A variety of local history materials including artifacts and photographs related to the SOO Line Railroad, the cranberry industry and annual Cranberry Festival, military history, household goods, the logging industry, and local resorts.
State and Local History
Stories of Sauk Prairie
A collection of audio oral history interviews with residents of Sauk Prairie, Wisconsin, conducted by Doris Litscher Gasser in the 1980s and 1990s. Each item in the digital collection also includes a photograph Gasser took of the each community member interviewed and an article published in the Sauk Prairie Star based on each interview.
Sun Prairie Historical Library & Museum
Sun Prairie Historical Library & Museum‘s digital collection shares manuscripts that document the history of Sun Prairie and surrounding areas. This includes petitions and other records of the Village of Sun Prairie Board of Trustees, directories and telephone books, a scrapbook of the Sun Prairie 20th Century Club, as well as data sheets from an environmental study of bird nests at Sun Prairie’s Patrick Marsh from 1948 through 1951.
Sun Prairie Public Library
Sun Prairie history is a collaborative project between the Sun Prairie Public Library and the Sun Prairie Historical Museum. Both organizations have collections of historical archives that chronicle the people, places, and events and tell the story of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a formerly rural space that has become a suburb of Madison.
Tales of Old Portage
Dorothy McCarthy’s “Tales of Old Portage” series of local history columns appeared in the Portage Daily Register from 1958-1975.
Taylor Brothers Photographs
Glass negatives created by the Taylor Brothers photographic studio of Adams County, Wisconsin, circa 1910-1930. Subjects are varied and include towns, buildings and street scenes in Adams County; construction and dedication of a new county courthouse; teachers, classes, and one-room school houses; road construction; and farmsteads, animals, and agricultural activities.
The Changing Landscapes of Wisconsin: A Digital Archive of Historic Aerial Photographs
Changing Landscapes of Wisconsin creates wide accessibility to a rare collection of historic aerial photographs acquired by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1937-1941. These photographs provide a snapshot of Wisconsin’s landscapes and have become a baseline dataset for understanding environmental, social, and economic changes that have occurred since that time.
Theresa Public Library
This collection documents the history of Theresa, Wisconsin through two books. The first, Life in the 1930’s / ’40’s, &’50’s As I Saw It and Lived It, is told through the eyes of local photographer Jim Widmer. Tagebush is a German-language diary and recollection of everyday life recorded in Theresa by author Friedrich Gorg Emanuel Ziemer.
Tom Taylor Blotters
A collection of ink blotters featuring historic photographs from the Wisconsin Rapids area which were distributed by local insurance agent Tom Taylor to promote his business in the 1930s.
Tom Taylor Book
The Tom Taylor Book, also known as 100 Years of Pictorial & Descriptive History of Wisconsin Rapids, was compiled by T.A. Tayor between 1934-1939. The digital collection pairs the historical photographs gathered by Taylor along with the details he recorded about each image.
