Archives Month 2011: "Born in Wisconsin"

Cobbling Together a Home for Local History

2012-01-22T14:23:00.000-06:00

The community of Clinton sits quietly near the Illinoisborder. Somewhere between Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago, the town of Clintonand its surrounding communities are attempting to forge an elusive identity.Unlike other Archives Month submissions, which focus on records or objects, theClinton Community Historical Society and its community themselves came under the lens. Like manynon-profits the CCHS existed on paper before they acquired a brick and mortarfacility—however the unique properties of their new headquarters precludes theuse of either.

The cobblestones composing its exterior walls behave much likebrick whilst the mortar binding them together does not resemble that usedtoday. Modern mortar contains rigid concrete while that used in the house is limestone based; fired in wood kilns, it was crushed to a fine powder and then mixed with sand and water. An unauthentic patching restoration of this mid-19^thcentury style would look poor and, because the mortars expand and contractdifferently, pick at the structural integrity. An ugly scar of concrete beneath a western windowsill speaks to this.

Before Clinton had a hardware store, and long before MammaLilla’s Pizza opened across the street, this cobblestone farmhouse rested atthe edge of an 80 acre farm field. The CCHS’s sign is dominated by a depiction of that veryhome. Society member Ron Nortier asked SAA-SC members Alex Champion, DanaGerber, Prairie Hady, and Jake Ineichen if it struck them as unusual;apparently a family member criticized the sign for its proximity to theartwork’s subject. While this was a valid thought, remarked one of thestudents, it was not a depiction of the house we were standing near but ratherthe house as it was when AlonzoRichardson built it in 1843—surrounded by nothing.

Mr.Richardson did not use isolation as an excuse however. Each stone were sortedthrough a board with various sized holes in it; the smaller, more perfectlyrounded stones were separated for the front of the house with the larger andless perfect ones used in the back. The limestone walls of the house were facedwith the cobblestones three to four rows at a time and it took several days forthe mortar to set before the next rows were able to be laid. The resultwas a wall 16-18 inches thick that retained autumn’s heat into the winter andspring’s coolness into the summer.

Following a brief tour of the grounds we were ushered intothe dwelling. Although the heat was turned on in anticipation of our visit, thecold dankness and evidence of a dozen simultaneous projects and restorationsreminded us that no one lived there.

The shower's tiling reminds bathers of history

A contemporary addition to the rear houses a modern kitchenand enumerable windows, which minimized the odor but also kept it relativelytoasty. Ron Nortier, who restored his own cobblestone himself, spoke ratherconceptually about the building’s older “improvements”; the complications ofworking on a home older than the state it resides in, the motivations ofwell-intentioned owners with their own dreams and agendas, and the then unknownconsequences of contemporary design, all contributed to enumerable “layers” ofthe interior’s façades.

I was reminded of home improvement shows on DIY or HGNwhere photogenic contractors give rooms an expensive looking re-finish bysimply covering the outdated décor. Eachscrape of the paint or pried off panel reveals still more challenges. Etched into partially exposed faux brickpaneling is a mysterious message claiming a person was murdered in the housebut a stray bullet hole was not located; perhaps the hole will be discovered as they scrape further into the past.

The subject of our visit was not the house itself but rathertwo prominent families who valued local and family history. Fresh from churchservices and with a polite but bored granddaughter in tow, Bruce and Carol Hahnshared their family’s papers, photographs and other objects. Many items pertained to Clinton's athletic history--especially basketball. As the owners ofthe remaining hardware store in Clinton the Hahns were acutely aware of changes inspending and transportation habits on small towns. In a seemingly rehearsedmanner Mr. Hahn claimed it was better when Clinton had three hardware stores;because pricing and merchandise were not identical among the stores,unsatisfied customers would simply go next door rather than spend their dollars out of town.

Bruce and Carol Hahn with their granddaughter

The Hahn's storefront in different times

Following them were Cyndy Bagley and her husband Loren.Presenting curated objects and extensive original research, especially as theyconcerned women, Mrs. Bagley was eager to have her labors of love reach anaudience. All conversations were recorded by chapter member Jake Ineichen.Hopefully they will be edited down and become available online.

Cyndy Bagley shows her research; SAA-Student Chapter members and Ron Nortier observe

Despite the unfinished appearance of the Clinton CommunityHistorical Society’s headquarters its foundation is firm. As the CCHS gears upfor Clinton’s 175^th anniversary they are preparing to utilize oldand new collections. Manyof their oral histories have been transcribed; they have some handwrittenfamily histories as well as a number of scrapbooks. A 92 page booklet wasput together in 1976 and a 356 page hard cover history was published in1987. "Clinton, Wisconsin 150 Years," published by CurtisMedia Corporation; they also have community newspapers dating back to 100 yearsas well as some local church historical documents. They also hope to havea Civil War veteran’s diary in time for the celebrations later in 2012.

[Submitted by Alex Champion with contributions by Dana Elizabeth Gerber and Ron Nortier]

Helen Bulovsky: The Story of a WWI Nurse

2011-10-28T12:42:00.013-05:00

Within the confines of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center exist the last remaining vestiges of Helen Bulovsky. The creation of a de facto arranged marriage between a Czech-American from Chicago and a Czech from Austria-Hungary, she was born in 1895 and died of a heart condition just 28 years later. Through inference from her records and family history, it seems Helen, a dainty five feet tall, knew she inherited her father’s weak heart, which killed him in 1906. After working a short time at Madison General Hospital (now Meriter) she joined the Army Nursing Corps and kept an account of her experiences abroad. Her records consist of photographs, letters and a diary all almost exclusively dated between 1917 and 1919 while she trained, travelled to France with the American Expeditionary Force, and finished her adventure peacefully in Belgium.

Undoubtedly realizing she was participating in one of the greatest events in history, Helen’s day-by-day diary is not used regularly until April 1918 while she trained and awaited deployment in New Jersey.

The unused portions of the diary contain glued photographs of family in Madison, including one at the steps of their 500 block West Mifflin Street home. After a quick guess to its location I realize it is one of the dozens of houses that contemporarily participate in the Mifflin Street Block Party; it saddens me slightly that such a dwelling is the home of transient undergrads and (knowing that block) negligent landlords. Surrounding pages of the diary consist of tokens from her trip(s) to New York City and details of her activities including getting her passport picture taken and receiving smallpox and typhoid vaccinations.

Writing aboard her transport ship on June 12^th, 1918, she explains the “ocean doesn’t seem so big to me as it did in the books…” and “the waves don’t compare [to] those I have seen in pictures. It really is a disappointment,” she complains, “but a fortunate one.”

Her letters from France detail her busy life and the encumbrances of army life. Upon arrival to a bullet riddled train station the nurses “had no shelter but for ourselves” and, after transport to assume their duties, immediately saw to patients with but a “small piece of canvas in a swampy field hospital” to protect their belongings and worked so much she “forgot sleep was an option.” Despite the carnage of her surroundings she ends with a joke—“Now, for my bed—I mean cot.”

Although she writes with sadness for tending to wounded men for whom she can do nothing (“Oh! how [sic] I wished I had a dozen hands and feet to help these boys”), Helen Bulovsky spends equal time pleading with family to write her. “After four months of watchful waiting, I received my first letters from home,” she laments. In another letter dated July 1^st and addressed to her sister Bess she writes “I just can’t see why you have not written to me for such a long time. Surely you have been away from home and know just what I would like to know.” She chides further and preempts her negligent sister’s excuses: “I know you are busy but now you have not your school work to bother you” and while their mother’s letters were precious they are too short since “[a] letter from home could never be too long.”

Her day-by-day diary is all but empty for those first months in France and a few entries in Belgium. After a long break from writing, she vents her sadness and loneliness from July 21^st to August 5^th in a spate of long-form composition spanning the sixteen pages; on July 29^th she grieves “I am mighty homesick and no sign of mail.”

