Whitewater, WI

Whitewater lies where Wisconsin's kettle moraine country ripples into lakes and drumlins — glacial terrain that gave the town its whitewashed limestone, its spring-fed creek and, locals insist, its ghosts. Nineteenth-century Whitewater hosted the Morris Pratt Institute, a school of Spiritualism whose séances earned the town the nickname "Second Salem"; the legends of witches' circles and haunted corners are now cheerfully curated civic property, paraded every October. The deeper past is genuinely mysterious: effigy mounds shaped as birds and panthers, raised by Indigenous builders a millennium ago, survive in the town's parks.

Modern Whitewater is a university town: the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, grown from an 1868 normal school, brings twelve thousand students to the community and national renown in two specialities — its business programmes and its wheelchair athletics, whose teams rank among the best anywhere. The campus also supplies the region's stage: the Irvin L. Young Auditorium, the 1,300-seat hall documented in this archive, presents touring orchestras, opera, dance and family series to the rural counties between Milwaukee and Madison. Add Whitewater Lake and the hiking of the Ice Age Trail through the moraines, and the town offers a very Wisconsin blend: glaciers, ghosts and a good concert season.