cc >> Good afternoon and welcome to History Sandwiched In. Today I'm really happy to present our first Halloween program. We have here today Dennis McCann, who had been a longtime columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and now is a freelance writer. He wrote a fabulous book called "Badger Boneyards" and we do have it here and afterwards Mr. McCann will be happy to sign copies of the book. Don't forget. There's wonderful stories here and he's going to talk about some of them, so without any further delay, please welcome Dennis McCann to History Sandwiched In. (applause) >> McCann: Thank you all for coming out. This is a really nice turnout. They say the number one rule in politics is to always book a room that's too small for the crowd so it looks really crowded. (laughter) We've managed to do that here. 

I'm going to talk a little bit about my new book on cemetery stories. A lot of people react with a little bit of surprise or bemusement and sometimes even not so happy responses when they hear it's a book of cemetery stories. But I tried a variety of stories, tried for a little bit of humor, a little bit of seriousness, a little bit of history, and just some good stories. People always say, how did this come about? So I tried to answer that in the preface to the book. (reading) Some years ago when in Atlanta on important newspaper business, and yes, there is such a thing, I noticed in a visitor guide that the greatest amateur golfer ever, Bobby Jones, was buried in historic Oakland Cemetery. This interested me for two reasons. One, I play golf, and Jones, who, in addition to his spectacular playing career founded the Master's tournament in Augusta, Georgia, was an iconic figure in the game. Two, on another occasion, some friends and I had once spent an afternoon, quite unsuccessfully, trying to find the Atlanta house where Jones had lived. I told the photographer I was with at the time that we had to add Oakland Cemetery to our itinerary. Dale was not a golfer, though, and he looked at me as if the fever had plagued my mind. 

It took two days to persuade him that I was quite serious, but on our last day, he agreed we could swing through the cemetery on our way to the airport, and when we did we found Jones's grave mowed short and tight as a putting green and graced with 18 specimens of plants, one for every hole at Augusta National Golf Course. Well, Dale was less than reverent. "Instead of a hole-in-one," he said, "he's the one in the hole." (laughter) I briefly paid my respects. On top of that, it was a spectacular cemetery, a most quiet city of some 70,000 residents with sections for Union soldiers and Confederate soldiers, a potter's field with 17,000 graves, a section for former slaves, a Jewish section, even a marker for Tweet the mockingbird. So much grand Victorian funerary architecture as to put Oakland Cemetery on the National Register of Historic Places. On our way out, I saw a sign pointing to the grave of Margaret Mitchell, of "Gone with the Wind" fame, and asked Dale if we shouldn't stop there as well. "Frankly," he said, "I don't give a damn." (laughter) I forgave him that, but I surely didn't agree. Cemeteries have long held an interest for me, which may be odd given my intention to one day be cremated and, nice coincidence here, gone with the wind. Maybe it was because during my college years I sometimes mowed grass in a small cemetery in a town settled by Norwegian immigrants. There were row after row of stones with Norwegian names, but also a marker for one lonely Irishman named Louie Kelly, an oddity I wove into a newspaper column years later when I discovered Shamrock, Wisconsin. 

As a traveling newspaperman, I found stories in cemeteries the way political reporters found them in city halls, or sports reporters in a gym. In Taos, New Mexico, I stood at the grave of Kitt Carson, whose exploits had intrigued me as a child. In Key West, I went early one morning to the historic cemetery where burials are both above and below ground to see the monument to the USS Maine and the famous headstone of BP Pearl Roberts. Pearl was said to have been a hypochondriac, so her husband ordered a marker that read, "I told you I was sick." (laughter) In Savannah, Georgia, visiting Bonaventure Cemetery was as much a must-do as trying the southern specialty called "she-crab soup," and it's hard to say which was more savory. Bonaventure is the beautiful, atmospheric burial place made famous in John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," but it had been discovered long before that. John Muir, after camping five days there in 1867, declared it so beautiful that almost any sensible person would choose to dwell here with the dead, rather than with the lazy, disorderly living. It might sound funny to say the dead inspired a lot of stories for me through the years, but it's true. In Little Benton in the lead mining region, I once stopped at the grave of the celebrated pioneer priest Father Samuel Mazzuchelli, whose Italian name was said to have so challenged the Irish nuns with which he worked that they called him "Father Matthew Kelly." Sure enough, his grave is flanked by those of several nuns with Irish names, all residents, appropriately enough, of St. Patrick's Catholic Cemetery. In the little cemetery in Scandinavia, Wisconsin, I once tried to count the number of Nelsons under grass, but gave up when I couldn't find a story in that. In New Diggings, the name refers to digging for lead and not graves, I walked through the old Masonic cemetery, said to be the first in Wisconsin. 

