cc >> Beth Lemke: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Wisconsin Historical Museum.
We're very glad to have you here as part of our History Sandwiched In series. Today, it's our pleasure to
bring you Erika Janik, local author, who is going to focus in on "Madison: A History of a Model City."
If you could please help me welcome her today, I'd greatly appreciate it. [APPLAUSE]
Erika Janik: Thank you so much for coming. It's so nice to see so many of you here.
I'm going to be talking to you, as Beth said, about Madison's history. Now I imagine that a lot of you
are probably from Madison or are from somewhere in this area so you probably already know a lot about Madison.
I'm going to try and tell you some things maybe, I'm going to try, that maybe you don't know about Madison.
I can't obviously tell you the entire history in this History Sandwiched In presentation, but I'm going to kind of give you an
overview of the city and how it got formed, tell you some kooky stories, I hope, about it. As Beth mentioned, my first book
was Odd Wisconsin. I'm very interested in kind of silly interesting side notes to history.
So I'll probably be sharing a few of those with you as well. I came to write this book, actually I had just finished
writing a short history of Wisconsin, which I like to say is 10,000 years in 200 pages, and I was very cognizant of
writing this book that a history of Madison could not be longer than the 200 pages I just wrote about Wisconsin.
But it was very hard. It was very hard to decide what to include and what not to include and how to make it
accessible. I'm actually not from Wisconsin originally. I grew up in a suburb of
Seattle. I came here about nine years ago not really knowing very much about Wisconsin and certainly
not knowing very much about Madison. And so I really wanted to write a book that was for someone like
me, wanting to learn more about the place that they've lived or for someone who's lived here maybe their whole life and
doesn't really know much about its history. So the first thing I'm going to do is actually read you a little
bit from the introduction and then we'll get started. Feel free to ask questions at any time.
Ebenezer Brigham left a first account of the land that would become Madison. Recalling his visit in 1828 he
said, "The site was at the time an open prairie on which grew dwarf oaks while thickets covered the lower grounds."
He then predicted, with remarkable foresight, that the land might be perfect for the capital of a new state.
Wisconsin, at the time, belonged to the Michigan territory. Oddly enough, Jefferson Davis also passed through Madison in
1829. The future president of the Confederate States of America had been sent to Wisconsin to
help build Fort Winnebago in 1828. Davis and his company of soldiers passed through Madison
looking for deserters. He later recalled the area as abundant in fish and waterfowl and noted that the Indians ate
primarily corn and wild rice. Madison's beauty and potential were not obvious to all earlier visitors, however.
To the soldiers pursuing Black Hawk in the summer of 1832, Madison didn't leave a very good impression.
If these lakes were anywhere else except in the country they are, wrote one soldier, they would be considered among the
wonders of the world, but the country they are situated in is not fit for any civilized nation of people to inhabit.
Fortunately, the man who would play an integral role in Madison's future took a different view when he first saw
the isthmus in the May of 1829. Judge James Duane Doty, traveling overland from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien, liked
what he saw so much that he purchased the land and plotted a grid of the streets for a future capital city that he called
Madison. He then successfully convinced the legislature that it should be created.
Less than a century later, landscape architect John Nolen would show Madison an aspirational vision of itself
that would serve as a challenge for future generations. His 1911 report revealed a Madison that took full advantage
of its natural assets. A place as pleasing to the eye as it was to live and to work. With just a little effort, Nolen
said, Madison could become a model city for the world. So that's kind of where the title of the book comes from.
I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But first I want to talk about, here we go, the glacier that
formed much of the landscape of Madison. So we're going way back long before there was Madison.
This glacier flowed into Wisconsin about 25,000 years ago. It was the Laurentide ice sheet.
You can see there that it covers a huge section of North America and a great portion of Wisconsin as well.
That line that you see there is where the glacier covered over Wisconsin. It left very impressive marks on
the country. The Finger Lakes in upstate New York are the result of this glacier, portions of Long Island
are a result of this glacier, but really some of the most impressive landscape features are here in Wisconsin, and
that's actually why the last kind of invasion of this glacier is called the Wisconsin glacier because you can really see in
Wisconsin's landscape that this glacier was here and really formed this place. You can see it in the moraines
and drumlins that are all over the state. We're actually on one of the drumlins right now.
