Helen Bulovsky: The Story of a WWI Nurse

Within the confines of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center exist the last remaining vestiges of Helen Bulovsky. The creation of a de facto arranged marriage between a Czech-American from Chicago and a Czech from Austria-Hungary, she was born in 1895 and died of a heart condition just 28 years later. Through inference from her records and family history, it seems Helen, a dainty five feet tall, knew she inherited her father’s weak heart, which killed him in 1906. After working a short time at Madison General Hospital (now Meriter) she joined the Army Nursing Corps and kept an account of her experiences abroad. Her records consist of photographs, letters and a diary all almost exclusively dated between 1917 and 1919 while she trained, travelled to France with the American Expeditionary Force, and finished her adventure peacefully in Belgium.

Undoubtedly realizing she was participating in one of the greatest events in history, Helen’s day-by-day diary is not used regularly until April 1918 while she trained and awaited deployment in New Jersey.

The unused portions of the diary contain glued photographs of family in Madison, including one at the steps of their 500 block West Mifflin Street home. After a quick guess to its location I realize it is one of the dozens of houses that contemporarily participate in the Mifflin Street Block Party; it saddens me slightly that such a dwelling is the home of transient undergrads and (knowing that block) negligent landlords. Surrounding pages of the diary consist of tokens from her trip(s) to New York City and details of her activities including getting her passport picture taken and receiving smallpox and typhoid vaccinations.

Writing aboard her transport ship on June 12^th, 1918, she explains the “ocean doesn’t seem so big to me as it did in the books…” and “the waves don’t compare [to] those I have seen in pictures. It really is a disappointment,” she complains, “but a fortunate one.”

Her letters from France detail her busy life and the encumbrances of army life. Upon arrival to a bullet riddled train station the nurses “had no shelter but for ourselves” and, after transport to assume their duties, immediately saw to patients with but a “small piece of canvas in a swampy field hospital” to protect their belongings and worked so much she “forgot sleep was an option.” Despite the carnage of her surroundings she ends with a joke—“Now, for my bed—I mean cot.”

Although she writes with sadness for tending to wounded men for whom she can do nothing (“Oh! how [sic] I wished I had a dozen hands and feet to help these boys”), Helen Bulovsky spends equal time pleading with family to write her. “After four months of watchful waiting, I received my first letters from home,” she laments. In another letter dated July 1^st and addressed to her sister Bess she writes “I just can’t see why you have not written to me for such a long time. Surely you have been away from home and know just what I would like to know.” She chides further and preempts her negligent sister’s excuses: “I know you are busy but now you have not your school work to bother you” and while their mother’s letters were precious they are too short since “[a] letter from home could never be too long.”

Her day-by-day diary is all but empty for those first months in France and a few entries in Belgium. After a long break from writing, she vents her sadness and loneliness from July 21^st to August 5^th in a spate of long-form composition spanning the sixteen pages; on July 29^th she grieves “I am mighty homesick and no sign of mail.”

Naturally she accounts for other things as well: Aborted trips to town, the condition of known Madison men in the trenches, the carnage of war—including a graphic scene of a horse launched into a nearby tree and hanging limply as it decomposed in its naked branches—and the oddities of army life. “It’s going to seem funny to look after ones personal affairs again” she writes in February 1919, “since we have been in the army we have been like children” complete with bedtimes and permissions to leave encampment; one transcript letter references censorship and, indeed, the original has strategically thin strip permanently redacted from the body.

Somewhere between New Jersey in 1918 and Madison in 1919 she met a young Pennsylvania soldier who bequeathed a small scrap book of personal photographs depicting scenes from home, motorized ambulances, and a picture of himself in his fatigues. “My fondest thoughts of you shall be that you cherish a humble gift from me,” he inscribed. Nothing else is known of this man.

“Not to be discounted, Helen did quite a bit of scrapbooking herself.”

The finding aid for her collection speculates this same man was the source of the “Sketches of Tommy’s Life...” postcards. The postcards depict the misadventures of a patriotic young Brit through several humorous series: “In Training,” “At the Base,” “Up the Line,” and “Out on the Rest” mention nothing of the war’s carnage save for the indignity of getting your morning tea ration’s water from a metal pail.

