Drive the back road between Horicon and Beaver Dam today and you could pass through Rolling Prairie without ever knowing you’d been there. It’s not a village anymore, not officially — just an unincorporated place name hung on a stretch of country between the towns of Oak Grove and Burnett, a few farms and a …
Origins, Archaeology, the Horicon/Van Brunt Connection, and the “de-extinction’ Plan to Bring It Back Did you know Wisconsin once hosted billions of passenger pigeons? The story of the passenger pigeon’s rise and fall has long fascinated historians and naturalists. Science writer Charles C. Mann revisited this ecological mystery in his acclaimed book 1491: New Revelations …
The Marsh the Rich Guys Tried to Own Before it was a national wildlife refuge with a visitor center and a gift shop, Horicon Marsh was 32,000 acres of the best duck hunting in the Midwest — and for about forty years, a handful of very rich men did everything short of putting up a …
Thirty Trains a Day, a Wreck in the Dark, and the Hotel at the Crossing Sometime before dawn on the morning of July 12, 1901, the engineer of Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul passenger train No. 3 — due into Portage at a quarter to four — throttled up for the crossing at Minnesota Junction, …
Madison, Wisconsin’s Civil War Cemetery 1862 – Present How the survivors of a Mississippi River battle came to rest in Wisconsin soil, and the Northern woman who called them “her boys” This piece is a companion to Horicon’s Civil War Story, tracing what became of the Confederate prisoners taken at the same battle where Horicon’s …