The capitol sits on top of a drumlin that was formed by this glacier. So we're a little bit, I guess,
hanging on the side of that drumlin. The glacier began retreating about 12,000 years ago, creating
our modern landscape. Actually, when the glacier started going away, Madison was still pretty much covered in
water. All of the debris from the glacier created some dams and so the melting water created a huge
lake over what is today Madison and it was called Glacial Lake Yahara. And the water was about 12 feet
higher than our lakes are today, and there was 100 times the amount of water that there is in Madison today with just a few
isolated islands. So the capitol itself, because we are on the top of this drumlin, we would have been on
an island. There's a few other spots on the isthmus. And this lake was here for a
long time. And finally the water started to breakthrough this debris dam and the water level started to go
down, and that's how we got our current lakes and we what now know as the Yahara River rather than the Yahara Lake.
You can still see some of the remnants of this lake, though. If you look at Maple Bluff, the bluff itself is actually the
side of Glacial Lake Yahara. So there are visible remnants of this glacier all around us. And with this retreat of the
glacier, that's really when people started moving into Wisconsin. Some of the first people to do
so were the Paleo-Indians. They were largely a nomadic people and started moving into the state.
And some of the people around 500 they started building effigy mounds. And the greatest concentration
of effigy mounds in the world is here in Madison. There used to be probably over a thousand of them.
Most of them have been destroyed, unfortunately, and they often took of the shape of animals, kind of geometric
shapes and spirits. The one you see here is on the grounds of Mendota Mental Health.
There's two really beautiful mounds up there if you ever get up there. These mounds really puzzled
Europeans when they came to this area. They had no idea what they were and who could have built them.
They didn't really believe that the Indians here could have built them because when you asked the Indians about them
they didn't seem to know very much about them either. So they came up with all kinds of theories about who could have
built these mounds and what exactly they could be. So I put some of the theories up here.
It was speculated that a lost race of Europeans built them. One of the 10 tribes of Israel. Maybe Atlantis was here in
Wisconsin. Aliens was also proposed. It really wasn't until 1894 that there was a definitive
scientific report that convinced most people, still a few outliers, that the Indians did, in fact, build these mounds and
that they were probably the ancestors of the Ho-Chunk. But who built the mounds doesn't actually tell us why they were
built. And we still don't really know that. There's a lot of speculation.
People think it's reflections of the theological beliefs of the native people who built them. But we don't really know.
And also don't know why they stopped building them. They built them for a period of about 500 years and then they
stopped. A lot of other Indian groups were moving into Wisconsin. So kind of changing the way
people chose to represent themselves. People were also becoming a little less nomadic.
They were setting up permanent agricultural communities so maybe this is what led them to stop.
We're skipping ahead a whole bunch. So Europeans begin coming to Wisconsin in the 17th century.
Not really to Madison yet. The first European in Wisconsin, the one who gets all the credit is Jean Nicolet.
He gets all the credit because he wrote it down that he was here. They actually believe that there
was another Frenchman, his name was Etienne Brule, and he was sent by Samuel de Champlain of new France to kind of explore
this area. And they believe that he skirted the shores of Lake Superior around 1630, but Brule made the
mistake of not writing his claim down. Whereas Nicolet wrote it all down.
So he was sent in 1634 by Champlain to find a water route to the Pacific and hopefully to Asia.
And so he landed at Red Banks, which is near Green Bay, thinking, perhaps, that he was in Asia.
This is a 19th century painting of his landing. And you can see he's wearing his best Chinese robe because he's
obviously in Asia. The Indians were a little confused by this. Not quite sure what to make of
it. So we know Nicolet did not find Asia because it is not a suburb of Green Bay.
But he did find a very rich source of furs, and the fur trade would come to dominate Wisconsin's economy.
So the fur trade was really all that Wisconsin was about for about 200 years, both under the French flag, then the British,
and then the Americans. The fur trade was largely happening in northern Wisconsin and the along the Mississippi
River. We do know of a few fur traders that were here in Madison. There was a man named Wallace
Rowan. He had a fur trade post at Pheasant Branch Creek around 1830.
He's largely credited as the earliest known permanent white home in the area. And his wife was commonly
thought of as the first white woman to come to Madison. Excuse me. Another man named Abel Rasdall,
he traded at Lake Kegonsa. And he also had a fur trade post right up here on the square on Pinckney Street, and he was
there for about two years. But for the most part, people still weren't really coming to Madison.
The really notable group of people to pass through Madison was really during the Black Hawk War.
Black Hawk led his people over the isthmus in 1832. He was being chased by some American troops because he had
tried to reclaim some Sauk lands on the Rock River that he had thought been fraudulently taken by the US government.