Naturally she accounts for other things as well: Aborted trips to town, the condition of known Madison men in the trenches, the carnage of war—including a graphic scene of a horse launched into a nearby tree and hanging limply as it decomposed in its naked branches—and the oddities of army life. “It’s going to seem funny to look after ones personal affairs again” she writes in February 1919, “since we have been in the army we have been like children” complete with bedtimes and permissions to leave encampment; one transcript letter references censorship and, indeed, the original has strategically thin strip permanently redacted from the body.

Somewhere between New Jersey in 1918 and Madison in 1919 she met a young Pennsylvania soldier who bequeathed a small scrap book of personal photographs depicting scenes from home, motorized ambulances, and a picture of himself in his fatigues. “My fondest thoughts of you shall be that you cherish a humble gift from me,” he inscribed. Nothing else is known of this man.

“Not to be discounted, Helen did quite a bit of scrapbooking herself.”

The finding aid for her collection speculates this same man was the source of the “Sketches of Tommy’s Life...” postcards. The postcards depict the misadventures of a patriotic young Brit through several humorous series: “In Training,” “At the Base,” “Up the Line,” and “Out on the Rest” mention nothing of the war’s carnage save for the indignity of getting your morning tea ration’s water from a metal pail.

Three years after her return she married her step-brother only to die nine months after; despite her delicate frame or perhaps the very cause of it, her weak heart enlarged and eventually failed. Family legend has it that she fraudulently passed an army medical exam by claiming her rapid heartbeat was from running up stairs to make the appointment. Felled by a congenital defect rather than German shells, she lived more in those months abroad than many of us do in our lifetimes. She spent her entire adult life caring for the sick and wounded but could not care for herself. She should not be remembered as a tragic figure, however, but rather an intelligent, curious, and playful soul who witnessed previously unknown degrees of carnage but still craved “juicy bits” of gossip from her preoccupied family.

[Post written by Alex Champion.]

The Appleton Edison Light Company

2011-10-24T17:40:00.010-05:00

To those familiar with Appleton, a small city on the Fox River in northeastern Wisconsin, it might seem like an unlikely site for a revolution in power generation. However unlikely, though, the city best known for its paper mills and Lawrence University also has the distinction of being the home of the world’s first commercial electric power plant.

Henry J. Rogers, the owner of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company, was convinced in the summer of 1882 that an electric power plant would provide a unique investment opportunity, and together with some of the city’s other investors went ahead and purchased the necessary equipment from Samuel Insull, one of Edison’s assistants. Edison himself was already constructing a larger plant in New York City, which opened for operation on September 4, 1882. The newly-formed Appleton Edison Light Co., however, began its operation just a couple of weeks earlier on August 20^th, giving it the distinction of being the first electric power plant to operate anywhere in the world.

The plant began as one “K” type dynamo in a wooden shed of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Co., powered by the company’s Fox River water wheel. It produced enough electricity to light 250 incandescent light bulbs, each of “sixteen candlepower” (approximately 50 watts).

Initially, lights were installed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Co. factory, a second paper factory nearby, and Rogers’ house (which still stands in Appleton today, known as Hearthstone):

Hearthstone, therefore, has the distinction of being the first residence in the world to be lit by electric light. Inside the house, one can still see the original chandeliers and the odd brass light switches used to operate the lights, rather different from the switches we are familiar with today:

The early operations of this revolutionary plant were not perfect, as one might expect. The mechanisms for regulating the flow of electric power, and even meters for measuring the power, had not yet been invented, and only came into use later in the 1880s, causing some early mishaps as the engineers sometimes overestimated how much power they were sending out and burned out the light bulbs. The equipment itself was much more primitive than we are familiar with today; most of the apparatus involved were made of wood, all the wiring was copper, often uncovered, and the light bulbs themselves contained bamboo filaments (something Edison himself had discovered to be better than his initial carbonized thread). The plant had some early financial troubles, due in part to these mechanical troubles, and also possibly due to undercharging its customers, since no one had a good idea of what might reasonably be charged for electric power. Mill customers were charged $2.00 per lamp per month (if the lamp was burned 15 hours each night), and residential customers paid $7.00 per lamp per year. The sixteen candlepower bulbs were $1.40 each, provided by the company.

The company did work through those early financial troubles, and expanded its customer base to other factories around the Fox River, and eventually to more residences throughout Appleton. Looking through the Sanborn Maps at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives allows one to trace the company over the following years. The 1883 map merely lists “one dynamo” in the storage shed of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company. By the time of the next map, 1886, the “Edison Electric Light Co.” had its own building containing 4 dynamos, a workshop and an office. It was located on a flume of the U.S. Canal just south of the Fox River, not far from the Appleton Boot & Shoe Manufacturing Company. It remained in the same location in 1891 (now with 7 dynamos), and is listed as running “night and day” (in its early days, it ran only at night, for that was when illumination was most needed). In 1895 the company had expanded out to another temporary location in the former Appleton Manufacturing Company, in addition to the site along the U.S. Canal, and by then what is now Main Hall of Lawrence University is listed as having electric lights. The 1901 map comes after the company’s bankruptcy in 1896, after which it was re-purchased by one of the initial investors and renamed the “Appleton Electric Light And Power Co.” It has three locations: the original site on the U.S. Canal (now expanded), a “Run at Night Only” facility along the Fox River, and a third location away from the river, southeast of State Street and Fisk Street, which was powered by steam from coal-fired boilers. By this time many of the larger buildings throughout the city had at least some electric lighting, as did a growing number of residences.

In spite of the rough start, the plant’s investors persisted, and thanks in no small part to their willingness to take a step into the future, the use of electric power spread rapidly throughout the United States. Improvements in the industry came almost as rapidly as the mishaps, and so what began as a novelty source of light in Appleton, Wisconsin, grew into the cheap, bright, steady source of illumination that we still use today.

I think I’ll close with the long-standing motto of Lawrence University (my own alma mater), which now strikes me as appropriate in more ways than one:

"Light! More Light!"

(All images courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society. I would like to thank the Wisconsin Historical Society for the use of their Archives and images.)

[Post written by Audra Hilse.]

Orson Welles and His Masterpiece: Born in Wisconsin

2011-10-21T10:16:00.005-05:00

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research is on the fourth floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and is accessible to anyone. The collection houses papers from celebrities like director John Ford, Groucho Marx, and Alan Alda, among others. In addition to these, it has some holdings related to Orson Welles, a Wisconsin native born in Kenosha on May 6^th, 1915, well known for his work in radio and film. In 1938, Welles did a radio production of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was so convincing that it caused a national “panic” where people believed that Martian invasion was actually happening. In 1941, Welles wrote and directed a screenplay of the film Citizen Kane. Other notable films include The Third Man and Touch of Evil. He died in 1985.

When I visited the Wisconsin Historical Society, I knew I needed to take a look at the final draft of the Citizen Kane script. I am a film buff, and reading that draft was a defining moment for me. I only read a portion, but I gained a deeper understanding of the film. Citizen Kane is about the life and last word (Rosebud) of Newspaper mogul, Charles Foster Kane. The film is loosely based on the life of Randolph Hearst, a media mogul.

Reading the final draft allowed me to understand the locations and plot of the film better. Xanadu, the famed estate of Charles Kane, is located in Florida. The nightclub scene with the last wife of Citizen Kane was incredibly written; the nightclub is located in Atlantic City, and Orson described the wife as “cheap.” When I saw the film, I didn’t notice her appearance as cheap, rather the dingy nightclub as sad. Orson’s description in the script was very accurate.

