The University of Wisconsin Press
History / Wisconsin / American Studies / Architecture
Creating Old World Wisconsin Visionaries, researchers, curators, and volunteers launched a massive preservation initiative to salvage fast-disappearing immigrant and migrant architecture. Dozens of historic buildings in the 1970s were transported from locations throughout the state to the Kettle Moraine State Forest. These buildings created a backdrop against which twenty-first-century interpreters demonstrate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century agricultural techniques and artisanal craftsmanship. The site, created and maintained by the Wisconsin Historical Society, offers visitors a unique opportunity to learn about the state’s rich and ethnically diverse past through depictions of the everyday lives of its Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, German, Polish, African American, and Yankee inhabitants. Creating Old World Wisconsin chronicles the fascinating and complex origins of this outdoor museum, highlighting the struggles that faced its creators as they worked to achieve their vision. Even as Milwaukee architect and preservationist Richard W. E. Perrin, the Society’s staff, and enthusiastic volunteers opened the museum in time for the national bicentennial in 1976, the site was plagued by limited funds, bureaucratic tangles, and problems associated with gaining public support. By documenting the engaging story of the challenges, roadblocks, false starts, and achievements of the site’s founders, Krugler brings to life the history of the dedicated corps who collected and preserved Wisconsin’s diverse social history and heritage. “Details the fascinating origins of the outdoor museum and the obstacles that confronted its supporters, including limited funding, bureaucratic snags and a skeptical public.” “Krugler [has] produced a book that explores, in detail, the struggle to build this ethnic history museum. It is a book that every public historian responsible for historic buildings and sites should read.” “Krugler fairly applauds the WHS visionaries, and those who supported them with money and volunteered during times of significant trouble, for their heroic endeavor. Krugler's book is a welcome description of what these people finally achieved.” “A worthy narrative that details the enormous task of making a museum.”
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“A meticulously researched account of the development of a premier historical attraction of significance not only to Wisconsin but to the entire nation. Krugler takes the reader from what was once just a vision to preserve vestiges of our state’s unique architectural legacy, through many perplexing challenges that complicated the museum’s construction, to what has become one of America’s largest and finest outdoor museums of rural American life.”
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John D. Krugler is professor of early American history and public history at Marquette University. He is the author of English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century. He lives in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.
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