Ancient Mounds & Frontier Firsts — Aztalan & Watertown

Aztalan is one of the most important archaeological sites in the Midwest — the remains of a Middle Mississippian town occupied roughly between 1000 and 1200 CE, and the northernmost known outpost of the vast culture centered at Cahokia near modern St. Louis. Its people raised flat-topped earthen platform mounds, cultivated maize, and ringed their settlement with a clay-plastered log stockade whose corner bastions have been partially reconstructed on the original footprint. Early settlers, awed by the earthworks, wrongly imagined a link to the Aztecs and gave the place its name; the true builders vanished from the site around 1200 for reasons still debated. Today interpretive trails cross the mounds along the Crawfish River, and a small seasonal museum run by the local historical society sits just outside the park.

The Octagon House is Watertown's architectural marvel — a 57-room, four-story brick mansion built by pioneer John Richards beginning in 1854, and one of the largest single-family homes in pre-Civil War Wisconsin. Its eight-sided plan reflects a brief nineteenth-century craze for octagon houses, promoted as healthier and more efficient, and the interior is crowned by a spectacular cantilevered spiral staircase that climbs unsupported through the center of the house to a rooftop cupola. Richards installed early central heating and indoor plumbing decades ahead of his neighbors. The Watertown Historical Society maintains the house with original furnishings and offers guided tours through its many rooms.

On the grounds of the Octagon House stands a small, plain frame building that carries an outsized place in American history: the first kindergarten in the United States. It was opened in 1856 by Margarethe Meyer Schurz — a German immigrant, student of the kindergarten movement's founder Friedrich Froebel, and wife of the statesman Carl Schurz — to teach local German-speaking children through the play-based methods then novel in Europe. The idea spread across the country from this modest room. Preserved and moved to the museum campus, the schoolhouse is furnished with period toys and Froebel's 'gifts,' the geometric play objects at the heart of his method.