Bitter cold? Sounds like fun!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

In an earlier post, “Intensely Cold Weather,” we examined the negative effects of several episodes of bitterly cold winter weather during the Clark family’s era and shortly afterwards. Today we look at some of the positive aspects of frigid winters in our part of the Old Northwest.

It’s no secret. Wisconsinites like to do stuff outdoors in the winter cold. Ice fishing. Skating. Cheering for the Packers.

But the Green Bay Packers professional football team wasn’t organized until 1919, a full eighty years after Jonathan M. Clark bought his first parcel of Mequon land in 1839. So what did our intrepid Wisconsin pioneers do back in the mid-1800s when those deep snows fell and cold north winds began to blow? Well, if you believe the newspapers of the era, there was no finer way to occupy a clear, frosty day—or moonlit evening—than to bundle up, go outside, and enjoy a…

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Meet the Neighbors: the Desmond family (part 2)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

In our previous post, we were introduced to the Desmond family, early Irish immigrants to old Washington/Ozaukee county and neighbors of Jonathan and Mary Clark. To our good fortune, one of the Desmond sons, Humphrey Desmond, wrote a memoir of his father Thomas that includes some unique family genealogy and tales of pioneer days in our area.

If you missed Part 1, I suggest you go ahead and read that post first. Then return here to continue with Part 2 of selections from A Memoir of Thomas Desmond, with a chapter on The Desmond Genealogy, by Humphrey J. Desmond, 77 pages, Milwaukee, 1905. And remember: you can read the complete memoir at this link, which is a part of the admirably organized and comprehensive online genealogy project The Desmond Archives.

Pioneer Days

Chapter 3 of Desmond’s memoir will be of particular interest to CHH readers. It relates various early Mequon events, some involving the Desmond family’s Catholic faith, their Bonniwell neighbors, and the local school that the Bonniwells helped build in the early 1840s. That first “Bonniwell School,” located less than a mile west of the Jonathan Clark house on what is now the southeast corner of Bonniwell and Wauwatosa roads in Mequon, was sketched in 1864 by Evander Bonniwell. The sketch (above) is reproduced here from page 71 of George B. Bonniwell’s comprehensive family history, The Bonniwells: 1000 Years. (Used by permission.)

[31]        III.   PIONEER DAYS

THE "hazard of new fortunes" undertaken by the Desmond family involved the clearing away of woods with the ax of the pioneer and the building of a commodious log house.
    The pioneers of this neighborhood were the Bonniwell brothers, who had settled there about 1835 [sic, 1839], and it was known as the Bonniwell settlement.
    Indians still roamed the forests of southeastern Wisconsin in 1843. My [32] father, then ten years old, alone in the house one day, was visited by a brave to whom he gave a large loaf of bread. The Indian loosened his belt as he ate the loaf, and when it was all gone departed peaceably on his journey.
    There was a log school house to which my father went. Books were not plentiful in those days. He studied his spelling lesson during the noon hour from the book of a desk mate. He had to start at the foot of the class, but one day he got to the head and kept his place.
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Meet the Neighbors: the Desmond family (part 1)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

In an earlier post, I mentioned a local history source that was previously unknown to me, the Memoir of Thomas Desmond, written by his son Henry Desmond. It was cited by Walter D. Corrigan in the bibliography of his otherwise error-prone and forgettable History of the town of Mequon, Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, brought down to about 1870.

I was intrigued. I already knew that Thomas Desmond and his brother Dennis were pioneer residents of the Town of Mequon and neighbors of the Jonathan Clark family for several decades. The Thomas and Dennis Desmond farm parcels were located in the NW quarter of Section 3, T9N-R21E, Town of Mequon. The Desmond farms, and the adjacent John Corcoran farm, were situated due north of the Jesse Hubbard, Jr., farm, due west of the Ferdinand and Friedrich Groth properties, and immediately adjacent to the northwest corner of the Jonathan and Mary Clark farm, which occupied all of the southeast quarter of section 3.