Three years after her return she married her step-brother only to die nine months after; despite her delicate frame or perhaps the very cause of it, her weak heart enlarged and eventually failed. Family legend has it that she fraudulently passed an army medical exam by claiming her rapid heartbeat was from running up stairs to make the appointment. Felled by a congenital defect rather than German shells, she lived more in those months abroad than many of us do in our lifetimes. She spent her entire adult life caring for the sick and wounded but could not care for herself. She should not be remembered as a tragic figure, however, but rather an intelligent, curious, and playful soul who witnessed previously unknown degrees of carnage but still craved “juicy bits” of gossip from her preoccupied family.

[Post written by Alex Champion.]

The Appleton Edison Light Company

To those familiar with Appleton, a small city on the Fox River in northeastern Wisconsin, it might seem like an unlikely site for a revolution in power generation. However unlikely, though, the city best known for its paper mills and Lawrence University also has the distinction of being the home of the world’s first commercial electric power plant.

Henry J. Rogers, the owner of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company, was convinced in the summer of 1882 that an electric power plant would provide a unique investment opportunity, and together with some of the city’s other investors went ahead and purchased the necessary equipment from Samuel Insull, one of Edison’s assistants. Edison himself was already constructing a larger plant in New York City, which opened for operation on September 4, 1882. The newly-formed Appleton Edison Light Co., however, began its operation just a couple of weeks earlier on August 20^th, giving it the distinction of being the first electric power plant to operate anywhere in the world.

The plant began as one “K” type dynamo in a wooden shed of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Co., powered by the company’s Fox River water wheel. It produced enough electricity to light 250 incandescent light bulbs, each of “sixteen candlepower” (approximately 50 watts).

Initially, lights were installed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Co. factory, a second paper factory nearby, and Rogers’ house (which still stands in Appleton today, known as Hearthstone):

Hearthstone, therefore, has the distinction of being the first residence in the world to be lit by electric light. Inside the house, one can still see the original chandeliers and the odd brass light switches used to operate the lights, rather different from the switches we are familiar with today:

The early operations of this revolutionary plant were not perfect, as one might expect. The mechanisms for regulating the flow of electric power, and even meters for measuring the power, had not yet been invented, and only came into use later in the 1880s, causing some early mishaps as the engineers sometimes overestimated how much power they were sending out and burned out the light bulbs. The equipment itself was much more primitive than we are familiar with today; most of the apparatus involved were made of wood, all the wiring was copper, often uncovered, and the light bulbs themselves contained bamboo filaments (something Edison himself had discovered to be better than his initial carbonized thread). The plant had some early financial troubles, due in part to these mechanical troubles, and also possibly due to undercharging its customers, since no one had a good idea of what might reasonably be charged for electric power. Mill customers were charged $2.00 per lamp per month (if the lamp was burned 15 hours each night), and residential customers paid $7.00 per lamp per year. The sixteen candlepower bulbs were $1.40 each, provided by the company.

The company did work through those early financial troubles, and expanded its customer base to other factories around the Fox River, and eventually to more residences throughout Appleton. Looking through the Sanborn Maps at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives allows one to trace the company over the following years. The 1883 map merely lists “one dynamo” in the storage shed of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company. By the time of the next map, 1886, the “Edison Electric Light Co.” had its own building containing 4 dynamos, a workshop and an office. It was located on a flume of the U.S. Canal just south of the Fox River, not far from the Appleton Boot & Shoe Manufacturing Company. It remained in the same location in 1891 (now with 7 dynamos), and is listed as running “night and day” (in its early days, it ran only at night, for that was when illumination was most needed). In 1895 the company had expanded out to another temporary location in the former Appleton Manufacturing Company, in addition to the site along the U.S. Canal, and by then what is now Main Hall of Lawrence University is listed as having electric lights. The 1901 map comes after the company’s bankruptcy in 1896, after which it was re-purchased by one of the initial investors and renamed the “Appleton Electric Light And Power Co.” It has three locations: the original site on the U.S. Canal (now expanded), a “Run at Night Only” facility along the Fox River, and a third location away from the river, southeast of State Street and Fisk Street, which was powered by steam from coal-fired boilers. By this time many of the larger buildings throughout the city had at least some electric lighting, as did a growing number of residences.

