Just east of the Capital City Trail crossing at the Yahara River, a nondescript warehouse rises on Madison’s west side. Its blank exterior offers no hint of what’s inside, and even the interior is not set up for glass cases and museum spotlights.

But its more than 180,000-square-feet of climate-controlled space contains the largest collection of North American history outside of the Library of Congress.

In all, the Wisconsin Historical Society holds 3.8 million print publications, 25,000 maps, 3 million images, 125,000 cubic feet of archival material and 750,000 historic and archaeological objects. Most are stored in the State Archive Preservation Facility, including the original Milwaukee Brewers Racing Sausages, one of the country’s first weather maps, traditional Ho‑Chunk baskets and comedian Chris Farley’s football jersey from Edgewood High School.

It’s a largely unknown, certainly underappreciated, Wisconsin treasure.

The archives are managed by the Wisconsin Department of Administration and operate in partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs and University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Typically, history is presented in a carefully curated way – edited in a textbook, displayed behind a rope, maybe protected under glass. But the archives are an uncurated mix, and in many ways a more accurate reflection of the jumble that is human life than the single storyline we try to make it out to be.

Here, history feels human and unfinished. Every box, aisle and rack holds items that come to life when someone pulls them out and shares their story.

“Without the stories, the passion behind them, the experiences of individuals, it’s just a desk or a chair, but it’s the stories that are there,” said Nick Hoffman, chief creative officer with the Wisconsin Historical Society. 

Preserving film history at 40°F

As the heavy doors to the “cold room” on the second floor swing open, chilled air spills out. The room’s temperature holds at 40 degrees Fahrenheit with 35% relative humidity – the ideal balance to protect film and videotape. 

More than 44,000 film cans sit packed inside, and despite Madison’s distance from entertainment hubs like Los Angeles and New York, this is one of the world’s leading collections of film and television history.

More than 300 manuscript collections include materials from figures such as Michael and Kirk Douglas, Agnes Moorehead, Rod Serling and Edith Head. The shelves hold Mary Tyler Moore’s full archive, materials from early talk show host Faye Emerson, and footage of the McCarthy hearings later used in a documentary by Emile de Antonio.

The oldest film in the archives − “The Lumberjack,” a 16-minute silent film shot in Wausau − dates back to 1914.

Many donors have no ties to Wisconsin. What binds the archive isn’t geography so much as the pull to preserve a legacy.

“It’s often about an individual,” said Jill Sterrett, chief collections officer.

History written in ink on paper

One of the country’s oldest newspaper collections resides on the third floor, including a July 10, 1776, edition of The Pennsylvania Gazette, with one of the earliest printings of the Declaration of Independence, as well as Frederick Douglass’ 1850s newspaper, and the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper published in a Native language.

The archives has the ability to bring people down to the individual level, then zoom out to show how an individual connects to a huge moment in U.S. history, Hoffman said. “That’s the scale that we have here,” he said. 

In the early 1960s, for example, the Historical Society began collecting material from civil rights groups and activists, becoming a leading center for studying the American civil rights movement. Today, the archives hold hundreds of thousands of documents and recordings from the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. Highlander trained activists like Rosa Parks to organize and educate people, especially on voting rights.

That training partly shaped Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man, which sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, said senior archivist Lee Grady.

One of the earliest weather maps by Milwaukee scientist Increase Lapham is also in the collections. Lapham made the map in 1868, reconstructing a storm from a decade earlier to show how weather patterns could be tracked. The map served as a proof-of-concept, Grady said, which helped prompt Congress to establish the National Weather Service in 1870.

The archives also have an ongoing, little-known interaction with the public. Grady said the Historical Society fields about 16,000 questions a year, mostly by email, on topics like land records, divorce filings, even whether a house is haunted. Family history requests are the most common, he said.

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Racing Sausages, Freedom Desks, tribal baskets share space

About 100,000 objects share space in a cavernous room on the fourth floor.