99 Fun Facts About Wisconsin

Wisconsin was the last state carved entirely from which territory?

Northwest Territory. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan were carved out first, and the future Wisconsin was handed from the Indiana Territory to Illinois's and then Michigan's before it got one of its own.

What is the capital of Wisconsin?

Madison. It existed only on paper when legislators chose it in 1836: land speculator James Doty named his planned city for James Madison, who had died that summer, and wooed undecided lawmakers with cheap lots.

Wisconsin's 'Badger State' nickname originally referred to what group?

Lead miners who sheltered in dugouts. In the boom of the 1820s they were too busy digging to build houses, so they moved into old shafts and hillside burrows like badgers; the animal became official only in 1957.

Wisconsin borders which two of the Great Lakes?

Superior and Michigan. The peninsula running between the two lakes belongs to the state of Michigan rather than Wisconsin because Congress awarded it in 1836 as payment for giving up the Toledo Strip to Ohio.

What is Wisconsin's largest inland body of water?

Winnebago. Every February spearers cut holes in its ice and wait in shanties for lake sturgeon, in one of only two places in North America where the giant fish may still be taken with a spear.

What is Wisconsin's official state motto?

Forward. By tradition, Governor Nelson Dewey and lawyer Edward Ryan threw out the Latin 'Excelsior' proposed for the new seal in 1851 and picked the word while sitting on the steps of a Wall Street bank.

Which bird has been Wisconsin's official state bird since 1949?

American robin. Schoolchildren picked it in a statewide vote in 1926-27, giving it twice as many votes as any other bird, but lawmakers took until 1949 to make their choice official.

Which fish is Wisconsin's official state fish?

Muskellunge. Lawmakers first tried to honour the musky in 1939 and passed it without a single no vote in 1955; Hayward went further and built a leaping one half a city block long that visitors can climb inside.

What did Wisconsin name its official state beverage in 1987?

Milk. Dairy has long had the law on its side here: Wisconsin was the last state to ban butter-coloured margarine, and shops could not sell it legally until 1967.

Which dance became Wisconsin's official state dance in 1993?

Polka. A class of second-graders asked their legislators for the law, and polka boosters backed the children with evidence of how deeply the dance runs through Wisconsin's traditions.

Which mineral, an ore of lead, is Wisconsin's official state mineral?

Galena. A Kenosha rock-collecting club asked for the 1971 law, and the heavy grey ore passed every test the state's geologists set: abundant, distinctive, valuable and bound up with Wisconsin's history.

Which dog breed, developed by Wisconsin hunters to work from a small boat, is the official state dog?

American water spaniel. Eighth-graders in New London, where the breed was standardised, lobbied lawmakers for years before the 1985 law passed; it is said to be the only breed native to Wisconsin.

Wisconsin grows more than half of America's supply of which fruit, its official state fruit?

Cranberries. A class of fifth-graders won the fruit its title in 2003, arguing that it deserved the honour more than the cherry; Wisconsin's marshes out-produce even those of Massachusetts.

Farmers around Wausau, Wisconsin, grow nearly all of America's cultivated supply of which crop?

Ginseng. Wisconsin growers raise about 95 percent of the cultivated American ginseng in the US, and sell so much of the slow-growing root abroad that their board keeps offices in China, Taiwan and Japan.

Wisconsin makes about a quarter of America's cheese, but which state overtook 'America's Dairyland' as the top dairy producer in 1993?

California. Its vast dairy farms took the title that Wisconsin had held since about 1915, though as of 2024 Wisconsin was still the country's biggest cheese maker.

Bakeries in Racine made which filled pastry, once pretzel-shaped and now a flat oval, Wisconsin's official state pastry?

Kringle. Danish immigrant bakers brought it to Racine in the late 1800s, and American bakers flattened the pretzel into an oval so that no bite would be without filling; a true one can take three days to make.

Which city calls itself the 'Bratwurst Capital of the World'?

