
Milwaukee Notebook: The Great Courthouse Trouser Disaster
The first Milwaukee courthouse was built in 1836 at the site of what today is Cathedral Square Park. This sample chapter from the book “Lost Milwaukee” by Milwaukee Notebook writer Carl Swanson. Early settler James S. Buck wrote the four-volume Pioneer History of Milwaukee, which one writer described as “a fascinating hodgepodge of largely undigested facts, gossip, puffs and salty observations.” Buck included events both great and small in the city’s formative years. For example, many historians relate the construction of Milwaukee’s first courthouse in what is today Cathedral Square, but only Buck gave us “The Courthouse Trouser Disaster.”...
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