George Esterly, a southern Wisconsin farmer and inventor, helped revolutionize farming practices across the nation with the creation of the Broadcast Seeder.
The expansion of Wisconsin’s dairy industry in the 20th century not only altered the economy of the state, but it also influenced the structure of the very barns that housed the bovine champions of the industry. Barns must be adapted and altered…
One of the biggest impediments to the progress of the popularity of bicycling in the late 19th century was bad roads. Wisconsin roads in the 1880s were “plagued by mud, poor signage, and crumbling bridges and sidewalks.”[1] This persisted throughout the 1890s…
When the wheat crop failures of the late nineteenth century jeopardized the incomes of many of Wisconsin’s immigrant farmers, the region’s Swiss population transitioned to a trade that they knew from the Old World: dairying and cheesemaking. To do this, Swiss farmers…
It may come as a surprise to learn that during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries slavery existed in the region that would become the state of Wisconsin. Over this period, thousands of enslaved African Americans or enslaved American Indians lived and…
People in the early 20th century witnessed the invention of all kinds of household tools we take for granted today, such as the vacuum cleaner, laundry machine, and refrigerator. This is a manual vacuum cleaner from 1911 at the Wisconsin Historical Museum. This small upright vacuum was designed to be operated by hand and easy…