[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of a lion to energy who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
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[Music]
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
Tonight we'll tell you about a retro fashion that is once again
taking the nation by storm.
It was designed in Wisconsin.
We'll also dig up the facts about some of the first
residents of this state.
But first, what's old can be new again.
Recycling has been part of our lives for decades.
Paper, plastic, even old clothing can have new life.
Recycling on a much bigger scale is one part of a concept
called green architecture.
For more than 30 years, the state's only full-time
non-profit architectural group has designed and
built energy-efficient and environmentally
friendly buildings.
The group is called the design coalition.
And its mission is the greening
of American architecture.
When it's finished, this house on Madison's east side will
look a lot like its neighbors.
But don't let looks to see view.
Like the color, for example, it's not brown, it's green.
Well, actually green architecture means different
things to different people.
Owner Lou Host, Jablonsky is a different kind of architect,
a green architect.
He's part of a social movement
called the design coalition.
He and other coalition architects around the
country are committed to a set of principles that
focus on restoring and reusing building materials.
100-year-old Douglas Ferbine recycled, the heavy timber peg
joints and so on, no nails.
Up here is engineered wood joists.
A lot of structural capacity for not a lot of
wood and plantation grown rather than old growth wood.
No toxic paints or solvents.
We started painting here.
This is with milk paint.
Milk paints a just milk casing, clay and
pigment, little bit of lye.
Last? Last, great.
It's got a beautiful texture,
very old type of paint.
What kind of insulation is in here?
This is cotton insulation, actually made from recycled
blue jeans.
Seriously. Yeah, when they make blue jeans,
you know this, if you sow, there's lots of cut off pieces.
And so it's not post-consumer.
Not a lot of it is post-consumer as I understand
it, but they fluff it up and they make it into a bat.
And what I love about it is it's great to use.
I mean, I couldn't do this
happily with fiberglass.
It would be very itchy.
It's a delight to use.
Same our value as fiberglass.
And other insulation?
Well, all the news that's fit to stuff.
The insulation on here is cellulose.
This is 100% ground up newspapers, little bit of
borax added for fire retardants.
The walls are old school.
A mixture of straw and clay made the way they used
to make walls in Europe.
These walls here, that you see, same kind of straw
clay walls, but with the earth and plaster on it.
This just has two coats of, doesn't have the final coat
on yet, so you see bits of straw and so on hanging out.
And then do you paint over that?
Or do you leave it?
You just leave it.
It's a, you know, earth and base line
plaster are millennia old.
Hosts, Jablonsky will also use plaster on the floor.
Kind of reddish, like potters glaze.
Then that's trial very smooth.
There'll be a ceiling, several coats of a natural
sealer and then wax.
So it ends up to be this beautiful leather-like
surface you can mop it.
It's, I've done a few earthen floors in there.
I come to think of them as premium floors.
They're labor intensive, but they're beautiful,
soft to walk on.
Very nice.
And very energy efficient.
The overall design of the home is passive solar.
South facing windows generate heat and the floor traps it,
acting like a storage battery.
Host Jablonsky has also incorporated a passive cooling
system that incorporates natural ventilation and shading.
He's paid attention to every detail, from the recycled
cast iron baseboards to the electrical outlets,
placed to minimize human exposure to
electromagnetic frequencies.
So you just bring out a bunch like this and twist
it a little bit and you'll water it together.
Kind of, it keeps its form like that.
Then you're good.
Host Jablonsky's home has become a laboratory
where students of green architecture come to study.
There's people who are interested in natural building.
They're particularly the older people are perhaps looking
at building their own home.
So there have been a series of workshops.
We teach different things.
We teach the straw clay, the earth
plastering, the earth flooring.
I think that a lot of people's conception of green architecture
is that you replace materials, conventional materials for
more green materials.
It goes beyond that.
It's actually an integration
of the structural system, the materials, the overall
design of the envelope so that it's passive solar
and it's passive cooling, bringing all these and show
how they work together.
That includes not just the architects, but
also the contractors.
This is another design coalition site, fields
neighborhood in East Troy.
It's kind of soupy out today, but actually this is
just the right kind of weather to show you what
makes this site so green.
This site was designed to be what they refer to as zero
runoff site, where we have rain gardens located pretty
much around the entire thing.
There's actually 16 small to medium sized rain gardens.
They vary in size from 20 or 30 feet by maybe 5 or
6 feet wide.
We dig down about 2 and a half feet.
And then in there we put a mixture of compost, loam,
sandy soils, all mixed up.
That goes in there, then we plant prairie grasses,
shorter on the outside, the tall grasses in the middle.