In the beginning of Citizen Kane, after the death of Charles Foster is announced, five newspapers are shown. Orson Welles notes in the script that he wants four newspapers from the United States, and one international paper to flash across the screen. This minor detail demonstrates Orson Welles’s masterful use of imagery; Charles Kane’s death is seen as an international event and this gives insight into the persona of Kane. By examining the script, which archives like the Wisconsin Historical Society allows us to do, we can more intimately understand the scope of the film in ways that aren’t always as obvious to the casual movie-goer. These archives help us not only to touch the past, but to think about it in new ways.

[Post written by Katherine Stotis.]

The Gollmar Bros: Stewards of the Wisconsin Circus

2011-10-16T13:25:00.006-05:00

While the most famous circus owners associated with Wisconsin may be the Ringling Bros., their cousins the Gollmar Bros. also form an important part of the Born in Wisconsin archives. The Gollmar Bros. started their own circus in 1891 and operated until 1916, spending the winters in Baraboo, Wisconsin. After 1916 the Gollmar name was leased to other circuses, and last used in 1926. UW-Madison alum and Circus World Archivist Pete Shrake provided both images of and information about this fantastic collection.

The records of the Gollmar Bros. Circus are located at Circus World in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The ten cubic foot collection is primarily comprised of the business records of the Gollmar Bros. Circus. While a few years are not represented, the records provide fascinating documentation into how the increasing size of the circus required more specialized occupations such as canvas-men, hostlers, and property men. By 1916 the records show that the Gollmar Bros. Circus had nineteen different payroll classifications, with other records documenting how the circus used railroad transportation to travel bring their show to their audience. Records also detail the distribution of advertising materials and include commissary ledgers, showing how the circus interacted with the public and part of the daily life of circus workers.

The Gollmar Bros. collection is an important part of Circus World, which houses what may be the largest collection of circus artifacts in the world. Over 210 original vehicles and wagons are on the grounds, as well over 9,500 multi-colored circus posters. Also included are thousands of journals, manuscripts, business records, original oil paintings, hand bills, programs, and rare photographs and negatives documenting the legacy not just of circuses, but of circuses that were born in Wisconsin.

[Post written by Pete Shrake with the assistance of Eric Willey]

The Board of Commissioners of Public Lands

2011-10-12T08:01:00.015-05:00

The archive of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL) preserves a set of records that touches every mile of Wisconsin territory, documents much of the state's funding of education, and helps provide books for every school age child in the state. BCPL, the first state agency in Wisconsin, has had many incarnations over the years, but has always managed Wisconsin's land holdings held in trust for public projects and education. (State parks and other natural reserves, on the other hand, are not held by the agency, but by the Department of Natural Resources.) BCPL has played a role in Wisconsin's history in often unique ways -- from loaning Wisconsin the money to equip the first Wisconsin units of Union Soldiers to providing early settlers with the only loans available at a reasonable rate. The chilly archives room in a state building off of the Capitol Square contains the records that document the land transfers that funded these loans -- and continue to pay about $27 per child to each school district a year for their school libraries. Taken together, the archive documents the history of a unique expression of dedication to education that was, as this year’s theme says, “born in Wisconsin.”

Last week, I returned the BCPL archive, where I was previously a research assistant, to get my hands on some of the favorites of their collection. The agency is moving to a new location early next year, but for now, a typical shelf is shown below.

I made the mistake of wearing a light colored shirt: by the end of the day, it was covered with red rot. The agency has managed, at one point or another, more than ten million acres, and it did so without computers. As you might expect, the ledger books, with thin line after thin line of land parcels, are large enough to crush a small human being. They certainly did a number on my fingers. These massive volumes, about 6 inches thick and wrapped in cloth to help protect users from red rot, are housed horizontally on rollers.

The BCPL archive holds the field notebooks of the original survey of Wisconsin by the United States General Land Office (GLO). The surveyors criss-crossed the state, marking trees and rocks to divide the western territories of the United States into square-mile sections. The markers they placed were, and remain, the basis for all legal land descriptions. In Wisconsin, winter held a distinct advantage for this work -- the surveyors could haul their measuring chains straight across the lakes on the ice. Indeed, when the surveyors came upon Madison, they were able to walk straight across Lake Monona and Mendota. An example of the Madison survey, complete with the very common “Entered March” … “Left Marsh.”

The field notebook above is one of hundreds, each carried along across hundreds of miles of Wisconsin territory, and now kept safely in fireproof cabinets in the archive. The survey notebooks, digitized and online, are used for a variety purposes, including studying Wisconsin's original tree cover and helping decide legal conflicts between land owners.

The field notebooks and a sketch map of the territory surveyed were sent back to a Surveyor General’s office, where plat maps like this one were created:

Every so often, a piece of land would have to be resurveyed, as happened to Picnic Point on the UW campus in the 1880s. The half-century between the original survey and the resurvey had witnessed both the alteration of the lake shore and the arrival of settlers in the City of Madison. The surveyor in the 1880s took the opportunity to note that a formation in the area "is occasionally used as a picnic ground.”

One of the reasons the GLO surveys were so important was that government revenue at all levels was dependent on land, through the sale of public land or the taxation of private land. Indeed, BCPL was founded to manage the millions of acres of land given to Wisconsin by the federal government. As a state, we received between 5 and 6 million acres to support the construction of railroads, 3.2 million acres of swamp land to promote swamp drainage and education, and 1.7 million acres to support local K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin. Including other smaller land grants, Wisconsin received about 10,000,000 acres from the federal government.

Many of the educational lands were individually appraised before being put on the public market. These appraisals can show a snapshot of the economic activity in the area. Here, we have a map of a square-mile section in Grant County, a county with rich mineral deposits. The appraisal map shows a house, a stable and two furnaces situated at the intersection of a river and a local road, as well as, of course, a number of ink splotches. This section is now home to the UW Platteville campus, and Pioneer Stadium sits just north of where the bottom right furnace once was.

The educational lands were sold to the public, and buyers typically were given some kind of payment plan. At a time when banks were scarce and unwelcome, the state was often the only source of a mortgage. The records of these sales sometimes bring out interesting characters. There are lands held by women and rights to land that were transferred more than ten times between different members of the community before being paid off. When the owner managed to pay the balance on the land, he or she would receive a patent from the state, shown below.

There was little restriction on how the money that came in from educational lands was to be spent, and in the early years many financial policies failed miserably. With few banks to provide loans, the state decided that the balance of the educational fund could be used to provide loans to any Wisconsin citizen who was willing to put up their land as collateral. In theory, this policy would have helped Wisconsinites while the fund received 7% interest on its loans (a very reasonable rate in the early days of statehood). Although it was a useful service for early settlers, this loan program failed when settlers began defaulting and the mortgaged lands they forfeited sold poorly on the market. In response, the loan program began loaning money only to school districts and municipalities. Below, a school district in Taylor County, a sparsely populated area at the time, applied and received a loan for $250 in 1877. Part of the fun of working with these records is determining what they mean – was this loan interest free, or have we simply not yet found the second document that deals with the interest payments?

And here, a loan of $48,000 was approved in 1953 to help a school district serving Marquette and Oconto Counties build an “addition of classrooms to the present Coleman High School.”

This program continues to this day. The interest provided by these loans allows BCPL to distribute more than $30 million a year to local school libraries.

[Post created by Amy Unger.]

Ada James

2011-10-07T08:04:00.003-05:00

Inspired by the recent political activities in Wisconsin’s capital, I turned to the Wisconsin Historical Society to find other instances of social reform and political activity born in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Historical Society was founded in 1846 and was originally located in the Capital Building in Madison. As WHS began to outgrow its quarters, a move was planned to a larger location on the University of Wisconsin’s campus to better serve the society’s main user base at that time, university students. WHS is now housed in an impressive building opened in 1900.

Not to be missed on a trip to WHS is the second floor reading room and the many paintings that grace the staircases.

Newly renovated reading room.

