Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 40, number 1, autumn, 1956

              by Don McNeil
Older states sometimes look down their more ancient noses at midwesteners who are trying to recapture the life and times of a civilization little more than a century old. So when one of us finds an eighteenth century document somewhere in the state we feel a certain thrill which our more sophisticated manuscript hunter friends in the East prob¬ ably would not experience. I recall the incident five years ago when a search of a hospital li¬ brary yielded an unusual Revolutionary docu¬ ment. Tucked away in the St. Luke's Hospital library in Racine were the original handwrit¬ ten minutes of the British army and navy sur¬ geons stationed in New York, dated 1781, two years before the treaty of peace between the struggling colonies and Britain.
Clem Silvestro had a similar thrill the other day when he found the journal of Moses Black, a Boston merchant, dated 1785 to 1787, along with a great variety of other manuscripts dating back to Wisconsin territorial days. Our eastern neighbors would not be stirred by such a find but for us, who consider manu¬ scripts "old" if they deal with the ante-bellum period, the discovery of records from the Revolutionary era can prove to be exciting.
Bill Schereck has been roving the state the past few weeks in an intensive search for costumes, craft objects, and household artifacts of various ethnic groups in Wisconsin for the annual exhibit sponsored by the Society's Women's Auxiliary. The theme this year cen¬ ters upon ethnic contributions and life and is entitled "The Village Green, Where the Peo¬ ples of Wisconsin Meet." The exhibit, which will be in the first floor galleries, will consist of hundreds of objects loaned and donated to the
Society. Bifl's main job of late has been to unearth the needed items for the showing.
One of the more unusual displays this year will be on the ancient Scottish sport of curling. Wisconsin had two of the earliest clubs in the nation, the Milwaukee group, formed in 1847, and the Portage club, formed in 1850. Curling enthusiasts now say that curling as a sport is on the increase after a long period during which the pastime nearly died out in America. With the advent of artificial ice in the 1930's curling began attracting thousands of new de¬ votees. For every hundred curlers in what they called the "mither country," there were new thousands in the United States and Canada.
Essentially, the game of curling consists of sliding a stone down a 139 foot strip of ice and having it come to rest as close as possible to the center of a three ring bull's-eye at the far end of the ice, or "sheet," as the curlers call it. The curling stones, which resemble teakettles, are sent spinning down the ice while two sweepers under the direction of a "skip" try to guide the stone by furiously sweeping the ice in front of it to increase its flight and to decrease its "curl."
The first match in Wisconsin came on a frigid New Year's Eve in 1850 at Dekorah. There a reminiscing band of Scotsmen, full of nostalgia and perhaps of New Year spirits, cleared a space on the Wisconsin River for a curling match. Immune to the blasts of the cold winter's night, the Scots used flatirons for stones. Later, finding this improvisation unsat¬ isfactory, they engaged a carpenter and a blacksmith to make the stones of wood with iron handles. Iron stones came into use in the early 1880's and the first granite stones were imported from Scotland in the early 1890's.
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