Chris Kolkowski from the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.
Thanks for coming to Enfocus.
Well, thanks for having me.
I love the story of, you know,
someone told me years ago we all have something in common,
but nobody ever talks long enough
to kind of figure out what it was.
And I think what brought us together is really interesting
because I'm sitting at the airport,
headed to Cleveland a little more than a month
from this interview now.
And I ended up coming across your dad.
You know, we start talking and I'm telling them
about what I do for a living.
And, you know, I love history and this and that.
And go, oh, my son's involved with history.
You know, so here we are.
It's funny how things work out.
My dad, I'm not at all surprised.
My dad talks to just about anybody.
And he's long taught me that everybody has a story.
They just want to share it.
And you guys obviously made a connection.
I'm glad it worked out that we can talk today.
Yeah, I love it.
And I'll tell you, if anyone that doesn't know,
you guys are located just really just steps
from the state capital.
That's right.
I've walked across that area, passed that building
so many times, many times it's at night.
And so it's always closed.
So, but I've never stuck my head inside.
And I finally went in.
How would you describe what the experience is there?
So the museum is right at the top of State Street.
So right across from the state capital.
And when you walk in, you get basically a tour
of the history of Wisconsin veterans.
We start with the Civil War,
and we go right around to the present day.
And it's not necessarily a museum about wars and battles,
although we do talk about that
because it's a veterans museum.
But it's really a museum about people.
You get a feel for who some of these people are in uniform,
a little bit about what they experience,
some of the service conditions.
Like I said, in all the conflicts from the Civil War,
right up to the present.
And we always try and find a way for anybody
that walks in a door to find something to connect to,
at least something, if not more than one thing,
in the museum, whether it's a hometown,
whether it's some personal aspect,
went to the same college, whatever the case is.
And I'm really glad you came in,
and I know you had a great time with my staff.
Yeah, I mean, I found it to be really interesting
that everything there is somewhat centered on Wisconsin
and Wisconsin's role.
How do you guys pull that off?
So we actually were founded by Civil War veterans
for the people of Wisconsin.
We turned 125 in 2026.
So we were founded in 1901 in the capital
as the GAR Memorial Hall.
Now, the GAR is the Grand Army of the Republic.
It's the Veterans Organization for Civil War veterans.
And our mission has since expanded
to include all Wisconsin veterans,
all services, all time frames.
And so the stuff that we get,
some of it we sometimes go out and acquire,
but the vast majority of it,
veterans and their families will donate to us.
And so, you know, when you have a veteran
that walks in and says, here's the uniform I wore
in Vietnam, or here's what my father or mother did
in World War II, here's their letters back and forth.
You know, it's just a fantastic,
it's a fantastic introduction.
So are you still, even to this day,
do you still get people that pop in and say,
hey, look what I found in my attic,
or look what I found in this shoebox that was in the basement?
Like, are you still getting artifacts in that way too?
That happens about every two to three days.
Really?
Either have somebody contact us by email,
or you'd be amazed what walks in the door sometimes.
We just had a general's aid,
family found stuff in the attic and was like,
hey, this guy was an aid to this general in World War II.
Would you be interested in collecting the material?
And so we took it in, yeah.
And I was really impressed with some of the artifacts I saw,
and the fact that they were authentic,
not replicas, you know, and the actual items.
Give us a sense, kind of, of what kind of things
that people will see when they walk in.
Well, that's what I call the power of the authentic.
The real thing, standing in front of the real thing,
is different than looking at it in a picture
or reading about it in a book.
There's a power of the real thing,
the real place, power of the authentic.
Some of the stuff that we have,
we've got battle-worn uniforms from all the conflicts.
We have a machine gun in World War I
that the only Wisconsin Army Medal of Honor recipient
earned the Medal of Honor capturing
and brought it home as a war trophy.
We've got, speaking of the Medal of Honor,
we've got four of them on display from World War II and Korea.
We've got a Vietnam helicopter that was in battle,
has some battle damage.
I don't know if they showed you that on the tail of the road.
How can you miss it?
So it's some really incredible stuff
and some really incredible stories that we have on display.
Yeah, and you guys have an actual cannon
from the Civil War period?
Right, battle capture too.
It was a Confederate cannon that was captured at Shiloh
by the 14th Wisconsin on the second day of battle
on April 7th, 1862.
And they brought it back as a war trophy to show off
and help raise war bonds.
And for years, it was, every July 4th,
it was the salute cannon that they'd fire down State Street
from the grounds of the Capitol.
