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>> 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
If you could please help me welcome her today, I'd greatly focus in on "Madison: A History of a Model City."
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.
are probably from Madison or are Now I imagine that a lot of you
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
I can't obviously tell you the about Madison.
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.
was Odd Wisconsin. As Beth mentioned, my first book
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
accessible. I'm actually not from Wisconsin originally. iI grew up in a suburb oft
Seattle.
I came here about nine years ago not really knowing very much
not knowing very much about Madison. about Wisconsin and certainly
me, wanting to learn more about the place that they've lived or Anfor someone who's lived heree a book that was for someone like
doesn't really know much about maybe their whole life and
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
said, "The site was at the time an open prairie on which grew dwarf oaks while thickets Rcovered the lower grounds."he
He then predicted, with remarkable foresight, that the
Wisconsin, at the time, belonged land might be perfect for the capital of a new state.
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
To the soldiers pursuing Black were not obvious to all earlier visitors, however.
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
Fortunately, the man who would of people to inhabit.
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
Less than a century later, be created.
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
of its natural assets. Madison that took full advantage
A place as pleasing to the eye as it was to live and to work.
said, Madison could become a With just a little effort, Nolen
I'll talk a little bit more modeabout that later.rld. But first I want to talk about, there 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.
You can see there that it covers It was the Laurentide ice sheet.
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.
are a result of this glacier, but really some of the most Nimpressive landscape featuress glaare here in Wisconsin, andand
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.
and drumlins that are all over You can see it in the moraines
the state. We're actually on one of the
The capitol sits on top of a drumlins right now.
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
water. started going away, Madison was still pretty much covered in
All of the debris from the glacier created some dams and so
lake over what is today Madison and it was called Glacial Lake the melting water created a huge
higher than our lakes are today, Yahara. And the water was about 12 feet
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
an island. we are on the top of this drumlin, we would have been on
There's a few other spots on the isthmus.
long time. And this lake was here for a
And finally the water started to breakthrough this debris dam and
down, and that's how we got our current lakes and we what now know as the Yahara River rather the than the Yahara Lake.o go
You can still see some of the remnants of this lake, though.
side of Glacial Lake Yahara. If you look at Maple Bluff, the bluff itself is actually the
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
of effigy mounds in the world is mounds. And the greatest concentration
here in Madison. There used to be probably over a
Most of them have been thousand of them.
shapes and spirits. The one you see here is on the they often took of the shape of animals, kind of geometric
There's two really beautiful grounds of Mendota Mental Health.
Europeans when they came to this mounds up there if you ever get up there. These mounds really puzzled
They didn't really believe that the Indians here could have Thbuilt them because when youre aasked the Indians about them.
they didn't seem to know very much about them either. So they came up with all kinds
built these mounds and what exactly they could be. of theories about who could have
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
Not really to Madison yet. Wisconsin in the 17th century.
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
this area. new France to kind of explore
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
This is a 19th century painting of his landing. And you can see he's wearing his in Asia.
obviously in Asia. best Chinese robe because he's
it. So we know Nicolet did not find Asia because it is not a suburb Not quitof Green Bay.o make of
But he did find a very rich source of furs, and the fur trade would come to dominate
So the fur trade was really all that Wisconsin was about for Wisconsin's economy.
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
He's largely credited as the 1830.
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.
he traded at Lake Kegonsa. Another man named Abel Rasdall,
And he also had a fur trade post right up here on the square on
there for about two years. Pinckney Street, and he was
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
He was met after crossing the Mississippi by a militia group thought been fraudulently taken by the US government.
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
Creek. Sauk over by Pheasant Branch
The isthmus was actually a really great place for the Sauk.
and there was some brush that was hard for the Americans. They weren't used to this kind It was kind of wooded and marshy
really well for the Sauk so they of terrain, whereas it worked
were able to get safely across the isthmus.
well for them and after 16 weeks Unfortunately, things didn't end
of pursuit, the Black Hawk war ended at the Battle of Bad Axe. It's kind of a misnomer to call
it a battle.
This war really impressed on a The Sauk lost 900 people. Black Hawk was eventually captured.
