Badger Boneyards

by McCann, Dennis

• ISBN13: 9780870204517
• ISBN10: 0870204513
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-05
• Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society

Summary

From the Ornate Tombs of Milwaukee beer baron Frederick Pabst to miniscule ancestral plots, Wisconsin cemeteries house memories of war, families, tragedy, and community. Badger Boneyards: The Eternal Rest of the Story unearths the intriguing and often long-forgotten histories of more than thirty Wisconsinites past, from the hard-scrabble life of an old-time cemetery man to the many husbands of a nineteenth-century charmer. Football great John Heisman is buried here, as is the state's smallest man, a woman whose tombstone names her murderer, and the boy who would not tell a lie and paid the price. Yet even in a graveyard, peace proves hard to come by: Wisconsin's Native American tribes have fought for undisturbed grounds and proper burial, and the inhabitants of a Bayfield cemetery were unearthed by a raging flood. Longtime Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dennis McCann seeks out the stories, both tranquil and turbulent, in Wisconsin's cities of the dead. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
An Old-Time Cemetery Man	p. 1
Buried in a Peninsular Paradise	p. 5
Where Oles Go to Rest	p. 12
Listen to Me, Just Once	p. 17
The Boneyard Built by Barons	p. 20
The ôWho Was Whoö of Forest Home	p. 27
The Talkative Cameron Tombstones	p. 32
The Tombstone Tavern	p. 36
The Virgin Em and Her Many Husbands	p. 39
Wisconsin's Smallest Man	p. 44
Belle Boyd, Confederate Spy	p. 46
The Lake Superior Surfer	p. 50
Heisman's Trophy	p. 54
Poor Percival the Poet	p. 58
Fort Crawford's Old Bones	p. 62
Confederates at Rest	p. 66
Where No Priest May Enter	p. 70
The Cemetery within a Cemetery	p. 74
Tales the Tombstones Tell	p. 80
The Restoration of a Cemetery	p. 87
Even in the Crave, He's Free	p. 92
The Boy Who Would Not Lie	p. 95
A Short Visit with the Belgians	p. 99
Shantyboy Hill	p. 105
Peshtigo Fire Cemetery	p. 108
Catharine, Murdered	p. 112
The Man Who Isn't There	p. 116
The Disrupted Spirits of Wisconsin Point	p. 120
When Peaceful Rest Was Washed Away	p. 124
A Veteran and Preacher Receives His Due	p. 130
A Controversial Burial Ground	p. 135
Spirits of the Dead Live On	p. 140
Acknowledgments	p. 145
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