WHS is open to researchers and the public alike. If a trip to Madison is not an option, WHS has a fantastic website with a variety of digitized collections and virtual reference available.

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/

The WHS archival collections are rich with materials of social reform and political unrest; varying from the papers and photographs of Edward Alsworth Ross, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin concerned with immigrant rights, federal health care and education; to film and manuscripts collections of anti-war protests from the Vietnam era; to the more recent Wisconsin Bureau of Community Health and Prevention Family Planning Program papers documenting family planning funding and education in the 1970’s and 1980’s. However, one collection in particular piqued my interest as an example of political reform born in Wisconsin.

The Ada Lois James collection chronicles the work of Richland Center, Wisconsin native Ada James as she worked to bring political equality to women and better the lives of Wisconsinites. Ada was born into a politically active family; her parents were David G. James, a Wisconsin state senator that among other accomplishments introduced a suffrage referendum bill to the state senate at the urging of his daughter in 1911; and her mother Laura Briggs James who was involved in the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association with her daughter. Throughout her life, Ada was involved in many organizations and social movements. Her papers contain correspondence with other social activist in the Midwest, correspondence from politicians as well as personal correspondence.

Below is the hand drawn cover and inside page of the Political Equality Club 1909 member log. Ada was president of the club from 1911-1918. She was also active with the Wisconsin Women’s Suffrage Association, and the National Women’s Party.

President-Marila Marshall, Vice-President-Gracie Harn, Secretary-Marcia Bliss, Treasurer-Mary McCormick

The suffrage movement began in Wisconsin in 1846 and was not fulfilled until June of 1919 when Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19^th amendment. Below is a letter from state senator Harlan P. Bird to Ada explaining why he is unable to support women’s suffrage. Although Senator Bird appears to hold women in high esteem, he explains to Ada that he cannot allow women to carry a man’s intellectual burden of voting. He also writes that he cannot foresee a time when the suffrage movement will catch on at a national level. The letter is dated April of 1909, some ten years before women won the vote in Wisconsin. You can click on the images for a closer look.

Ada and her fellow suffragist traveled around Wisconsin holding gatherings and trying to win the public’s support for women’s suffrage.

A group of suffragists in 1911 or 1912. Ada is in the center, wearing a sash.

A gathering in support of women’s suffrage in 1912 at Sister Bay, Wisconsin.

Although the suffrage movement was of great importance to Ada, she found time to be involved in other political movements. During World War I Ada became involved in pacifism and prohibition movements. After women secured the vote, Ada remained involved in social and political reform. In 1922 Ada was the Vice-Chairman of the Republican State Central Committee and in 1923 became the President of the Wisconsin Progressive Association. In her later life Ada became involved with social work within Wisconsin.

Ada was born in Wisconsin, and so was her determination and perseverance to bring about political equality.

[Post created by Laura Farley.]

2011-10-05T18:10:00.016-05:00

New Glarus Historical Society and the Swiss Historical Village

2011-10-01T13:15:00.011-05:00

Nestled in the rolling green hills of Green County Wisconsin, sits the quaint village of New Glarus. Proclaiming itself as America’s little Switzerland, the downtown resembles a series high roofed chalets rather than tar-papered brick structures ubiquitous in small towns. The landscape pales compared to the snow-capped mountains in the Swiss Canton of Glarus from which the town’s first settlers came but New Glarus has never forgotten its roots. The ornate Gothic typeface Fraktur which fell out of favor in the Germanies shortly before World War II peppers storefronts selling Swiss foods or knickknacks. Not all goods are created equal as far as their authenticity is concerned; it is an open secret that a bygone bride shortage caused rampant Scandinavian inter-marriage. Non-Swiss residents, drawn by the enthusiasm and environment of the town, continue to arrive at odd intervals but like in any small town they serve an informal probationary period before they are adopted.

A few blocks west of Highway 69, bisecting the small but lively downtown, lies the Swiss Historical Village maintained by the local historical society. A Swiss village at the edge of a Swiss village, authentic and authentically reproduced settlement structures abut the Swiss Cemetery and educate tourists, many of them Swiss nationals, of the transcendent American spirit of exploration and hardship.

Tucked above and below the village’s gift shop are the Historical Society’s heart. Inaccessible to most visitors, I needed to enlist the credibility of the Swiss Center of North America’s President and former local news anchor Beth Zurbuchen on Durst Road to gain access.

The first items which caught my eye were the metal edged stacks of original New Glarus newspapers. I immediately noticed the German language newspaper Deutsch Schweizerzerischer Courier changed its name to the New Glarus Post shortly after the Great War, switching not only its language but typeface as well.

My inner student archivist could not help but marvel at the well intentioned but seemingly haphazard cataloging and preservation. Newspapers were laid flat between non-acidic tissue paper in metal edged boxes while heavy Swiss 78 rpm records were stacked, harming their grooves. Many photographs are cataloged and arranged by subject but photos of the annual William Tell play were simply placed in a box.

I immediately recognized the name on the stylized family tree nearby. Going back into the 17^th century, the tree is too complex for me to find the leaves representing the famous Dürst family that settled in New Glarus in the 19^th. I remember the traveling trunk sitting on display in the Swiss Center of North America with “Dürst” fastidiously hand painted in Fraktur. Its literal weight sinks into my consciousness as I try to fathom carrying my worldly possessions to an unknown land; suddenly the sturdy, metal braced trunk seems so fragile. This moment of reflection is banished when I again wonder how Durst Road, which is also the Swiss Center’s street, is unrelated to the members on that tree. Perhaps it is but street signs are not allowed to have non-English characters; that would be a true shame since “Dürst” without the umlaut means “thirst,” very apropos for any street adjacent to the legendary New Glarus Brewery.

The basement houses their rotating objects collection. Cold and dry compared to the upper floor, the care and cataloging is more evident. Items donated by the community include shadow boxes of war medals, 19^th century firearms, musical instruments, and their newest, unprocessed acquisition—a bell from the Swiss Reformed church. Having become the United Church of Christ in the 1960s, the new church would have no use for an instrument engraved with the Swiss Reformed identifiers. I noticed thumbnail-sized gems encircling these Swiss Reformed markings and quickly realized they were not original; my guide could not tell me who donated the bell.

Evidently someone in the donor’s family felt the pristine instrument was not pretty enough and so bedazzled it with a dozen pieces of costume jewelry. It was upon this conjecture that I understood the position of this place; since they were charged with the preservation of the village’s history and culture, they accepted countless small donations from the community because few else would.

Every picture and object indicated their commitment to maintain the uniqueness of their town. A Swiss-German is a political and ethnic distinction rather than a racial one yet the New Glarners sustained themselves and their identities across the Alps, an ocean, half a continent, and within an enveloping immigrant population. The archive above the gift shop held the spirit of New Glarus as if some kind of reliquary; the uniqueness of the town and its community—and thus the tourist draw—is sustained by the psychic power of the archive.

My heart sank as I left. As a proud Minnesotan I never allowed myself the spiritual comfort of belonging to this state but New Glarus sneaked into my unguarded soul. For that brief moment I too was born in Wisconsin.

[Post created by Alex Champion]

Celebrate American Archives Month with SAA-SC!

2011-10-01T11:00:00.005-05:00

Welcome to the 4^th annual Archives Month Blog! The Society of American Archivists-Student Chapter of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is proud to welcome you to share in another month’s worth of posts and pictures in honor of American Archives Month.

This year’s theme, “Born in Wisconsin,” invites people and organizations around the state to reflect on the meaning of archives in their lives and society, and to discover the wealth of fascinating materials held by archives in Wisconsin. Throughout the month members of the SAA-SC will be traveling around the state of Wisconsin (and beyond!) to highlight unique collections and organizations, all the while writing blog posts illustrated with photographs of the archives and materials we see. We will report on a variety of archival materials “born,” originating or having roots in Wisconsin: native peoples, individuals, places, ideas, events, products, industries, hoaxes and much more.

