Would you like to take a ride on a rocket?

You could go 15 miles an hour.

I'll tell you about it today on Pioneer Wisconsin.

Pioneer Wisconsin presented by the Wisconsin School of the Year.

A series of programs for intermediate grades bringing authentic pictures of life in the early days of our state.

Your historian is Miss Doris Platt, supervisor of elementary school services of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Now here to tell you about train tracks on the prairie is Miss Platt.

Hello boys and girls.

Today I thought I'd wear a fancy costume for you.

This dress belonged to Mrs. Frank Baines of Jamesville in 1896.

Her father was a German pioneer who came to Jamesville and lived there all his life.

This dress has lace and embroidery on the sleeve and red ribbons, the black dress, and the hat also from the 1890s is blue velvet with a plume.

And do you see that?

Wicked looking hat pin?

It's so long and it comes right through from one side to the other.

And if anyone should run into it, it certainly wouldn't be very good, would it?

Well I put on this costume because the days of riding in ox carts and connoisseur wagons are over and today we're going to ride the train.

So I thought I could get a little bit dressed up.

Wisconsin was very interested in trains.

They had heard about a train in the east.

Oldwood hadn't gone very far.

It hadn't been very successful, but at least it was the first train.

So come on over here.

I'd like to show it to you.

This train is a model and it was taken from the State Historical Society and it's called the rocket.

Actually the very first train was called the Tom Thum, but this was made right afterwards in the 1830s.

The little train had wood in it and a barrel back here.

What do you suppose that was for?

Well that was for water in case the thing caught on fire.

It was a sort of a large fire extinguisher.

The other of this train was challenged to a race and they said, "Will you race a horse?"

And he said, "All right."

And so he drove his train along, but a little leather belt slipped.

He tried to fix it, but he caught his fingers in the gears and was hurt.

And so he couldn't.

And the horse won the race.

But people were encouraged.

They said, "Oh that man showed spunk.

He had a lot of spirit.

And maybe we could have a train too that would be almost as good and maybe we'd beat that horse after awhile."

And in the legislature in 1836 in Wisconsin, a man got up and said, "Let's have a train that goes all away from Milwaukee to the Mississippi."

In fact he said, "Let's have it go through Sinipi down in the lead region and all the way to San Francisco."

And this was such a wild and silly idea.

Almost like going to the moon with a railroad track that everyone said, "Horan they laughed."

And of course it didn't come to anything at all.

But in 1847 there actually was a railroad chartered in Wisconsin.

It was called the Milwaukee and Waukeshaw.

And it was to go between those two towns.

But people weren't sure what might drive it.

So in the charter it said, "This train is to move property and people between Milwaukee and Waukeshaw.

But by animals or by steam or any kind of power, whatever."

So they didn't know what really was going to do it.

But in 1855 miles of tracks had been built and a Pennsylvania engine was out to take the train on its first trip.

There were some important people on that trip, Mr. Mrs. Solomon Juneau and Byron Kilburn and important Milwaukee people for that first five mile trip.

It took them 12 minutes, that wasn't too long, and there was lots of cheering when they got on the train.

The men who surveyed the railroad had the same sort of problems that men who surveyed the military roads did.

They too went out with their surveying instruments.

And we hear about one man Andrew Davis, who went from portage to Lake Peppin in 1857.

His companion held the compass and he held the level and through swamps and bogs and rivers they went.

Sometimes he said, "It was so cold and we had to sleep on the ground, but it was too cold to sleep.

Sometimes they lost other members of their party and they didn't have anything but hard bread.

Sometimes they slept on wolf skins.

But the mosquitoes were the worst."

And he said other members of the party could wear veils and gloves, but we couldn't.

We couldn't look through a telescope with a veil and we couldn't manipulate our instruments with gloves.

And so it was pretty tough.

But the surveyors did get through and then the railroad man came.

Would you like to see a piece of early track?

This track is made of wood.

Did you know the early railroad tracks were made of wood and they were covered with thin strips of iron so that that made them firm.

Not firm enough though because when the train went over they loosened these pieces of metal and sometimes they flew up through the wooden bottoms of the railway cars and hurt the passengers.

So it wasn't very safe riding in a car.

And here are some spikes that were used to spike these wooden tracks into place.

They were spiked against stone or other metal.