What?
Yeah, so it's just got this incredible story.
And it's one of the first things you see
when you first walk in.
Yeah, and that's what I love about going through
and I hold your guys and you've got an incredible team
of folks that they seem to know what they're talking about.
They seem to be pretty fantastic.
They're great, yeah.
And I was telling the crew here and I was telling you too
that when I came in, I kind of geeked out a little bit,
I'm not ashamed to say it because I love history
and they seem to love it as well.
Oh, yeah.
And they really just offer, like,
I felt like I could talk to anybody in your facility
and they would be able to tell me something
about something that I was looking at.
I would agree with that.
And actually, one of the things when I came here in 2020,
one of the reasons I came was the staff.
It is a passionate, dedicated group.
It's a bunch of people that have found their calling
in doing history and doing veterans history.
And it's really, part of my job, actually,
is just to direct the creativity and direct the energy
and the right in the best direction.
And then I just let them go.
And as a leader, that's a wonderful place to be.
Yeah.
And it's a wonderful team and I couldn't be proud
of what we've been doing and what we're going to do.
Yeah.
Now how many artifacts do you guys think you have
in that space down there?
So in our total collection, both there
and in our offsite storage facility
on the east side of Madison, we have 27,000 objects
ranging in size from the Huey all the way down
to collar insignia and everything in between.
That, where we are in the museum right now,
we have about 3% on display just because of space limitations.
Wow.
So I'm not good at math, but I'm sure your viewers
can do the math and figure out what we've got there.
So you're saying there's like 97% of all the other stuff
you have is in a warehouse someplace else?
Yes.
Yes.
Think of an iceberg.
If you just saw the tip of the iceberg and there's this whole
underneath under the water.
And we've got some incredible stories there that we'd like
to put out on display.
How do you know what to keep?
How do you know what to collect?
One of the biggest things when, like, if you were to offer
us a collection, one of the biggest things that we look at
is we look at, first of all, what best tells your story?
You know, photographs, letters, diaries, that's pretty obvious.
But then objects.
And sometimes if you're giving an oral history to us,
we actually have the largest state-owned oral history,
veterans oral history collection in the country.
If you're talking-
When you say oral history, does that mean, like,
recordings of people talking about things?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Sitting down and doing an interview where I would be asking you
about your military service.
And if there are things that you mention or you hold up and say,
you know, oh, I brought this back from, you know, wherever I served,
we want that as well because that helps document your story.
So now, will you go out and seek people to tell those kinds of
stories?
Are you go out in the community across the state to find those
kind of people?
Guys and gals go across the state.
We partner with some of the local historical societies around
the state as well.
We partner with PBS on some things.
That's us.
Yeah.
So you guys are great to work with.
You know, some of it is people come to us too.
And it's part of the conversation we have is, you know,
we're interested in your collection.
If you want to talk to doing oral history, it's your choice.
Here you go.
We also look at things like condition.
You know, is it we don't want to bring in bugs.
We don't want to bring in something that's moldy.
You know, that sort of thing.
Condition, preservation.
And then one of the other things we look at is,
do we have it?
You know, everybody in World War II came home with what's called
the Eisenhower jacket, which was the dress, you know, the
dress one that was cut off at the, you know, at the bottom.
It's a real sleek, sharp looking thing.
There were 330,000 Wisconsinites that served in World War II.
If every single one of them donated their Ike jacket to us,
we wouldn't have space for anything else.
Yeah.
So there's a little bit of picking and choosing about that of some
of the more I hate to say usual suspects.
We may.
It's like, okay, we will make exceptions in cases.
But by and large, you know, that's another factor that we consider.
Yeah.
And I'm going to break this into two pieces here.
So for you, as someone who's around us a lot, what do you feel like
is the most impressive piece of the collection that's on display
at the actual museum itself right now?
I would say, I would say one of the most impressive things,
and when I do tours, one of the things that people react to
are the medals of honor.
Because most people have never seen the Medal of Honor up close
and personal.
And we have four of them.
We have five in the collection.
We have four on display at any given time, and we rotate them.
And when they see the medal, they see the stories.
You can just see how it clicks.
Because people know the Medal of Honor, but they may not really,
they may not have ever really been exposed to it.
Can you give us a sense of how unique it is for someone to receive that?
So think about the Medal of Honor was created in 1862, retroactive to 1861.
So it's been around for about 165 years.
Think of the many, many millions that have served in the armed forces.
Two millions in the Civil War, four million in World War I,
16 million in World War II, and that's just the major world wars
in the Civil War.