We hope you will join us throughout the month to learn about archives, read about the great organizations who preserve them, and share engaging stories about anything and everything “born in Wisconsin!” Check back often, and we’ll see you in the comments.

To read more about American Archives Month, visit this page on the Society of American Archivists website. To see what’s going on around Wisconsin throughout October, find suggestions for events for your organization, and learn more about Archives Month in Wisconsin, visit the Wisconsin Historical Society’s website.

Where Do We Go From Here?

2010-11-14T13:15:00.013-06:00

Our student chapter completed our American Archives Month celebration with a display for the UW-Madison SLIS display case. The library scheduled the display for three weeks because we recieved so many great compliments about last year's scrapbook display. We continued with the State's theme of the month, "Postcarding Wisconsin," but broadened the display to include vintage postcards and albertype print-outs of postcards from all over the United States.

Virgina Corvid found the albertype print-outs at the Wisconsin Historical Society and secured permission for their use. She also brought all the tools displayed in the case: an awl, a piece of ore, a carpenter's pencil and corner measure, rusty nails, and other implements to help give the display an early Twentieth century ambiance.

The vintage postcards were provided by my father-in-law, an antiques collector. They range from photo postcards to divided back postcards and capture a good deal of the Western Pennsylvanian portion of Appalachia where I grew up. We wanted to recreate an aspect of postcard use during the early 1900's, calling into play railroads, steel mills, construction, and factories, all of which were aspects of industrialization in the U.S. during that time period.

Again this year, we had the pleasure of archiving the display creation. The photographs in this post depict us putting the display together and the final product. In the second photograph, Leah Kolb and Virginia Corvid are deciding how to arrange background colors and text. In the next photo, Virginia is completing final touches to the case before we lock it up. The student chapter members that were part of creating the display are pictured below (from left) Eric Willey, Virginia Corvid, Danielle Taylor, and Elizabeth Fox-Corbett.

The student chapter's activities associated with our celebration of archives month started here, but they haven't yet ended. Danielle submitted an entry to the Midwest Archives Conference winter newsletter sharing our experience with the blog and display. I will also present our blog at this year's Midwest Archives Conference on a panel titled: "Reaching Virtually Everyone -Virtually."

On behalf of everyone who has created posts for the blog and who helped create the display, we want to thank everyone who followed our journeys learning about postcards and taking steps into the past to uncover hidden treasures throughout Wisconsin.

Entry compiled by: Eliizabeth Fox-Corbett

The Mazomanie Historical Society

2010-10-29T09:26:00.000-05:00

Mazomanie is a small village about 45 minutes west of downtown Madison with claims to fame concerning railroads and electricity. As a stop on the first rail line to cross Wisconsin, the village served as an important service center for over 25 years. Mazomanie was also an early adopter of electricity; the village was first lit in 1885, which was before Madison. These are just a couple things I learned about Mazomanie when I visited the village’s historical society and museum on a rainy Saturday morning in late October.

I was lucky enough to meet with Bob Dodsworth, who founded the Mazomanie Historical Society in 1966. Bob explained that the historical society and the library, while independent entities, share a building that used to be the railroad depot. The structure was built by the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad Company in 1857, and it was restored to its original form in 1993, which was when it began its new life as a library and research center.

The Mazomanie Historical Society also maintains a museum, which is housed in a building that served as an electrical generation plant in its first life. Today the museum consists of four rooms and an attached jail (no longer in use!), and displays permanent exhibits about Mazomanie’s settlement and development, as well as rotating exhibits.

The Mazomanie Historical Society has over 500 postcards, which I was permitted to leaf through and examine. Bob Dodsworth said the postcards have been slowly trickling in since he founded the society in 1966, and that today some are even found on eBay. The collection really does run the gamut, though there are some repeaters—the high school, in particular, seemed to be a popular choice.

On the back of the above postcard (stamped 1908), someone wrote a note to the receiver; the sender and the receiver must have attended together.

Various downtown views of Mazomanie were also popular postcards.

Above is a postcard, dated 1911, showing a Mazomanie street car traveling through downtown.

And here are another couple views of downtown. The upper is dated 1910, and the lower is undated.

Here is the Mazomanie Public Library and Historical Society Research Center in its previous incarnation as a busy railroad depot, 1909.

Sometimes the postcards took a more serious turn, such as these that depict the damage done by two deadly tornados.

This postcard of Hitler is one that offered no clues on the back about where it came from.

And, to end on a more lighthearted note, here is proof (in case anyone has forgotten) that photo doctoring was possible pre-Photoshop! On the back, the sender wrote to the receiver that he thought the corn was “grown near where you grew up.”

Special thanks to Bob Dodsworth for welcoming me to the Mazomanie Historical Society, filling me in on its origins and collections, and giving a personal tour of the museum!

Images of postcards courtesy of the Mazomanie Historical Society.

Entry compiled by Marisa Hirsch.

Seeking Meaning in Context

2010-10-28T09:12:00.006-05:00

Recently, I met with Andy Kraushaar, the visual materials curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society, to discuss his postcard collection. When we met, I was hoping that I would discover a collection of postcards with a story behind it, especially, in the archival sense, a provenancial story. As our meeting and discussion progressed, however, the difference of visual materials became clear to me once again. Images have an appeal that defies original order. People collect and exchange them for their own sake. Historically this has resulted in images often being removed from their context in archival collections and organized for subject-based access. It has also resulted in what archivists call artificial collections, an assemblage of chosen items rather than a group organically accumulated as the byproduct of a function.

Yet with people’s affinity for narrative and story, there is always a story. In Andy’s collection of postcards, the story that emerged for me was part of the history of photography. Before the widespread mechanical reproduction of images, hobbyists and professionals produced photos through painstaking and sometimes toxic methods, images are that compelling. In the history of postcards, the real-photo postcard preceded the mass-produced postcard. In other words, people mailed the original prints themselves with messages and stamps affixed to the back. For a time, Kodak produced photo-printing paper with postcard graphical conventions on the back like the separating line down the middle. The high-fidelity of actual photographs came casually and sweetly in the mail.

Andy has collected a number of real photo postcards mainly for their compelling and unusual composition. We looked at a number of them on his Flickr photostream. As I browsed through them, I simply wondered. What did this mean to people? Who are those people? Who made that and who did they send it to? Find a few of my favorites below.

Find more real photo postcards in Andy Kraushar’s photo stream on Flickr by searching for his user name akrausha and the tag rppc for real photo postcards. There are currently 214 in the collection.

Images Courtesy of: Andy Kraushar.

Special thanks to Andy Kraushar for his inspiration, stories, and time!

Entry complied by: Virginia Corvid

Prairie du Chien Museum at Fort Crawford

2010-10-27T15:35:00.018-05:00

My voyage to Prairie du Chien began on a gorgeous Saturday morning in early October. The drive from Madison, to Prairie du Chien is quite amazing, glacial bluffs on one side and flat, prairie lands along the other. I met with Mary Elise Antoine, the Vice President of the Prairie du Chien Historical Society. Mary is a librarian, historic researcher, and consultant to museums and private collectors. She provided such amazing details and stories that I am unable to convey the entirety of it here.

Fort Crawford was built on a small island on the Mississippi River in 1816, by the United States military to create a military presence in the area after the War of 1812. Due to flooding the fort was moved to Prairie du Chien in 1829. Prairie du Chien is the oldest town on the Upper Mississippi River, part of the Tri-Cities that also include Marquette and McGregor, Iowa. Because of Prairie du Chien’s location it was a very prosperous place during the French and Indian War and sometime thereafter. The ties between the people of Prairie du Chien with the local Native Americans were very strong; so much so that the United States military built a chain of forts along with Fort Crawford when it was moved from the island onto the mainland. This military move obviously put an end to fur trade as well as the ties of the local towns’ people with the Native Americans, which not long after led to the Black Hawk War in 1832.