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
River, which includes the Madison area. All of the Ho-Chunk were to tleave Madison by June of 1833.k
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,
purchased. late 1835, two lots had been
continually happens in Madison Neither one of them were on the lake. This is kind of a thing that
where no one is terribly interested in being on the lake.
the lake. We kind of ignore the lake and The town kind of forms away from
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
would want it. land right then but they soon
So by 1836, Wisconsin had enough people to finally become a
And the territorial legislature met at Belmont in this kind of territory.
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
delegates. poor quality of their fellow
his fellow Wisconsinites. HeAnd they also said that theer obuilding was cold, and it just was really not impressed with
at all. The only job, really, of the wasn't a very nice place to meet
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.
Wisconsin since about the 1820s. He'd really been involved in
He'd gone on an expedition around the state recording all
He'd been a judge in Michigan. of the flora and fauna.
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.
He's a little miffed that he's So we have this territorial legislature meeting in 1836.
So he brings a land surveyor not invited to be a delegate. But he has another way to get involved.
down with him from Green Bay and they map out a city.
about that. They lay out a city on the It's very blurry, I'm sorry
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.
because that was Madison's So he named the streets after the signers of the Constitution
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
building in Belmont. poor quality of the legislative
They were all cold, so he brought them robes so they would be warm.
And he also promised them some
Now there was a lot of of the best land lots that they could have in Madison if they would go for his city.
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
get better transportation there. services, potentially you can
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
why aren't we the capital? they're always like,
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.
had been to all of the places under consideration. He was also the only person who
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.
The first settlers were Eben and People began kind of slowly settling in Madison.
Roseline Peck. They ran a tavern in Blue Mounds
had been selected as the and when they heard that Madison
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.
Wisconsina. Sorry, excuse me. Let me drink more water, maybe I They named her Victoria
The Victoria was Queen Victoria who had just ascended to the thrown. can stop coughing.
honor of the new territory. Someone had suggested that they give her that as her first name, And Wisconsina, obviously in
that as her middle name. but they ended up going with
Workmen soon began arriving to build the new capitol.
that they built. This is the capitol building
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
James Morrison. He built the capitol. He also built a hotel across the build the capitol, his name was
House. street called the American
underneath it. And perhaps thinking that because he'd built this capitol he could keep his pigs
wasn't really quite done. The boards would expand and contract with the weather, and the capitol, and the capitol
mud and dust would come up so occasionally pig squeals and
through the floor. There was a story of a
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
So Milwaukee continually is kind get their capitol together so we're going to try to take it again.
of marshaling forces to try to say that Madison is not fit to
This capitol is finally finished be the capital of this state.
in 1844. Finished that everyone can agree
There's windows, there's floors, it's finally finished.
Any motion to improve this there's no pigs downstairs. And most people were pretty happy with it.
because they were really trying to get the capitol to move with promptly votthem.wn by all of And more people were slowly
coming into Madison.
Finally in 1846, Wisconsin had enough people to become a state.
in 1846. So they drafted a constitution
particular that no one else had. Now this first constitution was pretty radical. It had three provisions in
One of them was that they allowed married women to own property.
Now in most other states at the time, married women were
[LAUGHTER] property, they couldn't own property.
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,
So that was written into the none of these things would be a problem.
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
approve, and it ignited some sent out for the state to
fierce debate about how it was going to, particularly the
owning property, how it was going to destroy the home and men would unsex the women. things about married women
thrown out, and they drafted So finally this constitution was
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
territory, it was the capital of not the capital just of a
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
state trying to take away our status. They did continually get about other cities around the
the governor saying things like if you don't improve your hotels, we're going to move the pressured fcapital.slators and
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,
to make itself better to entice people to come here, to make Madison was in continual debt because it was trying constantly
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
Norwegians and Germans were some Madison too.
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
tension between the two groups. There was also, Madison's population also kind of tended Yankees, and this creates some
It would grow for a few years and then stagnate for a few years. to boom and bust.
city leaders because how are This really worried a lot of
They also were really worried thethat there were no majorul city if we can't keep getting people to come here.
the future. This is how you got ahead in the industries forming. Manufacturing was the wave of
There were some small industry world, and we didn't have any major manufacturers.