Then you add all the thousands in Vietnam and up to the,
there's over a million on active and reserve duty today, just alone.
Of all those millions of millions of people,
less than 4,000 have earned the Medal of Honor.
Wow.
And it's very close to 4,000, it's about 38, 3,900.
So that's how rare it is.
And so for us to have even five in our collection is pretty significant.
I was blown away by the fact that two of the ones you have are a father-son
combination.
That's right.
From Wisconsin?
Arthur and Douglas MacArthur are from Wisconsin.
And Arthur was earned his in the Civil War at the Battle of Missionary Ridge
in November of 1863, as an officer in a Milwaukee regiment, the 24th Wisconsin.
And then Douglas, who was appointed to West Point from Wisconsin,
later earned his for the defense of the Philippines in World War II.
They're the first father-son Medal of Honor combination in our country's history
and they both have Wisconsin roots.
Yeah.
I remember seeing their photographs as you come in pretty close to the big battle cannon there.
Yeah.
Going back to talking about some of the artifacts,
one of the artifacts that really caught my attention was an actual chain
and whip, or leg, I'm not sure what you would call it,
but it was from the slavery period.
Yeah.
And I was told that-
Leg irons basically.
Leg irons.
Yeah.
And I was told that a soldier had brought that back from the battlefield.
What's the story on that artifact?
In 1863, during the Vicksburg campaign, the campaign opened the Mississippi River.
There were several Wisconsin units that were involved,
and when they crossed the Mississippi River into the state of Mississippi,
for a lot of these badgers, it was the first time that they were really up close and personal
with the horrific institution of slavery.
And some of these guys, if you read their letters, which we have in our collection,
they were absolutely horrified by what they saw, and understandably so.
And so some of these guys collected these things and brought them home
just so that people would see.
Yeah.
It made that much of an impact.
And what- I can't remember if the label told it,
but at least some of the things on display but also in our collection
are from Jefferson Davis's Plantation, which was overrun by Union troops.
So here you are, the president of the Confederacy's Plantation,
and you are taking not only war trophies, but you're taking examples,
hey, this is what we're fighting against.
This is what we're fighting for.
It's to end this.
Yeah.
And so bring it home.
It's a powerful, and then having them out there and being in front of them,
it's just a powerful thing.
Yeah, I was surprised, too, that like you think of a whip,
you think it's going to have some kind of a leather or, you know,
kind of material attached to, but that particular one that you have on display
is, looks like a piece of metal or some sort of a metal, I guess?
Yeah, it had a metal and like cloth in it.
We have an all leather one in our collection.
And it is- And I say this to say that I didn't know that they made those
out of, you know, that kind of a harsh material, I guess.
Well, and it's one of the ones you use for the extra harsh element.
It's an extremely unpleasant thing to think about.
Yeah.
But at the same time, you know, history is not all sunshine and roses for sure.
And you have to remember that piece.
Yeah.
Do you find when people come through, does it become an emotional experience?
Is there going through all these periods of war?
It can be.
It can be.
It depends on the visitor.
One of the ones that I will find that's very interesting is when you
have families come through, and you can tell there's several generations.
And I'll use an example that I've witnessed myself is where you have
grandpa stand in front of our map of Vietnam with his grandchildren and say,
this is where I was and point toward the soldier we have on display and say,
that's what I looked like.
And I flew in one of those and pointed to the Huey directly above.
So those kind of connections are really incredible.
Some of the stories that people can respond to, like we've got stories of
people that are killed and then, you know, the family story, you know,
that's still resonant.
And I actually have staff members when I talk about the death of somebody in
their twenties that have children in their twenties and can get emotional,
you know, when we're talking about that or when they're hearing it on a tour.
So it just depends on what grabs people.
But again, that's the connection we're looking for.
It may be emotional, it may be intellectual, whatever.
But the point is to get these stories and get people connected and realize,
hey, these were people just like us.
They did incredible things in the service of our state and nation.
And, you know, it helps bridge that gap.
The civil military divide as it's called.
Yeah.
And when I came through, I just happened to arrive about the same time,
a large classroom of kids were coming through.
They probably were, those kids were probably around 10, 11 years old.
And I saw Eric, you know, one of your guys there, you know,
give them the presentation.
And I was, you know, pretty cool to see these young folks learn about this.
So who's the typical person that kind of comes through?
And how do you build an experience that's going to kind of cross all the generation
so everybody gets a little something out of it?
That's kind of the trick.