The above postcard is a photograph of a painting inscribed: Original Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. This first collection was donated to Prairie du Chien Museum at Fort Crawford by Griff William, a local resident, interested in the acquisition of local historical materials.

The photo postcard above is Fort Crawford before its restoration, begun by the Daughters of the American Revolution during the 1930’s. The postcard is inscribed in white paint, along the bottom of the left hand corner: Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien – Wis.

The above postcard, also part of the McGregor collection, circa 1910 is a photograph of Steiner’s Construction, early immigrants to Prairie du Chien, their family line has been in the area for over 150 years.

The other collection Mary brought with her to show me comes from a private collector she works with and permission was given to share a few of this mysterious individual’s fantastic collection.

The above postcard is inscribed: Section of New Prairie du Chien, Marquette $1,000,000 suspension bridge, total length 3729 feet, only suspension bridge on the Mississippi River, open for traffic 1932, dedicated June 9-10-11, 1932. I love this image with the parked 1930’s automobiles in the foreground and people standing just behind the cars on the bridge barely visible.

A rooftop level street scene, inscribed: Main Street, Prairie du Chien, Wis. The photographer captures very clearly the road sign for Wisconsin Highway 18 then known as The Great River Road which connects Marquette, Iowa, and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

Last but definitely not least, a spectacular aerial view of Prairie du Chien, Marquette, Iowa and the Mississippi River. This photo postcard is inscribed: Pontoon and Suspension Bridges between Marquette, Iowa & Prairie du Chien, Wis. The steamboat with its stacks blazing captures an important aspect of history within this Tri-City area.

I regret that I cannot share all the amazing postcards with everyone, but if you’re ever in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, don’t forget to stop at the Fort Crawford Hospital Museum and all the local historical places around town. Believe me, you’re missing out!

Images Courtesy of Prairie du Chien, Fort Crawford Museum. Special Thanks to Mary Elise Antoine for all her great information and time!

Entry Compiled by: Elizabeth Fox-Corbett

Postcards at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee

2010-10-26T13:57:00.010-05:00

A short story for a glimpse into history

A recent visit led us to the Jewish Museum Milwaukee: http://www.jewishmuseummilwaukee.org/, where we were greeted by the museum’s archivist, Jay Hyland. The archives and museum have an important relationship and work very closely with one another. The museum and archives are also an important part of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. The museum’s archives are a rich resource for people looking to do genealogical research, which is mainly what the records are used for. On this day Jay took some time to show us another interesting part of the archive: the postcard collection. He was knowledgeable about the collection, and also gave some insight into the importance of a story as part of a collection of materials in an archive.

The collection of postcards at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee is small, but varied. There are several different subjects of postcards, and all offer some insight into an aspect of the collection. However, as Jay pointed out, the history of this postcard collection is somewhat of a mystery. It’s unfortunate that we don’t know the back story of the postcards, but they do show us some interesting views of Jewish culture and life around the early parts of the 20th century, and the collection has some really wonderful images!

The postcards above and below show images celebrating the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, commonly referred to as “Jewish New Year.” An inscription along the top of both cards is a traditional greeting wishing the reader a good year. Because these postcards have such beautiful imagery, they are often used by community members around the time of Rosh Hashanah (this year it was in early September) to create holiday displays.

The postcards above and below highlight a different aspect of this collection: they both show pro-labor images of the early 20th century. The above postcard depicts a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the rich tycoons who depend on laborers; these men and women are depicted as supporting prohibition in order to make their workers “work for 12 cents a day like those in the orient.” In contrast, the working-class people are depicted as trying to “enjoy life as much as possible and study how to better conditions.” The final inscription on the front reads, “Not intoxication but exploitation makes us poor. Capitalists drink and are rich. Oriental workers don’t yet, are poor.” These inscriptions show the complex relationship between several different issues in the early 20th century, including class, industrialism and prohibition.

The postcard above shows a strongly symbolic, pro-labor image of a wedding-cake like structure; at the bottom of the structure, supporting all the other layers, is the working class. Above them are the middle class, soldiers, religious leaders, the aristocracy and, at the pinnacle, a bag of money as big as the people depicted. This postcard illustrates pro-labor ideals in an intriguing and striking allegorical image.

Several of the postcards also provide information about the community member who owned them. The message on the above postcard is written in Russian; however, the printed inscription above is in Russian, French and Polish, indicating along with the handwritten message that the owner of this postcard was probably from Russia or Poland. Several of the postcards in this collection have messages in this same handwriting on the back.

The postcard below again shows the ties of the Milwaukee Jewish community to their Eastern European past. The card’s main inscription, in Russian, states “Hello from Rogacheva.” There is indeed a town in Russia called Rogacheva, which is likely the same town this postcard is depicting. On each of the wings of the butterfly woman pictured at the center is a photo of a building or scene in Rogacheva; clockwise from top left, these images are of Rogacheva’s main street, some sort of institute, the beach front and the theater.

As we saw, even with little explicit story, postcards can offer a rich view into the past and cultural background of the people who owned and used them; indeed, through this collection at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee we got a glimpse into the cultures, languages and politics of the Jewish community in the early 20th century.

Thanks to Jay Hyland for showing us this beautiful collection and sharing a bit about the archives with us!

Images courtesy of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee.

Entry created by Eric Willey and Cassie Warholm-Wohlenhaus.

Chippewa Valley Museum

2010-10-25T10:25:00.008-05:00

Unique leather postcards from the Glenn Curtis Smoot Library and Archives in Eau Claire, WI.

The Chippewa Valley Museum is the sort of place well known in the Eau Claire area for its exhibits documenting daily life in Wisconsin. But the museum is also home to the Glen Smoot Library and Archives, a small but valuable repository tucked away between the exhibits on pioneer life and woodland Indian Tribes. As an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, I was a docent at the museum and spent many hours there giving tours to elementary school children. But I never had the opportunity to visit the archives, so when I found out that the museum maintains a collection of postcards, I made sure to visit on my next trip to Eau Clair. Librarian Eldbjorg Tobin was kind enough to take me into the stacks to look at the approximately 1200 postcards they keep, and also allowed me peruse them to my heart's content.

The collection is small but covers a diverse range of postcard topics, styles, and time periods, most have some kind of connection to the region. One of the largest portions of the collection was of lumber-related materials, and I look at dozens and dozens of black and white postcards of lumberjacks and lumber camps from the 1800's through the 1920's.

Every lumber camp needs a mascot. This one has Mr. Tootles.

Popular local sports like ski jumping are also highlighted in this collection.

While many of the postcards had the typical views and vistas that I would expect, I was struck by the idiosyncratic subject matter of some of the cards: A downtown fire in 1915 that destroyed a department store, for example:
Or a group shot of the first WWI volunteers to enlist from August, WI, standing awkwardly on the sidewalk in their street clothes. One that I found particularly odd was a booklet of postcards of scenes from Reims, France, after it was bombed and gutted during WWI. Each postcard highlighted an area of particularly devastating damage. I wondered what the sender might scribble on this one:
"My dear, I saw this pile of rubble that was once a thriving neighborhood and thought of you. Love, Stanley."

But of course, a lot of people (myself included) buy postcards not to send to others but to hold onto a piece of memory: a beautiful painting in a museum, a city view you couldn't possibly achieve with your little Canon Powershot, an event you didn't witness but holds personal significance. These postcards are compelling to me because they come from the same community I grew up in and spent the first years of my adulthood. I found myself pulling out postcard after postcard to look at and photograph because they held connections, however tangential, to my own life and history. I stood there wondering what made someone think a certain street, a certain view was important enough to print and sell - and what made someone pick it up and buy it? What made someone save it for decades?

