still visible in the schools and streets that bear his name. King’s efforts were informed by a strong Whig ideology that he hoped would knit the expanding nation together—economically and culturally—through railroads, canals, newspapers, and, at last, government-sponsored, tax-supported schools. Knitting the Nation Together On August 12, 1855, newspaper editor, local school board member, and Whig Party crusader Rufus King Jr. boarded a train in Milwaukee, barely able to contain his excitement for what…

This map of North America, ca. 1700, was part of a geographic primer created by Oxford mathematician and geographer Edward Wells. While most pages in the atlas were set so that an “ancient” map faced a “modern” map for purposes of comparison, the more recently discovered Americas stand alone. This map follows one published by Father Louis Hennepin in 1698, based on his explorations of the New World. Notably, “Hennepin’s Discovery”—the modern-day Midwest—includes relatively accurate depictions of the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay, while the Caribbean islands and eastern seaboard (“English Plantations”) are rendered in greater detail—and at an exaggerated size—in comparison to “Parts As Yet Unknown” in the western half of the map. Most curious, perhaps, is the “island” of California, with the Baja peninsula extending all the way…

He painted the homesteads, architectural ruins, and natural beauty of rural Wisconsin with a zealot’s dedication and a draftsman’s skill. At times, she stayed up all night with cigarette and drink in hand, creating her own fantasy world in sculpture and paint. For over fifty years, Max and Ava Fernekes played a yin and yang artistic duet, producing an unparalleled visual legacy in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Max and Ava were struggling artists when they met at the first Milwaukee Art Fair in 1932. Max had already attained some notice for his series of realistic drawings of landmark buildings that had been published in local newspapers. A formally trained painter, he depicted reality brick for brick. Despite family opposition, Ava followed Art’s siren call and gleefully plunged down the “rabbit hole”…

This map of North America, ca. 1700, was part of a geographic primer created by Oxford mathematician and geographer Edward Wells. While most pages in the atlas were set so that an “ancient” map faced a “modern” map for purposes of comparison, the more recently discovered Americas stand alone. This map follows one published by Father Louis Hennepin in 1698, based on his explorations of the New World. Notably, “Hennepin’s Discovery”—the modern-day Midwest—includes relatively accurate depictions of the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay, while the Caribbean islands and eastern seaboard (“English Plantations”) are rendered in greater detail—and at an exaggerated size—in comparison to “Parts As Yet Unknown” in the western half of the map. Most curious, perhaps, is the “island” of California, with the Baja peninsula extending all the way…

“[We are] removing our hats to the owners, managers and players of the Northern league as the most intrepid baseball detachment in the world,” proclaimed sportswriter Gordon Gilmore of the Saint Paul Dispatch in the spring of 1942. “They started in the bottom of the depression, when baseball leagues were folding rather than organizing. Through lean years and others only slightly plump, they hewed to the base lines. They started with two strikes on them and somehow over a period of ten years have managed to avoid the third, fatal swing.”1 One of those Northern League teams was the Superior Blues of Superior, Wisconsin. Over the course of the Great Depression the Blues faced constant financial struggles and changed ownership three times. Despite the team’s instability, the Blues officials found…

At the start of the logging boom in the 1850s, hemlock was the black sheep of Wisconsin’s insatiable lumber industry. Unlike sturdy, supple white pine, hemlock was ill favored because the wood was brittle, weak, and coarse grained, prone to splintering. While these characteristics prevented its cutting in the early years of the lumber era, it was only a brief stay of execution from the crosscut saw. In fact, Wisconsin’s hemlock forests were doomed millennia before with the discovery that by tanning skins of animals, hides could be made pliable, strong, and water resistant. It took little time for European settlers, who had relied on oak and chestnut for tanning in the Old World, to discover that the Eastern hemlock’s reddish bark contained tannic acid.1 The irony is that its…

The Spring 2018 issue was mislabeled on page 1 as volume 101, number 2. It is volume 101, number 3. Thank you to David Mladenoff of Madison, who pointed out that in the Spring 2018 issue, the vessel in the lower left photo on the final page of Greg Kocken’s essay, “The Amateur’s Eye: Daniel Bastian Nelson in Eau Claire,” is a rowboat, not a canoe. Thanks also to reader Peter Riese of Holland, Wisconsin, who notes that it is the Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, not the Minneapolis & St. Paul, that ran through Spring Green in the 1880s. The error was on the second page of Peter Shrake’s article, “Puckety Chute: The Hard-Luck Story of the Cazenovia and Southern Railroad,” which ran in the Spring 2018 issue.…