He was met after crossing the Mississippi by a militia group and he led them, basically, on a chase for 16 weeks through
Illinois and into Wisconsin right across the isthmus. You can see a little plaque where they passed over by the
Essen Haus down there. One night the Americans camped over by Olbrich Park and the Sauk over by Pheasant Branch
Creek. The isthmus was actually a really great place for the Sauk. It was kind of wooded and marshy
and there was some brush that was hard for the Americans. They weren't used to this kind of terrain, whereas it worked
really well for the Sauk so they were able to get safely across the isthmus. Unfortunately, things didn't end
well for them and after 16 weeks of pursuit, the Black Hawk war ended at the Battle of Bad Axe. It's kind of a misnomer to call
it a battle. The Sauk lost 900 people. Black Hawk was eventually captured.
This war really impressed on a lot of native people in Wisconsin that resisting the Americans was not going to work
out. A lot of them really stopped putting up much of a fight. A few months after Black Hawk
was captured, the Americans met with the Ho-Chunk and made them cede all of their land between the Wisconsin River and the Rock
River, which includes the Madison area. All of the Ho-Chunk were to leave Madison by June of 1833.
They had a lot of kind of semi-permanent camps on the shores of Lake Mendota. They loved this place.
Were very resistant to leave. Even after they left, many still came back, were often chased out.
But it was really, Americans were starting to pour into Wisconsin at this time. The land office in Green Bay had
opened. Lots in Madison went up for sale in 1835. Interestingly, though, no one
wanted land in Madison. After three months of the land office being opened where land is being purchased everywhere
else, nothing had been sold in Madison. Finally, late that year, late 1835, two lots had been
purchased. Neither one of them were on the lake. This is kind of a thing that
continually happens in Madison where no one is terribly interested in being on the lake. The town kind of forms away from
the lake. We kind of ignore the lake and turn our backs on the lake for quite some time.
But things were really about to change for Madison. People might not have wanted the land right then but they soon
would want it. So by 1836, Wisconsin had enough people to finally become a territory.
And the territorial legislature met at Belmont in this kind of ramshackle looking building. This picture is from 1870 and it
does look very run down. It's now a beautiful historic site that you should all go see. But I'm not actually sure
conditions were much better when the territorial legislature met there in 1836. All of the legislators
complained about the poor quality of the town. Where were the services that they were looking for.
It wasn't anything that they liked. They also complained about the poor quality of their fellow
delegates. Henry Baird, who was the leader of the territorial legislature, was really not impressed with
his fellow Wisconsinites. And they also said that the building was cold, and it just wasn't a very nice place to meet
at all. The only job, really, of the territorial legislature, though, was to pick a capital for the
Wisconsin territory. And this is Madison's story comes into play. This man here
is James Duane Doty. He was a land speculator and territorial judge. He'd really been involved in
Wisconsin since about the 1820s. He'd gone on an expedition around the state recording all of the flora and fauna.
He'd been a judge in Michigan. He was very familiar with Wisconsin. And he was the one, as I read in
the introduction, he had passed over the isthmus and where other people thought it wasn't fit for humans to live, he thought it
looked okay. So he ends up purchasing most of the isthmus for about $1,500. He thinks it will be a nice
city, but he also thinks he can make a buck off of this place. So we have this territorial legislature meeting in 1836.
He's a little miffed that he's not invited to be a delegate. But he has another way to get involved.
So he brings a land surveyor down with him from Green Bay and they map out a city. It's very blurry, I'm sorry
about that. They lay out a city on the isthmus that he names Madison. Now, that name is kind of a
calculated move because at the time president James Madison had just died and people were, he was kind of capitalizing on the
sympathy for the love of this founding father. So he named the streets after the signers of the Constitution
because that was Madison's crowning glory. And he named the main street through Madison, Washington in
honor of our greatest president. So he comes to Belmont armed with his map of Madison, and he also comes with something else,
buffalo robes. Now remember I had mentioned that people complained about the poor quality of the legislative
building in Belmont. They were all cold, so he brought them robes so they would be warm.
And he also promised them some of the best land lots that they could have in Madison if they would go for his city.
Now there was a lot of competition at the time to pick a capital city because for a frontier area, getting your town
named the capital could really make or break your city. It would bring in a lot of services, potentially you can
get better transportation there. So a will the of places, whether they were even a city or not, whether they were just a dot on
a map with nobody living there, everyone was hoping that they could boom their city by making it the capital.
So 19 Wisconsin cities competed to be the capital. Among them were Mineral Point, Fond du Lac, Portage, Racine,
Platteville. Milwaukee was also in the running. Milwaukee had one permanent
settler at the time. [LAUGHTER] When I give talks in Milwaukee they're always like,
why aren't we the capital? Which we'll talk about a little bit because Milwaukee, frequently throughout the 19th
century there was kind of a battle between Madison and Milwaukee. Milwaukee, was always trying to
take the capitol away from Madison and Madison was doing everything it could to hang on to it.