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I spent an afternoon poking through Irish Hollow Cemetery, where it occurred to me that the cemetery that survives a ghost town must be doubly haunted. There are thousands of cemeteries in Wisconsin, large and small, tidy and neglected, so old the headstones can't tell their story and so new the ground is still wet from the tears of mourners. For every sprawling city of the dead like Milwaukee's Forest Home Cemetery, with more than 100,000 burials, there is a bedroom-sized family plot on a country road. Either case, and in every cemetery in between, where the dead rest, history lives and stories abound. And these are some of them. (ends reading) This all came about after I took a buyout from my newspaper three years ago and got a call from a publisher at the Historical Society Press in Madison. She took me to lunch and said, "Do you have any book ideas that you'd like to do?" I said, "Well, I really have always wanted to do a book called 'Badger Boneyards: The Eternal Rest of the Story.'" She kind of did one of these, you know. I had the title long before I had a book to go with it, because I found when I was traveling for the newspaper that I did find stories in cemeteries. In 1998 I wrote a history of Wisconsin that the newspaper published as part of the sesquicentennial observance. Well, where do you find history? You find it in museums like this or in libraries, or in cemeteries, because that's where the people who made the history eventually wind up. 

It really didn't occur to me that I was writing as many cemetery-based columns for the paper as I did until I started looking back. I was able to access all of those, and quite a number of them. It seemed that I'd become associated in readers' eyes as well with that, because a number of those were prompted by tips from readers who said, "Boy, if you like this one, you should go here and see this," or "you should go and meet this fellow." I just really sort of accidentally got into it. Somebody asked in an interview this morning if this was my hobby and I said, "It's not a hobby, it's much more an interest." But it is very much an interest and it became a way to get stories for the newspaper for a number of years. I used to come up with different scams to get out of the office for the summer at the newspaper, so one year I decided I would travel the border of Wisconsin all the way around, taking the road closest to the edge and just find stories along the way. Someone got in touch with me when they found out what I was doing and said, "You've got to stop when you get up north and see this guy." This became one of my favorite stories in the book. It's called "An Old Time Cemetery Man." (reading) This story comes from about six feet over the Wisconsin-Michigan border in Norway, Michigan, but no artificial boundary should get in the way of a good cemetery tale. Someone once told me when I got to this area I should slip across the border and visit Digger. Digger is really Ed Wenzel, also called Billy. He was 76 when we met in the early 1990s and might truly be called the last of a dying breed. 

A small town sexton who knows where the bodies are buried because he buried them. When I called to say I was coming, I was struck by Digger's distinctive UP accent, so I bought a tape recorder that night and took it with me the next day. Digger was wearing a cap and work clothes, and with no immediate need to arrange for another permanent lodger, he had time to show me around the piney setting where he worked. I'd been told to ask Digger about the old days, so I did. "1937, April the first, 1937. When I walked up here the first day, it was really like a son of a gun. You had to walk four miles. There were no cars them days. There was no building, nothing. Just a little old shed down in a hole. 

They had a wheelbarrow, a shovel and a rake, that's all they had. Steel wheel, too. You had to dig everything by hand and then wheel everything to the woods by wheelbarrows, because there's half the grave left over. Anybody with any sense knows that. Like I said, you had no place to eat, no shed, 30-below, you had to come out and dig. You had to shovel the snow by hand, no snowblow, all with a scoop shovel. Then I started to plow with a truck without no door. That's how I froze my face. I got a dollar and a half a day, and then the other guys got a dollar and a quarter. I got a quarter more because I took the foreman's job. 

