08/14/2026
Introducing…”Mill Madonnas”
Oshkosh told its own story in the language of the men who owned the mills: Paine, Sawyer, Buckstaff, McMillen. Forty-seven sawmills by 1874. A river so full of white pine you couldn't row a boat through it. But the city that burned five times and rebuilt itself every time was held together by the people that story leaves out, the women of the Sixth Ward and Polonia. The boarding-house keepers, the midwives, the Felician sisters who taught the immigrant children, Hannah McGreer who sold the land that became Sacred Heart for fifty dollars. The women who, in 1898, walked the picket line at half a man's wage and were half the strikers in the riot that killed seventeen-year-old James Morris.
Mill Madonnas puts one of them at the center of the Sawdust District, where this history actually took place, and treats her with the gravity the city has only ever spent on its lumber barons. She wears a branching crown, the forest that built and burned Oshkosh, hung with the small moons and tokens of a working life. A raven keeps watch at her shoulder; a child sleeps against her. Behind her the mills run their smoke to the horizon on both sides, and the log-rail line draws the eye straight down the Fox toward the river you're standing beside. At her feet, the flora that came back after every fire.
Thank you to David Carpenter for painting with us. You are awesome. Thank you to Greenes Pour House at the Granary for your incredible hospitality. Thank you Spark Towns for including us in this project. Thank you to Discover Oshkosh and all those who made this mural project possible.