Doty had an advantage, though, besides the buffalo robes, the money and the map of his city. He was also the only person who
had been to all of the places under consideration. So his word carried a lot of weight with the delegates.
Sorry about that. So after 23 votes, Madison was finally selected as the capital, and people began buying lots
from Doty. And after his initial investment of $1,500, he made $35,000 in eight months.
So it was quite an investment for him. People began kind of slowly settling in Madison.
The first settlers were Eben and Roseline Peck. They ran a tavern in Blue Mounds and when they heard that Madison
had been selected as the capital, they decided that they would pull up their stakes and come to Madison and see if they
could make a living here. They actually had the first white child born in Madison. They named her Victoria
Wisconsina. Sorry, excuse me. Let me drink more water, maybe I can stop coughing.
The Victoria was Queen Victoria who had just ascended to the thrown. And Wisconsina, obviously in
honor of the new territory. Someone had suggested that they give her that as her first name, but they ended up going with
that as her middle name. Workmen soon began arriving to build the new capitol. This is the capitol building
that they built. It wasn't quite ready when they actually opened the doors in 1838.
They thought it was ready but it wasn't really ready. One of the men who had come to build the capitol, his name was
James Morrison. He built the capitol. He also built a hotel across the street called the American
House. And perhaps thinking that because he'd built this capitol he could keep his pigs
underneath it. So he put his big hog farm, basically, in the basement of the capitol, and the capitol
wasn't really quite done. The boards would expand and contract with the weather, and so occasionally pig squeals and
mud and dust would come up through the floor. There was a story of a legislator getting kind of
irritated with the discussion that was going on so he stuck his cane down in the hole through the floor which set all
the pigs squealing and dust rising up through the floor. So this really just got all of the Milwaukee folks all pleased.
Like this hick town can't even get their capitol together so we're going to try to take it again.
So Milwaukee continually is kind of marshaling forces to try to say that Madison is not fit to be the capital of this state.
This capitol is finally finished in 1844. Finished that everyone can agree it's finally finished.
There's windows, there's floors, there's no pigs downstairs. And most people were pretty happy with it.
Any motion to improve this capitol building, though, was promptly voted down by all of the people from Milwaukee
because they were really trying to get the capitol to move with them. And more people were slowly
coming into Madison. Finally in 1846, Wisconsin had enough people to become a state. So they drafted a constitution
in 1846. Now this first constitution was pretty radical. It had three provisions in
particular that no one else had. One of them was that they allowed married women to own property.
Now in most other states at the time, married women were property, they couldn't own property.
[LAUGHTER] It also outlawed banks. A lot of people were really nervous about banks,
really nervous about credit. There had been several economic depressions and recessions and so people really thought that
the banks were the problem. So if we just outlawed them, none of these things would be a problem.
So that was written into the constitution. They also put the issue of black suffrage up to a vote.
This was also pretty radical stuff for Wisconsin at the time. So this first constitution was sent out for the state to
approve, and it ignited some fierce debate about how it was going to, particularly the things about married women
owning property, how it was going to destroy the home and men would unsex the women. So finally this constitution was
thrown out, and they drafted another one in 1848 that was much more sedate, much more conservative and that one
eventually passed. And they also, in becoming a state, said that now Madison was not the capital just of a
territory, it was the capital of a state. And hopefully this would cement its place.
People in Madison were like maybe we can finally relax. Maybe we don't have to worry about other cities around the
state trying to take away our status. They did continually get pressured from legislators and
the governor saying things like if you don't improve your hotels, we're going to move the capital.
So the city kept investing a lot of money in improving the capitol, including the services, and also running itself into
tremendous debt in the process. Throughout the 19th century, Madison was in continual debt because it was trying constantly
to make itself better to entice people to come here, to make people think that it was a worthy city, and unfortunately
we just didn't have the money to actually be doing all of these things. Wisconsin was very irresistible
to immigrants, though. And they started coming very rapidly after statehood, even to Madison too.
Norwegians and Germans were some of the main immigrants to Madison. The city, though, was really
still controlled by Yankees. Wisconsin had mostly been settled, most of the Americans who came here were people who
came from New England and New York. They were already familiar with how America worked.
So that really helped them gain positions of power. And this was true in Madison as well.
So even as more immigrants are coming into this city and they're setting up shops and they're establishing newspapers,
setting up churches, most of the government offices are still controlled by all of these Yankees, and this creates some
tension between the two groups. There was also, Madison's population also kind of tended to boom and bust.
It would grow for a few years and then stagnate for a few years. This really worried a lot of
city leaders because how are they going to be a successful city if we can't keep getting people to come here.
