Milwaukee Mayhem

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Murder and Mystery in the Cream City’s First Century

Matthew J. Prigge

From murder and matchstick men to fires, painted women, and Great Lakes disasters—explore the little-known history of the dark underbelly of a Midwestern metropolis.

224 pages, 5.5 x 8.5, 19 b&w photos
Paperback: $24.95 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-716-7
Ebook: $15.99 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-717-4
Publication Date: 10/7/2015

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Milwaukee Mayhem by Matthew J. Prigge book cover

Description

The city of Milwaukee is famous for its industry, its beer, and its stunning lakefront—but there's also a dark side to the Cream City. From its early years as a burgeoning community on the shore of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee has had its fair share of strange tales of scandal, vice, mystery, murder, and disaster—and a wide-eyed public who could not help but gawk at it all. In Milwaukee Mayhem, author Matthew J. Prigge forgoes the major historical signposts found in traditional histories to offers a new perspective on the city’s formative years, focusing on the madness and mayhem that were born of the city’s transformation from lakeside settlement to American metropolis.

Milwaukee Mayhem draws on the hard-hewn news reporting of the era to present these stories in grim and vivid prose and create an engaging and chilling narrative of the city’s shadowy past. Through his thoughtful introduction, Prigge gives the work context, eschewing assumptions about “simpler times” and highlighting the mayhem that the growth and rise of a city can bring about. These stories are the orphans of Milwaukee’s history, too unusual to register in broad historic narratives, too strange to qualify as nostalgia, but nevertheless essential to our understanding of this American city.

Author Bio

Matthew J. Prigge is a freelance author and historian from Milwaukee. His work has been featured in both local and national publications and has won multiple awards. He also previously hosted the local history radio segment, "What Made Milwaukee Famous," and has led sightseeing historical boat tours of the city’s rivers and harbor. He is the author of Damn the Old Tinderbox!: Milwaukee’s Palace of the West and the Fire that Defined an Era, also published by WHS Press. Prigge lives in the Milwaukee suburb of St. Francis.

From drunken settlers and violent mobs to hapless drowning victims, Prigge has probed the dark corners of Milwaukee history. He brings new life to the forgotten innocents and perpetrators alike, reminding us that beneath every city’s progress is a grittier tale of human complexity and contradiction.

Whitney Gould

Former “Milwaukee Journal Sentinel” reporter and architecture critic

“A fascinating—and often disturbing—chronicle of Milwaukee’s orphans of history, a diverse collection that fully justifies the author’s conviction that ‘a city cannot be built on progress and triumph alone.’”

—John D. Buenker, Professor Emeritus, UW–Parkside, and editor of Milwaukee in the 1930s: A Federal Writers Project City Guide

“A simply fascinating and fully absorbing read from begininning to end, Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City's First Century is . . . exceptionally well researched, impressively well written, and deftly crafted with the inclusion of occasional black-and-white historical photos.”

—John Burroughs, Midwest Book Review

“Milwaukee historian Prigge delves into the dark side of the Wisconsin metropolis in the 19th century through this collection of sordid stories. . . . There are murderers, a 'stout and moon-faced' bigamist named Jiggs Perry, and a bingo-addicted tenant with a grudge who bludgeoned her landlady; and tragedies like the 1883 fire at Newhall House. . . . This history is teeming with interesting characters like Rosina Georg, a proprietor of a dance hall known for underage drinking and an interracial clientele, and Frank Blunt, a thieving womanizer who was raised as a girl but lived as a man. Other tales include a suicide by cannon, an antikissing crusade, roving bands of flirtatious fops, and the chilling account of a young woman picked up for a blind date and never seen alive again. Prigge plucks these stories from obscurity and vividly brings them to life. He also helpfully identifies the modern locations of settings should readers feel inclined to take a macabre Milwaukee tour.”

—Publisher's Weekly