Odd Wisconsin, Odd UW

From John Muir’s wake-up contraption to the queen of bootleggers, some of the state’s most unusual tales have university ties.

By Erika Janik MA’04, MA’06

The Wisconsin Idea — the venerable concept that extends the borders of knowledge beyond the university — also, apparently, extends the bounds of oddity. Wisconsin’s past is full of crazy characters, bizarre events, and surprising schemes that didn’t make it into the state’s official history. And many of these offbeat stories have University of Wisconsin connections.

Odd Wisconsin: Amusing, Perplexing, and Unlikely Stories from Wisconsin’s Past, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, brings these stories to light, revealing the state with all the bumps, bruises, and perplexities that make a place more than just a location on a map, an entry in an encyclopedia, or the home of a university.

The idea of telling the state’s peculiar stories began as a way to share the funny articles, books, manuscripts, and photos found in the society’s collections that were simply too good to put aside in the name of serious research. So, in 2004, “Odd Wisconsin” debuted as a blog on the organization’s Web site, and a year or so later, the Wisconsin State Journal began running entries as a weekly feature. In 2007, the blog’s content was recast as a book, bringing together some of the best tales and a bunch of new ones — including this sampling of stories with UW connections.

The phrase “buying the farm” took a literal turn in the early twentieth century when realtor, banker, land developer, and UW regent Benjamin Faast organized the Wisconsin Colonization Co. in northern Wisconsin. In 1917, Faast purchased about fifty thousand acres of land devastated by logging in Sawyer County and began offering parcels of it to immigrants as ready-equipped farms. It was not Faast’s first development scheme in the state’s northern region; he had earlier convinced the regents to help new farmers by locating an agricultural demonstration station on his own land in Rusk County. But his plans for Sawyer County were scaled to a whole new level of magnitude, both in amenities offered to settlers and in his longer-term vision.

Each farm came with land, an “attractive house and barn, a cow, 2 pigs and 6 chickens, a set of clearing tools, and clover and timothy seed.” An expert in close touch with the College of Agriculture provided free farming advice. Houses came in four styles and were “attractively painted in striking contrast with the average tar paper shack and log cabin of the pioneer.” Faast, who strongly believed that the happiness of the townspeople was directly tied to aesthetic beauty, provided seeds and garden plans, and encouraged settlers to contribute to the overall appearance of the community by growing flowers and vegetables.

The farm sites were only the beginning of Faast’s grand plan. He also mapped out what he hoped would become the centerpiece of the colony, a prosperous city he named Ojibwa and described as “the first planned and carefully thought out rural town in the whole Chippewa Valley, if not in all Wisconsin.” In his mind, Ojibwa included a zoo, parks, streets with sidewalks, a restaurant, a large general store, and neighborhoods that took “advantage of the natural beauty spots.”

Unfortunately, Faast’s dream began to bottom out soon after it began, and the Wisconsin Colonization Co. went bankrupt in 1929.

Paul Bunyan is America’s best-known folk hero, the subject of stories told and retold in lumber camps from Michigan to California. Known for his size and strength, Bunyan supposedly cleared North Dakota of its forests, created Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes from his footsteps, and carved the Grand Canyon from the trail of his dragging axe. From the 1880s through 1910, Bunyan stories were often improvised aloud by groups of veteran lumberjacks to test the gullibility of new recruits. Some were also intended to intimidate the novice loggers, who were mostly teenagers fresh from the farm or the city, by exaggerating the dangers of extreme winter conditions or mythical forest beasts.

But as oral tales, these Bunyan stories might have easily disappeared along with the lumber camps that sustained them, were it not for the efforts of a UW student named K. Bernice Stewart ’16. The daughter of an Antigo timber cruiser — someone who estimated the value of timber in a forest — Stewart had spent several winters of her childhood in logging camps, hearing Bunyan accounts directly from loggers. Under the guidance of her UW English professor, Homer A. Watt, she began interviewing and carefully collecting these stories from Wisconsin sources around 1912. With Watt’s help, she published her research in 1916.