They also were really worried that there were no major industries forming. Manufacturing was the wave of
the future. This is how you got ahead in the world, and we didn't have any major manufacturers.
There were some small industry but there wasn't a big, I don't know, a big machine parts or agricultural implements.
These things were developing in Milwaukee, but they weren't coming here to Madison. And this worried a lot of
people. We did have one thing, though. And that's the University of Wisconsin.
James Duane Doty had actually set up, in his original plan for Madison he'd actually set aside an area for a state university.
And so people had kind of gotten it in their heads that there was going to be a state university here.
The land that he actually marked out for the state university is where the UW is today. The university was written into
our state constitution, and the regents purchased the land for it in 1849. But the UW actually began
somewhere else. From 1849 to 1851, they held classes at the women's seminary which was on Wisconsin Street.
And Professor John Sterling led 17 boys, most of them were from Madison. And it was mostly like a college
prep class because there weren't universities here. People weren't necessarily ready to do university level work.
So it was kind of like high school squished into a few years and then they'd shove them off to the university.
This photo is of some students in the 1860s. They're standing in front of Main Hall, which we now know of
as Bascom Hall. We did lose that dome on top, it's lovely though. One of the students who went to
the UW in the 1860s was John Muir. And I don't how many of you have ever seen this.
This is John Muir's revolving desk. It's down at the headquarters of the society down on campus in
the lobby. John Muir, we know him as this naturalist, disappearing off into the wilderness for days and
writing books and really being an advocate for the environment, but he was also a really good inventor.
And as a teenager he used to whittle all these machine parts out of wood, and he won several blue ribbons at the state fair.
One of the things that he had in his dorm room in North Hall in the 1860s was a combination bed alarm clock.
So he would set the alarm and when the alarm went off the bed would tip him up on to the floor and strike a match and light a
candle. [LAUGHTER] So a really innovative thing that we could probably use
today. Another one of his inventions was this which is the revolving desk.
It was kind of a study aid. He would put his books in there and set timers. The book would come up and open,
and after a preset time studying, the book would close, drop, the desk would rotate, another book would come up and
open. [LAUGHTER] So you can see kind of the gears here.
There's one book, the other books are kind of stacked down here. And I highly recommend if you
haven't seen it going down to the society headquarters on campus and taking a look at it. It's in one of the cases.
He carved this when he was 19 years old. It's pretty impressive. So we had a university, we
didn't have any major industries. There were some other businesses, though, that were
helping Madison grow. We had a very big ice harvesting business. Makes a lot of sense.
We have a lot of water and it gets very cold here. Everything you need for ice harvesting.
Another thing we had was this picture here. What you see is Lakeside House. This was in Olin Park, right in
the center of it. It was a resort. Had beautiful views being right on the shores of Lake Monona.
Beautiful views of the isthmus. It actually first opened in 1854. It was called the Water Curer
and it offered hydropathic treatments. Hydropathy was a form of treatment where people believed
that water could cure everything. And so there were various forms of ways you could take the
water. One of them was you would wrap a cold, wet sheet around yourself and lay there for about three
hours, and then you would go off on a long nature walk and come back and stand under a shower, a cold shower for like 15 minutes.
You would soak in cold baths. So all kind of things. Unfortunately, this original iteration didn't really take
off. It closed after about a year, but it reopened in 1866 as Lakeside House and it actually
became one of the most successful resorts in Madison. It attracted people from all over the country.
It was very elegant, had a ballroom. People would come from the south in the summer and enjoy the cool
breezes off the lake. William Sherman, the Civil War general, stayed there, as did Lincoln's son Robert also came
and stayed. The building was destroyed by fire in 1877. In some ways, it was sad to lose
this beautiful building and this industry but also the resort industry at the time in the 1870s was kind of flagging in
Madison. There was another economic recession on. Most of the resorts in Madison
were closing. So having it burn down was, I don't know, maybe it would have saved them some economic pain.
Interestingly, Madison had this big resort industry but swimming in Madison was illegal. Swimming in Madison had been
illegal since 1851. I guess the law said that you couldn't swim in a public place between 5:00 AM and 9:00 PM,
which basically meant very few hours of the day that you could go swimming. A lot of people worried that
public swimming was indecent. So this probably didn't help the resort industry grow. Finally, in 1879, Madison did
overturn this law, made swimming legal. There are some boys that were caught skinny dipping, and what
were they going to do? Throw them in jail? So they eventually realized lots of people had been doing things
like this and they legalized swimming. Now the Civil War in Madison, Wisconsin plays a pretty big
part in the Civil War. I think when we think of the Civil War and when you hear about the Civil War it's very
focused on things that are east and south, for obvious reasons. But Wisconsin men and women served in every major battle.