It's a trick.
It's a trick.
It's, you know, how do you do that to engage everybody, you know,
senior citizens all the way down to children?
And that's the trick.
I call it the trick.
One out of every three of our visitors are school children.
And I'm really, really proud of that because that's the next generation.
What we do is diminished if the next generation doesn't understand
or appreciate what this history is.
And so for some of the younger kids, it's not necessarily, you know,
it's more, this is what they use.
This is what they wore, you know, focus in on those concrete examples,
those, you know, think of what it would feel like to wear a wool uniform.
Don't you think you'd be hot on the battlefield?
You know, things like that for them.
You know, high schoolers, you can do something different with them.
You know, you can focus on geography.
You can focus on different things.
And then for the, you know, for other audiences,
it's just tailoring your tour to what you want to do for the audiences.
And that's why we present it the way we present it.
Even if you walk through the galleries unguided, there's enough there.
You know, if you want to play on some of our digital interactives,
you can play on the digital interactives.
If you just want to walk and look and see what catches your eye,
you can do that too.
That's also why we put the maps out there.
So people see kind of where, you know, where's Vietnam?
Where's Korea?
Where's the Pacific Theater in World War II?
And so it's kind of, we try and create kind of a choose your own adventure
and let you, you know, let you kind of guide yourself from there.
And why do you think it's important for these young folks to learn about all this?
And why is it important for them to learn specifically about Wisconsin's role
in previous conflicts?
I think it's important for two reasons.
To educate and to inspire.
To educate, people need to understand that the shoulders,
the shoulders that we stand on as Wisconsinites and as Americans
are the generations that have gone before us.
And when you think about what Wisconsinites have stood for,
have raised their right hand and said we're going to defend the state
and the nation and serve the state and the nation,
you need to understand what that is and what that has entailed.
The other thing I would point out is the state symbols that we look at
every day that are callbacks to Wisconsin veterans,
our state flag, our state song on Wisconsin,
both callbacks to Wisconsin.
But old Abe has a civil Wisconsin civil war tie.
You know, so there are things like this that we see every single day
that most people don't realize comes right out of the service of Wisconsin veterans.
So that's the education piece is get that appreciation
of what has made us who we are and what we are and where we're going
and the shoulders we stand on.
The other piece is inspiration because some of the most incredible stories
that you will come across are some of the stories we have in the museum.
I tell people if you want to read some absolutely incredible stuff,
read Medal of Honor citations and be very thankful that people like that
have existed and have been capable of doing that.
That's something that's educational, but it's also very inspiring.
When you realize some of what has gone before and hey, we've gone through this
or hey, the frozen show sin, they survive that horrible winter,
we can do the same thing, whatever is going on in front of us.
It gives us perspective.
And so that's the inspiration piece.
And I think that's both of those you can find at the Veterans Museum for sure.
Yeah.
And I want to hit on something, two things you actually mentioned
that I was going to bring up later, but since since she brought it up,
you're talking about Old Abe, you know, and for those that don't know,
maybe giving them a brief little history of who Old Abe represents
and what he represents.
Old Abe the War Eagle.
When most people think of Wisconsin in the Civil War,
they tend to think of the Iron Brigade in the east.
But Old Abe was the mascot of the 8th Wisconsin,
which served in the Western Theater, including in the Vicksburg campaign
we were talking about earlier.
And on the way to Camp Randall, when the unit was forming,
a group, a company out of Eau Claire bought an eagle.
And they carried Old Abe into battle alongside the unit colors
all through the unit service.
Old Abe at the end of the war came back.
He had a price on his head.
The Confederates had given a bounty.
If somebody can kill what they called the Yankee Buzzard.
He survived unscathed, came back, lived out his days
in the basement of the Capitol.
He died of smoke inhalation in the first Capitol fire.
His body was burned up in the second Capitol fire,
but we still have some original feathers from him.
We do have a replica, full-scale replica in the museum.
You can't miss it.
It's one of the first things you see.
Old Abe, there's a statue of Old Abe in the state assembly chamber
that's right above the speaker's dais.
And so Old Abe watches over the state legislature.
You'll see Old Abe pop up in a few other places.
The mascot, one of the high school mascots up in Eau Claire
is the old Abe's.
So it's one of the great symbols of Wisconsin.
And he still goes into battle because of the connection
to the 101st Airborne.
I don't know if they explained that to you or not.
They did.
They did.
And I want to make sure people get this too.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but was Old Abe flown in battle
as a symbol of here we come kind of thing?