I did it all. Took care of the books, the whole damn thing, and I was never a bookkeeper, I was a gravedigger, and I told 'em that. Now I get, well, a guy shouldn't put salaries in there." (laughter) "We only get $325 for digging a grave. They get $600 and $800 in Iron Mountain. See, we don't have no backhoe. We could have one, but to me it don't seem feasible. It's only sand, you know. We dig them all by hand, a couple of hours in the sand and we dig a hole, and one hour after we're done you couldn't even tell where they was buried. We dig 'em all year round. I dug at 30-below. 

You gotta pound with a hammer and maul and dig 'em. When you're young you can go like heck. Like I said, it's sand, but like I said, it ain't easy. And I hate to say it, but if I hadn't never stayed here, they wouldn't have a cemetery like it is. I don't want to brag about myself, but I know because I keep this up like I keep my yard at home. But I'm only one man and I'm getting older. I can't cut the mustard like I used to, because I fell off the roof about five years ago and about killed myself. My wife rolled me over and I heard her long miles away saying, 'Eddie, your father is gone, I think. I think your father is gone, go call an ambulance. I think your poor old father is dead.' But then I started to roll a bit. 

She said, 'Oh, Lord Amighty, he's starting to move!'" (laughter) "A woman the other day says, 'I never thought you'd be back digging holes again. You were pretty well battered.' I broke my arm and my collarbone and my pelvis, but I got out of the damn bed and came back and dug again. You got to be a cemetery man. You got to be dedicated. You got to go with the weather. When there's snow, you know, or a God-darned rainstorm, you got to be out there. You gotta get the God-darned thing in the ground. If a man says the funeral is 10 o'clock Tuesday, it's 10 o'clock Tuesday. Even though you are dead, you are on time." We sat for a while in the sexton's office, where large, historic photographs served as decor. "Oh yeah, all the miners from that top picture up there, I buried the whole damn bunch of 'em. 

Even the widows now, because that's 55 years now, don't forget. See, all these younger guys. This kid will be in here in a little while, funny he ain't here already. They're dead, all these guys." (laughter) "My mother, my father, my brothers I did. I dug my mother's on a Sunday. I dug all my relations, too. It never bothered me. Yesterday I buried my classmate. When someone calls up and says, 'So-and-so's dead,' you kind of feel funny. You get used to it like anything else. 

Years ago I done all the digging, but now I get my son Eddie and them kids. They like that, see. But I know when I'm gone, the day I walk out of here, they're gonna go mechanized, I know they are." We drove through the cemetery, where I met a host of dead people. "The first grave I dug was right there," Billy would say, a man at peace with his accomplishments. He is at home here and like a good cemetery man he has planned ahead. His stone is in place, and he knows who will open the earth to receive him. "Eddie," he said. "Like father, like son." (ends reading) I tried to get some variety in the book, different stories, all that involve a cemetery in some way. They're not all cemetery profiles. Some are. 

They're not all people profiles, some are. Some of the people are living and some of the people are dead. Some of them only connect with a cemetery sort of accidentally or tangentially. One of the stories is the founding of Tombstone Pizza in Medford, Wisconsin. Years ago there was a tavern there. It was called the Tombstone Tap, because across the street was a cemetery. The owner of the place was Pep Simek and his brother. Pep was tending bar one Sunday in the 1960s, Sunday afternoon, I think he said, and he had served himself a few and was dancing the Peppermint Twist and his wife said, "Sit down before you fall down," and he fell down before he sat down. (laughter) Broke his leg, and while he was recuperating, he was in the kitchen working on recipes for a pizza. Starting selling the pizza at the tavern, it was called the Tombstone Tap Pizza. 

Then they figured out how to freeze them and take them other places. They had an old Cadillac station wagon and began delivering these. They shortened the name to Tombstone Pizzas. Years later, Kraft came along and bought the company for millions of dollars and Tombstone Pizza became a nationally known brand. They had an advertising campaign that showed a man on death row. They said, "What do you want on your pizza?" He said, "Pepperoni and onions." Pep was really upset that his pizza was associated with death row, but it was out of his hands by then and he was a wealthy man. If you buy Pep's Pizzas today, that's him back in business under a different name. All that is connected to a cemetery. That's just an example of the things in here. Some of the stories are about famous people, as I mentioned. 

