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Johnston Emergency Hospital, established by the city of Milwaukee, opened in its permanent location on the corner of Third and Sycamore (now Michigan) Street in 1894. It provided emergency medical care in a twenty-four-bed facility. The hospital earned a place in history on October 14, 1912, when a would-be assassin shot presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt… Read More

Jones Island is a peninsula formed at the mouth of the Milwaukee River, shaped as much by the city’s development as the lake and river that surround it. With easy access to fish, wild rice, and mainland resources, the marshy strip became an important Potawatomi summer village prior to white settlement. As the frontier community… Read More

Republican Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908-1957) grew up on a farm near Appleton, Wisconsin. He moved to Milwaukee in 1930 to attend Marquette University, where he studied engineering and law. A mediocre scholar, McCarthy was active in student government, debate, and men’s boxing. He graduated with a law degree in 1935. He worked a long… Read More

Josette Vieau Juneau (1804?-1855), was the Métis “founding mother” of Milwaukee, who midwifed the settlement, literally and figuratively, in its formative years—and was the grandmother of a Métis U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Paul O. Husting. Menominee and French Canadian, she was born in Green Bay—when still called La Baye, a vestige of its Nouvelle France… Read More

Joshua Glover was an escaped Missouri slave. In 1852 he settled in Racine working at a nearby sawmill. On the night of March 10, 1854, a posse consisting of two federal marshals, Glover’s former master (Benammi Garland), and four other men broke into his home and arrested him under the authority of the Fugitive Slave… Read More

Social worker Nell Alexander and future Girl Scout organizer Alice Chester founded Milwaukee’s local chapter of the Junior League in 1915. Organized as a nonprofit, voluntary association, the Junior League’s mission is educating young women on contemporary social issues and training them to develop leadership skills and serve in the community. Milwaukee Junior Leaguers, or… Read More

The relationship among Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Racine Counties has always been problematic, reflecting the dueling influences of Wisconsin and Illinois over their development. As one measure, consider how the U.S. Census Bureau officially designates their relationships. Although Racine is part of the Milwaukee-Racine-Waukesha WI Combined Statistical Area, Kenosha is not. Instead, the Census Bureau affiliates… Read More

The greater Kettle Moraine stretches from Kewanee County south through Walworth County. It was created when the Green Bay and Lake Michigan “lobes” of the Wisconsin Glacier (it had six lobes all together) retreated some 10,000 years ago. The retreating glacier left behind geological indentations, known as kettles, and deposited debris—silt, rocks, and boulders—that produced… Read More

While the Village of Kewaskum exists nearly entirely within the limits of the Town of Kewaskum, the boundaries between the Village and Town frequently shifted. In 1846, the territorial legislature reallocated the Kewaskum area from north central Washington County to the neighboring Town of West Bend. Just a year later, the land was separated from… Read More

Kindergarten is a preschool education approach designed to transition children from home to school. “Kindergarten” is a German word that means “garden for the children.” It traditionally emphasized learning through playing, singing, drawing, and social interaction. The first kindergarten was established in Blankenburg, Germany, in the late 1830s. In America kindergartens usually enroll five-year-old children,… Read More

Performing traditional African, African-American, and Caribbean dances, Ko-Thi Dance Company aspires to bridge the cultural gap between western and non-western peoples. The company’s founder, Sierra Leone native Ferne Yangyeitie Caulker studied with the National Dance Company at the University of Ghana in the late 1960s. After finishing research in Ghana, she opened the Ko-Thi Dance… Read More

Kohl’s Corporation, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in suburban Menomonee Falls, operates a national chain of over 1,100 department stores. The Corporation had over $19 billion in sales in 2014. As of 2015, Kohl’s had stores in every state except Hawaii and employed a total of 137,500 people across its corporate and retail locations. Forty… Read More

Estimated at approximately 4,000 residents in 2014, the Korean American population in the greater Milwaukee area has grown by at least twofold since the 1980s, when the community was estimated at 1,200 to 2,000 members. Yet the number of Korean restaurants was the same then as it is now: two. While Seoul Korean Restaurant and… Read More

For over one hundred years Ladish Company has engaged in the age-old practice of forging metal into a variety of finished products. Innovative application of such technology made the company one of the foremost forge shops in the country, and modernization of the basic process made Ladish a key supplier of aerospace parts. In addition,… Read More

In one of the worst maritime disasters in the history of the Great Lakes, the steamship Lady Elgin sank off the coast of northern Illinois during the early hours of September 8, 1860. The ship left Milwaukee late on September 6 bound for a political rally in Chicago with approximately four hundred passengers on board,… Read More

An informal name, northwestern WAUKESHA COUNTY’s Lake Country encompasses over twenty lakes and their surrounding region. These lakes vary in size and depth from large, named lakes, like PEWAUKEE, OCONOMOWOC, and Okauchee Lakes, to small ponds. Located within easy traveling distance of both Milwaukee and Chicago, Lake Country became a popular summer destination for wealthy… Read More

Europeans derived Lake Michigan’s name from the Anishinaabemowin word mishigami, meaning “big lake.” It is the second largest Great Lake by volume and third by area surface; it is the only one located entirely within the United States. Milwaukee’s economic development has been made possible by the Lake’s harbor, which provided protection from storms and… Read More

Several distinct phases in land use and planning are apparent throughout Milwaukee’s history. Informal and “special purpose” planning dominated the city’s early decades, followed in the Progressive Era by creation of formal planning bodies that guided growth and redevelopment for the first half of the twentieth century. Lastly, attempts at both regional planning and central… Read More

As in all communities, Milwaukee residents have always needed to dispose of the GARBAGE they produced. One disposal method that transforms the metropolitan landscape is sanitary landfills—sites where garbage is dumped into trenches and covered with soil. At times the use of landfills brought the city of Milwaukee into conflict with both neighboring and distant… Read More

The current Baltic state of Latvia became independent from the Russian Empire in 1918, was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940, was invaded by the Nazis in 1941, retaken by the Soviet Union in 1944, and was a Soviet Socialist Republic until the fall of Communism and independence in 1991. That political history served… Read More