In spite of the rough start, the plant’s investors persisted, and thanks in no small part to their willingness to take a step into the future, the use of electric power spread rapidly throughout the United States. Improvements in the industry came almost as rapidly as the mishaps, and so what began as a novelty source of light in Appleton, Wisconsin, grew into the cheap, bright, steady source of illumination that we still use today.

I think I’ll close with the long-standing motto of Lawrence University (my own alma mater), which now strikes me as appropriate in more ways than one:

"Light! More Light!"

(All images courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society. I would like to thank the Wisconsin Historical Society for the use of their Archives and images.)

[Post written by Audra Hilse.]

Orson Welles and His Masterpiece: Born in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research is on the fourth floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and is accessible to anyone. The collection houses papers from celebrities like director John Ford, Groucho Marx, and Alan Alda, among others. In addition to these, it has some holdings related to Orson Welles, a Wisconsin native born in Kenosha on May 6^th, 1915, well known for his work in radio and film. In 1938, Welles did a radio production of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was so convincing that it caused a national “panic” where people believed that Martian invasion was actually happening. In 1941, Welles wrote and directed a screenplay of the film Citizen Kane. Other notable films include The Third Man and Touch of Evil. He died in 1985.

When I visited the Wisconsin Historical Society, I knew I needed to take a look at the final draft of the Citizen Kane script. I am a film buff, and reading that draft was a defining moment for me. I only read a portion, but I gained a deeper understanding of the film. Citizen Kane is about the life and last word (Rosebud) of Newspaper mogul, Charles Foster Kane. The film is loosely based on the life of Randolph Hearst, a media mogul.

Reading the final draft allowed me to understand the locations and plot of the film better. Xanadu, the famed estate of Charles Kane, is located in Florida. The nightclub scene with the last wife of Citizen Kane was incredibly written; the nightclub is located in Atlantic City, and Orson described the wife as “cheap.” When I saw the film, I didn’t notice her appearance as cheap, rather the dingy nightclub as sad. Orson’s description in the script was very accurate.

In the beginning of Citizen Kane, after the death of Charles Foster is announced, five newspapers are shown. Orson Welles notes in the script that he wants four newspapers from the United States, and one international paper to flash across the screen. This minor detail demonstrates Orson Welles’s masterful use of imagery; Charles Kane’s death is seen as an international event and this gives insight into the persona of Kane. By examining the script, which archives like the Wisconsin Historical Society allows us to do, we can more intimately understand the scope of the film in ways that aren’t always as obvious to the casual movie-goer. These archives help us not only to touch the past, but to think about it in new ways.

[Post written by Katherine Stotis.]

The Gollmar Bros: Stewards of the Wisconsin Circus

While the most famous circus owners associated with Wisconsin may be the Ringling Bros., their cousins the Gollmar Bros. also form an important part of the Born in Wisconsin archives. The Gollmar Bros. started their own circus in 1891 and operated until 1916, spending the winters in Baraboo, Wisconsin. After 1916 the Gollmar name was leased to other circuses, and last used in 1926. UW-Madison alum and Circus World Archivist Pete Shrake provided both images of and information about this fantastic collection.

The records of the Gollmar Bros. Circus are located at Circus World in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The ten cubic foot collection is primarily comprised of the business records of the Gollmar Bros. Circus. While a few years are not represented, the records provide fascinating documentation into how the increasing size of the circus required more specialized occupations such as canvas-men, hostlers, and property men. By 1916 the records show that the Gollmar Bros. Circus had nineteen different payroll classifications, with other records documenting how the circus used railroad transportation to travel bring their show to their audience. Records also detail the distribution of advertising materials and include commissary ledgers, showing how the circus interacted with the public and part of the daily life of circus workers.

The Gollmar Bros. collection is an important part of Circus World, which houses what may be the largest collection of circus artifacts in the world. Over 210 original vehicles and wagons are on the grounds, as well over 9,500 multi-colored circus posters. Also included are thousands of journals, manuscripts, business records, original oil paintings, hand bills, programs, and rare photographs and negatives documenting the legacy not just of circuses, but of circuses that were born in Wisconsin.