If you go to Spring Green, you can go to Unity Cemetery next to the Unity Chapel, and stand at the grave of Frank Lloyd Wright. There's a lovely marker there. Frank Lloyd Wright isn't there anymore. He was there for more than 20 years after he died. He was brought back from Arizona, where he died, and was buried with great pomp and circumstance. He was taken to the cemetery in a horse drawn carriage and buried. There was room in the cemetery for his wife at the time, Olgivanna. Many years later when she died in Arizona, she wanted no part of going back to Spring Green and it was her wish that Frank be brought back and put with her in Arizona. So his followers granted her wish, basically came and spirited him away, tried to get him out of the state before anybody knew. When the story broke, there was a great deal of fuss that Frank Lloyd Wright was being taken away from Wisconsin and away from the valley where he founded his studio and worked. 

The Capital Times broke the story and there was an uproar. A lot of people said, it's grave robbing, they can't have him, we want him back. The legislature passed a resolution demanding the return of Frank Lloyd Wright. (laughter) It'll shock you to know the legislature was ignored. (laughter) And Frank Lloyd Wright was taken away. But if you go there today, you can go in and stand at the grave and there's no indication he's not there. A woman came to a talk recently and said she had just been there for one of the tours that they give related to one of the more recent Frank Lloyd Wright books, and they took the tour group through the cemetery and never mentioned that he's not there in the stone that they showed them. Other stories in the book are about lesser-known people, and some of them that just really appealed to me. There's one that's sort of an accidental discovery, and it's called "The Virgin Em and Her Many Husbands." This one also takes place just across the state line in McGregor, Iowa, but it started in La Crosse. (reading) I was in Wisconsin in a reading room at the La Crosse Public Library when I came upon the story of Emma Eastman, a story so good I have no memory of my original mission that day. 

Much of Emma's colorful life and a number of her marriages played out in western Wisconsin. The town of McGregor gets something of an asterisk on the issue of statehood because it lies just across the wide Mississippi River from Wisconsin, within full view of our shore. But enough rationalization. As men tended to be, I was smitten when I met Emma, luckily decades too late to propose marriage, and I gave myself over that day to pursue her story. She was known as the Virgin Em, in the same way a big man can be called "Tiny," or a milquetoast answer to "Butch." This was, after all, a woman who was buried with three husbands near at hand, and who had six more sprinkled through her past. If Elizabeth Taylor was an optimist every time she walked down the aisle, she still couldn't hold a candle to Emma Eastman. That much I learned that winter day in the library from a writer Myer Katz's "Echoes of Our Past," his history of La Crosse, that included an account of the beautiful and incredible Emma Cameron, as she was known in her La Crosse days. The surname came from her marriage to Peter Cameron in the city's very first wedding. Of course, by then it was Emma's fourth, and far from her last. Later in her life, Emma was said to have lamented that she had not made it an even dozen. 

Well, I read further that Emma was buried an hour downriver in McGregor, in a queer necropolis with six of her former husbands. He was wrong on the number, but not the main point. I couldn't go home without heading first to McGregor to find that boneyard. The various accounts of Emma's life and loves differ on details. Some go out of their way to adorn the tale with wild charges, as if a pistol-packing pioneer woman with nine husbands needs help, but a former McGregor man, Ronald G. Harris, has spent much time tracking down public records that tell Emma's story. According to Harris's book, "Eastman Cemetery," Emma was born in Ohio in 1823 to Peter and Mary Coleman Eastman, who had moved to western Wisconsin, then across the river to McGregor in 1838. A year later at just 14, Emma married Ephraim Kellogg. The union did not last long, nor did her 1839 marriage in Grant County, Wisconsin to a man who soon divorced her on the basis of her subsequent marriage to yet another man named Cunningham the same year. There is much more evidence of marriage in her life than divorce. (laughter) Emma apparently found it easier just to move on than to deal with the legal niceties. 