So I think that Wisconsin's role is a very prominent one. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was really what kind of started some
of the anger here in Wisconsin. This was going to leave the decision about slavery up to the states.
There was also a provision of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that was particularly galling to a lot of Wisconsin residents and that was
that it wasn't going to allow non-citizen immigrants to vote. At the time, you didn't have to be a citizen to vote you just
had to be a male, and a white male at that. Wisconsin is flooded with immigrants at this time, and to
tell them that they couldn't vote was very galling to them. So the republican party, we know that Ripon lays claim to being
the birthplace of the republican party. The actual republican organizing convention for Wisconsin
happened on the capitol lawn here in Madison in 1854. The republican party was very successful very quickly,
nationally and in Wisconsin. When the Civil War finally broke out, Madison sent three times as many soldiers to the war as
Milwaukee, and nearly the whole town turned out to see the soldiers off to war. The recruits were trained at
several facilities around the state but the largest one was Camp Randall. That's the picture you see here.
At its height it had 94 buildings and could accommodate 5,000 men. It also housed confederate
prisoners. The camp created problems for the city though. If you can imagine a lot of
young men all confined in this place with not much to do after the day's drills are done. So many of them would hop the
fence and go to downtown Madison and go to the bars and the dance halls and play cards. City residents really didn't
enjoy this very much. There was a lot of problems. There was fights. A few people were murdered.
So they weren't terribly eager to have this camp here in town and were probably grateful when the Civil War ended for many
more reasons than just the battles being ended. They were just grateful to get their town back.
Another person who is very prominent in the Civil War and in Madison was Cordelia Harvey. She was the widow of Governor
Lewis P. Harvey. And she was convinced that only the northern climate would help heal soldiers.
She had traveled all over the south visiting Wisconsin soldiers, and she saw the conditions that they were living
in and she's like this will not do. So she went to Washington, DC, she lobbied President Lincoln
and war secretary Edwin Stanton to get them to give her money so she could build a hospital. She finally got her wish, the
Harvey United States Army General Hospital opened in 1863. The hospital could hold up to 600 people but it was soon
overflowing, and they had some of their patients sent over to Camp Randall. After the war the hospital
became home for children orphaned by the war. I show this picture, this is the 8th Wisconsin with their mascot
which is Old Abe. Civil War regiments actually all over the country had mascots. It wasn't that unusual.
Old Abe became one of the most famous, though, nationally. He traveled into battle with the regiment.
There was a soldier assigned to protect him during the war. But after the Civil War he came to live in the basement of the
capitol, and tons of people came to visit him there. He also appeared at Civil War reunions, and he was really a
celebrity. And he had his own special room in the capitol. Unfortunately, there was a fire
down there and he eventually died of smoke inhalation. But he did spend the rest of his life after the war here in
Madison. After the war, the city was doing a lot better. We were starting to finally get
some more industries. The population was growing again. It would fall off again for a
while too. But one of our new residents was this man here. His name is Ole Bull.
He was a very famous Norwegian violinist. He had come to Madison on a tour in 1868, and he met a women
named Sara Thorp here. And they eventually married and they lived in Madison for nine years when he wasn't traveling
the world playing. This is their house. It's now the Knapp House today which is a graduate student
residence but for a while after the Bulls left it was Governor's mansion. Bull really became friends with
UW Norwegian instructor Rasmus Anderson, and he would put on benefit concerts to help raise money to start a Scandinavian
studies department and help make the University of Wisconsin a center of the study of Nordic culture.
So Madison actually gets a new capitol. They outgrew that first one. The state was growing.
They needed more room for the legislators. Construction on this capitol began in 1857 and was completed
in 1869. And this capitol had a very special feature in the west wing, and it was called the
overhead silencer. There was an enormous chandelier suspended in that west wing, but lawmakers felt nervous sitting
beneath that big chandelier so it was soon removed, leaving a hole in the ceiling. And after 20 years, a small
mountain of dust and grime had accumulated around the edges of that hole directly above the heads of the elected officials.
