Wisconsin Stories is a partnership of the Wisconsin
Historical Society and Wisconsin Public Television.
In the 1870s, photographers were feeling far between,
so people had to rely on them passing through
their communities to have their portraits taken.
Andrew Dahl traveled the roads of southern Wisconsin,
photographing families and their possessions, and he
left behind this incredible collection of photographs.
I'm Tracy Will.
And I'm Debbie Kometz.
Travelers of all kinds have been through our state,
sometimes entertaining, sometimes educating, and
sometimes providing a service.
So we're going to take a look at some of the people
who journeyed through Wisconsin and some of the
places that they passed through.
Some travelers provided only a passing thrill,
while others transformed entire communities,
leaving a lasting impact.
So tonight, stories about passing through,
on Wisconsin Stories.
[Music]
Funding for Wisconsin Stories is provided in part
by an advised fund of the Community Foundation of
Southern Wisconsin, the estate and family of Lois
Bacchus, the Halbert and Alice Kadesh Foundation, and Philip J.
in Elizabeth B.
Hendrickson, encouraging you to support
history on Wisconsin Public Television and
to visit Wisconsin's treasured historic sites.
[Music]
As the frontier days in Wisconsin began to fade, a
new feature began to appear on Main Street throughout the
state, the Opera House.
In the days before movies and radio, when the word "theater"
was an objectionable term, opera houses were centers
of entertainment and education, and the people
that passed through them provided a vital link
to the outside world.
In 1878, Allens and Partridge built a large meeting
hall on the second floor of his carpentry and
furniture shop in Argyle.
Like most opera houses, Partridge Hall underwent
many changes over the years, becoming a silent movie house,
the star theater, before eventually turning into
the Argyle Chick-Hatchery and Feed Store.
The current owners painstakingly renovated the building, which
now serves as a restaurant, bed and breakfast, and once
again, a community hall.
This is built in 1878, I think we were told.
Is there a period where opera houses proliferate, where a
lot of them begin to be built around the region
in the Midwest?
This is really the boom time for opera house
construction in the Midwest.
The railroads are extending out into small
communities like Argyle.
These touring shows would travel all through the
United States, going from small town to small town,
brought by the railroads.
Mary Pickford came here.
At the time she came here, she was one of the most
famous celebrities in America that would have been traveling
acts coming through here.
Like the Ringling Brothers brought
their dog and pony show here in the early days of
the Ringling Circus.
So it brought a wide variety of people, musicians,
people doing ethnic comedy, all sorts of different things.
So you get mental shows, you get like Lyceum
speakers, individuals coming in, giving lectures.
Their favorite local son, Bob LaFallet, spoke in this very
room for two hours in 1889 as part of a public event.
The cost of your mission here also brought you a
library service across the street for your horse too,
so a lot of people came in from the countryside.
In 1983, a group of Stoughton residents raised funds to
renovate the City Hall's second floor opera house,
which had sat unused since the 1950s.
The hall was once a focal point of the community, providing a
stage for traveling entertainers and audience for temperance
speakers and a showcase for many a class play.
Volunteers supplied the elbow grease to start the
cleanup and raised funds for a new fire escape,
that allowed the hall to once again host events.
Eventually, they secured a generous foundation
grant and raised enough funds from local residents
to completely replaster and refinish the interior.
John Vornford was one of the leaders of the Restoration
Effort in Stoughton that returned the opera house to
its original luster, including a fire curtain from 1915.
The only thing I really saved this place was the
high school graduations and the plays that they had,
the graduations up to 1938 and the plays up to 1953.
So there were a lot of people from Stoughton that had
wonderful memories of this.
Oh, look at this!
1944, the '34, but what's this one?
'46 Junior Class?
Junior Class '46.
Are some of these names the people that contributed
to Fixers' play up?
Absolutely. The main reason I get into it
is I want the city of Stoughton to live, not to die like
a lot of small towns there.
And I think this opera house will bring live and we'll
bring in a lot of people.
Bring the hardest foot and back to life.
That's right.
That's a beautiful place.
Beautiful. In Ashkash, architect
William Waters modeled the grand opera house after
the opera houses of Europe.
What kind of city is Ashkash at that time?