[Post written by Pete Shrake with the assistance of Eric Willey]

The Board of Commissioners of Public Lands

The archive of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL) preserves a set of records that touches every mile of Wisconsin territory, documents much of the state's funding of education, and helps provide books for every school age child in the state. BCPL, the first state agency in Wisconsin, has had many incarnations over the years, but has always managed Wisconsin's land holdings held in trust for public projects and education. (State parks and other natural reserves, on the other hand, are not held by the agency, but by the Department of Natural Resources.) BCPL has played a role in Wisconsin's history in often unique ways -- from loaning Wisconsin the money to equip the first Wisconsin units of Union Soldiers to providing early settlers with the only loans available at a reasonable rate. The chilly archives room in a state building off of the Capitol Square contains the records that document the land transfers that funded these loans -- and continue to pay about $27 per child to each school district a year for their school libraries. Taken together, the archive documents the history of a unique expression of dedication to education that was, as this year’s theme says, “born in Wisconsin.”

Last week, I returned the BCPL archive, where I was previously a research assistant, to get my hands on some of the favorites of their collection. The agency is moving to a new location early next year, but for now, a typical shelf is shown below.

I made the mistake of wearing a light colored shirt: by the end of the day, it was covered with red rot. The agency has managed, at one point or another, more than ten million acres, and it did so without computers. As you might expect, the ledger books, with thin line after thin line of land parcels, are large enough to crush a small human being. They certainly did a number on my fingers. These massive volumes, about 6 inches thick and wrapped in cloth to help protect users from red rot, are housed horizontally on rollers.

The BCPL archive holds the field notebooks of the original survey of Wisconsin by the United States General Land Office (GLO). The surveyors criss-crossed the state, marking trees and rocks to divide the western territories of the United States into square-mile sections. The markers they placed were, and remain, the basis for all legal land descriptions. In Wisconsin, winter held a distinct advantage for this work -- the surveyors could haul their measuring chains straight across the lakes on the ice. Indeed, when the surveyors came upon Madison, they were able to walk straight across Lake Monona and Mendota. An example of the Madison survey, complete with the very common “Entered March” … “Left Marsh.”

The field notebook above is one of hundreds, each carried along across hundreds of miles of Wisconsin territory, and now kept safely in fireproof cabinets in the archive. The survey notebooks, digitized and online, are used for a variety purposes, including studying Wisconsin's original tree cover and helping decide legal conflicts between land owners.

The field notebooks and a sketch map of the territory surveyed were sent back to a Surveyor General’s office, where plat maps like this one were created:

Every so often, a piece of land would have to be resurveyed, as happened to Picnic Point on the UW campus in the 1880s. The half-century between the original survey and the resurvey had witnessed both the alteration of the lake shore and the arrival of settlers in the City of Madison. The surveyor in the 1880s took the opportunity to note that a formation in the area "is occasionally used as a picnic ground.”

One of the reasons the GLO surveys were so important was that government revenue at all levels was dependent on land, through the sale of public land or the taxation of private land. Indeed, BCPL was founded to manage the millions of acres of land given to Wisconsin by the federal government. As a state, we received between 5 and 6 million acres to support the construction of railroads, 3.2 million acres of swamp land to promote swamp drainage and education, and 1.7 million acres to support local K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin. Including other smaller land grants, Wisconsin received about 10,000,000 acres from the federal government.

Many of the educational lands were individually appraised before being put on the public market. These appraisals can show a snapshot of the economic activity in the area. Here, we have a map of a square-mile section in Grant County, a county with rich mineral deposits. The appraisal map shows a house, a stable and two furnaces situated at the intersection of a river and a local road, as well as, of course, a number of ink splotches. This section is now home to the UW Platteville campus, and Pioneer Stadium sits just north of where the bottom right furnace once was.

The educational lands were sold to the public, and buyers typically were given some kind of payment plan. At a time when banks were scarce and unwelcome, the state was often the only source of a mortgage. The records of these sales sometimes bring out interesting characters. There are lands held by women and rights to land that were transferred more than ten times between different members of the community before being paid off. When the owner managed to pay the balance on the land, he or she would receive a patent from the state, shown below.