And the water, because of the way we grade, hits
all these rain gardens that are dispersed around.
And it gets back to this stuff and goes
back to the water table.
No erosion, no effect on the water quality.
During construction, this black fence keeps silt
from reaching the pond.
The design of these apartments incorporates passive
solar, recycled particle board instead of plywood,
and flow forms like this one to oxygenate and
improve the quality of any water runoff and direct it
away from the apartments.
This is the first time.
And working with Lewis has been
a pleasure and an experience.
It's amazing how many times and Lewis so well in tune with it.
Little bitty things that you can do to help green
a construction project.
Green architecture is more energy efficient, so you're
going to save energy.
In a green building, the indoor environment is healthier.
You're selecting materials that keep the indoor air healthy.
You shouldn't be doing green architecture just
for altruistic reasons.
As a building owner, you get something out of that
and you get real things.
You get lower costs, you get a healthier environment, and you
get usually less maintenance.
The cost is about the same as conventional architecture,
but you often get buildings with character where
everything old is new again.
The green architecture movement in Wisconsin
got a big boost recently.
Veridian, Dane County's largest home builder,
announced the company will build 650 certified energy
efficient, environmentally friendly homes this year.
[Music]
The people in our next story are using old materials
to try to learn new facts about our state's past.
Art Hackett reports that archaeological discoveries
in Door County are causing some scientists to reconsider
how long humans have been in this part of the world.
[Music]
This is the story of the digging that takes
place before the digging.
Every time the Department of Transportation builds a highway,
like this one in Door County, archaeologists go before the
road builders to figure out who was here before we were here.
Researchers from several Wisconsin universities have
been studying multiple sites along this corridor between
Sturgeon Bay and Green Bay.
In a routine survey for a highway project,
archaeologists go down about two and a half feet.
That's where they find most of the evidence
of human occupation.
But in the case of the Door County site, things they
found at the two and a half foot level led them to
dig three times that far.
The younger than 2,000 years is all restricted to
the plow zone up in here.
Market University archaeologist James Clark says, "Unless early
occupants dug into the ground, much of what they left remained
in the top few inches of soil.
It takes major geological events like floods or glacial
periods to bury things deeply."
Market Professor Dave Overstreet has laid out a
sample of artifacts on a table.
Pottery items from the top layer of soil are nearest to
him. They were left by the Woodland Indians.
As you move down the table, things
get older, much, much older.
When we got below this and trying to find the underlying
sediments that are known as Glenmore Till, which
should floor all human occupation here, we found
these water ruled artifacts.
There's a spear points and some waste flakes and
they're clearly tumbled like in a rock polisher.
Well, the last time that the water level was this
high was 10,600 years ago.
10,600 years ago is when humans were first thought to be making
their entry into North America.
They weren't supposed to be in Northeast Wisconsin.
The digging continued in researchers found additional
stone chips and arrow points.
This was really exciting.
This was off the graph and it said, "My God, there's a real
component here that predates 10,600 years ago.
None of that stuff was supposed to be up
in the door from insulate."
Overstreet has made other surprising finds involving
Wisconsin's prehistoric era.
In Kenosha County in 1987, he uncovered a woolly mammoth
sculpt in which appeared to have been butchered by humans over
13,000 years ago.
Nothing from door county has matched that.
All I can tell you is this stuff is somewhere slightly
younger than about 12,000 years.
Everything from here down was totally unexpected.
It's kind of rewriting our understanding
of door county archeology.
The Marquette researchers are digging next to the boss tavern,
a long time roadhouse near Dykesville, which the Department
of Transportation purchased as part of a highway right of way.
A crew from UW-Milwaukee is digging in some
woods about a mile away.
It's like, "Well, this is somebody making tools.
You know, 2000 years ago, it's
cool to find that.
And even that little tiny piece."
UW-Milwaukee graduate student, Lisa Sowers of Cedarburg,
says archeological work is painfully slow, but exciting
when you find something.
"Somebody like me was handling this with someone making a
tool or maybe they sat down here for a while and maybe
they had a camp here.
And I like to speculate about that."
Artifacts found by the UW-Milwaukee group were also
older and deeper than expected.
Archaeologist Brian Nichols.
"Paces of chip stone that come from the manufacturing of
formal tools like projectile points or scrapers or drills
or something like that."
Nichols says the evidence shows someone set up shop
here and worked making stone tools, leaving a scattering
of chips but little else.
"People are coming in.
There are small groups of people coming
in, setting up camp for one night or two nights and they're
moving out.