Ashkash was the second city of Wisconsin back in 1883.
It was thriving.
There were eight major lumber mills here, a
huge lumber business.
So the local businessmen, lumber people, got together
and decided they wanted to embellish their cultural work.
And they built the grand and opened in 1883 with an opera
called the Bohemian Girl.
They really had an opera and an opera house?
Oh, absolutely.
The early management brought up operas that played in Milwaukee
and they played in Ashkash also.
As time progressed and those shows weren't available or
whatever, we had things like Mark Twain coming along.
Mark Twain was here?
Oh, absolutely.
He gave lectures here and he was known as a
humorist back in those days.
Ashkash became a destination for some of the greatest artists
and entertainers of the day.
Legendary actors Sarah Bernhardt and singer Enrico
Caruso each played the grand.
And later, comedians like Charlie Chaplin
and the Marks brothers, ushered in an active Vodville
era that also featured Wisconsin's own Harry Houdini.
There was a circuit back in those times of grand opera
houses where these traveling troops would come through and
fit on these small stages.
And there was a spectacle to behold.
The opera house eventually became a movie house that still
featured occasional performances of local theater groups.
But by the 1950s, the once posh theater began to deteriorate.
And by the 1970s, the damage was almost beyond repair.
The building was a wreck.
The bricks were falling out all over.
Eventually, it was slated for a destruction and demolition.
In 1979, Nick Navel and a group of concerned citizens launched a
new effort in the 20-year fight to save the grand opera house.
Eventually, it was put to referendum.
And by an overwhelming majority of 80 percent, the people of
Oshkash decided to purchase and restore this building.
I think we've done a pretty good job of putting this
back into the Victorian era.
Mark Twinkie can walk through the door.
I think he'd never left it.
In terms of the types of performers that you bring in
from the outside, there's still people packing it in, bringing
their equipment in, setting up in the dressing rooms, moving
through, putting on a show.
Yeah, exactly like it was back in 1883.
They're coming by truck instead of force and bugging.
One of Wisconsin's most famous athletes was a barnstorming
wrestler from Nakusa named Ed Strangler Lewis.
In the 1920s, Lewis became an unbeatable champion
and a national celebrity.
On the road for over 30 years, Strangler Lewis wrestled in
over 6,000 matches and during his long career was a key
player in pro wrestling's change from a sport to a spectacle.
At the International Wrestling Institute and Museum in
Newton, Iowa, wrestling historian Mike Chapman, his
piece together artifacts that tell the history of the
sport, including a special room devoted to the early days
of professional wrestling.
He's reserved one corner for Ed Strangler Lewis, including one
of Lewis's headlock machines.
The spring-loaded headcar from wood was a crowd pleasing and
became one of Strangler Lewis's trademarks.
He squeezed it to practice his signature hold,
a crushing and inescapable headlock that helped him wrestle
his way into sport's history.
According to almost everybody I've talked to, there's only two
people who are considered the greatest professional wrestlers
all time.
It's Frank Goch of Humboldt, Iowa, and Ed Lewis.
Lewis was born Robert Friedrich in 1890, a tremendously strong
and gifted athlete.
He was influenced by other champion
wrestlers from Wisconsin, including Evan Strangler
Lewis from Madison, who was the original Strangler Lewis.
And in one of his first professional bouts, he was
soundly beaten by Marshfield's Fred Beale, a wrestling
veteran who had once beaten the national champion Frank Goch.
But it was Goch who inspired Lewis the most
in his wrestling career.
After watching Frank Goch draw 33,000 people in 1911 to
Kamiski Park for a wrestling match, which at that time
was a huge, incredible event.
It was the largest crowd ever to see an athletic event in
America other than a horse race.
And I think Ed Lewis wanted to pattern himself after
Frank Goch saying, "This is what a Midwestern farm kid can
do. I'm good.
I can rule the roost here for 15-20 years.
I think a lot of money, travel the world, travel the United
States, have a lot of fun, and also become a sports icon, and
that's exactly what he became."
But to get there, what's the schedule like
for a guy like that?
It's a tough life.
It's a very tough life.
I saw an estimate that there were
like 2,000 wrestlers in America in Ed Lewis's day.
