Documenting Wisconsin

I just lost two hours of my life browsing through the photo archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society (although as a wee lad in Wisconsin we always called it the "Hysterical Society"). What is remarkable is not just that they have literally thousands of vintage photos available online, but they’re all meticulously annotated.

I would like to show some thumbnails of the photos they have available, but the society has made it very clear that they don’t take kindly to that. In fact the website states quite plainly that they expect a hundred bucks for every photo that I reproduce.

But the motherfuckers didn’t say I couldn’t reproduce their descriptions of the photos.

They have a fun and weird gallery of some 82 photo-doctored postcards.

"A group of men on a lakeshore grapple with a giant pike. Two men pull on a rope hooked to the pike while two more stand ready with harpoon-like sticks. Another man pours out a bottle of water on his head. Red text in the upper portion of the image reads, "How we do things at Attica, Wis.""

"Photomontage of a dwarf wearing a top hat driving a cart, drawn by a mule, filled with giant eggs. The dwarf is wearing a suit and a top hat. The donkey is being confronted on the road by a giant chicken. A barn is visible in the background. The words, "Caught with the Goods," appear at the bottom of the image field."

There’s also 152 circus photos. Wisconsin, despite being the most banal place on earth, was where the Ringling Brothers wintered.

"Two men sit in a two-wheeled buggy hooked up to zebras, next to a fence near the Ring Barn on the left (which is still standing), with several male spectators. This was the Ringling brothers winter quarters on Water Street."

The images from the Wisconsin State Fair are surprisingly interesting. I had not known that the Wisconsin State Fair has an honorary queen by the title of "Alice in Dairy Land".

"Marjean Czerwinski, the 1951 Alice in Dairyland wearing her crown, takes a drink of milk while winking at the camera. "

Other galleries to check out:
Handdrawn maps of Wisconsin cities from a "birds-eye" view.
Victorian-era vacation photos from the Apostle Isles, which have to be the end of the earth.
And a rather sad photo gallery documenting Angora rabbit breeding in Nazi concentration camps.