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The Apostle Islands, near the southern end of Lake Superior, were named by missionaries who followed the French fur traders into this area. It was thought that there were twelve islands in this archipelago (and therefore the missionaries named the group after the twelve apostles), but there are in fact twenty-two islands. Twenty-one of them are now within the boundaries of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, a part of the National Park Service. In the first picture you are looking out across Sand Bay from a point on the mainland over to Sand Island in the distance.

The islands are formed of brown sandstone laid down by braided streams about one billion years ago. Sandstone on several of the islands was quarried for about thirty years, beginning in 1869, to furnish brownstone for urban Midwest buildings. In the second picture you see the old county courthouse in Bayfield, Wisconsin, which now serves as park headquarters for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and which is built of the brown sandstone quarried from the area.

Lake Superior is 360 miles long, 160 miles wide, and 1,332 feet deep at its lowest point. It is the world's most expansive freshwater body. Lake surface altitude lies at about 602 feet elevation, and its bottom, gouged out by Ice Age glaciers, reaches 730 feet below sea level!

The capital city of Wisconsin is Madison, home to two of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs in architecture. One is the Unitarian Meeting House, which was built between 1947 and 1951. The newest is the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center on the shore of Lake Monona, which was built between 1994 and 1997 from a plan that Wright designed for the purpose before he died. From one side of the center one can look out across the lake, and from the other side one can look up a pedestrian mall two blocks to the Wisconsin State Capitol Building. When Frank Lloyd Wright designed a building, he not only designed the structure of it, he also designed the furnishings, complete with carpet. The orange, brown, and gold carpet in the expansive hallways and convention rooms has been a source of controversy between factions who either like it or dislike it intensely. Personally, I think the carpet is very unattractive--a design and color choice of at least two decades ago, and I wonder if Wright would choose it if he were alive today. Outside the center, I love the graceful draping concrete designs on the lakefront side.

Oconto, Wisconsin, is the site of a 4000-year-old burial mound of an ancient Copper Culture people. Archeological excavations revealed many artifacts fashioned of copper, which were buried with the dead. Today a park is situated on the site, and there is a path leading up to the small mound, on which is a rock engraved with the name Copper Culture and stating the age of the mound to be about four thousand years.

Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is the site of a deadly forest fire that killed over 800 people on the night of October 8, 1871--strangely enough, the same night as a much more widely publicized fire that destroyed part of Chicago. The fire was fueled by tinder-dry woods and grasslands, at the end of a dry spring and summer. It was spread by a tornado-force wind that hit that night, driving the fire from the forest right through the town. A thief who had been stealing from damaged houses the next day was sentenced to be hanged. In the whole town, there wasn't an unburned rope to be found for hanging him, and his cries for mercy convinced the crowd to pardon him. He was actually saved by the fire!