Or what did they represent when he was?
Well, Old Abe, bald eagle.
So representing the United States.
Old Abe, Abraham Lincoln.
And it's that extra, you're not just carrying the colors,
you're carrying the national mascot, which is also the unit mascot.
And the 8th Wisconsin was officially known as the Eagle Regiment
for that reason.
And so it creates that esprit de corps, that sense of teamwork,
that sense of pride in the unit that, hey, we're the only ones
carrying an eagle into battle in the entire Union army.
We're the only regiment that does this.
And it's, you know, it just adds something extra.
It adds that extra oomph that sometimes carried them on to victory.
It's pretty sad that he survives all that war and all those things
and then loses his life in a fire at the Capitol.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's our, in some ways it's very ironic.
You survive all that and then this is what happens.
Yeah.
Now do you get a sense that there's a, any wow type of moment
or exhibit at the museum that people tend to drop their mouth
every time they see it or they, you know, make some stop
and maybe pay attention to that exhibit a little bit longer
than some of the other ones that you think stand out to you on that?
I think one of the things that stands out to people,
that's kind of a tough one because, again, it's different
for different people, but I will say there are two or three
that people stand around and look at.
One of the ones is the Vietnam exhibit, but one of the other ones
and one of the ones that I noticed people linger at quite a bit
is Mark Nieto and the USS Cole.
During the USS Cole attack, October 12th, 2012,
sailors were killed during the terrorist attack at Aiden Yemit.
One of them was Fondilac's Mark Nieto and they come back.
He's cremated.
Half of his ashes are spread in the family cemetery in Fondilac.
The other half are buried at sea.
And one of the things that we have on display is one
of Nieto's uniforms.
We have some other things from that day and that event.
But we also have the box that carried his ashes
that were put over the side.
And his mother, right before it was carried on board ship
to go be buried at sea, she kissed the tag.
And the lipstick is still there.
And it's the mom's final kiss goodbye to her son.
And that's the reaction we get from a lot of people.
And that's one of those we were talking earlier
about impacting families.
That's one of those where I've actually, I've seen mothers
get very emotional because they can relate.
I mean, it's an easy thing to relate to if you're a parent.
And the final kiss goodbye to your child that has died
before his time.
Yeah, I was really impressed by the realism of most,
well, all of the exhibits, especially the ones that involved
people and the mannequins and things that are wearing
the uniforms.
I mean, there's one of a soldier on his knee.
It's to the left when you walk in to the main exhibit
hall there.
And it literally startled me because it looks like a real
person.
Yep.
A lot of those actually are real people.
When the museum was done, there's a company on the east coast
called Studio Ice and they can do castings of your face.
And so we had people get their face molded, just some staff
members, volunteers, you know, some other prominent
veterans that helped construct that museum in 1993.
And they put them in the gallery.
There's one in the Mexican border with the guy on horseback
still visits every now and then to check on himself.
Make sure you haven't replaced him with someone.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I love that.
Give me a second here to look at my notes because I was
going to go to a place and I just, hitting on some,
oh, I knew what I was going to, I was going to ask you,
I'd love to talk a little bit about the state as sort of a
source for all this great military history.
You know, we hear, you know, Camp Randall Stadium.
We hear, you know, I live on the east side near Union corners.
Union corners.
Yep.
And I've got the big, you know, gold statue right there
in my neighborhood.
Well, can you tell us about some of the remnants of that
history that's still amongst us.
And like, when I think Camp Randall, I don't know if people
realize that that was a place where, you know,
Wisconsin is a place where, you know,
Wisconsin soldiers went, you know, to get trained and
prepared to go to battle.
Absolutely.
If you look around, not just Madison, but around the state,
you will find traces of the state's military history.
Camp Randall being one of the best examples.
Half of Wisconsinites that went off to war,
mustered in Madison, and then went off to the front.
The other half were in Milwaukee.
And actually, during the Spanish-American war,
the state fairgrounds, you know, everybody goes to the state fair,
everybody loves the state fair.
That was the Camp Randall of the war with Spain in 1898.
Oh, wow.
And there's a little plaque on the exhibition hall that
commemorates that service.
But Camp Randall, the parade field at Camp Randall during the
Civil War, is today the gridiron.
It's actually the playing field in the stadium.
And if, you know, for those who are familiar with military
installations, the parade field is really kind of the beating
heart of life at the installation.
And so for, they to be on the same spot,
every time I go to that stadium, it just,
it hits me on a little extra level.
