WIWisconsin Fun Facts

Wisconsin is the only state where making cheese requires a license. Roughly a quarter of all American cheese comes out of here, more than 3.5 billion pounds a year, and the state runs a master cheesemaker credential modeled on European guild programs that takes years of production experience before anyone can even apply.

Facts most people get wrong

• The badger on the state seal is not an animal story. In the 1820s and 1830s the lead miners of the southwest corner burrowed into hillsides and slept in the shafts through winter rather than build cabins. Neighbors called them badgers, and the nickname attached to the whole state. It came from lead, not wildlife.
• Wisconsin is no longer the top milk state. California passed it in total milk production in 1993 and has stayed ahead. Wisconsin still makes far more cheese than any other state, which is the part locals actually care about.
• The Green Bay Packers have no owner. More than half a million people hold shares. The stock pays no dividend, cannot be sold at a profit, and confers little beyond a certificate and a vote. The team takes its name from the Indian Packing Company, which paid for the first set of jerseys in 1919.
• Milwaukee is not the capital. Madison is, built on an isthmus between two lakes, and Milwaukee is the larger city by a wide margin.
• The ice cream sundae claim is contested. Two Rivers, Wisconsin dates its version to 1881 and Ithaca, New York claims 1892. Both cities have put up signs. Neither has ever produced proof that settles it.
• The Republican Party's birthplace is disputed too. A meeting in a Ripon schoolhouse on March 20, 1854 is the most widely credited origin, but Jackson, Michigan claims the first formal state convention that July, and both cities still argue about it.

Records and firsts

• Wisconsin produces roughly a quarter of the cheese made in the United States and is the only state that requires cheesemakers to be licensed. Its Master Cheesemaker program, launched in 1994, was the first of its kind outside Europe.
• The state grows about 60 percent of the country's cranberries, well ahead of Massachusetts.
• Marathon County alone accounts for the large majority of cultivated American ginseng, most of it exported to Asia.
• The first kindergarten in the United States opened in Watertown in 1856, taught in German by Margarethe Meyer Schurz.
• Christopher Latham Sholes patented the first commercially successful typewriter in Milwaukee in 1868, and the QWERTY keyboard layout came with it.
• Ole Evinrude built the first practical outboard motor in Milwaukee in 1909. Stephen Poplawski of Racine patented the drink mixer that became the blender in 1922.
• Harley-Davidson has built motorcycles in Milwaukee since 1903 and still runs its headquarters there.
• Wisconsin passed the first state unemployment compensation law in the country in 1932, three years before Social Security existed.
• The Ringling brothers started their circus in Baraboo in 1884 and wintered it there for three decades.
• The National Mustard Museum in Middleton holds more than 6,000 mustards from over 70 countries.

Geography that surprises

• Wisconsin touches two Great Lakes, Superior and Michigan. Add the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers on the western side and most of the state's border is water.
• The Driftless Area in the southwest was skipped entirely by the last glaciers. It kept its deep valleys, limestone bluffs and cold spring creeks while the rest of the state was scraped flat.
• Timms Hill, the highest point, reaches only 1,951 feet, lower than the low point of several western states.
• The state holds more than 15,000 lakes, and the Wisconsin River runs about 430 miles from the north woods to the Mississippi without ever leaving the state.
• Wisconsin wanted the Upper Peninsula. Congress attached it to Michigan in 1836 as compensation for Michigan losing the Toledo strip, and Wisconsin boundary claims were still being argued into the twentieth century.
• Door County, the peninsula pointing into Lake Michigan, has about 300 miles of shoreline and eleven lighthouses, more than any other county in the country.

Where the name comes from

The state takes its name from the Wisconsin River. Jacques Marquette wrote the local Miami name down in 1673 as Meskousing. French speakers reshaped it into Ouisconsin, English speakers into Wisconsin, and Congress fixed the modern spelling in 1845, three years before statehood.

The meaning has never been settled. The most common reading is something close to river running through a red place, a reference to the red sandstone cliffs at the Wisconsin Dells. The state motto is a single word, Forward, adopted in 1851 by two men who wanted a seal that sounded like progress rather than Latin.

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Bordering states

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