You can see the Thomas Desmond and Dennis Desmond parcels in the upper left quadrant of this detail from the Shoolmap of the Town of Mequon / School Map of the Town of Mequon, pre-1872, UW-Milwaukee–AGS Digital Map Collection, showing Sec. 3, T9N-R21E. The southeast quarter section is labeled “Widow Clark,” and suggests that the map was made sometime after Jonathan Clark’s death in 1857, but before Mary Turck Clark and her daughters sold the property in 1872. (For more on this unique, useful map, see our post Monday: Map Day! – “Shoolmap” of Mequon, c. 1872.)

A Memoir

A memoir of any early Mequon settler, especially a Clark family neighbor, is always something I’d like to read. But the Desmond memoir was privately published, in 1905, in an edition of only 50 copies, to be distributed only to the immediate family. I checked Worldcat, and it had a citation for the book, but did not know of any libraries that had a copy. Might someone, somewhere, have this little book? Well…

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“Intensely Cold Weather”

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

We’re having some very cold weather this weekend, not unusual for Wisconsin in mid-winter. But it got me thinking, wondering what sort of winter weather did the Clarks and Turcks and Bonniwells experience, and what effect the did the cold have on their daily lives?

To find out, I started by searching digitized old newspapers, looking for the phrase “below zero,” in Wisconsin, between the years 1833-1899. Oh boy, did I get results! After narrowing my search to more local sources, I found this news item on page 2 of the Wednesday, January 2, 1884 issue of the Cedarburg News:

This article suggests that the winter of 1883-1884 was expected to be somewhat mild; an “open” winter was one with little or no snow cover on the ground. All the signs and predictions thought this would be the case. Apparently, the local muskrats had built their houses differently in 1883, as muskrats do when they expect a milder winter. The “universal opinion” of the “local weather prophets”—including Milwaukee’s famed “Ice Bear,” Henry Kroeger—thought so, too. But on the night of December 28-29, 1883, the thermometers in Cedarburg—just a few miles from the old Jonathan Clark farm—dropped to 25 degrees below zero (Farenheit). It was the coldest morning in decades.

But by the 1880s many of the older members of the Clark, Turck, and Bonniwell families had died, and many of the younger generation had left Ozaukee county and relocated to Milwaukee, Chicago, Minnesota, and elsewhere. Some or most of them may have missed this late-1883 cold snap. But this short article also mentions another, similar record cold spell, one that Mary Turck Clark and her children actually lived through, in Milwaukee, around the New Year of 1864.

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CHH Year in Review, 2025

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 7 Comments

Harrison, Gabriel, “California News,” Daguerreotype, c. 1850. Metropolitan Museum of Art

What’s the news? I’ve gathered the expert—and stylish—editorial staff of Clark House Historian (see above) and together we proudly present the latest installment of our more-or-less annual Blog Year in Review!

Let’s begin with some blog statistics for 2025:

In some ways, 2025 was not a particularly productive year for CHH. I only managed to publish 35 posts, averaging less than one per week. Most posts were new material, but some were revised repeats of favorite seasonal and holiday topics, such as Christmas, Memorial Day, Veterans Day and such.

Meanwhile, “behind the scenes,” I was busy with some non-blog research projects, one focused on the post-Fred Beckmann history of the Wisconsin House building in Cedarburg, and another centered on the history and construction of the Jonathan Clark House.

Not surprisingly, with the number of CHH posts down, reader engagement dropped also, to a low of only 3 “likes” and 34 comments for the year. Just to be clear, I really do like to hear from y’all, so let me encourage you “like,” comment, and ask questions more often in 2026. Even if I’m working on a larger, longer, research project—which tends to slow my online blog production—I really enjoy reading and replying to your queries.

On the other hand, the number of blog subscribers increased in the past year. Clark House Historian currently has 86 subscribers. If you’d like to comment or subscribe, but don’t know how, click this link for all the “how to” details.