Her capacity for finding husbands might have grown out of what one account called her "unsurpassedly beautiful figure and features, remarkable verve, and great presence of mind." Or more likely from her capacity to mold one of the opposite sex to her wishes, as readily as gently as an artist molds a figure in plaster. Whatever the case, Peter Cameron signed on as husband number four in 1846, telling his family in a letter later, "I got myself a wife sometime since." By other accounts, Emma was a prominent character in early La Crosse social life. She was said to ride horseback through town carrying a rifle. She was also said to have possessed a notable temper, but apparently could be diplomatic as well. One report said she helped avert an Indian attack through her knowledge of the Indian language. In 1849, Peter killed a man in a dispute over ownership of logs and was jailed in Prairie du Chien. He was released some years later. After his death in 1854, Emma was drawn into a lengthy court fight over his property. Harris wrote that her fifth husband, Ralph Bolz, helped her with the property dispute. Emma didn't need help the night that Peter's brother Daniel went to her house to recover some deeds. 

Emma pulled a pistol from under her pillow and fired two shots, leaving Daniel with a hole in his coat and a piece of his little finger gone. Alas, later that year, Emma petitioned for divorce from Ralph, entering into the court records a letter he had mailed from Missouri accusing her of adultery, including his inclination to "look her up and hang her, except that it would nasty up a perfectly good rope." (laughter) Emma next entered into sacred union with Nelson Sharp in Prairie du Chien in 1861, and after his death in 1863 married DeWitt Clinton Van Sickle, a man she called "Clinty." Harris writes that Van Sickle died behind a team of runaway horses in 1881. There were no natural causes in Emma's life. (laughter) Emma had a grave marker made that read, "Clinty, my heart clings to thee, love. In heaven I hope to meet above. You was ever kind and true to me, so was I to you. Emma C.V." Van Sickle was buried in Eastman Cemetery along with other family members that included Emma's sister Anne, her father, and later her sister Louisa. According to Harris, the WPA Cemetery Recording Project lists husband number eight, Michael Stents, as also being in Eastman Cemetery, and so was her last husband, Joseph Wilson, who survived her. Nevertheless, as I approached the town of McGregor that day and my first stop at the public library, I wondered just how much was apocryphal and how I would find the little cemetery where Emma lay at rest. Was anyone else even aware of the Virgin Em? The answer was yes. 

I no more than said her name than library director Michelle Petit pointed over my shoulder to a wall mural of McGregor scenes, including one depicting Emma in a black dress, standing in front of her husbands' graves with a flower in her hand and a tear tracing down her cheek. She handed me a flyer for an upcoming Valentine's Day program on "The Many Loves of Emma Eastman," featuring Pat Matt of nearby Elkader as Emma. Best of all, Petit gave me directions to Eastman Cemetery. Out of town and into the country a ways to Keystone Road, down the driveway to the Maluski farm, where a small sign pointed to the cemetery on a wind-whipped hill. Many of the original stones have long since disappeared, but a few years earlier, a Scout troop and members of the Clayton County Pioneer Cemetery Restoration Commission had worked to renovate Eastman Cemetery, cleaning brush and weeds and scrub trees. It is believed about 30 graves are on the site, including a more recent stone for Van Sickle, which is protected by a chain fence and has a welcoming arch that reads "Eastman." Later I called Harris in Wisconsin Rapids to talk about Emma. He spoke of the challenge of separating fact from fiction in her story and why he was determined to do so. "The reason she is so intriguing is, I don't know what she would be called now, a schizophrenic or something," he said, citing tales of her temper. "She apparently was a beautiful woman, too. I think of her now as a character. 