Her careful efforts to preserve and interpret the tall tales helped to launch a tradition of scholarly study of folk tales that continues to this day. And because of Stewart, Bunyan himself lives on, memorialized on countless restaurant menus, in songs, and at tourist attractions and festivals from Bangor, Maine, to Portland, Oregon.

For those who struggle to get out of bed in the morning, consider this solution from former UW student and famed naturalist John Muir x1863 — a bed that does it for you.

In a letter written years after she first visited Muir’s dorm room in North Hall in the early 1860s, Grace Lindsley recalled a combination alarm clock/bed that tipped him onto the floor at the appointed time each morning. While Muir was being unceremoniously dumped out of bed, another mechanism struck a match and lit a candle at the foot of the bed.

In fact, Muir’s room was full of innovative gadgets to help him maximize his college experience, many of which could still prove quite useful today. One invention, a bookstand that revolved after a preset time spent studying, led Lindsley’s mother to remark, “He ought to have so arranged it that if he hadn’t properly learned the lesson, a hand would come up and bop his ears.” Muir’s creative bookstand is displayed in the lobby of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Though known as the Dairy State, Wisconsin might just as easily have been known as the Brewski State, since beer-making was a tradition in many of its German-American communities. When national prohibition went into effect in 1920, Wisconsinites begrudgingly went along with it for a while, but in 1926, they overwhelmingly voted to support an exemption for “near beer,” a beverage with 2.75 percent alcohol. Three years later, voters endorsed a second measure that called for an end to prosecution of prohibition violators.

By then federal officials were afoot in Wisconsin to assess conditions. Investigator Frank Buckley found that the state was “commonly regarded as a Gibraltar of the wets — sort of a Utopia where everyone drinks their fill and John Barleycorn still holds forth in splendor.” After ten years of prohibition, he found that in Madison, “The section of the city known as the Bush is made up of Sicilian Italians of the worst sort, most of whom are bootleggers. ... The queen of bootleggers, an attractive young Italian girl, caters exclusively to a fraternity-house clientele.” While in Madison, Buckley visited the local chapter of his national fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, one morning about nine o’clock. He observed quite a commotion — the result of an attempt to induce two of the brethren, who had apparently imbibed well, but not wisely, the night before, to get up for morning classes.

Other cities were worse. At the opposite end of the state, Buckley wrote, Hurley “tucked away up in the wild lumber and iron section of northern Wisconsin, right on the Michigan State line, has the distinction of being the worst community in the State. Conditions in Hurley are not unlike those of settlements like Dawson City, Cripple Creek, El Dorado, Borger, and other boom communities. Gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, and dope are about the chief occupations of the place. Saloons there function with barmaids who serve the dual capacity of soda dispenser and prostitute.”

Live without dairy products, wheat, beef, pork, or sugar? While they may sound like fightin’ words in a dairy and agricultural state, during World War I, Wisconsin residents were encouraged to do just that — and
the Women Students’ War Work Council and the UW Home Economics Department produced a recipe booklet to show them how.

Although most people associate food rationing with World War II, these state and federal programs were first implemented as a show of home-front patriotism during WW I. And Wisconsin was actually at the forefront, pioneering many of the programs that formed the foundation for federal Food and Drug Administration policies under Herbert Hoover.

Wisconsin became the first state to organize both state- and county-level councils of defense, which helped to educate citizens about wartime sacrifices. Wisconsin’s State Council of Defense was particularly interested in the national food crisis that developed once the United States entered the war in 1917. Council chairman Magnus Swenson 1880, a UW regent, began vigorously promoting food conservation through the cultivation of home gardens and the institution of meatless and wheatless days.

Anyone for some steamed barley pudding or scalloped cheese?

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“Names and dates matter, but the stories are what make history fun, important, and relevant,” says Erika Janik MA’04, MA’06, who wrote about WHA Radio’s Homemakers’ Program, another gem in Wisconsin’s history, for On Wisconsin in Spring 2007.