And sometimes you could see the railroad road workers making trestles, building bridges and they built them out of wood also over the rivers.

And often they were safe and sometimes they collapsed and they weren't too safe.

All of the things connected with the railway were much corsor and cruder than they are today.

Here's something I'd like to show you.

This is a link or coupling that connected two trains.

It's very heavy so I won't lift it up.

But you can see the space here in the center.

And this was placed between the two trains and then this pin which is heavy too was used.

To link the two cars, railway cars together.

I'll put it there and hope it won't fall off.

This came from a North Milwaukee railway depot and has been in the society or sometime now in our railway collection.

After the first little tom sum engines and rocket engines, the wood burning engines came to Wisconsin.

Come here I'd like to show you this.

This is a wood burning train.

It was called the Pioneer and it was in Wisconsin in 1860.

Can you see the little bell?

There wasn't any whistle on the early engine.

That's the little bell.

And here is the tender and here the logs of wood were placed.

And we have two passenger coaches behind their old ones with a high windows and doors.

And they're made of wood and they weren't a bit safe because if sparks flew from the wood, they might catch the train on fire or a boiler might explode and a fragment of metal blow into your face.

You also felt rather seasick riding on an early train.

The engineer had to stop and get wood.

And this is a little wood ticket that he used.

It's called a half-cord ticket.

He got a half-cord of wood.

This is a Wisconsin central railway ticket from 1872.

And the engineer paid for his wood in this way.

The railway men had quite a joke.

They said when they came to the big wood pile and the men on the railway helped them load it.

Here, give us some big slivers.

The logs were big slivers that they threw in to burn.

And then they said, "And don't give us any of those round pieces.

We don't have any curves on this trip."

And they pretended that the round pieces of wood or logs were used to go around curves.

If you were riding on a passenger train in the 1860s, you would see some interesting equipment.

The conductor might come down the aisle and collect your ticket and he might be carrying this in his hand.

You know what this is?

Well, this was a versatile instrument.

With this, the conductor could close and open windows.

Here's a little hook.

He could push the windows up and down.

And he also could have a light.

He could light candles or gas lanterns or kerosene lanterns, whatever he needed.

Here's a little strip that pushes the taper up.

The little flame comes out here and the conductor could hold us up in the air and light a candle or a lamp or whatever he needed.

Of course, sometimes when he lighted that fire, it didn't stay just where he wanted it to.

And maybe some sparks would fall and the upholstering or the straw seeds would catch on fire too.

And then you'd have to run for the fire extinguisher.

Do you ever see a fire extinguisher like this one?

This is called a star hand grenade.

And it contains not water, but a chemical.

And if a fire came, you didn't try to take the cork off or open the bottle or pour out the contents.

But you took it in your hand like a grenade and threw it as hard as you could into the flame where the glass would break and the liquid would come out.

And we hope would put out the fire.

The conductor had a number of other lanterns that he himself used.

This one is a kerosene lantern.

It doesn't look unlike ours today.

The kerosene was here and the wick and he would swing this lantern for signaling.

There are lots of stories in the 1850s about desperate things that happened on the railroad.

Because the signaling wasn't so versatile or so good in those days, it wasn't always perfectly worked out.

No telegraph system very well worked out then.

And so we find stories of heroines who rushed out in the track and signaled and called and hoped that they would stop the train before one coming from the other direction ran into it.

The construction man, the man who worked on the wood trains, used an oil torch like this.

This has the wick for oil or kerosene.

The oil is placed in the bottom.

So this was a construction man's torch or lantern.

And this padlock was used for padlocking freight cars.

And you would see some of those as freight cars came more and more into being for carrying wheat and farm produce out across America.

We had a famous railway king in Wisconsin.

His name was Alexander Mitchell.

And he came to Milwaukee in the 1830s.

He is the grandfather of Billy Mitchell, an aviator I'm sure that you've heard about or read about in World War I. Alexander Mitchell started a bank and he made some money and with his money he was able to help finance railways.

Railways that went east and west across the state and then north and south too.

And finally by buying up many smaller lines, he was able to have two main lines in Wisconsin, the Milwaukee and St. Paul and the northwestern.

And when Alexander Mitchell became famous and spent his money freely and helping to get railways started, little depots sprang up all over the countryside and roundhouses and all sorts of railway yards where people could get the trains repaired.

