City Streets
The 12 Segments of McKinley Avenue
Including Cold Spring area that held horse races and set world speed record.
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Including Cold Spring area that held horse races and set world speed record. Back to the full article.
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Increase A. Lapham (1811-1875), Wisconsin’s first scientist, and his family lived for years on E. Poplar St. (McKinley) between Third and Fourth.
Their backyard was a huge garden and they had a cow. Within walking distance of the Milwaukee River, Lapham maintained a weather station there. Four times a day, Lapham, or in his absence, his wife Ann, and later their children, read and recorded data from the instruments. It was here that Lapham discovered a minuscule tide on Lake Michigan. Later he described the unusual wind-caused seiche, a lake wave phenomenon. The data are on file in the Lapham archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society (of which Lapham was a founder), in Madison.