If I had known her, I probably would have disliked her. Or married her, it's what men did." (laughter) (ends reading) I'm going to show a few photographs now of different cemeteries. This is near Sauk City, Prairie du Chien. It is the Andrew -- Free Congregational Cemetery, created to serve the Free Congregation of Sauk County, or the groups that were known as the "Free Thinkers." This was quite a movement in the 1800s that came over from Germany. Free Thinkers were often referred to as atheists. They preferred to say that they just treasured reason over dogma, but they were anti-clerical. They didn't believe in priests or ministers or that sort of occupation. This is the one Free Thinker community out of several hundred that has survived and is still in business today, but the land that was granted for this cemetery by Andrew -- was given on the grounds that no priest or minister should ever set foot inside. (laughter) It's kind of interesting. You can see those tall pines, those were saplings brought over from the Baraboo bluffs when they built the cemetery, and now 125, 140 years later, they're gorgeous, wonderful trees. 

A lot of cemeteries in the country, you'll notice them first because you'll see pines in the distance or arborvitaes, it really identifies the cemetery. This one stands out even more because of the size of those trees. This is just an example of funerary architecture at a cemetery in Door County. I happened to notice as we were walking, my wife and I were walking through the cemetery, that there were a lot of these markers for children. It turned out later on that it was a cemetery next to a church where children who had not been baptized were not allowed on consecrated grounds, so they were buried in a special plot, so that everywhere around us were children. It was a very poignant kind of thing, because normally you think of lives lived fully, and all of a sudden you're standing in the children's section of the cemetery, and you realize otherwise. This is the White Star Church. The White Star Psychic Science Church, also in Door County. This serves a community of Spiritualists near Brussels. Spiritualists, it was another movement that started in the 1800s. 

They were people who believed that life does not end with the change called death, and that with sufficient faith and guidance from other Spiritualists, members could communicate with the dead. This church has been in this place for well over a century  and is still in operation. It became popular after the Civil War. Mrs. Lincoln actually consulted Spiritualists in the White House, trying to commune with her son, who had died. Some Belgian soldiers brought this back to Door County and established a church. It had kind of different struggles. There were actually a couple of different churches up there at one time, but one of the members, in order to show his faith, cut off his hand and when he died as a result of that injury, others kind of lost faith. (laughter) But the White Star Psychic Science Church is still in operation on a little country road, Cemetery Road, as a matter of fact. They have two cemeteries. The first one has about 14 people buried under a single marker. 

That site proved unsuitable for a cemetery because of high water, so they have another one that I went to because I thought that the cemetery of a psychic church would be a great place to commune with the dead, but I heard nothing that day. This is another example of what they call funerary architecture. It was especially popular during Victorian times, they'd put these really ornate things on graves. This is one of my favorites. This is in a community called -- in Door County, right on the main highway. The church is called St. Mary of the Snow Catholic Church, and some time during the 1970s, the priest at that church decided that they needed a parking lot, and the best place for a parking lot was out in front, where, unfortunately, years before that they had started the cemetery. So he had all the stones picked up and moved to the side of the church and put them in this little spot that's not much bigger than this stage. They're all about eight inches apart. So it looks like the cemetery for the world's smallest group of Belgians. (laughter) Then he paved over the cemetery with the bodies underneath and has a cemetery. 

It's really interesting when you go and stand there because the names, of course, are really old-country, and a few of them have, you can see, photographs. They put porcelain photographs of the dead. It's more interesting when you can actually see the person who's buried there. In the style of that time, many of the poses are so formal and severe, it's almost as if they knew where the photo would go for eternity. (laughter) This is one of what I call the two Talkative Cameron Tombstones. This is in Walworth County. The first one is for John Cameron, who died in 1946 at age 80. His stone is right next to this one for his son. But John's has the full terms of his pension printed on the stone. (laughter) It says, "Pension Certificate. 

This is to certify that John D. Cameron, upon retirement from active duty, has been awarded a pension in recognition of his long, faithful, and efficient service through a period of 41 years and one month. This certificate is not transferable or assignable." (laughter) And he included the president's name signing the thing, and it was really just curious, because I'd never seen anyone with the terms of the pension. You wonder what he's saying. "I'm grateful to this company for giving me a pension." Or maybe, "I can't take it with me, but I'll take it as close as I can." (laughter) As interesting as that was, the one next door for his son, Duncan, is even better. Duncan, as you can faintly read, died in Chicago at the age of 24. Graduated, and then it goes on to tell a few things about his bachelor of arts, his high school, where he went to grade school. You think, that's pretty good accomplishments for someone who died at 24. If you go around to the back of the stone, they had just gotten started. It goes all the way down. 

