03/13/2026
A recent historical snippet in the Mineral Point newspaper led to a discovery about railroad tracks. The railroad ran like a steel ribbon through the countryside from Mineral Point south, and for generations it carried more than freight and passengers. It carried stories. Some of them were harmless.
Many people remember a childhood moment of curiosity: placing a penny on the rail and waiting for the distant whistle of an approaching locomotive. The train would roar past, the ground trembling beneath your feet, and afterward you would retrieve the flattened copper prize—a souvenir of youthful experimentation. Not the smartest pastime, perhaps, but hardly the sort of mischief that kept railroad men (most of them were men) awake at night.
But sometimes the tracks attracted a very different sort of trouble.
In the “From the Files” column of the Mineral Point a few weeks ago, one small notice stood out. Dated January 1, 1901, it read:
“John Johnson, better known as ‘Dogskin,’ a dissipated resident of Darlington, has confessed that he placed the rail across the railroad track one night last week, which nearly wrecked a passenger train. He will probably be given a term in Waupun.”
That brief paragraph seemed like a strange and dangerous prank—far beyond a penny on the rails. So naturally, curiosity took hold. What kind of man would do such a thing?
The answer, it turns out, was not encouraging.
Digging deeper into sources such as 50 Wisconsin Crimes of the Century by Marv Balousek, Crime of Magnitude by Mark Lemberger, and materials from the 2004 Wisconsin High School Mock Trial Tournament revealed Johnson’s story stretched far beyond that single newspaper line.
The incident itself likely happened years earlier, around 1892. Johnson initially confessed and entered a guilty plea for placing the obstruction on the tracks. Later he recanted, forcing the matter into court. In 1901, nearly a decade after the original event, a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to two years in the state prison at Waupun.
Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of Johnson’s appearances in the criminal record.
After his release, he was arrested for attempting to chloroform his wife, though she later withdrew the complaint. Only a week later, he began telephoning young girls and attempted to assault two children, ages six and ten. Claiming insanity brought on by alcohol, Johnson was examined by two doctors who agreed with the diagnosis. He was sent to the Mendota Asylum for the Insane for about nine months.
Freedom did little to change his behavior.
Soon after leaving Mendota, Madison police arrested him for accosting two people and attempting to rob them. That incident resulted in seventy-five days in the county jail.
Two years later in Monroe, he sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl. Again two doctors declared him insane, and again he was sent to Mendota—this time for three months.
The cycle continued. Complaints of family abandonment. Another conviction. Another prison sentence.
By all accounts, Johnson was known as a man of limited intellect and frequent drunkenness, a troublesome figure whose life seemed to drift from one misdeed to the next.
Then, in 1911, his name became connected to a much darker event: the kidnapping and murder of seven-year-old Annie Lemberger. Johnson confessed and was sentenced to life in prison. Yet he later insisted that the confession had been coerced—a not uncommon problem in the policing methods of that era.
Years later, new evidence surfaced, and after a pardon hearing Johnson was eventually released.
It is the kind of story that begins with a single line in an old newspaper and grows stranger—and darker—the further you follow it.
And after following that rabbit hole through decades of crimes, confessions, trials, and rumors, you might think the lesson would be about criminals, or justice, or the strange ways history reveals itself.
But perhaps the simpler moral is still the best one.
Train tracks are inherently dangerous places which require special vigilance when you are near them.
[The picture in this post has been edited as an illustration]