One day in the early 1890s, a particularly verbose legislator was going on and on and a bored colleague looked up at that hole
and thought about how he could put all that dust to good use. He secretly instructed a page to lay a board across the hole,
propped it up on a stick, and ran a cord from the stick down to a nearby closet. The next day, when yet another
speaker launched into a speech that threatened to last for hours, the inventor snuck off to the closet and gave that cord a
sharp tug. The plank crashed down with a deafening thud, and a stifling cloud of dust shot out from the
hole and scattered over the members below. [LAUGHTER] According to the newspaper,
there was no more talking that day. [LAUGHTER] After that, the overhead
silencer became something of an institution in the Wisconsin Assembly. A page was assigned to reset it
regularly. The newspaper reports that some legislators brought umbrellas to their desks to protect
themselves from the dust. [LAUGHTER] And as a result, the legislators learned to express themselves
in as few words as possible, and if you were giving a speech and you saw someone sneaking off to the closet,
you usually brought your speech to a hasty conclusion. [LAUGHTER] Unfortunately, we lost
the overhead silencer in the capitol fire of 1904. Robert La Follette was actually our governor at the time, and he
was awakened at 4:00 AM on February 27, 1904, and told that the building was on fire. He didn't hold a press
conference. He ran down to the capitol and spent the next three hours running in and out of the
building saving documents, paintings, some of the most precious items of our state. And many of the things that we
have in our collections have Robert La Follette to thank for saving them. One of the things that we did
lose in the fire though, was Old Abe. After old Abe had died in the first fire that happened just in
his room in the capitol, they had actually stuffed him, but in this fire we lost the original Old Abe stuff.
And even though we lost the capitol, we lost almost all of it, there was only one wing that did not fall during this fire,
there had already been talk about building a new capitol. This capitol was, again, too small.
There wasn't enough room for everything that people wanted to put in there. So plans had already been
underway to build a new capitol so it was almost like we're sorry this fire happened but we needed a new one anyway.
So we began building the capitol that we now have here in Madison. As far as I know there's no
plans to build a another one. It seems like they're building a new one every 50 years at first. So by the early 20th century a
lot of industrialization and technology had created some problems that people hadn't quite planned on when they
started doing this. There's a lot of poverty, a lot of dirty cities, so people were trying to come up with ways to
make cities a nicer place to live. One of these manifestations of this was something called the
city beautiful movement. Various efforts to create parks and make cities more habitable for people.
One of the ways that Madison decided to kind of go about doing this was they hired this man, John Nolen, to create a
plan for the city. And he was hired in 1908. And he really did more than just create a city plan.
He was a landscape architect but he really took a whole, I'm not quite sure of the word, he took a holistic view of the city.
He really wanted to make a healthier place to live, not just a better designed place to live.
And he was the first one who really called Madison a model American city. He said it only really needed to
invest in itself, and that's something that it hadn't done. Some improvements had already begun happening in Madison.
The Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association had started putting in parks and putting in scenic drives around the city.
They eventually hired Nolen to help make the city even better. Nolen was not, he didn't love everything he saw in Madison.
He was actually very critical when he first came. He thought that we were underutilizing the lakes.
There were no playgrounds for children. The streets were crowded and misaligned.
We weren't planting trees. It just wasn't a very beautiful place, but he saw a lot of potential.
Among the things that he proposed were a grand mall connecting Lake Monona with the capitol, the creation of an
arboretum, more playgrounds, low income housing, and he also proposed a cap on the heights of buildings around the state
capitol so you could always see the state capitol. He also urged people to think of the common welfare and to
provide places for everyone to live and to work. The plan was really largely ignored when it was presented in
1910. Part of it was that the plan he proposed cost a lot of money, and people couldn't imagine
where we would get the money to do all of the things that he suggested. But slowly, I'd say over the
last 100 years, many of the things that Nolen proposed have actually come about. We do have an arboretum.
We don't have this grand mall down connecting the capitol to Lake Monona but something has been done with that area that,
like it or not, is there, the Monona Terrace. The cap on the building heights. And the ideas that Nolen first
proposed kind of gave Madison more confidence in itself than it had ever had. As I mentioned, throughout the
19th century they're constantly fighting back people saying that they're not worthy being the capital city.
So having this outsider come in and say that this is a beautiful, amazing place was a real confidence booster in a way
for the people of Madison. I'm only going to tell you a little bit more because I see it's almost 1 o'clock.
Something else that Madison was a real leader in and something that was kind of surprising to me is food conservation during
World War I. I tend to think of food conservation as being more of a World War II thing, but actually
there was a ton of conservation programs happening in World War I. And this man, his name was
Magnus Swenson, and he was from Madison and he was a leader of food conservation efforts in Wisconsin and many of his plans
were adopted nationally. He came up with the idea of wheatless and meatless days. They came to be known as the
Wisconsin plan and were instituted nationally. A lot of women were forming common defense councils, and
they would create window displays on how to conserve food. This is one that was on the
square in 1917. They all have kind of these little rhymes. I enjoy this one because it has
all the vegetables holding hands. Very happy. It's interesting the Dane County
women's group that created all of these window displays actually created a booklet of these window displays and how to
do them with suggestions, and they sent it to the national office thinking they'll be so impressed with us.