Perhaps most important of all, I left wondering: what kind of things can we learn about community identity from the buying and selling, sending and saving of images?

The building to the right to the distant trolley car was my last apartment in Eau Claire.

Thanks to the Chippewa Valley Museum Librarian, Eldbjorg Tobin.
http://www.cvmuseum.com/Library1.html

Entry compiled by: Kaitlin Dunn.

Curt Teich Archives

2010-10-22T09:18:00.005-05:00

If you take Highway 12 east out of Madison, and follow the farm studded fields south, you eventually end up in Wauconda, IL. This is exactly what I did this week, on a particularly snappy fall day during height of southern Wisconsin autumn color. With brittle stalks of sun-reflecting golden corn alternating with the brown stubble of harvested fields; it would have been a pleasant mid-week escape even if I wasn’t heading toward the largest public collection of postcards in the world. However, this collection—situated on the grounds of the Lake County Discovery Museum—is well worth the trek across the border for anyone interested in postcards. In Wauconda, it’s not an exaggeration to say that postcards outnumber people here by thirty to one. That works out to over 350,000 postcards!

As I toured the Archives with Corinne Menominee, collections cataloguer, and Debra Gust, imaging and licensing specialist, I learned this abundance is due to the donation of the Curt Teich Postcard Company. The Curt Teich Company was begun in Chicago in 1898 and produced postcards of scenic places throughout the U.S. and the world. Sold in 1976, the company’s archive of postcards and related material was donated intact to the Lake County Discovery Museum in 1982. The archives maintains copies of most of the postcards the company produced, as well examples of every postcard in album form, and over 100,000 work files for individual postcards. For several years the archives was solely focused on cataloging the thousands of items they received from the company. But now the archives accepts donations of other postcard collections—and field far more offers than they can possibly accept.

Each one of these boxes contains 500 postcards

Examples of all of the Curt Teich Company postcards can be found in one of these albums.

This being a blog about Wisconsin postcards, I couldn’t visit this archive without looking at some examples from the Badger state. This was not difficult to do, as the archives has postcards from 10,000 cities and towns, including over 400 Wisconsin communities. I had the opportunity to look at several examples of postcards of Wisconsin cities from throughout the 20^th century and was struck by the variety of styles and views. The postcards I saw of Madison and Milwaukee were incredibly comprehensive in their locales and angles. Most of these postcards were artistic renderings of photographs, using the bright, punchy colors the company was known for in later decades. One can trace the aesthetic evolution of the company by noting the change from muted, muddy colors in the 1910’s to brighter, sharper colors in the 1930’ and 40’s and beyond.

These souvenir booklets contain a variety of miniature views.

These work files are invaluable to researchers because they document the process of creating each postcard, sometimes revealing the images are not always what they appear to be. For example, Corinne showed me a postcard of Bayfield WI. It was a simple view of a country road with an approaching automobile. But the corresponding work file reveals that the photograph used in the postcard is labeled New York, not Bayfield, WI. Corinne also mentioned the artist’s habit of adding small touches to postcard art to create a more pleasing scene (for example, adding a trolley car to an otherwise empty street or removing buildings for a less cluttered look.)

The real photograph labeled “General. New York” next to the finished postcard, labeled “Greetings from Bayfield, WI.”

Items from the Bayfield postcard work file.

The archives hosts a large number of researchers seeking Curt Teich images for anything from magnets to company calendars, scholarly research and even a few movies. An example of recent scholarly research was a study of imagery of the Grand Canyon, but my mind wheeled with a dozen other possibilities of research that could be done with this collection and the other smaller collections in the archives. Thank you to Debra Gust and Corinne Menominee for showing this fascinating collection and sharing its history with me!

Learn more about the Curt Teich Archives at: http://www.lcfpd.org/teich_archives/?rdct=teicharchives.org

Images courtesy of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives and fotosearch.com

Entry compiled by Kaitlin Dunn

Wisconsin Veterans Museum

2010-10-18T10:18:00.001-05:00

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center research room is oddly welcoming for a state building with the banal name “Thirty on the Square”. Tasked with collecting primary and secondary materials documenting the wars and lives of Wisconsin veterans, it is unique even to similar archives which typically collect materials for particular branches of the armed forces, particular wars, or even particular units. This latitude allows them to cast a larger net but also means they must actively capture the latest aspects of veterans’ lives as wars, times, and technologies change. Reference and Outreach Archivist Russell Horton is preparing a display of postcards from the early 20^th Century which will illustrate their supplemental role in, rather than as, informative communication with their relatives back home and show the richness of their travels as they trained and fought.

Housed with other photographs, some dating to the Civil War, are scores of postcards protected by thin plastic enclosures to retard the decades of deterioration. The writing, whether pen or pencil, is often faded into a nearly illegible scrawl but the vast majority contain no annotation whatsoever; the World War I postcards are typically reproductions of photographs showing little more than a man in uniform with a single annotation, usually (but not always) where correspondence is written: “Dad” is the most common but these are usually personal names with implicit family comprehension. Horton speculates that these postcards served as photographs to commemorate time and place and accompanied letters or other notes. A handful are addressed and stamped with no additional information.

The mass produced postcards are similarly bereft of personal touches but primarily display the environmental circumstances of the soldiers. Marked with the names of French printing companies these postcards capture the rubble of broken cities like Verdun and the corpses of slain airplane pilots, but also the portentous arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces on parade and echoed in the World War II postcards commemorating the liberation of Paris. These World War II postcards, with captions in French and English, are far more celebratory as the people of Paris shrug off the despotism of the Nazis and welcome the arrival of American forces.

Four cards stuck out to me in particular: The first was a World War I era plain paper with a sewn face depicting a purple flower and the words “Forget me not.”

A second and far simpler government issued postcard informed the recipient that their soldier had successfully arrived in France as a part of the American Expeditionary Forces but was an oddly comforting courtesy from the Army.

The third and fourth were more extensive, however. A series of ten postcards documenting the landscape of one 1941 soldier’s training camp outside San Diego was the most annotated of them all. His descriptions of the photographs fall off the edges and fill every square inch of white space and thus there is no room for an address or stamp. They were likely sent with a letter or a small packet. The fourth set of postcards was of the type that Horton is placing in his exhibit; an object stating to be a “Souvenir Folder” and emboldened with Lady Liberty, the unstamped and unaddressed envelope is actually a string of ten postcards depicting the American cargo vessel USS Wilhelmina. According to the online Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, she was built in 1909 by Matson Navigation Co. and impressed into the US Navy during the Great War. She was returned in 1919 and sold to British interests in 1940 only to be sunk by U-boat in 1940.

In an age when Wisconsin was more rural and its residents likely to born, live, and die in the same county, these postcards illustrated their circumstances more than their thoughts. I cannot speak for succeeding generations of veterans but I suspect that sophisticated mass communication, cheaper photographic reproduction, and colored illustrations and photos reduced the need to implant photographs onto postcards or color-in scenic images of exotic locales. With telephones and later e-mail to inform family of the soldier’s circumstances, postcards fell back on commemorating a location or event. Annotations are more extensive today but circumstantial; The Eiffel Tower postcard may describe the poor body odor of the locals, a Vienna one expressing joy over the size of the pretzels available in the Christmas Market, or any number of snippets perhaps unworthy to be sent in a letter, e-mail, or phone call. Personally I am a fan of this bygone era when pictures spoke for themselves and were far more telling.

