Next History Club Activity will be posted on July 5th or 12th, 2024!
June 14, 2024
This month’s activities were inspired by some of the things we learned during our March and May activities. In March, we examined the working lives of skilled craftsmen who made wooden architectural elements at the Segelke & Kolhaus (S&K) factory in La Crosse (1857-1960). This got us wondering about what we might figure out about…
May 17, 2024
In Activity #1 we examined surviving evidence about how coded rules or norms might have shaped who could or could not socialize, eat, drink, or shop at certain places in La Crosse. With the exception of the Palm Garden’s separate entrances for river traffic and town residents, Activity #1 mostly focused on La Crosse’s permanent…
May 3, 2024
As the weather warms up this spring, we hope you are taking some time to be outside and enjoy the turn of seasons. And if you’re not, maybe May’s History Club activities can encourage you. This month, we are going to look at how different spaces in downtown La Crosse have been informally coded in…
March 22, 2024
This March, we are looking at the Segelke Kohlhaus Manufacturing Co, (S&K). In Activity #1 we focused more on S&K’s history and what its products were like. Now in Activity #2, we want to turn our investigation to the people who made both the corporation and the products. In other words, we now want to…
March 8, 2024
This month, we want to return to a theme we’ve explored previously: labor history and the pride La Crosse craftspeople had in the products they made for both local and regional use. In February 2021 and April 2023 we looked at this topic through the history of the La Crosse Rubber Mills Co. Now, for…
February 23, 2024
This February, we are taking a look at Dark La Crosse Stories a podcast/videocast produced by the La Crosse Public Library Archives in collaboration with the La Crosse Tribune. In 2020, Fox 25|48 began to reimage the Dark La Crosse Stories content as dramatized historical documentaries in a production called Rivertown. For Activity #2 this…
February 9, 2024
This month, we are going to explore primary sources and history narratives in a slightly different format: through video (or audio, if you prefer). We will do this by looking at Dark La Crosse Stories, which is a project that the La Crosse Public Library Archives Department (LPLA) produces in collaboration with the La Crosse…
January 19, 2024
This January we are looking at St. Mary’s Indian Boarding School, which was located on the Bad River Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin, but run by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration headquartered here in La Crosse. In Activity #1, we looked at articles written by Mary Annette Pember who is a descendant of survivors…
January 5, 2024
This spring, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (FSPA) celebrates their 175th anniversary as an organization devoted to prayer and service. They formed in Bavaria in the late 1840s with their initial members emigrating to the U.S. shortly thereafter, joining the nearly 1,400,000 German-speakers arriving in the U.S. between 1840 and 1860. According to their…
[La Crosse] History Club 