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
And so people had kind of gotten Madison he'd actually set aside an area for a state university.
it in their heads that there was going to be a state university
The land that he actually marked here.
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
somewhere else. From 1849 to 1851, they held it in 1849. But the UW actually began
And Professor John Sterling led 17 boys, most of them were from classes at tMadison.'s seminary which was on Wisconsin Street.
prep class because there weren't And it was mostly like a college
universities here. People weren't necessarily ready
So it was kind of like high school squished into a few years to do university level work.
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 lobby. the society down on campus in
John Muir, we know him as this naturalist, disappearing off
writing books and really being into the wilderness for days and
an advocate for the environment, but he was also a really good inventor.
And as a teenager he used to
One of the things that he had in whittle all these machine parts out of wood, and he won several blue ribbons at the state fair.
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
candle. [LAUGHTER] and strike a match and light a
So a really innovative thing that we could probably use
today.
It was kind of a study aid. He would put his books in there was thisand set timers.evolving The book would come up and open,
and after a preset time studying, the book would close, drop, the desk would rotate,
open. [LAUGHTER] another book would come up and
So you can see kind of the gears here.
There's one book, the other books are kind of stacked down
haven't seen it going down to the society headquarters on campus and taking a look at it. AnIt's in one of the cases.ou
He carved this
didn't have any major when heindustries.rs old. IThere were some other. businesses, though, that were
helping Madison grow. We had a very big ice harvesting
We have a lot of water and it gets very cold here. business. Makes a lot of sense.
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.
Beautiful views of the isthmus. It actually first opened in Had beautiful1854.s being right 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
You would soak in cold baths. So all kind of things. cold shower for like 15 minutes.
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
It was very elegant, had a over the country.
ballroom. People would come from the south in the summer and enjoy the cool
breezes off the lake. William Sherman, the Civil War
and stayed. The building was destroyed by general,fire in 1877., as did 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
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
overturn this law, made swimming resort industry grow. Finally, in 1879, Madison did
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
part in the Civil War. swimming. Now the Civil War in Madison, Wisconsin plays a pretty big
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
There was also a provision of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that was states.
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
the birthplace of the republican that Ripon lays claim to being
party. The actual republican organizing
happened on the capitol lawn convention for Wisconsin
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
Milwaukee, and nearly the whole town turned out to see the many soldiers to the war as
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.
prisoners. It also housed confederate
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.
So they weren't terribly eager There was fights. A few people were murdered.
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
Another person who is very their town back.
prominent in the Civil War and in Madison was Cordelia Harvey. She was the widow of Governor
Lewis P. Harvey.
She had traveled all over the And south visiting Wisconsinnly the northern climate would help heal soldiers.
in and she's like this will not do. So she went to Washington, DC, conditions that they were living
and war secretary Edwin Stanton to get them to give her money so she lobbied President Lincoln
Harvey United States Army General Hospital opened in 1863. she could build a hospital. She finally got her wish, the
overflowing, and they had some The hospital could hold up to 600 people but it was soon
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
which is Old Abe. Civil War regiments actually all 8th Wisconsin with their mascot
Old Abe became one of the most over the country had mascots. It wasn't that unusual.
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
celebrity. to visit him there. He also appeared at Civil War reunions, and he was really a
down there and he eventually And he had his own special room in the capitol. Unfortunately, there was a fire
died of smoke inhalation. But he did spend the rest of his life after the war here in
Madison.
some more industries. AThe population was growing doing a lot better. We were starting to finally get
again. It would fall off again for a
while too.
But one of our new residents was this man here.
He was a very famous Norwegian His name is Ole Bull.
violinist. He had come to Madison on a tour
named Sara Thorp here. in 1868, and he met a women
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
residence but for a while after the Bulls left it was Governor's which is a graduate student
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
So Madison actually gets a new the University of Wisconsin a center of the study of Nordic culture.
capitol. They outgrew that first one.
They needed more room for the legislators. The state was growing.
