The Building That Would Not Sit Still: Horicon’s Old Stone Shop Today, at the corner of Mill and Vine streets sits nothing more dramatic than a highway bridge and the quiet current of the Rock River sliding underneath it. It’s easy to stand there and forget how much history that stretch of water has actually …
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 …
Blankets, Nitro, and a Borrowed Buggy The Great Horicon Post Office Job of 1913 Picture Horicon in the second week of June, 1913. The marsh north of town would have been turning green, the cattails springing up, the smell of water that rises off the Rock River basin once the weather turns, and by mid-month …
Three Revolutionary War Veterans Who Shaped Wisconsin’s Early Frontier Historical Horicon Wisconsin As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, three quiet Dodge County cemeteries hold a story that connects Wisconsin’s farmland to the cannon smoke of the American Revolution. Three men—Levi Holcomb, Gershom Noyes, and Richard Newsam—each carried the memory of …
During the Civil War, they answered the call. Most came home. All left something behind. Part One of Five A Town Answers the Call How Horicon, Wisconsin, went to war in the spring of 1861 165 years ago, when President Abraham Lincoln issued his first call for 75,000 volunteers in April 1861, the citizens of …
Dodge County Pioneers Before the railroads. Before the courthouses. Before Dodge County looked anything like it does today, this land was already home. The Ho-Chunk people and other Indigenous nations had lived among these marshes, prairies, and oak woodlands for countless generations before a single pioneer’s wagon ever arrived — hunting, farming, raising families, and …