Images courtesy of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

Entry compiled by: Alex Champion

Wisconsin Historical Society - Albertype Collection

2010-10-15T09:07:00.001-05:00

The Wisconsin Historical Society holds a remarkable postcard-related collection, the nitrate negatives of the Albertype Company. This collection is comprised of 12,000 nitrate negatives produced by the Albertype Company of Brooklyn, New York between 1890 and 1952 that were used to create over 25,000 photographic prints, souvenir books, pamphlets and postcards for national distribution during this time period. The former photograph curator of the Society, Paul Vanderbilt, obtained them from the Library of Congress and brought them to WHS in 1954 and 1955.

The negatives are stunning and fragile for the same reason, the nitrate-negative reproduction process the Albertype Company employed. Invented by Austrian Photographer Joseph Albert (1825-1886), the process used a collotype coated glass plate to produce a printing plate for inking and reproduction on paper. It made high-speed mass production of photographs on paper which mimicked the appearance of photographs possible for the first time. The process has been replaced today with offset lithography but is still in use in fine art reproduction. The large format nitrate negatives ranging from 4” x 5” to 8” x 10” the Albertype Company used for this process have a gorgeous level of detail but the nitrate negative material itself is an unstable format that will degrade into noxious, flammable, outgassing goo over time. Over time, other cellulose formats replaced nitrate negatives because of these problems and today the more stable polyester format is standard. Cooling will considerable slow the nitrate decay process and WHS stores the negatives in refrigerators to mitigate the decay of the negatives. Meanwhile, the Visual Materials Digital Lab is digitizing the negatives and placing them online to allow greater access to the collection.

The collection fascinates me for a number of reasons. First, its management and description reflects changing priorities and approaches in archival visual materials practices. The Albertype negatives are arranged topically and have item-level description including location typewritten on each sleeve. Vanderbilt also dispersed some of the collection to other repositories based on content affinities. This item-level treatment is no longer possible for most collections and as I read the type on each sleeve I consider the amount of time and research that went into to the work. Moreover, during Vanderbilt’s time, photos were seen as useful for their content and properly separated from their provenance-based original order in collections. Distributing parts of the collection to other repositories based on the location documented in the photo and completely physically reorganizing the collection into subject categories (including, for instance, glaciers) was appropriate and obvious. Technologically facilitated access to visual materials allows archives today to provide both subject and content-based access while preserving provenance context. More important, I also think that archivists in our media saturated society have shifted to considering photographs as records in a way they were not previously.

Approaching the materials in the Albertype collection as a whole exposes many other layers of what it documents apart from particular places at particular times. When the collection was originally produced ostensibly it offered a new visual lexicon to America, of America. It was the cutting edge of mass-produced visual materials in a geographically-large young nation composed primarily of immigrants with many barriers to transportation. In other words, I see the Albertype collection as a record of the visual stories the nation told itself about itself to create itself across the barriers of space and culture.

Perusing the digitized portions of the collection underlines this propagandistic nation-forming function of the images. It documents regions, history and citizens of the country as stereotype and grand narrative. Here is the ice breaking up in Alaska, here are the things that belonged to the Pilgrims, here are the “Indians,” here is the impoverished and happy “negro,” here is the city beautiful, here are the giant trees to be cut in the west, here are the portraits of “great men,” here is a room where George Washington lived. These were postcard images to send to distant relatives and friends. Looking at the collection as a whole, I read these images against the grain, seeing both the image itself and how it contributed to a construction of “America.”

Ice Break in Alaska, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 68799

Pilgrim Chair and Cradle, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 72074

Buffalo Hunting in the Southwest Painting, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 70725

African American Boy, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 71438

Fountain in New York City, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 69585

Old Growth Forest, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 68498

Andrew Jackson, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 70754

George Washington’s bedroom, Valley Forge, PA Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 71964

Digitization of these remarkable and fascinating images is ongoing. Currently there are over 2700 online. Find the collection by searching “Albertype” as a keyword in the Wisconsin Historical Images Database at: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/

Many thanks to Andy Kraushaar the Visual Materials Curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society for introducing me to the Albertype collection and for his work to make it broadly available online.

I wonder what we will tell ourselves about ourselves with these images now.

Entry compiled by: Virginia Corvid.

New Glarus Historical Society

2010-10-13T08:55:00.000-05:00

Greetings from New Glarus!

The Swiss Historical Village and Museum’s Picture Postcards

The history of the postcard collection at the New Glarus Swiss Historical Village and Museum is just beginning to come alive again. The collection has been part of the archive for as long as our guide, Jo Gehl, has been there. However, until about ten years ago the postcards were completely unorganized. Jo took on the project of organizing the postcards, finishing last year, and she holds high hopes that patrons will be able to use them for a wider variety of purposes. Along with postcards, the Historical Society also has collections of newspapers and store ledgers.

Jo took a little time to talk about the early history of the town. New Glarus was settled in 1845 after about 200 volunteers decided to emigrate from Glarus, a small town in Eastern Switzerland, after experiencing several years of economic downturn, poor harvests and food shortages. Settlers said that the valley, hills and trees of the area reminded them of their native Switzerland.

The postcard archive has many pictures of historical New Glarus. These were not only created by the people of the town, but were also part of the tourism industry propagated by the state of Wisconsin. The state often printed up postcards highlighting the more popular attractions of Wisconsin. Sometimes the scenes depicted were exaggerated, as seen in the postcards above. However, many of the postcards created by the citizens of New Glarus show the town in an authentic way. The postcard below has the inscription “Main St./New Glarus/Wis.”

There are many depictions of people in general, and also many bearing wedding-day images of brides and grooms, like the postcards below. Many postcards show personal scenes, and are a window into the personal memories of the early New Glarus residents. In the late 1800s, printing photographs on glossy photo paper was very expensive. In order to save money and to still have their personal photographs and memories, people would print photographs on postcards. Jo estimates that as much as 70-80% of photographs were printed this way at the end of the 19^th century.

These postcards depicting people were especially interesting; most of the postcards showed very stoic. people. Jo explained that in the late 19^th century, the process of taking a photograph was very long, and you had to stand very still while it was being exposed. Also, the ideas behind having your picture taken were different—a photograph wasn’t something to smile for, it was something that would merely show what you looked like.

Postcards with people as their subjects are interesting because they indicate some of the trends and traditions of people of the time period (for example, the postcard of the farmers above shows styles of dress and one of the machines from this time period). Not only that, but they can also be used for more specific purposes. By examining these picture postcards, patrons are able to do genealogy work and identify certain people who were living in New Glarus at a certain time.

Sometimes the backs of postcards were rather interesting. Below we see an inscription on the back of a postcard sent to a Minnesotan, written in German. The language in this message is very familiar, and the two people were possibly friends or relatives. Many of the postcards in the archive have messages written in foreign languages, especially the Swiss dialect of German.

The residents of New Glarus were eager both to hold onto their language and transplanted culture, but they were also eager to identify with the new place they lived, as we see in the pride-filled postcards depicting New Glarus. Jo shared an interesting story of how some residents of New Glarus became American citizens. The newly-arrived immigrants of New Glarus often wanted to gain their citizenship as soon as they settled. They walked the 17 miles to the county clerk, filled out the paperwork and swore an oath for their citizenship. When they left, the county clerk would give them an apple. The new citizen would take the apple back to New Glarus and plant the seeds on the grounds of the museum. All around the museum the apple trees grew, and whenever the community had a potluck or a social gathering, they would gather the apples and make an apple pie, which was known in New Glarus thereafter as a “citizenship pie.”

Thanks to Jo Gehl of the New Glarus Historical society for taking time to share these collections and their wonderful history with us!

Images courtesy of the New Glarus Historical Society.

Entry created by Eric Willey and Cassie Warholm-Wohlenhaus.

Mount Horeb Area Historical Society

2010-10-11T09:55:00.002-05:00

Mount Horeb, Wisconsin is proudly known as the "Troll Capital of the World." The town celebrates its Norwegian heritage through the mythological trolls that are so prominent in Scandinavian folklore. Troll statues greet visitors as they visit the area.