And they were crisscrossing the nation and showing up in
towns of 60, 80, 200 people wrestling in Saturday afternoons
in promp due matches.
A lot of them were raw matches.
They come to a local community and they say, "Hey,
you're pretty good.
We've got a kid right down the
street that can whip you."
And the whole town would show up to watch the match and Ed
learned the hard knocks that way.
I'm sure he won a lot more than he lost, but I'm sure he
lost a lot in those days too.
These guys were warriors of a bygone era, and Ed Lewis is the
epitome, the personification of that kind of athlete.
I mean, Ed Lewis was just a tough human being.
Lewis combined his physical skills with a deep knowledge
of the sport and wrote a series of books about the various
holds and wrestling moves.
A lot of the wrestlers in that era weren't interested
in pinning somebody.
They were interested in making him say, "Uncle."
And there were probably 20 or 30 joint locks that
they could throw on.
Here's one.
Take him like that.
And it always is how you go against the joint.
But as a sport, at that time, it's really a sport.
It was a 90% true sport.
It wouldn't be an Ed Lewis's
best interest to go out and flop the guy in a minute
and a half and have the spectators go home disappointed.
I came to see Ed Lewis and I saw a minute and a half.
So Ed was so good that Ed could make
those kind of decisions as he got in the ring and make a match
out of it for 15 or 20 minutes.
But then he gets you and his headlock.
Sure. Well, the headlock was one of his
big moves.
There's several ways to do the headlock.
One's here and across the neck and then into the jaw.
That's called a jawlock.
Another one is to get the arm in at this arm.
Yeah, you see this in amateur wrestling.
This is legal in amateur wrestling.
I can try to throw you this because I've
got the arm and I can't show.
But the early days of pro wrestling, this is
how Ed Lewis did it.
The Stranger won the heavyweight championship belt in 1920
and toured constantly.
Once claiming there wasn't a town of more than 5,000
population in which he hadn't appeared.
He wrestled for purses, large and small and
often returned to Nikusa to visit his family and put
on wrestling exhibitions.
For a 10 year period, there wasn't a wrestling America
that could last with Ed Lewis.
For a 10 year period, maybe 15, Ed Lewis ruled supreme.
He hobnob with all the great celebrities of his day, Jack
Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Douglas Fairbanks, the movie actor.
Everybody who was anybody knew who Ed Stranger Lewis was.
They all enjoyed being in his company because he
was gregarious, outgoing, charming and fun to be with.
Ironically, Lewis's domination of the sport began to take
a toll on his popularity.
With little chance of defeat, crowds began to dwindle,
turning instead to baseball, football and boxing for their
sports and their children.
According to legend, promoters convinced Lewis to inject some
excitement into the sport by losing his championship belt
to a popular Nebraska football star named Wayne Big Mun who
hurled Lewis from the ring.
The match marked the beginning of the end for traditional
professional wrestling.
When you look at the history of wrestling, it's really
hard to understand exactly how it changed from a
true athletic contest into more of a theatrical event.
So with Stranger, you're beginning to get a change?
I think you can make the case that Ed Stranger Lewis is the
pivotal character in the history of wrestling's transition.
He helped introduce the showmanship into wrestling and
with no regrets, I would say.
In 1898, Congress authorized the printing of postcards
by private businesses which started a postcard craze.
Collecting picture postcards became a popular hobby and
photographers fanned out across the country taking shots for
the big postcard companies.
But at the same time, two local postcard photographers, LL Cook
and Sherwin Gillett, roamed the Wisconsin countryside and
left behind a photographic record of the state.
I talked with photoarchivist Andy Krauscher about what
made their postcard special.
Well, these are what postcard collectors now refer to
as real postcards.
They're actually printed on silver
gelatin onto real photographic paper rather than offset.
So each one of these postcards, even if you'd have multiple
copies of it, each one would be individually printed?
That's right.
Individually printed and then
sold to the customer.
Sherwin Gillett and LL Cook both would concentrate on
the main street view.
They would come into town and
plunk their camera down right in the middle of the street
and at least take that shot.
Who was LL Cook?
LL Cook was a commercial photographer from Lake Mills
and the photographic work concentrates both on main
street views but also northwards resource, which is really
kind of a lot of fun, the images that we have here.