In this picture of a roundhouse you'll see a water tank and several engines that have come together and are going to be serviced before they go on the road again.

At the depot you could buy a railway ticket.

I have some here, they are paste-forward tickets, something like small theater tickets and these all belong to Bishop Kemper, a famous Wisconsin traveler in 1867.

The Western Union Railway Company, Milwaukee and St. Paul, La Crosse and Milwaukee, Chicago and Northwestern, Racine and Mississippi.

The Racine and Mississippi issued a timetable in 1860.

I'd like to have you look at this very, very carefully.

Because of the small print, I suppose you can't read it, I'd like to read it to you, we have the story of what happened before there was standard time.

At the top it says, "The clock in the Secretary's office at Racine will be taken as the standard time.

Conductors will be particular to compare their time with it before leaving the station.

They will also compare time with each other at passing stations and see that the clocks of other stations and the watches of conductors of construction and wood trains compare with the standard time.

Can you think what it was like before we had standard time?

The train started that.

It didn't make any difference when you wrote in an ox cart what time it was, you could take the sun time, the time of the village you were in.

But when you went in a train quickly from one part of the country to another, you did need to have standard time.

And in 1870, the railroads established the four time zones in America.

And after that, you had to change your watch when you went from one spot to another.

All the little depots in Wisconsin towns became fabulous commercial centers.

Sixtier 70 teams would drive in bringing their wheat, little stations like Sussex and like Trico that no longer are important at all.

Little stations that have passed out of being and the towns almost become ghost towns.

But all how important they were in the 1860s and 70s and 80s and in the 1890s.

And here we have two of our museum staff Dave McNamara and Rhoda Stobb who are going back to college.

They're going back to school.

Rhoda is wearing a dress that belonged to Mrs. CF Finney of O'Connor, Milwaukee in 1899.

She has on a big straw hat with flowers and one of those long dangerous hat pins too.

And she has a parasol.

This was not for rain.

This is silk and lace.

It's just a sent shade.

It wouldn't do a bit of good if a big shower came up.

And Dave is wearing one of those plaid coats and a straw hat.

And he has his banjo there too.

Once you give us a little tune on it Dave.

This is a homemade one.

It was made out of the top of a snare drum and he's going back to impress his fraternity brothers with the songs that he's learned to play during the summer.

Oh, there comes that train whistle.

Well, they better pick up their bags and get going.

Don't miss that train.

You won't get back to the university in time.

So they have taken their train ride and they're probably in a wood burning train.

We have a lot of other fascinating kinds of transportation in Wisconsin.

We mentioned last week that sometimes there were horses drawing streetcars.

And the poor horses got pretty tired doing that.

You may be sure that they were the first to rejoice when electricity came into actual working use in Appleton in 1892.

And an electric streetcar came down the street in 1896.

That was a big day.

There was a circus in town.

And people heard this funny noise and they wondered what it was.

And they rushed out of their tents at the circus and they rushed out of their houses and they went to see.

I'd like to show it to you.

This is a model of an electric streetcar.

This wasn't the one in Appleton.

It was one in Milwaukee.

There's a little trolley line.

The electricity is up in the air there somewhere.

And this was really an innovation and lots of fun to have a streetcar ride.

They even had streetcar parties in Milwaukee.

Perhaps you read about them.

And then after the wood burning train and the electric trains, there were always coal burning trains until recent times.

Would you like to see a coal burning train?

This little train was made in Pennsylvania, this little model.

And we had lots of Pennsylvania engines and trains working in Wisconsin.

And here's the coal.

And it was only a few years ago that the last boilers and coal went out.

And diesel engines came in.

The trains came to Wisconsin.

Lots of celebrations took place when they arrived for the first time.

When Madison in 1864, when the engines came in, people had bands playing in cannons booming and a big dinner served even in the capital park.

But the wood burning stoves, trains, those were the ones the lumberjacks had to work for.

They had to chop down logs to get those ties and rails and put the trains on the road.

Would you like to see what a lumberjack camp was like?

Would you like to get your axe and your peepee hook and come along a tote road with me next week?

Well get ready and I'll see you then.

[Music] Miss Doris Platte is your historian on this series of programs, Pioneer Wisconsin, authentic pictures of life in the early days of our state.

Miss Platte is supervisor of elementary school services for the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

Pioneer Wisconsin is a presentation of the Wisconsin School of the Air.

[Music]