Sheboygan. It won the title from Bucyrus, Ohio, in 1970, when a judge ruled that its sausage makers, bakers and backyard chefs had earned it; locals 'fry' their brats on the grill and serve them on a round hard roll.

Which fast-food chain opened its first restaurant in Sauk City in 1984?

Culver's. Craig Culver, his wife Lea and his parents opened it in the family's home town by taking over the old A&W root beer stand that his parents had owned some twenty years before.

At a Wisconsin supper club, what all-you-can-eat meal is the Friday-night staple?

Fish fry. Catholic settlers bound to meatless Fridays turned to perch from the lakes, and during Prohibition taverns stayed in business on the strength of the frying pan.

In 2023 Wisconsin lawmakers named which drink the official state cocktail?

Brandy old fashioned. The state's taste for the spirit most likely dates from just after the Second World War, when good liquor was scarce and its distributors bought up a huge supply of good brandy.

The Packers take their name from a company that packed what?

Meat. Curly Lambeau was a shipping clerk at a meat-packing firm in 1919 when he talked his employer into paying for the new team's uniforms, and the sponsor's trade stuck as the nickname.

Who owns the Green Bay Packers?

Fans who hold its stock. The team has been a publicly owned nonprofit since 1923: the shares pay no dividend, and nobody may hold more than 200,000 of them, so that no one can ever take control of the club.

Which coach led the Packers to victory in the first two Super Bowls?

Vince Lombardi. He died in September 1970, and the league renamed its championship prize the Vince Lombardi Trophy in time for the very next Super Bowl.

Which Packers safety invented the Lambeau Leap in 1993?

LeRoy Butler. He took a lateral from Reggie White after a fumble, ran 25 yards and jumped into the stands on a bitterly cold day against the Raiders; when the NFL later cracked down on celebrations, the Leap was spared.

What does University of Wisconsin mascot Bucky Badger do after every Badgers score?

Push-ups. Bucky does one for every point Wisconsin has on the board after each score, so a blowout gets brutal: a 2010 rout of Indiana added up to 573 of them.

Harley-Davidson and which rival were the only two major US motorcycle makers to survive the Great Depression?

Indian. The Massachusetts firm was two years older than its Milwaukee rival and had once been the biggest motorcycle maker in the world, but it outlived the Depression only to go bankrupt in 1953.

The little Plank Road Brewery, bought by a German immigrant in 1855, grew into which Milwaukee beer giant?

Miller. Frederick Miller arrived from Germany carrying his own brewer's yeast, paid $2,300 for the small brewery and put his name on it.

Pabst Blue Ribbon got its name from what?

Silk ribbons tied on bottle necks. From 1882 the brewery, proud of its prizes, hand-tied a blue ribbon to every bottle of its Select beer, and drinkers took to asking bartenders for 'the blue-ribbon beer'.

Which machine was patented in Milwaukee in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes and his partners?

The typewriter. Short of money to develop it, Sholes sold his patent rights for $12,000 to the gunmaker Remington, whose machines carried his QWERTY keyboard around the world.

Which architect was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, in 1867?

Frank Lloyd Wright. He left his home town a warehouse, designed for a local wholesaler to settle his own unpaid bills; its cost ran so far over budget that the client lost the building in bankruptcy.

The House on the Rock near Spring Green is a central location in which 2001 Neil Gaiman novel?

American Gods. Gaiman says readers assume he invented the place, when in fact he toned the real attraction down so that people would believe it.

Wisconsin Dells calls itself the capital of the world for what?

Waterparks. The breakthrough came when a local resort, the Polynesian, put a roof over its slides, so that families could splash through a Wisconsin winter and the town could trade all year.

Door County is named for the treacherous strait off its tip; what do sailors call that passage?

Death's Door. The French called it Porte des Morts, a name said to recall a war party lost there in its canoes, and the strait stayed hazardous enough for sailing ships to keep it.

Which is the largest Apostle Island, and the only one outside the national lakeshore?