Construction on this capitol began in 1857 and was completed
in 1869.
overhead silencer. And this capitol had a very special feature in the west wing, and it was called the
There was an enormous chandelier suspended in that west wing, but
beneath that big chandelier so lawmakers felt nervous sitting
it was soon removed, leaving a hole in the ceiling.
mountain of dust and grime had And after 20 years, a small
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
propped it up on a stick, and ran a cord from the stick down lay a board across the hole,
speaker launched into a speech to a nearby closet. The next day, when yet another
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]
silencer became something of After that, the overhead
regularly. an institution in the Wisconsin Assembly. A page was assigned to reset it
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,
you usually brought your speech and ito a hasty conclusion.eech and you saw someone sneaking off to the closet,
[LAUGHTER] Unfortunately, we lost
the overhead silencer in
was awakened at 4:00 AM on the capitol fire of 1904. Robert La Follette was actually our governor at the time, and he
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
There wasn't enough room for small.
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.
plans to build a another one. It seems like they're building a As far as I know there's no
new one every 50 years at first. So by the early 20th century a
lot of industrialization and
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 wanted to make a he really took a whole, I'm not quite sure of the word, he took a holistic view of the city.
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
He was actually very critical help mwhen he first came.etter. NolHe thought that we wereove evunderutilizing the lakes.n.
There were no playgrounds for children. The streets were crowded and
We weren't planting trees. misaligned.
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
1910. Part of it was that the plan he proposed cost a lot of money, igand people couldn't imagine in
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 don't have this grand mall down connecting the capitol to We do have an arboretum.
like it or not, is there, the Monona Terrace. The cap on the building heights. been done with that area that,
proposed kind of gave Madison more confidence in itself than And the ideas that Nolen first
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.
there was a ton of conservation I tprograms happeningod conservation as being more of a World War II thing, but actually
Magnus Swenson, and he was from Madison and he was a leader of in World War I. And this man, his name was
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.
they would create window A lot of women were forming common defense councils, and
square in 1917. They all have kind of these little rhymes. This is one that was on the
all the vegetables holding I enjoy this one because it has
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
The national office makes their own book and sends it out to all office thinking they'll be so impressed with us.
were copied that they printed their own and sent them to the states, and the Dane County women were so incensed that they
everyone around the country as well.
So a lot of the things that happened right here in Madison
He hosted all kinds of canning became, Magnus also was a big proponent of backyard gardens.
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
So the end of World War I actually brought a lot of was prosperity to Wisconsin,ith programs to help.
A lot of the wartime industries really, really helped the state. particularly to Madison.
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
This is in Madison in 1924. A lot of people came out for it. you see here.
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
There were some problems with crime there and prohibition, as I'll tell you in a minute. immigrants were.
tried to get adherence is by And so that was really how they
saying that they were going to help with crime.
choice for the KKK because their And it was kind of a logical
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
He secretly deputized 30 efforts.
Klansmen to help conduct raids in the Greenbush neighborhood.
did this, he was not punished for it. Actually the city reimbursed him When it was found out that he
The KKK didn't last here, though. They didn't really offer any for any money he spent.
purpose, and by the late 1920s kind of major goal or long-term
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.
There had been a lot of tensions So we know that prohibition was instituted nationally after World War I.
there was all kinds of tensions obetween the Yankees and they immigrants. StarA lot of the immigrants,tury
particularly the Germans, thought a Sunday was not
The Yankees did not agree with complete without a beer and a picnic.
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
rules there should be about alcohol. they should go and what kinds of
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
named Frank Buckley around the Commission to investigate prohibition enforcement nationally, and they sent a man
And it's the most entertaining country to see what prohibition actually looked like on the ground.
walking around various towns in govWisconsin which he calls aer read. There's many scenes of him
But there's a part where he's walking down Regent Street and utopia of the wets where John Barleycorn has his day.
likely it's this woman here. he meets what he refers to as the queen of the bootleggers and
This is her very Her name is Jennie Justo. She was eventually arrested for operating an illegal still.
melodramatically saying goodbye to her mother. And she was basically supplying
a lot of the fraternity houses
campus, and she assured him that on campus with alcohol. Frank Buckley also went and visited the Dean of Women on
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]
Regent Street that led to the seizure of 475 gallons of wine There was one raid on
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%
So Wisconsin was already brewing alcohol.
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]