So they don't leave large pieces or large
evidence of cultural activity."
Material found by the UW-Milwaukee researchers
has been more difficult to date than the artifacts
found by the Marquette crew.
Nonetheless, Nichols says it appears to be
around 10,800 years old.
Marquette Professor Overstreet says these sites
and others point to a pattern of civilizations.
"All of these sites in Eastern Wisconsin are linked together
in spite of the fact that there may be 2,000 years difference
because what's documented here is the ice sheets retreating
and the ice sheets advancing the people moving right along
that ice marginal front."
Overstreet says it was once thought that humans didn't
arrive until the ice had melted away.
In reality, people were living right
at the edge of the ice.
"We just had this perception that that was a cold and
inhospitable environment and we tend to think about
once the ice sheets move north and the landscape
recovers and is re-vegetated, then the people come in.
I don't think that anybody would have suggested that there was
any occupation in Wisconsin before about 11,000 years
ago at the maximum extent."
"Do we have any idea?
Do you have any guesses to where these
people came from?
Probably from down south, obviously from
warmer climates, but as other...
because the record is so sporadic and there's only small
pockets of these sites and they all come across every once in
a while, it's difficult to make those types of interpretations."
Federal law requires archaeological work be done
in consultation with Native American tribes from the area.
In this case, it's the Menominee tribes, historical preservation
officer Dave Greenow.
He has no doubts about who these people were.
"We've traced our history way back to the ice age and the
Menominee people have been here that long.
In fact, our creation story took place
across the Bay over at the mouth of the Menominee rivers."
That's only about 25 miles by water from where the
archaeologists are digging.
"So if anything that is found here, of course, is associated
with the Menominee people are affiliated.
So we have a great concern for those artifacts."
"The radio-carbon dates are kind of bouncing around
from about 900 AD to 1300 AD, but there's...
I guess there's certainly a good
chance that this may be one of the prehistoric
expressions of the land."
As the dig-it-boss tavern was nearing the end, Marquette
Professor Dave Overstreet sat down with Greenow and showed him
the accumulation of artifacts.
"The notable thing about this component, I mean we
have like 200 refuse pits and we got carbonized corn
and in the bottom of one of the pits, there was this big
flat amblestone like the Heaven of the South West for
graining corn.
I was not even going to know what that is.
I have never seen a complete one from Wisconsin."
"This is my favorite artifact, Dave, pretty in pirates
sandwich. I think it's a woodworking tool in hands.
And I also strongly suspect that these people working
these post-glacial lakes were making dugout commues and
moving around by water craft as, you know, certainly
10,000 years ago and earlier."
Overstreet says there are links between the monomony people
of today and the more recent artifacts found at the site.
The older items are harder to connect with the
members of modern tribes.
"They all have differing ideas about their antiquity and where
they came from, some believe they emerged right here.
Others have migration stories that in the distant past, they
came from the south or the east or the west or the north.
But we can't link anything below this point to any
Native American group."
So far, the digging's been done where the highway project
required it to be done.
There are other independent sites
into our county where the research is only beginning.
Overstreet's crews will move there when work on the
highway corridor is complete.
[Music]
We move now to the Hurley area, one of the coldest parts of
the state this time of the year.
But it's also a manufacturing hotbed of sorts.
An area businessman is taking a hat
designed more than a century ago and marketing it as the
newest must-have fashion.
[Music]
"Yeah, it's cold."
It must be right around zero with a windshield
of about 20 below.
The Northwoods hub of Hurley, Wisconsin and its sister
city of Ironwood, Michigan.
It's a tiny place where snowmobiles gas
up on the in-stream.
And I can feel the wind hollering up in
my gear flaps here.
The kind of place that knows for cold.
And how's the cromor doing?
Just fine.
The Chromor, the bulwark against the blizzards of winter.
It is the hat of the North, known by many names.
It used to call it the upper cap, but it was a railroad yet.
It is also known in certain parts as the Chromor Domer.
The official name is the Stormy Chromor Blizzard
cap, seen in stores and on heads across the North.
You want a red one?
Maybe somebody will get you one.
The self-described, biggest fan of the Chromor is this
man, Bob Jacker of Ironwood.
I absolutely love this hat.
I love the hat.
I wore one all my life.
This is the Chromor.
Of course you want to buy it.
I mean, you want to buy it because it's a great hat.
And of course you've worn it for 20 years, just like
I've had mine for 20 years.
Come on to their Chromors.
This is the original Chromor.
The Butter for Milburts, John Milburts' story in Ironwood.
Probably 15, 20 years I've had them.