Madeline Island. It is the one Apostle with a year-round village, so when the lake freezes the ferry gives way to an ice road to the mainland, and to a windsled in the weeks when the ice is too thin for cars.

Wisconsin's 1,200-mile Ice Age Trail roughly follows what feature left by the last glaciation?

The terminal moraine. Lawyer and hiker Ray Zillmer proposed it in the 1950s as a long, thin Ice Age national park tracing the line where the last ice sheet stopped, from the St. Croix River to Door County.

Wisconsin law stops any building within a mile of the State Capitol from doing what?

Blocking the view of its dome. A view-preservation law caps the height of everything within a mile, which keeps the Capitol the tallest building in its city.

The Hodag, a horned and spiky creature of lumberjack lore, is the symbol of which northern Wisconsin city?

Rhinelander. Timber cruiser Eugene Shepard claimed in 1896 to have caught one alive, later admitted his beast was wood and ox hide, and the city adopted the fake as its symbol anyway.

Which Wisconsin village on the Mississippi was Laura Ingalls Wilder born near in 1867?

Pepin. The Big Woods of her first book were real, so a replica of the log cabin her father built now stands on the family's old land, seven miles outside the village.

Which artist was born in a farmhouse in Sun Prairie in 1887?

Georgia O'Keeffe. She grew up with six siblings on the family's dairy farm, taking art lessons as a child, decades before the hills of northern New Mexico became one of her great subjects.

Budapest-born Harry Houdini grew up in which Wisconsin city, where his father served as a rabbi?

Appleton. The family arrived from Hungary when he was a small boy and his father became the town's rabbi, so the downtown block where they lived is now called Houdini Plaza.

Which electric-guitar pioneer was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 1915?

Les Paul. After hours at a New York guitar factory he fixed a neck, strings and a pickup to a length of four-by-four and called it the Log, one of the first solid-body electric guitars.

Which future prime minister attended Milwaukee State Normal School in 1916 and taught in the city?

Golda Meir. As a Milwaukee schoolgirl she organised a fund to buy textbooks for classmates who could not afford them, and the grade school where she did it now carries her name.

Aldo Leopold's weekends at a Wisconsin chicken coop inspired which book?

A Sand County Almanac. Wisconsin has no Sand County, only sandy soils like those around the family shack, and Leopold never saw the book in print: he died helping a neighbour put out a grass fire a year before it came out.

Margarethe Schurz opened America's first what in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1856?

Kindergarten. She began by taking her own daughter and a few neighbours' children through the games and songs of Friedrich Fröbel's method, and the whole class was taught in German.

Which senator from Grand Chute, Wisconsin, did his colleagues censure in 1954?

Joseph McCarthy. After more than four years of unproven charges that communists riddled the government, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure him, and he died in office less than three years later.

Progressive icon Robert La Follette, Wisconsin governor and senator, was known by what nickname?

Fighting Bob. His fight with party bosses began in 1891, when he announced that his own party's state boss, a US senator, had offered him a bribe, and he spent years building a rival faction to beat the machine.

A 2008 bronze statue on Milwaukee's Riverwalk honors which TV character?

The Fonz. Milwaukee's tourism office took the idea from statues a TV channel had given other cities and raised the money itself; Henry Winkler called the idea bizarre, then came to the unveiling with most of the cast.

That '70s Show is set in which fictional Wisconsin town?

Point Place. Its teenagers stay stuck in the late 1970s: eight seasons on air, from 1998 to 2006, cover less than four years of story, ending as the clock ticks over into 1980.

Justin Vernon founded the band Bon Iver in 2006 in which Wisconsin city?

Eau Claire. Laid up in his father's cabin, Vernon watched an Alaskan town on Northern Exposure greet the first snow with 'bon hiver', good winter, and dropped the h because he disliked how the real spelling looked.

Which political party traces its birth to an 1854 anti-slavery meeting in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin?

Republican organizers met in Ripon's Little White Schoolhouse to fight the Kansas–Nebraska bill, which threatened to carry slavery into new territories. The building is a National Historic Landmark.

Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson founded which annual environmental observance, first held as a teach-in in April 1970?

Earth Day came to Nelson after he saw a vast oil slick off Santa Barbara from an airplane. He hired a young activist, Denis Hayes, to coordinate the first one.

In the 1997 film Titanic, which character names Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, as his hometown?

Jack Dawson also recalls ice fishing with his father on Lake Wissota, a famous slip: the reservoir was not created until five years after the ship sank.

Which doll's 1960s novels gave her a hometown in the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin?

Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, daughter of George and Margaret Roberts. In the Random House novels she attended Willows High School.

Which fantasy role-playing game did Gary Gygax's company TSR first publish in 1974 from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin?

Dungeons & Dragons was self-published because Gygax could not find a publisher for it. Lake Geneva also gave its name to Gen Con, the gaming convention he started there in 1968.

Wisconsin was the last state, until 1967, to bar which butter rival from being sold colored yellow?

Margarine is naturally white, and dairy firms won laws by 1902 to stop it being dyed to pass for butter. Makers answered by selling it with a packet of yellow food coloring.

Which tissue brand did a Neenah, Wisconsin, paper company launch in 1924 as a disposable cold cream remover?

Kleenex only caught on as a throwaway handkerchief after the company's head researcher pushed a reluctant ad chief to give the idea a little advertising space.

The Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys in Wisconsin at 13 below zero in a 1967 title game known by what nickname?

The Ice Bowl was so cold that the referee's metal whistle froze to his lips as he signaled the start of play, and a broadcaster's coffee froze in its mug.

Which circus did five siblings launch in 1884 from Baraboo, Wisconsin, where its old winter quarters are a museum?

Baraboo housed the circus every winter until 1918, by which time the family also owned its great rival, Barnum & Bailey. The two were merged in 1919 into one show, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.

Which 1939 film was test-screened in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, three days before its Hollywood premiere?

The Wizard of Oz played the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc on August 12, 1939, one of a handful of small-town previews held before the gala at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of rival stands Kopp's, Leon's and Gilles, is the unofficial world capital of which dessert?

Frozen custard adds egg yolks to ice cream for a smoother texture, a trick two Coney Island vendors popularized in 1919 before it spread across the Midwest.

Fresh cheese curds, a Wisconsin snack often sold deep-fried, are prized for making what sound against the teeth?

A squeak is the sign of freshness: after about 12 hours, even in the refrigerator, moisture seeps into the curd and the sound fades.

In southern and eastern Wisconsin, people asking for the 'bubbler' are looking for what everyday fixture?

A water fountain is a bubbler in only a few pockets of America: a dialect survey found the word common in Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Which European ancestry is the most common in all but three of the counties in Wisconsin?

German roots were claimed by 36 percent of residents in 2022, far ahead of Irish at about 10 percent. Wisconsin does lead every state in its share of Polish ancestry.

Which Milwaukee lakefront event, first held in 1968, did Guinness certify in 1999 as the world's largest music festival?

Summerfest was the idea of Mayor Henry Maier, who came home from Munich's Oktoberfest wanting a festival of Milwaukee's own. Its permanent grounds carry his name.

Which costumed mascots sprint around the field in the sixth inning of every Milwaukee Brewers home game in Wisconsin?

Sausages began racing in the early 1990s as a field of three: a bratwurst, a Polish and an Italian. A hot dog and a chorizo joined later.

Under what name did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lead Wisconsin's Milwaukee Bucks to their first NBA title in 1971?

Lew Alcindor had taken his Muslim name on converting to Islam in 1968 but only began using it publicly after the 1971 title. The Bucks had won the right to draft him on a coin toss with Phoenix.

Which 1970s sitcom followed two bottle-cappers at the fictional Shotz Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin?

Laverne & Shirley left Wisconsin in its sixth season: the friends lost their brewery jobs to automated bottle-capping machines and moved to Burbank, California.

