5 files on the desk from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Sun Prairie-born educator; Portland schools superintendent; president of Milwaukee-Downer College, 1895–1921
under $50,000 (1949$)
Ellen Clara Sabin was Sun Prairie's first educator of national standing, and she began by teaching her own town. Born there on November 29, 1850, to Samuel and Adelia Sabin, she was carried west as an infant during the California gold rush and brought back to Wisconsin in 1854. The family settled at Windsor, just north of Sun Prairie. Oldest of eleven children, she taught the younger ones at home, then at fifteen or sixteen enrolled at the University of Wisconsin among the first women in the regular course. She taught Sun Prairie's grade school while still a student, left without a degree, and by nineteen was principal of Madison's Fourth Ward School.
Oregon made her famous first. She worked as a teacher and principal there, then in 1887 became superintendent of Portland's schools, the first woman to hold that post in a large American city. Wisconsin pulled her home in 1890 to rescue struggling Downer College at Fox Lake. She mediated the 1895 merger with Milwaukee Female College, built the new Milwaukee-Downer campus, and served as president until 1921. Occupational therapy entered the college curriculum on her watch, and she helped organize the Wisconsin Federation of Women's Clubs.
She died in Madison on February 3, 1949, at ninety-eight. Lawrence University still keeps a Sabin House. Sun Prairie holds the birth, the grade-school classroom she ran as a teenager, and the hometown claim for a career that remade Milwaukee-Downer.
Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Modernist painter; born and raised on a Town of Sun Prairie farm until about age 15
$65 million
Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was a Sun Prairie farm child before she became the painter of New Mexico deserts and flowers. She was born on a Town of Sun Prairie dairy farm on November 15, 1887, at what is now 2407 County Road T at Town Hall Drive, and left Wisconsin in her mid-teens.
Second of seven children, she was named for a Hungarian grandfather who arrived in 1848 and later went home. The frame birthplace house burned in 1976. Town Hall School sat across the road. By age ten she had decided to be an artist; once a week she and sisters Ida and Anita took a wagon into town for watercolor lessons from Sarah Mann on North Street. Sacred Heart Academy in Madison boarded her for one high-school year, 1901–02. In the fall of 1902 the family left for Williamsburg, Virginia; she stayed with Aunt Lola Totto, finished a sophomore year at Madison High, and followed them south in June 1903.
That is the Wisconsin stretch: a farm, a one-room school, Mann’s studio. Sun Prairie later named a park for her, then renamed it for two local coaches; a marker now sits at the municipal building, and Highway 19 carries her name. The farm is a private house. She died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986.
Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Born in Madison; raised in Sun Prairie.
$5 million+
John August List is the experimental economist who learned markets at baseball-card shows in Sun Prairie and later made field experiments a standard tool in economics. He was born in Madison on September 25, 1968, and raised in Sun Prairie, the son of a truck driver and a secretary. He cut grass and shoveled snow for a dollar or two, walked to the PDQ for gum and cards, and by the mid-1980s was buying, selling, and testing pitches at weekend card shows. He graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1987, went to UW–Stevens Point on a partial golf scholarship, discovered he would not make the Tour, and discovered economics instead.
A University of Wyoming Ph.D. in 1996 led to posts at Central Florida, Arizona, and Maryland, and, since 2005, the University of Chicago. He pioneered randomized trials in actual markets—work George Akerlof and others have called revolutionary—served as a senior economist on President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers in 2002–03, and later became the first chief economist at Uber, then held the same role at Lyft and Walmart, turning millions of real trips into data.
He still tells the card-table story. Textbooks in 1987 said you could not run a clean experiment in the messy world; the Sun Prairie kid kept doing it anyway. Madison is the birthplace; Sun Prairie is the raise and the high school.
Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Former Wisconsin Assembly speaker and U.S. ambassador to Norway; longtime Sun Prairie resident
$22,632
Thomas Adolph Loftus spent most of a public life inside Sun Prairie city limits—Assembly speaker, losing gubernatorial candidate, and Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Norway. Local papers still call him a Sun Prairie native; the precise version is that he moved there at five and never really left.
He was born April 24, 1945, in a small Stoughton hospital. After a good tobacco crop his father bought into Brooks Implement, a farm-machinery dealership on the Sun Prairie side of the county; the Loftus people had been Norwegian dairy farmers near Brooklyn, Wisconsin. Tom graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1963, served two Army years in the Vietnam era, then earned a degree at UW–Whitewater and a master’s at Madison’s La Follette School.
He sat in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1977 to 1991, served as majority leader, and from 1983 to 1991 was the longest-serving Democratic speaker in state history. He lost the 1990 governor’s race to Tommy Thompson, 58 percent to 42 percent. After chairing Clinton’s Wisconsin campaign, he served as U.S. ambassador to Norway from November 1993 to December 1997—NATO expansion years, with the Oslo Accords negotiated nearby—and received a Grand Cross from King Harald. Later posts included WHO adviser and UW System regent. He still lives in Sun Prairie; his 2024 memoir is Mission to Oslo.
Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
NHL defenseman and first Wisconsin-born Hobey Baker Award winner; born in Sun Prairie
$14 million
William “Will” Butcher is the first Wisconsin-born player to win the Hobey Baker Award, college hockey’s top individual honor. The win started on Sun Prairie ice and ran through Denver before a memorable NHL debut with the New Jersey Devils.
He was born in Sun Prairie on January 6, 1995, to Joe and Julie Butcher. He played youth hockey in town and for the Madison Capitols, coached by his father, a two-time NCAA champion at UW–Stevens Point. After the U.S. National Team Development Program—gold at the 2012 under-18 worlds, later Team USA captain and top defenseman at the 2015 world juniors—he spent four seasons at the University of Denver. Each year his point total climbed. As a senior in 2016–17 he put up 37 points, finished plus-27, won NCHC player of the year, and helped Denver to a national championship. The Hobey followed. He tried to give the trophy to his teammates.
Colorado had drafted him in the fifth round in 2013 and let him walk. The Devils signed the free agent, and on October 7, 2017, he became the first Devil with three points in a debut, then finished with 44 points in 81 games and an All-Rookie nod. Four seasons in New Jersey, a year in Buffalo, and later stops in the AHL and Europe followed. He remains an avid muskie fisherman. Sun Prairie is the pond he learned on; the NHL line is the afterlife.