And these are some nice interiors.
They're very clean.
They are very clean.
Both of these photographers use
professional equipment so they were using four by five cameras
or five by seven cameras, which give these photographs
this wonderful clarity.
And you can see most of these are taken with daylight,
natural light, which gives them this sort of ambiance.
Yeah, it's a nice, it's a very, very nice feel.
Let's talk about Sherwin Gillett because he's in
a different part of the state.
And where did he go?
Well, Sherwin really concentrated very heavily on
the southwestern part of the state and what's so valuable
about it is that he really documented every little town
in that part of the state.
From 1905 to 1935.
And I did prepare this map here that shows how
extensively Gillett covered the southwestern part of the state.
You can see here that he's really hit every small town.
Lots and lots of places.
Lots and little towns.
Well, there's some fascinating views.
I mean, these are just, these are
wonderful. Look at this one.
He oftentimes would, when he would come into town, would
try to get a good overview of the entire town.
And that's what this is.
It's the bird's eye view of the town.
Well, here's the main street in Glen Haven and
it's two different years, maybe 15 years apart.
And look at the difference.
What I'm struck by is the automobile in this
lower photograph and the horse-driven wagon in the top.
You've got a water pump there next to the sidewalk and
just a line of buildings.
But later, you've got a gas pump, not too far from the
water pump and now they're cars.
But a wonderful record of changing Glen Haven.
Still a dirt road, but now the tree has grown
another 10 feet, perhaps.
Tell me about this one.
Well, this is a swimming pool.
I mean, this is a swimming pool in Richland Center.
That's a great one.
This was an artificial pool, but just alive with life here.
You can even see somebody coming right off the slide.
Here's an interesting picture.
Would you say that that looks casual?
It's a little bit disheveled.
It's hard to tell.
It does look like it's an active post
office based on the sign.
Lots of posters on the wall of the building there, on
the wall of the addition.
Blooming can fare in a state fare.
What year is that?
I can barely see a date.
I think it's his 1908.
Now, here's one.
Lovers Lane.
What about this?
Well, this seemed to be a popular subject
in this time period.
Sure, when Jillette documented Lovers Lane in practically
every town that he went in.
So I'm not sure how many of these, the towns people thought
of as Lovers Lane or whether Jillette gave them those names.
I like this one, too.
I like it because it shows the time when farmers
were bringing their own milk to the creameries.
And creameries literally were located at crossroads.
There were so many of them in Wisconsin because they
were serving a small area.
And well used in popular creamery is evidenced by
these tracks in the mud.
Andy, when I look at this now, I can't help but turn it over
and see that it was a postcard.
And it seems like something that would have gotten
thrown away has the attitude about this image changed.
Oh, I think absolutely.
The way in which we use these now, they
really are historical records.
They go far beyond their original intent.
I mean, now we look back at these photographs.
Sometimes it's the only documentation we have
of these small towns.
These offer a lot of internal evidence about what life
was like at that time.
And they give us a glimpse into the past.
[Music]
The town of New Diggings in southwestern Wisconsin
was once a thriving lead mining boom town.
On a hill on the edge of town, Stan St.
Augustine's church unchanged since it
was built to serve the lead miners and their families.
This church was built in 1844 by Father Samuel
Charles Mansa Kelly.
He was an Italian missionary who from 1830 has worked in the
Wisconsin and Tristate area, building churches and
forming parish communities.
So this is the one church remaining church of his that
has not been altered in any way.
It is as it was used by the people.
The legacy of Father Samuel Mansa Kelly's work as a church
builder, school builder, and community organizer
lives on to this day.
Father Mansa Kelly was born in Milan, Italy
within a few blocks of the impressive Milan cathedral.
As a young man, he gave up the chance to go into
business with his wealthy father, choosing instead to
become a Dominican priest.
While studying in Rome, Mansa Kelly was recruited
to travel to America and become a missionary priest.
Biting farewell to his family and friends, he embarked on the
45-day journey and finished his studies in a log cabin in Ohio.
In 1830, Mansa Kelly was sent to a mission on Maconaw Island.
His territory, which included what is now Wisconsin, covered
some 52,000 square miles.