You know, you talk about street names and location names,
Union Corners, Fairchild Street, Civil War veteran,
later became governor.
You know, you start going down the list and you see a lot of
these names.
The old house bar, I understand, is that,
is that really a old post office?
I thought I heard someone say it.
It was one of the old post offices.
You know, and then you go to other places around the state,
Argon, the town of Argon in northern Wisconsin,
named after the World War I battle.
Dorchester has a monument to the famous four chaplains that
die at sea from Dorchester.
None of them were directly connected to Wisconsin,
although there were badgers that died in the shipwreck.
But because it was the SS Dorchester that sank,
they raised a monument there.
There's the Korean War Memorial up in Plover.
You know, there's an admiral has a park named after him in up
in Stevens Point.
Mitchell, you know, Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee.
General Mitchell, General Mitchell, Billy Mitchell.
You know, and you start going down the list and then you look
at the national cemeteries and the state veteran cemeteries,
you know, that are around the state.
Bob Euchar is now, because he was an army vet,
is now buried in the national cemetery right by the stadium.
You know, so if you look, you can find reminders and the presence
of Wisconsin veterans in the very, very physical fabric of what
this state is.
Now that one spot where a lot of the graduates from UW take
their photographs coming into Camp Randall with the big pillars,
is that remnants of the original Camp Randall?
That's part of the original Camp Randall.
As a matter of fact, that arch that people walk through to get to
and from the stadium and is very famous, was raised by the GAR
and Civil War veterans in 1911 to commemorate.
Most people don't stop and look at it, but the statues are really,
you know, really well done.
And then the plaques list all of the units that came through Camp
Randall.
And if you don't see how many soldiers do you think walk
through those arches?
Well, give you an idea.
There was 81,000 badgers that served in the Civil War for the
United States.
And if about half of them came through Camp Randall sets about
40,000 people.
And if you think about that society at the time, it wasn't as
mobile as we are.
You know, you and I have both talked about how we moved around
for our career and a lot of people that move around or travel.
For a lot of these people, they'd never really been out of the
county until they go to the big city of Madison or the big city
of Milwaukee and then from there to the front lines.
And so for a lot of these veterans, and I would argue even
for later generations, this is one of the defining things in
their life.
There's a song that comes after World War I that is written
called, How Can We Keep Him Down on the Farm After He Seen
Petterie?
So how can these, all these returning servicemen, you know,
are they really going to stay in their small town when they've
seen Paris, when they've seen other parts of the world?
You know, and that's another human piece of it that people
don't necessarily think about.
Yeah.
And earlier you mentioned on Wisconsin as a battle cry.
Yep.
I had no idea that that song comes from Wisconsin military
explaining that history.
So we talked about Arthur and Douglas MacArthur.
This is actually from Arthur MacArthur's Medal of Honor
action.
They're going up the Missionary Ridge outside of Chattanooga,
Tennessee, and it's an 800 foot that slope, 45 degrees or
better.
And as they're going up, the color bearer of the 24th Wisconsin
who's in his 40s gets tired.
Understandably so.
But the problem is in the Civil War you're trained that
whenever the flag is, you are.
So if the flag stops, you stop.
So he stops for a second to catch his breath.
The unit stops under fire.
Arthur MacArthur is 18 years old.
He's full of all that teenage energy, right?
So he comes over and grabs the flag and yells, I'll take it
and turns to the unit and yells on Wisconsin.
Leads him up the hill.
One of the first two flags to break a top Missionary Ridge.
Or one of the first two flags seen a top Missionary Ridge is
the 24th Wisconsin.
And he gets the Medal of Honor for that leadership under fire.
It's that story that inspires the state song and the fight song
on Wisconsin.
So does that mean that regimen?
They were all Wisconsinites?
Yep, they all came from Milwaukee.
Most Civil War units were recruited from a specific either
specific region or a specific city in the case of Milwaukee.
You could get everybody from Milwaukee County because it's
a big enough city.
You get some units, like one of my ancestral units, the 21st
Wisconsin is from the counties around Manitowoc between
Manitowoc and Lake Winnebago.
And so that's where that comes from.
You get Madison units as well.
But they all are very, and a lot of these guys grew up together.
We're served in the same, you know, or knew the same neighborhoods,
knew the same city.
So they're serving with friends.
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that these are all
volunteers back in those days.
That's correct.
That's correct.
The draft, most of the 250 year history of the United States
military from 1775 to the present, only about a third of that has
been the draft.
The rest of the time it's been volunteer.