Two Rivers, Wisconsin, claims soda shop owner Ed Berners invented which dessert in 1881 by adding chocolate syrup?

The sundae's birthplace is disputed with Ithaca, New York, in a rivalry dubbed the Sundae War. Berners sold his for a nickel, at first only on Sundays.

Which showman pianist, famous for the candelabrum on his piano, was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, in 1919?

Liberace met his idol, the Polish virtuoso Paderewski, backstage in Milwaukee at age eight. From the 1950s to the 1970s he was the highest-paid entertainer in the world.

The deadliest wildfire on record hit which Wisconsin lumber town on the same 1871 day as the Great Chicago Fire?

Peshtigo lost at least five times as many people as Chicago did, with deaths estimated at 1,500 to 2,500, yet its blaze was largely forgotten beside the big city's.

Which Native American leader's 1832 war with US forces ended in a rout at the Battle of Bad Axe in Wisconsin?

Black Hawk's war gave a 23-year-old Abraham Lincoln his only military service: he was elected captain of his militia company but never saw combat.

Which Jesuit missionary, namesake of a Milwaukee university, crossed Wisconsin by canoe with Louis Jolliet in 1673?

Jacques Marquette and Jolliet carried their canoes almost two miles between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, a path that later gave the town of Portage its name.

Which bald eagle, mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry in the Civil War, inspired the 101st Airborne's shoulder patch?

Old Abe retired to a two-room apartment in the state Capitol, complete with a custom bathtub and a caretaker, after officials classified him as a war relic.

In June 1919 Wisconsin beat Illinois to be recognized as the first state to ratify the constitutional amendment on what?

Women's suffrage cleared the Illinois legislature an hour sooner, but Wisconsin's delegate, David James, arrived first and was handed a statement naming his state the first to ratify.

Which Scottish-born naturalist, later a co-founder of the Sierra Club, grew up on a farm near Portage, Wisconsin?

John Muir's family left Scotland in 1849 to start Fountain Lake Farm, and he later paid his own way through several years at the University of Wisconsin.

Which bank robber slipped away from a botched FBI raid on Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin in 1934?

John Dillinger is thought to have been given away when the lodge owner glimpsed a pistol under his coat during a card game. He and his gang still escaped through the unguarded back of the building.

What name did Frank Lloyd Wright give the home and studio he began building in 1911 near Spring Green, Wisconsin?

Taliesin means shining brow in Welsh: Wright built the house on and into the brow of a hill, close to land that had belonged to his mother's family.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, elected three mayors between 1910 and 1960, Daniel Hoan among them, from which political party?

Socialist mayors boasted so often about Milwaukee's excellent public sewers that a party rival coined the label sewer socialism for them, meaning it as an insult.

Which blood thinner, first sold in 1948 as a rat poison, is named for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation?

Warfarin takes its first four letters from the foundation's initials and its ending from coumarin. President Eisenhower was treated with it after a heart attack.

Which Wisconsin city hosts EAA AirVenture, when its airport control tower becomes the busiest in the world for a week?

Oshkosh has hosted the fly-in since 1970, when it outgrew an airport in Rockford, Illinois. The Experimental Aircraft Association behind it began in a basement in Hales Corners.

Which famously pungent cheese is made in the United States only at a cooperative in Monroe, Wisconsin?

Limburger comes from the old Duchy of Limburg, in present-day Belgium. Some Wisconsin restaurants serve it as a sandwich with brown mustard.

The American Birkebeiner, held between Cable and Hayward, Wisconsin, is North America's largest race in which sport?

Cross-country skiing caught on in America partly thanks to founder Tony Wise, who built trails at his Telemark resort in 1972 and named the race after a famous one in Norway.

Which doll line, launched in 1986 by Pleasant Rowland's Wisconsin company, pairs historical characters with books?

American Girl grew out of a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, where Rowland saw a gap in the market for dolls that looked like children. She sold the company for $700 million in 1998.

Which bicycle maker began building steel touring frames in 1976 in a red barn in Waterloo, Wisconsin?

