Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin
Christopher Latham Sholes
Typewriter pioneer whose Kenosha claim is the anti-hanging editorial years (typewriter/QWERTY are Milwaukee)
$12,000
Christopher Latham Sholes is remembered nationwide for the typewriter and QWERTY, work he did later in Milwaukee. Kenosha’s claim is earlier and sharper: as editor of the Telegraph he helped abolish capital punishment in Wisconsin after witnessing a botched hanging. He was born in Pennsylvania on February 14, 1819, came west as a printer, ran his brothers’ Green Bay paper, and then, at a brother’s bidding, founded the Southport Telegraph when the lakeshore town was still called Southport (renamed Kenosha in 1850). He lived there with Mary Jane McKinney until about 1857, served as a state senator and Free Soiler, and was among the rare 1856 legislators who refused a railroad bribe. On August 21, 1851, two to three thousand people watched John McCaffary, who had drowned his wife in a cistern, hang a mile south of downtown. The drop failed; McCaffary strangled for something like twenty minutes. Sholes wrote that the crowd had been “indulged in its insane passion for the sight of a judicially murdered man,” and hoped it was Wisconsin’s last such disgrace. He won a State Assembly seat. On July 12, 1853, the governor signed abolition. McCaffary remains the first and last person executed under Wisconsin law. The typewriter years (1867–73) and QWERTY belong to Milwaukee. He died in Milwaukee on February 17, 1890.