He traveled regularly to Green Bay and the surrounding
area, ministering to the Ho Chiang and Manamani Indians.
Mansa Kelly created a prayer book in the Ho Chiang language
and later in Almanac in the Ojibwe language, the first
book printed in Wisconsin.
In 1835, Mansa Kelly passed through the hills of what is now
southwestern Wisconsin, where a great lead mining rush was on.
He made his way through the hard-drinking
frontier, baptizing and hearing confessions.
Eventually, he received permission to minister
to Galena, the Buke and the surrounding area.
So he would go from area to area and tell me how he would
form people into a parish.
He would start with a Catholic family and word
would get around that there would be mess in that house
and that family's house.
And so other Catholic families would come and that would
go on for a while and then he would, if possible, and if
it seemed like a good thing to do, he'd start talking to
them about building a church.
Father, Mosaic Kelly took no salary, eating at one house
and sleeping in another.
He organized over 40 parishes and began a long
period of church building.
How many churches was he responsible for
their construction?
I believe there about 24 churches that he built, either
built him with the people or he had him prefabricated and
some were shipped from prayer to sheen and some were shipped
from Cincinnati down the river.
During construction, Mosaic Kelly served as fundraiser
and money collector, receiving donations from Catholics,
as well as non-Catholics, who wanted to build up
their frontier communities.
He also served as architect, general
contractor, and stone mason.
And the interesting thing is he never had
an architectural class.
He just never, we have a list of all the classes
he's taken and not one of them had to do with it.
But you know, he lived in Milan and he saw
beautiful, beautiful things.
He always wanted them to have a beautiful church.
Father Mosaic Kelly traveled constantly through the
roadless lead region.
Gratjits Grove, Schoelsberg, New Diggings, Snake Diggings,
Hard Scrubble, and Mineral Point, organizing parishes,
giving sermons, and gaining signatures on pledges of
abstinence from alcohol.
He carried with him a portable desk so that he could
write while on the road.
He had a horse named Napoleon, a big white horse, and then
he bought a buggy and a horse.
So they said on the way to New Diggings, there's a hill not too
far out of town that the people who had gathered here could
see him coming and would get in church and be ready for one.
He got it.
Because of his relentless energy, some friends
took to calling him the little steam engine grease.
While others in his mostly Irish congregations referred to him
affectionately as Matthew Kelly.
In 1844, Mosaic Kelly convinced George Wallace Jones
was constant territories representative to Congress
to sell a mound of land the Indians had called "Sinzenawa"
or "Home of the Young Eagle."
There, Mosaic Kelly established a Dominican
community, including a new order of Dominican sisters.
He then turned his attention to education and built
a college for local men.
In 1852, a time when most women received little education,
Mosaic Kelly and the sisters from Sincenawa moved to the
nearby town of Benton and established a school for girls.
Who were the young women who came here?
Oh, there were daughters of lead miners.
There were daughters of the merchants and
the families here from town and from the countryside.
So they would come from all over.
One of the outstanding things about the Academy
was the science equipment that he brought from New
York out of a catalog and put here electro-magnetic
experimental machines that even the University of
Wisconsin admits at that time.
Did not have the quality of science equipment that
Mosaic Kelly provided.
He expected them to be teachers, eventually.
That was his goal for them.
Father Mosaic Kelly died in 1864, contracting pneumonia
while on the road visiting an ailing parishioner.
He is buried in the cemetery
behind the church in Benton.
Eventually, the sisters at Benton moved back to Sincenawa
Mount where they established a high school for local
girls. And in 1881, the sisters received 55 acres of
land in Madison where they founded Edgewood College.
This is where Edgewood College sisters got their training
and Governor Washburn became acquainted with us and gave us
the 55 acres for the college.
So Father Mosaic Kelly's vision of educating people
really lives on continually.
[birds chirping]
[music]
Funding for Wisconsin Stories is provided in part by an
advised fund of the Community Foundation of Southern
Wisconsin, the Estate and Family of Lois Backus, the Halbert
and Alice Kadesh Foundation.
And Philip J.
In Elizabeth B.
Hendrickson encouraging you to support history on
Wisconsin Public Television and to visit Wisconsin's
treasured historic sites.