They list everything from being a Boy Scout to a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, a member of the University of Michigan union, naval reserve, assistant instructor at Michigan, and on and on. Even that he was business manager of the Michigan yearbook. You say, well, why did they do that? He died at 24, so maybe they were suggesting that even though he didn't live long, he had a nice, full life and will tell you everything about him. They must have had sufficient funds to pay the stonecutter, because they never abbreviated "University of Michigan." It's spelled out every time. (laughter) Turned out I was able to discover that he died of tuberculosis and was buried in the cemetery next to his father, but there's a bit of mystery with those stones, and that's the fun part of coming across these things. People, when they are in the process of having stones prepared, don't always have a sense of humor, and they aren't always thinking of what other people will think later on. But if you're walking in cemeteries, the more you can put stuff on graves to inform people or even entertain, I think is good for people who like cemeteries, like me. (laughter) Before I started this book, my favorite intersection in Wisconsin was near Bonduel, south of Bonduel in a little community called Slab City, where you can go right onto Dump Road, or left onto Hope Lane. (laughter) I always thought that was sort of a metaphor for life. So this would be the other end of it. 

(laughter) The interesting thing, also, is that there's a church on Cemetery Road and it's not named Church Road, it's named Cemetery Road for the cemetery that's next to the church. This was the Eastman Cemetery in McGregor, where Emma is buried with three of her husbands. You can see it has been cleaned up and a number of the newer markers remember her story. Country cemeteries often have these big gates. This, of course, has the family name on it as many do. The most popular cemetery names in Wisconsin tend to be Forest Home, for example, or Greenwood, or Evergreen. All of these bucolic names. It's supposed to, I suppose, reassure the families more than the people who are there that they're in an okay place. But that's the Virgin Em's resting place. This is the mass grave at the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery. 

(audience murmurs) Obviously, the Peshtigo Fire is one of the most significant historical events in Wisconsin history. More than 1300 lives were lost, they aren't even sure how many, exactly. Such a significant event in Wisconsin that when they began the historical marker program, the number one historical marker was put at the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery. There is a museum next door that tells the basic story, but really it's important to also get out and walk through the cemetery. More than 300 were buried in this mass grave who could not be identified. Not a clue. Many of them were men who were working in lumber camps, might have been in dormitories, had no one there to identify them. Many others were, obviously, burned well beyond recognition. But if you walk through the surrounding cemetery, they have little signs at some of the graves that also tell the story about how that person or that family died. There's one that I remember where a husband grabbed one of his children and rushed away and his wife grabbed the other two and rushed in another direction, and the next day, they each thought each other was dead and had this smokey reunion. 

There's another one, a man must have hitched up the wagon a little too quickly because he took off with his family and the hitch was loose and he had to stop and fix the wagon, and a wave of flame rolled over and killed everyone. (audience murmurs) Sorry, I'm depressing you here. I had you laughing a minute ago. (laughter) It is a pretty powerful cemetery to visit and get some of the history there. >> Is that the mass grave itself? >> Yes, that is at the mass grave. This is Frank Lloyd Wright's grave in Unity Cemetery. It's very nice, as you can see, but if you go there to pay respects, you have to speak up... (laughter) Because he's in Arizona. I just mentioned a minute ago that I like it when people have a little bit of fun with things. (laughter) This is a cemetery outside of the Oneida community in Green Bay. 

Mostly a Native American cemetery, but not exclusively. It's connected with the church that's there, quite historic. But a number of the markers in this cemetery have more personalized effects on them. They would have deer, for example, or they would have tribal symbols. There might be a Packer "G," photographs of the deceased in some cases. But I really like Roy's message. "Listen to me, just once!" It's again one of those where you're standing there and you say, is that for his kids, or the government, or his wife? Who did he want to listen to him just once? Those are the fun little surprises you can find. John William Heisman of the trophy fame is buried in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. That surprises a lot of people, even more when you get there and you see the grave, because it's just flat to the ground. It's just the name and date, without any identification. 