And, you know, we think of the draft because they had the
peacetime draft all the way through Vietnam.
That is the exception rather than the rule.
The volunteer military we've had since 1973 is very much the
rule.
And so you get these people that make a conscious decision to
raise the right hand and go.
Yeah, and one of the things I learned from and listening to your
team is some of these regimens were built on community and people
were pulled from these the same communities and part of that
community includes a lot of diversity in terms of people of
color.
That's right.
And that's something that we try and showcase a lot and try
and point out where we can.
There are entire companies recruited out of the Indian
reservations, the native reservations.
It's really interesting how they know written the language but
how you translate, transliterate that in the records.
There's a company of United States color troops that comes out
of Milwaukee to go serve in the United and a couple of black
USCT Wisconsinites are at Appomattox, the surrender of
Lee's Army in 1865.
And there's some that are liberated as slaves and end up
here in Wisconsin after working or enlisting in the Union Army
and end up here as Wisconsinites and are treated and no
different than any other civil war veteran.
And that's something that should be mentioned is the GAR never
segregated in any way.
They actually had a few women members as well.
And the same was true of a veteran's organization since.
And so, you know, you sometimes hear veterans say, I see no
color but green or blue or, you know, whatever the service is.
And you see that also in some of these veterans communities,
too.
It's a really incredible story.
Yeah.
What do you see, Chris, future wise in terms of how this museum
continues to be curated and how it grows and what's it going to
look like moving forward, especially, you know, a hundred years
from now?
That's actually, it's funny you bring it up that way because
that's something that I talked to the team about, particularly when
we collect, as I say, when we collect, what do we want people
160 years from now to know about this generation?
What are we going to need to tell that story?
And we have an idea of that because of the Civil War 160
years ago.
What do we have and what did we wish we had?
So, there's that.
The other thing is when we take, like, if you were to donate,
if you're a veteran you donated me your uniforms.
We take on a legal and ethical obligation to make sure that
it's in good shape and can be studied.
Your story is preserved and can be shared for future generations.
And that's something we take very, very seriously.
In terms of where we're going, we are actually have been working
with the state legislature on, in the latest budget, they gave us
some money to do some engineering and planning to look at the next
generation of the Veterans Museum and expanded Veterans Museum to
do more display spaces to make even more programming space, you know,
to really take us to the next level.
And to the point I just made, when we looked at what we needed and
we started looking at what's going to be required, I said,
we're not thinking 10 years.
We're not thinking 30.
I want you to think 50 years and beyond.
This is a once in a generation project.
And so let's think about it in those terms and give those future
generations, you know, set them up for success to be able to carry
it, you know, to stand on our shoulders and be able to carry it
forward and continue the important mission that we do.
Yeah.
And you talked about artifacts and things you wish you might have.
Is there something out there that you feel like you'd love to get
in that collection over there that you'd like to see come your way?
One of the things that I'd like to see is, I'd actually like to see,
that's a tough question.
Oh, come on.
You can handle this question.
So one of the things that we'd like, actually we'd like to see is
we'd like to see more from the current conflicts.
One of the things that you'll find is that from Desert Storm
forward, they have trouble thinking of themselves as historic.
Yeah, because it's all, we're all kind of living it, right?
We're still living it.
Yeah.
And it's still in the fairly recent past.
But Desert Storm is over 30 years ago.
9-11 is going to be 25 in 2026.
You know, so getting those stories now from that generation of
veterans is something that we'd really like to, you know,
we'd really like to see more of.
That's a piece of a part of the collection that we're still
trying to.
Is there a Wisconsin piece of history, a military history that's
connected to 9-11 that you can think of off the top of your head?
We had several badgers that were in the Pentagon on that day,
and we have their oral histories.
That's probably the most prominent thing that I can think of off
the top of my head.
And we did actually have, we have at least, we have oral histories
from several Wisconsin veterans that joined because of 9-11.
And they talk about it, you know, I saw the towers come down
and it motivated me to join up and serve my country.
And we actually have somebody who joined the Army who survived
the Trade Center.
And was from Wisconsin, had moved to New York, was there,
and then joined the Army and afterwards retired back home.
So, you know, that's probably our closest tie.
Yeah.
And we talked about what you thought was, you know,
one of the more impressive kind of artifacts on site.
Let's go to that warehouse.
You've got so much stuff in there.
What is the most impressive thing you think you feel like you
have in that space?
So I'll give you two things.
Number one is the, we have the flag from the 24th Wisconsin
that Arthur MacArthur carried up Missionary Ridge.
