The practice of converting Hudson’s Bay Company blankets into coats began years before the company began mass-manufacturing point blanket coats in the twentieth century. During the fur trade, Native Americans hunters traded beaver pelts for …
Military & War
Old Abe’s Visual Legacy
Old Abe began his career as a real, live eagle, serving as a mascot during the Civil War. In the decades that followed, the Grand Army of the Republic brought the bird on tours around the country. In the many …
French Wisconsin at Fort la Baye
French explorers, voyageurs (fur traders), Jesuit priests, and other settlers began arriving in the Upper Great Lakes region of North America in the mid-1600s. Jean Nicolet supposedly landed near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1634, naming the …
French Cartography in the Great Lakes
French mariners and explorers using the Le Maire Sundial Compass depended on both their own specialized navigational expertise and maps produced by French cartographers. Many such maps were created based on explorer accounts of the navigable waterways …
Dr. James T. Reeve
The owner of this particular cupping kit was Dr. James T. Reeve. Dr. Reeve was born near Goshen, New York, on April 26, 1834. Despite losing his father at age five and his mother five days before …
Kemp Trial
One ringleader of the 1862 Ozaukee County Riot was Nicholas Kemp, an immigrant from Luxemburg, Germany, and blacksmith by trade, who had emigrated to America in 1846. At the time of the riot he was in the …
Ozaukee County Draft Riot
Following the South’s attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, Wisconsin, and the North as a whole, experienced a surge in patriotism and an eagerness to fight for the North, offering more volunteers than were needed. …
The Aluminum Industry and Wartime Demands
In 1920 the aluminum cookware industry in Wisconsin gained control of over 50 percent of the total national market, after selling less than five percent in 1910. By 1929, West Bend ranked third in the nation in sales …