The Milwaukee & Northern's Herald
We were thrilled to be able to add the authentic Milwaukee & Northern herald to our web site on 29 September 2026. We wish we could have included it when we started this web site in 2020, but we didn’t have a decent copy of it at the time.
We credit this young woman for leading us to our first glimpse of a color version of our herald.
She posed for a portrait at the S. Mortensen & Co. studio in the Cameron building on Stephenson Ave. in Iron Mountain, Mich., circa 1890. She then had cabinet cards made for her to give to her family and friends. As was typical at the time, S. Mortensen & Co. printed advertisements on the back side of this woman’s cabinet cards. It just so happened that the Milwaukee & Northern was one of the advertisers for that photographers’ studio.
After Tom purchased this cabinet card, he made a few attempts to create a digital version of this herald. He did not think his (admittedly) amateurish attempts were good enough for our web site. Although, we did use it on our business cards, and we think they look pretty good.
We owe many thanks to Erich at Fox Stamp for using Tom’s crude depiction and this cabinet card to produce an attractive rendition of our herald.
This is the only M&N herald we have confirmed. The earliest uses we have found were an advertisement in a newspaper and a railroad pass in 1889. We have not seen this herald depicted on rolling stock, but we have only seen two photographs of early M&N boxcars.
We have seen a sketch of a Milwaukee & Northern variation of the Milwaukee Road’s tilted rectangle herald, but we haven’t seen an actual example of it. We will add it here if we are able to confirm its authenticity.