This week, elementary school classrooms across the nation are decorated with paper cutouts of turkeys and autumn leaves. In some places kids still dress up as ersatz Pilgrims and Indians to re-enact a fictional feast about which few details survive (we gave all the slender evidence for the first Thanksgiving in this previous entry). Thanksgiving nevertheless became the universal celebration...

In May of 1872 a body was discovered in a Peshtigo lumber camp. The man had been knocked unconscious by a blow to the head and then strangled. This murder naturally produced much gossip in a nearby tavern, the Dew Drop Inn, but after several days talk moved to other things and the murder was left unsolved. About a...

Last week marked the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of Nov. 9/10, 1938, on which hundreds of German synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish-owned businesses destroyed, and 25,000 to 30,000 innocent people were arrested for deportation to concentration camps. We tend to categorize the Holocaust as "back then" and "over there," so it is odd to discover the truth...

In the heyday of logging, lumberjacks invaded northwoods towns every spring after spending a long winter isolated in the woods. "When we had been in camp four or five months," Otis Terpenning recalled, "we were so full of life and activity we just had to expand or die… One crew was always ready to fight any other crew, and...

Sit down at a bar to watch the Packers and you'll probably find a bowl of popcorn, pretzels, or nuts within easy reach. But in 19th-century Milwaukee, the bowl on the bar was more likely to be full of dead crayfish from a nearby swamp. To hide their humble origins and make them sound more appetizing, these were usually called...

You've probably heard of Old Abe, the eagle that accompanied Wisconsin troops during the Civil War. But how about Joe the Monkey, a regimental mascot during World War Two? David Mackin of Milwaukee won the pet monkey from French sailors during a crap game in North Africa. Joe tagged along as Mackin's unit moved across Africa and then north through...

Back in 1879, a saloon-keeper in Fond du Lac exploited a customer's weakness in order to save him from bad habits. According to the press, a prominent citizen of that city had been coming into the bar a bit too often for his own good. The owner of the tavern appreciated the patronage but thought that his friend ought...

In 1936, residents of Manitowoc had the unique privilege of seeing a circus every day. No, it wasn't a permanent encampment of a show, nor even an extended visit from the famous Ringling Bros. or Barnum and Bailey troupes. It was a training school for the professional big top that the Wisconsin State Journal called, "the only one of its...

Last week a scholar in Vermont called with questions about a peculiar pamphlet in the Society rare book collection. Its title page opens with the bizarre phrase, "Iontri8aiestak8a ionskaneks…" and continues with equally strange typography. The little book is a religious primer in the Mohawk language printed at Montreal in 1777, and investigation revealed that the Society's is the only...

During the summer of 1930, papers in northeast Wisconsin ran several memoirs by a writer named B.A. Claflin. Two of these concerned a woman named Mary Ann who ran a boarding house in Peshtigo and worked in logging camps upriver. A big woman, standing six feet tall and weighing near 200 pounds, she was especially imposing when angry. In one...

This weekend marks the anniversary of one of the most dramatic floods in living memory -- the deluge that nearly swept away the village of Spring Valley. The 973 residents of the little Pierce Co. town were used to floods. Their village, strung out lazily along the Eau Galle River in a deep valley, had witnessed major inundations in 1894,...

Long before unsolicited emails offered shares in fictitious Nigerian fortunes, equally brazen scams were perpetrated on the Wisconsin frontier. Con men known as "patent right sharpers" would demonstrate useful products, sell shares to naive investors, and then hightail it out of town before the victims discovered the fraud. One such swindle happened in 19th-c. Fond du Lac and involved a...

To most of us, Labor Day is just the last long weekend of summer. But we have this long weekend only because more than a century ago working men and women insisted on public recognition of their contributions to American life. The direct inspiration for Labor Day occurred in New York City on Tuesday, September 6, 1882, when 10,000 workers...

The desire to be "first" seems to be part of human nature. Here in Wisconsin, the Manitowoc Co. city of Two Rivers has long claimed to be the birthplace of the ice cream sundae, citing local oral tradition of its invention at Berner's Ice Cream Parlor in 1881. But Ithaca, N.Y., also claims the distinction, and can point to an...

In the 1850's, a group of Baraboo women took it upon themselves to make their town dry. At the time, nearly every grocery had liquor available, as well as the saloons and hotels in town, with whiskey often being the hottest commodity. Then as now, drunken men were responsible for much violence against women, "young girls were seduced, homes...