Wisconsin Historical Society

Tony Vitello from the Letterman.

Special thanks to Wisconsin Historical Society and for financial support from WBA Hall of Famer Terry Bond.

How'd you find all those papers?

A lot of them are stored in a few different archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society at UCLA and at Ithaca College where he taught.

And so I would travel around.

I would look at them.

W-O-K-Y

Special thanks to Wisconsin Historical Society and for financial support from WBA Hall of Famer Terry Bond.

Well, for a book like this that is so heavily illustrated, not good.

There are almost 200 images from the Wisconsin Historical Society archives.

I had to both buy a digital download and pay a licensing fee for each one.

Our friend Lisa Marine negotiated a favorable rate, which I appreciate, but the bill was still in the high four figures.

Our first public meeting was in early 2024.

This was largely inspired by the Wisconsin Historical Society's decision to replace their museum at the top of State Street and create what obviously all of us are well aware has long been under construction now, the very exciting Wisconsin History Center.

Well, as a result of that project, the public right-of-way adjacent to the soon-to-be History Center needed to be reimagined, redesigned.

Obviously, we own that property.

It's public right-of-way.

Rather than having the Wisconsin Historical Society simply redesign that prime public space, we made the decision that this would be a city-led intensive redesign process for Mifflin Plaza and at the same time Carroll Plaza across State Street adjacent to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

We've had a series of public meetings.

In fact, the next public meeting, if I could give a public service announcement, is scheduled for the evening of Monday, November 9th.

They're not transcribed.

They are hard copy, giant tomes in Madison at the Wisconsin Historical Society archive.

So I spent a long time converting those names, looking page by page, into an Excel table where I could track all of them.

One thing about that source is it only mentions one name per household, and that is almost always a man, right? He is the farmer in that, those agricultural census records.

It was really carefully cataloged.

It was exactly where I expected it to be.

I didn't know what it contained, you know? It, it was in, uh, there are two cardboard boxes that are the Seymour family files at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and they're very well cataloged and, um, you know, well cared for.

And the, in the finding aid, in the sort of index of what's in there, it just notes, you know, Ella Seymour's diary.

Within a few seconds, he realized he was looking at a canoe, possibly an extremely old one.

Now, experts with the Wisconsin Historical Society have determined that the vessel is a roughly 1,000-year-old dugout canoe, likely handcrafted and used by Indigenous communities in the late 10th or early 11th centuries.

Numerous dugout canoes have been found throughout Wisconsin, including 16 in an ancient canoe parking lot in Lake Mendota, near the state capital Madison.

But the newly discovered vessel is believed to be the first found in Pewaukee Lake, a 2,437-acre spring-fed body of water located in Waukesha County on the western outskirts of Milwaukee.