Museum at the Portage

Built in 1912, the Museum at the Portage is the current home of the Portage Historical Society and serves to educate members of the community about the history of Portage and its surrounding areas. Before it was the Museum at the Portage, this historic location was the home of prominent Wisconsin playwright, Zona Gale, and her husband, William Breese. 

Zona Gale, a native of Portage, WI, was born August 26, 1874. An avid writer from a young age, Gale received her Bachelor and Masters of Arts in Literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1895 and 1901, respectively. After working for Evening World in New York City for a few years, Gale moved back to Portage in 1904, where she produced her better known pieces or work, including her play Miss Lulu Bett (1920), for which she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. Gale’s works primarily showcased village life in the Midwest through fictional towns that often resembled her hometown.

In 1944, a few years after Gale’s death in 1938, her husband donated the house that they had shared to the city of Portage to use as the public library. The building then served as the Portage Free/Zona Gale Memorial Library for the next fifty years. Due to the building being originally constructed as a residential structure, there were certain space limitations that posed problems to the library’s ability to grow its collections and services to accommodate the growing community. By 1990, the space had become entirely too small for the size of the collection and the community that it served, so in 1994, the City of Portage decided to move the library to a new, larger location.

Shortly after the Portage Library formally moved to its new location in 1995, the former Zona Gale house then became home to the Portage Historical Society, which then opened The Museum at the Portage in 1996. The Museum at the Portage was founded to showcase displays that are relevant to Gale and the larger community. As a museum, the building holds Gale’s study, which remains almost exactly the same since her death in 1938, and exhibits on the history of the Portage Canal, the railroad industry, and other facets of Portage’s history. 

Along with the museum portion of the building, as the home of the Portage Historical Society, the building also holds local genealogical and archival records that reflect the community, including donated community ephemera, yearbooks, and local government documents.

In 2014, an electrical fire broke out damaging some of the museum’s historical photos and frames and the room that was used for children’s story time before the library moved in the 1990s. The fire also resulted in the renovations to the Zona Gale study, which had not been remodeled or changed since it was built as an addition to the house in 1928. The building has since been repaired, and with free admittance, it continues to be a location that serves to hold and honor the history of Wisconsin’s third oldest city.

Green, Shannon. “Museum at the Portage Fire Caused by Electrical Short.” Wiscnews.com. Portage Daily Register, April 15, 2014. https://www.wiscnews.com/portagedailyregister/news/museum-at-the-portage-fire-caused-by-electrical-short/article_e2e438f9-063f-597e-aaaf-8fd21b72f2bf.html.

Noojin, Matthew. “‘Angels in the Commonplace’: Zona Gale and the So-Called School of Wisconsin Authors.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 103, no. 4, July 2020.

Portage Public Library. “History of the Library.” History of the library | Portage Public Library. Accessed November 30, 2020. https://www.portagelibrary.us/history-library.

Vernau, Noah. “'Bring Your Friends,' Portage Museum Leaders Say.” Wiscnews.com. Portage Daily Register, August 7, 2018. https://www.wiscnews.com/portagedailyregister/news/local/bring-your-friends-portage-museum-leaders-say/article_ffcd651a-68e7-54d1-8171-e9e4029e5924.html.