The national office makes their own book and sends it out to all the states, and the Dane County women were so incensed that they
were copied that they printed their own and sent them to everyone around the country as well.
So a lot of the things that happened right here in Madison became, Magnus also was a big proponent of backyard gardens.
He hosted all kinds of canning classes and food preservation workshops, all of these things that became national programs.
After the war, Magnus was tapped by Herbert Hoover to help with some of the food efforts in Europe because there was a lot
of famine and starvation, and he was charged with coming up with programs to help.
So the end of World War I actually brought a lot of prosperity to Wisconsin, particularly to Madison.
A lot of the wartime industries really, really helped the state. But it also brought a lot of fears.
The Russian revolution made a lot of people very nervous about communism, made people nervous about immigrants.
There was a real strong Americanization crusade to make immigrants more American. The KKK first appeared in
Wisconsin in 1920 near Milwaukee. And they staged this parade that you see here.
This is in Madison in 1924. A lot of people came out for it. You started seeing white hoods all around town.
One of the ways the KKK gained power here was by promising to maintain order in immigrant neighborhoods, and they really
targeted the Greenbush area, the Regent Street area because that's where most of the immigrants were.
There were some problems with crime there and prohibition, as I'll tell you in a minute. And so that was really how they
tried to get adherence is by saying that they were going to help with crime. And it was kind of a logical
choice for the KKK because their usual targets didn't really exist in abundance here in Wisconsin so it was hard for
them to get followers. Madison mayor Milo Kittleson actually helped the KKK in their efforts.
He secretly deputized 30 Klansmen to help conduct raids in the Greenbush neighborhood. When it was found out that he
did this, he was not punished for it. Actually the city reimbursed him for any money he spent.
The KKK didn't last here, though. They didn't really offer any kind of major goal or long-term
purpose, and by the late 1920s the KKK had mostly disappeared from Wisconsin. But they did have a shining,
unfortunately shining moment in the mid-'20s. All right I'm going to tell you one more thing and then open it
for questions. So we know that prohibition was instituted nationally after World War I.
There had been a lot of tensions over alcohol in Madison early on. Starting in the mid-19th century
there was all kinds of tensions between the Yankees and the immigrants. A lot of the immigrants,
particularly the Germans, thought a Sunday was not complete without a beer and a picnic.
The Yankees did not agree with this. A lot of them thought that a Sunday was only complete with
church and nothing more. So there had been a lot of tension over taverns and where they should go and what kinds of
rules there should be about alcohol. Madison residents actually voted themselves dry in April of 1917,
a year and a half before national prohibition. All of the saloons in town closed on June 30, 1917.
One of the breweries closed, the Breckheimer Brewery. Fauerbach and Hausmann actually kept brewing.
The law only said they couldn't sell beer in Madison, not that they couldn't brew beer in Madison.
So they set up a warehouse in Middleton where you could go out and pick up your beer. And if you couldn't get there,
they had a delivery service to bring it to you. So it was full service. The government also set up a
commission called the Wickersham Commission to investigate prohibition enforcement nationally, and they sent a man
named Frank Buckley around the country to see what prohibition actually looked like on the ground.
And it's the most entertaining government report you will ever read. There's many scenes of him
walking around various towns in Wisconsin which he calls a utopia of the wets where John Barleycorn has his day.
But there's a part where he's walking down Regent Street and he meets what he refers to as the queen of the bootleggers and
likely it's this woman here. Her name is Jennie Justo. She was eventually arrested for operating an illegal still.
This is her very melodramatically saying goodbye to her mother. And she was basically supplying
a lot of the fraternity houses on campus with alcohol. Frank Buckley also went and visited the Dean of Women on
campus, and she assured him that none of the women in her care were drinking any alcohol. And he writes how naive she is
to think that that could possibly be true because of course all of these women were drinking alcohol just like all
of the men were. There were all kinds of illegal stills all over Madison. Unfortunately, the way you found
out about them is when they exploded. [LAUGHTER] There was one raid on
Regent Street that led to the seizure of 475 gallons of wine in a single night. In 1929, Wisconsin voters
actually repealed the state's prohibition enforcement law. They were realizing that perhaps it was a losing battle.
They were never going to win. This also allowed for the production of beer with 2% alcohol.
So Wisconsin was already brewing again before prohibition was even repealed nationally. So I think I'm going to stop
there because if you have any questions, I have time for that. But thanks so much for listening.
[APPLAUSE]