Mm-hmm.
So, when I show it on tours.
And that's dating back to the win again?
That's about 1863.
So it's a 160-year-old silk flag.
Wow.
And so I pull it out and say, this is the origin item.
And it's incredible, the reaction we get.
One of the other things that we have is, you know,
the Iron Brigade was known as the Black Hats because of the tall
black hats that they wore.
The only battle-worn black hat still in existence
is in our collection.
Wow.
And it was carried at Gettysburg by the Color Bear
of the Second Wisconsin, who was shot five times
and actually was shot six times because the six bullet
went through the brow of the cap but was too high
for him to, you know, for his strike his head.
And give us a quick lesson on the Iron Brigade
and for those who don't know that.
So the Iron Brigade is very famous unit.
It's the second, second, sixth, seventh Wisconsin,
19th Indiana and 24th Michigan.
And they were known, again, we were talking about signatures
earlier with the Eagle Regiment.
They were known as the Black Hat Brigade and later
the Iron Brigade because of their tenacity in battle.
But their signature was wearing the tall,
it's called a hardy hat, dress hat.
And so, in fact, the Confederates at Gettysburg,
one Confederate is recorded as saying to the other,
there's those damn black hatters again.
This ain't no militia, we're fighting.
This is the Army of the Potomac.
So everybody on both sides knew who they were.
They were very famous and even today,
a lot of people when they think of Wisconsin
and the Civil War, that's the first thing they think of.
So, and as far as the name itself,
they became the Iron Brigade because of their toughness
or how they get that kind of...
Because of the toughness in battle.
Actually, it was the Battle of South Mountain in 1862
as they are climbing the mountain under Confederate fire
and going up very steep.
One of the Union generals looks at and says,
those must be men of iron to do that.
Wow.
And that's the name stuck.
Yeah.
We're going to wrap you up because I know you've been
there a little bit talking to us.
I'd love to hear just why are you so passionate about all this?
To be honest, reason's personal and professional, both.
The professional piece, I think we've already talked about
some of the power of a great story,
the power of being able to share these stories.
I'm very passionate about, you know, teaching and educating
and getting people as excited as excited as I am
and to understand the importance of this stuff.
But this is also personal.
My ancestors have been in Wisconsin since 1845.
I have Wisconsin ancestors, Wisconsin veteran ancestors
in my family tree, all services from the Civil War
all the way up through the Cold War.
And so, for me, it's a way to honor that and honor my family
and honor their service as well.
And so, those two things make it very easy to come out of bed,
get out of bed every day.
And if you had one superpower to kind of make something happen
that you'd like to see happen over in your space,
what would that be?
And are you, any plans to move anytime soon or to move
into a bigger space, anything like that?
So, the current plan is we're working to exercise the option
to buy the building, where we are.
And once that's done, where the engineering is,
the concept is, we're going to tear down the existing building
and build new and build a new purpose-built facility
to the requirements that we talked about.
If I could wave a magic wand, it would be fully resourced tomorrow
and we'd be able to get underway.
But we're still working through the engineering
and we're still working on raising the funds.
It's going to be a public-private partnership
with our foundation and with the state.
As I tell people, we're on the same path as the History Center,
which is under construction across the street from us.
We're just a few years behind.
But it's going to be exciting.
It's going to be very exciting.
Well, Chris, I appreciate you stopping in,
and I appreciate the team that you guys have over there.
You're doing some incredible work.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
I'm an old man, but I went in there and I learned things
that I didn't know before,
and I'm going to have to come back and spend some more time.
Don't be a stranger.
We appreciate you stopping in.
I don't know how long that was.
It went fast, however.
It didn't go fast.
I didn't have to look at my notes hardly at all.
I had to look a couple times because there was just some things
that I wanted to make sure I got in.
Yeah.
If I had a guess, I would think that was about 40.
I don't know.
Mark, do you need any cutaways?
Are there any questions you need to really ask?
I think I'm good.
I was scared.
How long was that?
Do you have a time on that?
Roughly?
About 45 minutes.
I think I'm good.
Let me take the one quick of my notes here just to make sure
since we're all here.
Whatever you need, Mark, whatever you need.
I appreciate it.
And you offered, Willie.
I think I got everything in there.
There's one question I did.
That's one I didn't ask, but it's okay.
I think I'm good, man.
All right.
Is there anything that you wanted to get in there that we missed it?
I think we covered it.
I think we hit it.
We hit it great.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I'm good.
I'm good, guys.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.