Trek started with a payroll of five, taking aim at a mid to high-end market then dominated by Japanese and Italian bikes. Its red barn had been a carpet warehouse.

Which La Crosse, Wisconsin, convenience store chain uses a different name in Iowa to avoid confusion with a rival?

Kwik Trip becomes Kwik Star in Iowa, where the similarly named QuikTrip already had stores. It began as a single small grocery in 1965 and bakes its own bread and doughnuts.

Which 1992 hip-hop hit do University of Wisconsin football fans dance to between the third and fourth quarters?

Jump Around, by House of Pain, is so tied to the Badgers that its title appears on fan clothing and even on the campus credit union's bank cards.

Wisconsin and Minnesota, college football's most-played top-division rivalry, have battled since 1948 for which trophy?

Paul Bunyan's Axe replaced the Slab of Bacon, a trophy that vanished after the 1943 game and stayed lost for more than 50 years.

Which Milwaukee-born catcher, dubbed Mr. Baseball by Johnny Carson, called Wisconsin's Brewers games for 54 seasons?

Bob Uecker signed with his hometown Milwaukee Braves in 1956 and later played announcer Harry Doyle in the film Major League and its two sequels.

Which talk show host, born in rural Mississippi, moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at age six and went to school there?

Oprah Winfrey did so well in the Upward Bound program at Milwaukee's Lincoln High that she was transferred to the affluent suburban Nicolet High School.

Which summit in Price County, topped by a public lookout tower, is the highest natural point in Wisconsin?

Timms Hill stands 1,951.5 feet tall, a figure fixed only in 1962 by a surveyor from a local telephone company. Rib Mountain, visible 44 miles away, is about 27 feet lower.

Which observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, houses the largest refracting telescope ever used for research?

Yerkes was founded in 1892 by astronomer George Ellery Hale and is known as the birthplace of modern astrophysics. Its main dome holds a telescope with a 40-inch lens.

Which architect gave the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin a 2001 pavilion whose sunshade opens like 217-foot wings?

Santiago Calatrava fitted the wings with wind sensors: if gusts top 23 miles per hour for three seconds, they close. They also fold at night and in bad weather.

A 20-pound chunk of which Soviet spacecraft crashed onto a street in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1962?

Sputnik 4 was an uncrewed test of the capsule design later used for the first human spaceflight. Manitowoc has marked the crash with a Sputnikfest since 2008.

Wisconsin's Milwaukee Brewers arrived in 1970 as a relocated franchise that had played one season under what name?

Seattle Pilots finished last in 1969, their only season, and their owners declared bankruptcy during the next spring training. Bud Selig's group moved the club to Milwaukee on April 1, 1970.

Which hunting breed, developed along Wisconsin's Fox River to work from a small skiff, is the official state dog?

American water spaniel breeders wanted a dog compact enough to ride in a skiff yet tough enough for the state's cold water. It is a rare breed even at home.

Which Wisconsin wetland, a stopover for over 200,000 Canada geese, holds a state and a national wildlife refuge?

Horicon Marsh was once dammed into what was called the largest man-made lake in the world, until the state Supreme Court ordered the dam torn down in 1869.

Which Wisconsin tribe, whose Ojibwe-given name means wild rice people, lost federal recognition in the 1960s?

Menominee roots in the region may reach back 10,000 years, by some accounts to the Old Copper Culture. The tribe grew wild rice as one of its most important staples.

Which hilly region of southwestern Wisconsin was never covered by ice during the last glacial period?

The Driftless Area lacks drift, the geologists' word for the silt, gravel and rock that glaciers leave behind. Its rivers run instead through deep, dramatic canyons.

Which Wisconsin state park, the largest in the state, is known for 500-foot quartzite bluffs and Balanced Rock?

Devil's Lake formed about 12,000 years ago, when a glacier plugged both ends of a gap in the bluffs. Another of the park's rock formations is called Devil's Doorway.