There was little restriction on how the money that came in from educational lands was to be spent, and in the early years many financial policies failed miserably. With few banks to provide loans, the state decided that the balance of the educational fund could be used to provide loans to any Wisconsin citizen who was willing to put up their land as collateral. In theory, this policy would have helped Wisconsinites while the fund received 7% interest on its loans (a very reasonable rate in the early days of statehood). Although it was a useful service for early settlers, this loan program failed when settlers began defaulting and the mortgaged lands they forfeited sold poorly on the market. In response, the loan program began loaning money only to school districts and municipalities. Below, a school district in Taylor County, a sparsely populated area at the time, applied and received a loan for $250 in 1877. Part of the fun of working with these records is determining what they mean – was this loan interest free, or have we simply not yet found the second document that deals with the interest payments?

And here, a loan of $48,000 was approved in 1953 to help a school district serving Marquette and Oconto Counties build an “addition of classrooms to the present Coleman High School.”

This program continues to this day. The interest provided by these loans allows BCPL to distribute more than $30 million a year to local school libraries.

[Post created by Amy Unger.]

Ada James

Inspired by the recent political activities in Wisconsin’s capital, I turned to the Wisconsin Historical Society to find other instances of social reform and political activity born in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Historical Society was founded in 1846 and was originally located in the Capital Building in Madison. As WHS began to outgrow its quarters, a move was planned to a larger location on the University of Wisconsin’s campus to better serve the society’s main user base at that time, university students. WHS is now housed in an impressive building opened in 1900.

Not to be missed on a trip to WHS is the second floor reading room and the many paintings that grace the staircases.

Newly renovated reading room.

WHS is open to researchers and the public alike. If a trip to Madison is not an option, WHS has a fantastic website with a variety of digitized collections and virtual reference available.

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/

The WHS archival collections are rich with materials of social reform and political unrest; varying from the papers and photographs of Edward Alsworth Ross, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin concerned with immigrant rights, federal health care and education; to film and manuscripts collections of anti-war protests from the Vietnam era; to the more recent Wisconsin Bureau of Community Health and Prevention Family Planning Program papers documenting family planning funding and education in the 1970’s and 1980’s. However, one collection in particular piqued my interest as an example of political reform born in Wisconsin.

The Ada Lois James collection chronicles the work of Richland Center, Wisconsin native Ada James as she worked to bring political equality to women and better the lives of Wisconsinites. Ada was born into a politically active family; her parents were David G. James, a Wisconsin state senator that among other accomplishments introduced a suffrage referendum bill to the state senate at the urging of his daughter in 1911; and her mother Laura Briggs James who was involved in the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association with her daughter. Throughout her life, Ada was involved in many organizations and social movements. Her papers contain correspondence with other social activist in the Midwest, correspondence from politicians as well as personal correspondence.

Below is the hand drawn cover and inside page of the Political Equality Club 1909 member log. Ada was president of the club from 1911-1918. She was also active with the Wisconsin Women’s Suffrage Association, and the National Women’s Party.

President-Marila Marshall, Vice-President-Gracie Harn, Secretary-Marcia Bliss, Treasurer-Mary McCormick

The suffrage movement began in Wisconsin in 1846 and was not fulfilled until June of 1919 when Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19^th amendment. Below is a letter from state senator Harlan P. Bird to Ada explaining why he is unable to support women’s suffrage. Although Senator Bird appears to hold women in high esteem, he explains to Ada that he cannot allow women to carry a man’s intellectual burden of voting. He also writes that he cannot foresee a time when the suffrage movement will catch on at a national level. The letter is dated April of 1909, some ten years before women won the vote in Wisconsin. You can click on the images for a closer look.

Ada and her fellow suffragist traveled around Wisconsin holding gatherings and trying to win the public’s support for women’s suffrage.

A group of suffragists in 1911 or 1912. Ada is in the center, wearing a sash.

A gathering in support of women’s suffrage in 1912 at Sister Bay, Wisconsin.

Although the suffrage movement was of great importance to Ada, she found time to be involved in other political movements. During World War I Ada became involved in pacifism and prohibition movements. After women secured the vote, Ada remained involved in social and political reform. In 1922 Ada was the Vice-Chairman of the Republican State Central Committee and in 1923 became the President of the Wisconsin Progressive Association. In her later life Ada became involved with social work within Wisconsin.

Ada was born in Wisconsin, and so was her determination and perseverance to bring about political equality.

[Post created by Laura Farley.]