He was a famous fellow associated with the New York Athletic Club. Some call him the father of the forward pass, and quite a creative football mind. He's buried in his wife's family plot in Rhinelander and it's believed that no Heisman winner has ever gone to see him at the cemetery. I was at the cemetery and had to ask for directions to there, from someone who was tending flowers. He said, "Yeah, people come all the time, especially in the fall when they give the award out." Football fans will stop. But there's not a big to-do about it in Rhinelander. There is an exhibit at the airport that tells that he's there. There was one occasion where a fellow came along and he left a Mason jar on the grave with four football tickets to a college game. And the tickets were not used. Well, it was to a Minnesota game, so you can figure that out. 

(audience groans and laughs) But the sexton at the cemetery took those home as sort of a souvenir for his years of tending the John Heisman grave. This is in Peninsula golf course. Peninsula State Park actually has three burial places within the boundaries of the park and this is one of them. This was the site where a Potawatomi leader named Chief Simon -- was buried. This was his tribe's ancestral land, and he was quite attached to the area, and he was often described as the last in a line of Potawatomi chiefs who negotiated for his people with the government and he was in Door County for a talk at something, and he was asked if he might like to be buried in Door County. He said, that would be great, he'd like to do that, it was his home. He died in poverty, but the promise was kept. Door County being Door County, they kept him on ice for a few months. He had the bad timing to die in winter, and they wanted to bury him as a tourist event. (laughter) So they waited until spring and in May had this elaborate ritual ceremony and he was buried with the coat that he wore to Washington and a number of personal items. 

And a totem pole was erected. One of the historians in Door County thought that would be an appropriate thing, despite the fact that Wisconsin Indians have no connections to totem poles. (laughter) This is, I think, the third version of the totem pole, and it's a nice little novelty. There's a rock underneath there, there's a marker that says "a true and noble Indian." If you're playing the golf course and your ball gets too close to there, you do get relief from the totem pole. The only course with such a rule. (laughter) >> But he did die in poverty? >> Yes, he did die in poverty. This was, again, one of those moments you just don't expect. You're walking through a cemetery, and saw, obviously, a very recent burial. This may have been just shortly after this, the ground had not even repaired itself and grown up grass again. We saw those leg braces leaning against the stone and just, wow. 

Again, you don't know exactly what the message is. She didn't need them anymore, she's rid of them? In heaven you can walk fine? Or, "They got me here, thank you." But it's just one of those things that just kind of stops you. They even have the shoes still attached to them. I have no idea if they're still there now, but just one of those moments. This is in Wisconsin Dells. It's the grave of Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy. (audience murmurs) She was quite a figure during the Civil War. She was said to have been the prettiest girl in the Confederacy and she used her feminine wiles to extract secrets and share them with southern officers. She gained a lot of fame when she ran across a battlefield once to give Stonewall Jackson some information that he could use to attack. She was jailed and eventually freed again. 

After the war, she became convinced of the cause of unity. One nation, one cause, and she was on an extensive speaking tour when she came to the Dells about 1900. It was then called Kilbourne City, but she was speaking at Wisconsin Dells and she died and was buried in Wisconsin Dells. You can see they still have the Confederate flag that flies and the DVR, Daughters of the Virginia Republic, or something, put a marker there. For many years, a man in the Dells would come at Memorial Day and raise not only the American flag, but also the Stars and Bars at the cemetery in honor of Belle Boyd's presence there. A couple of years ago, a women's group from Virginia came and honored her and him on the 50th anniversary of his having cared for that grave. In return, they placed a wreath at the gravesite of Wisconsin soldiers in Virginia who died and were buried in Virginia during the Civil War. It's kind of, probably the only cemetery in Wisconsin where you'll find a Confederate flag always flying, although, in Madison, of course the Forest Hill Cemetery, there is a Confederate section, for 140 or so southern soldiers who died while they were prisoners of war at Camp Randall during the Civil War, and are buried far from home. There are a couple of places in Wisconsin where you can also find Revolutionary soldiers, but those are far more rare. And that's our program. 

So thank you all for coming out today. I really do appreciate it. (applause)