Chromors are part of the family.
This is my Gramps that I never knew.
And this is Uncle King.
The fun part is they went and ran
with white shirts and ties on.
And Chromors, the dress of choice.
Chromors are part of their history.
This is the Earth's Palmer family.
This is Teddy who's now, I believe, 72, or
all wearing Chromors.
Ted Earth's Palmer.
62 years later.
Still stuck on Chromors.
We all kind of grew up with him.
I had him, you know, from a young kid.
When hunting, I had my Chromor.
So it was something that my dad gave me.
So he kind of stayed with it for years and years.
He'll tell you that this is his family who...
The Chromor is an old hat, a hundred-year-old hat.
Invented 1903 by Cacana Native Stormy Chromor.
His story was celebrated in a children's golden book.
But right here, this says Mr.
Puffer Bill is really George Stormy Chromor
who worked for the Chicago Northwestern
Railroad in Wisconsin.
Stormy was a railroad man who loved baseball.
Add the bitter winds of a Wisconsin winter.
And the combination led to this classic creation.
So he had an idea to put some ear flaps on his
baseball hat, basically.
And that's really the hat we have today, is it...
Is a baseball hat with ear flaps?
And that elegant design has lasted for over a hundred years.
Clearly, the Chromor has staying power.
Grandpa put it on in early fall and took it off in late spring.
And it was, you know, it's a...
up here, it's at nine month hat.
It's the patented pull-down ear band system.
That's the secret to the supreme comfort of this warm companion.
For a hundred years, sales were steady.
A company in Milwaukee churned out Chromors and all was well.
Till year 2002.
Jack Wurt recalls the fateful day.
I was sitting in a coffee shop and the local dealer Mark from
the Hobby Wheel in Ironwood said to me, "Can you believe
they quit making Chromors?"
No more Chromors?
I don't know why.
My immediate reaction was, "Can you get me the phone number?"
Now this wasn't just any old phone call.
Because Bob Jackwurt isn't just your average Chromor fan.
He's also the owner of Jackwurt Fabrics, a business in Ironwood
that employs over 170 people.
And has a 30 year history of making all kinds of
objects from awnings to dog beds out of fabric.
These people know their way around a sewing machine.
Who better to create Chromors?
Just that belongs here.
It's like it almost like it came home.
Jackwurt bought the rights to make the Stormy
Chromor blizzard cap.
The Uper Hat is known manufactured in the U.P.
But marketed nationwide with great results.
Orders are pouring in.
The Chromor has been picked up by countless catalogs.
I'd like to see one out of 10 people in the United
States know what a Chromor is.
I would love that.
And in one year, sales have tripled.
They plan a few changes, new colors for example.
But they feel it's essential to keep the original
Chromor owner in mind.
They call him "toibal".
We call this person the old hat wearer, "toibal".
It's what we've always said.
What's "toibal" than "think"?
What will "toibal" think?
And we will rate them a "toibal".
This one is my birthday present.
Well, I got this one, maybe 10 years ago.
And this one I got last summer is I got enough
for a lot of daily life.
Some objects are tied to memories, to places, to
people, to share times.
Jackwood shares a story.
She said when my husband Dave died in 1983, his fishing
buddies came by her house three days after the funeral
and asked for his red Chromor and took it out on Isle Royal
and buried it in his memory.
And because that was his favorite place to fish.
And I've got a dear memories of Uncle King.
And I can remember the hat hanging on the pig.
I can remember it being there.
And I can remember the old black ones in the warehouses and
hanging with the sadastanum.
And I see this another hundred years, and I somehow
modern medicine changes the shape of a person's head.
I can't imagine that this had ever go out of style.
The folks from Jackward Fabrics tell us that they're doing
so well that they plan to expand from the hat business,
launching a Stormy Chromor clothing line in the fall.
That's our program for tonight.
You can find more information about In Wisconsin and
the stories you saw tonight by going to our website.
The address is www.wpt.org/inwisconsin.
Once there, you can also find transcripts of past programs
and click on video links to watch featured reports.
You won't find us on the air over the next few
weeks. We'll be taking a break while Wisconsin
Public Television features some special programming.
We'll be back with another new episode in three weeks
on Thursday, March 25th.
Until then, thanks for joining us.
We leave you tonight in Lake Geneva with a look at
a wintertime sport that's not for the faint of heart.
Iceboat racing.
For In Wisconsin, I'm
Patty Low.
Good night.
[Music]
Stop flagging.
Up!
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Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of
Alliance Energy who bring safe, reliable, and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods, and life in
Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliance Energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web.
[Music]