By Tom Still
MADISON, Wis. – It will be March before demolition of the existing State Historical Society Museum on Madison’s Capitol Square gets underway, and late 2026 or early 2027 before a new and much larger “History Center” rises on that site and two adjacent properties.
Just don’t think history is taking a holiday in the meantime. In fact, for people living across Wisconsin, it will become a chance to take in some road shows.
Founded in 1846, two years before statehood, the Wisconsin Historical Society is more than a depository of artifacts, books and manuscripts from the state – but an important link to national and pre-history gems.
A journal from the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Abraham Lincoln’s shawl, the largest film collection outside Hollywood, native canoes once preserved under water, some of the first copies of founding documents, a huge array of colonial newspapers and one of three original copies of the “Star-Spangled Banner” are in the collection.
Not everything has been on display, of course, especially in the smallish former hardware store on the corner of State and Carroll Streets. A massive, climate-controlled building on Madison’s East Side serves as a repository for millions of items and will remain so. But once the $160 million public-private History Center repens, more rotating exhibits will have their rightful space.
For the interim, history will take a road trip. While there is a temporary exhibit, tour and gift shop space that is open to visitors, the Historical Society plans to make the most of its statewide reach. The “History Makers Tour” has started bringing pop-up exhibits, artifact displays, author talks and special events to some of the society’s 22 historic sites as well as other community venues. The series is funded by a grant from Culver’s Restaurants.
It’s a “museum without walls” approach, according to director Christian Øverland, a technology historian who came to Wisconsin after a serving in leadership at The Henry Ford, a national landmark destination of attractions in Dearborn, Mich. “We will bring our brand across the entire state.”
Because relatively few school children can tour the temporary location inside the glass-walled U.S. Bank Building on Capitol Square, it will be instructive to see what will resonate with young people moving ahead.
My guess is that tech and innovation may play a role. How many of today’s “AirPods” fans would know that the first high-fidelity stereophones were developed by Milwaukee’s Koss Electronics Inc.? A pair is part of the society’s collection. Innovation in bicycles, motorcycles, motorboats is also represented.
Other examples of Wisconsin’s tech legacy I’ve seen over time in society exhibits include a century-old control panel from a temperature regulation system manufactured by the “Johnson Service Co.” of Milwaukee, now Johnson Controls Inc., one of Wisconsin’s most iconic companies.
The first adjustable-volume micropipette, which revolutionized the process of measuring and transferring biological fluids, is also part of the collection. When paired with a “respirometer,” which measured small amounts of oxygen, the devices sped research in molecular biology in the mid-20th century. Both were developed by Gilson Medical Electronics of Middleton, founded by UW-Madison scientist Warren Gilson. The society also has the computer used by Epic Systems founder Judy Faulkner to write the company’s first lines of code.
A bottle of “Dairyland Rat and Mouse Killer” from the 1950s was a reminder of the research done by Karl Paul Link, the UW-Madison professor who discovered that a substance to kill rodents could also be refined to prevent life-threatening blood clots and strokes in people.
What, if any, of those items go on the road is a function of careful planning, security and logistics, but they are all examples of how Wisconsin innovation has spanned time. It will be a while before the History Center opens, but there are plenty of chances to learn about who we are and how we got here.
Still is president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. He can be reached at tstill@wisconsintechnologycouncil.com.
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