Monthly readership

As you can see (below), even though the number of new posts in 2025 was lower than in previous years, total blog readership was up substantially over 2024:

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Happy New Year!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

180 years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1846, this amusing woodcut appeared on page 3 of the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, advertising the shop of pioneering Milwaukee merchant—and local character—Bazille “Uncle Ben” Throop:

That same morning, Jonathan and Mary Clark awoke to their fifth New Year’s Day together as a married couple. Living with them were their first three (of an eventual eight) children: Caroline (5 years old), Henry (almost 3) and Elizabeth “Libbie” (9 months). They were probably still living in their original log cabin home; it would be at least two more years until Jonathan M. Clark carved his name and “1848” in the keystone above the front door lintel of the two-story stone house that is now the Jonathan Clark House Museum.

Did the Clarks see “Uncle Ben’s” ad on January 1st? It’s not impossible, but I’d be at least mildly surprised if our young farm couple spent their earnings on a subscription to a Milwaukee daily newspaper. On the other hand, given their love of lifelong learning, it would not be out of character if they did. But we really don’t know.

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Holiday Greetings!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

“The Christmas Tree,” after Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly, 25 Dec. 1858. Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

Christmas is almost upon us and, frankly, I’ve been too busy—and too tired—this month to write much for the blog. It’s certainly not for lack of topics or sources. I have the beginnings of over 60 [sic!] blog posts sketched out already, and a huge pile of fascinating documents and images set aside to illustrate those posts. The amount of interesting material is daunting, and organizing each topic into one or more coherent posts takes time and energy that have been hard to come by these past few months. Now it’s late December and I’m looking forward to visits from family that will keep me happily preoccupied until early January.

I’ll be back with new material after the New Year. In the meanwhile, below are links to a few holiday-themed favorites from past years for your (re-)reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy them. And in 2026, I look forward to an exciting (and more consistently productive!) year of discoveries here at Clark House Historian.

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“Dashing through the snow…”

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

As I write this, southeastern Wisconsin is in the midst of our first substantial snowfall of Winter, 2025-2026. In Jonathan and Mary Clark’s lifetime, the day after a storm like this meant it was time to hitch up the sleigh and have some fun “dashing through the snow.” Here’s a lightly-revised and expanded repeat of a post that celebrates Clark-era “sleighing time” and “jingle bells.” (And be sure to click the highlighted links for more vintage wintertime images and info.)

Kimmel and Forster, publishers, “Winter Pleasure in the Country,” circa 1865. National Museum of American History, Peters Prints Collection, Smithsonian Institution.1 Note the modest straps of jingle bells on the one-horse sleigh and the much more ostentatious—and louder—straps of bells on the two-horse sleigh.

Last winter, our earlier CHH posts Snow!, Shoveling out -and other winter chores and Stuff Happens – on a sleigh ride, got me wondering again about winter travel in old Washington/Ozaukee county during the Clarks’ era of the mid-1830s through the 1860s or so. Assuming most of the more successful farmers—such as the Clarks, Bonniwells and Turcks—owned a one- or two-horse sleigh, how easy was it to navigate that sleigh on the early county roads? Could you sleigh ride all the way to Milwaukee? And if you could, how long might that take?

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Home to Thanksgiving

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. To celebrate the holiday, I thought I’d reprint a lightly revised version of our now-annual CHH Thanksgiving post, to share with you a few vintage recipes and a nice Currier & Ives lithograph from the period.1

Thanksgiving, 1867

Durrie, George H. and John Schutler, Home to Thanksgiving, ca. 1867, New York, Currier & Ives. National Gallery of Art, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Public Domain. Click to to open larger image in a new window.

By 1867, when this sentimental lithograph was first published, the Clark family had been living in the City of Milwaukee’s seventh ward for about six years. Family patriarch Jonathan M. Clark had died a decade earlier, and his only son, Henry M. Clark, had been gone for about a year and a half. Family matriarch Mary (Turck) Clark was living in a house in Milwaukee with her unmarried daughters, Libbie, Persie, Theresa, Laura, Josie and Jennie.

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The American Revolution: are you watching?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

The American War of Independence began 250 years ago, more than half a century before the forced removal of Wisconsin’s original native peoples and the beginnings of large-scale, government-sponsored, white settlement in the Wisconsin Territory of the 1830s.

Verger, Jean Baptiste Antoine De, artist, [Soldiers in Uniform], 1781 (detail). The soldier on the right was a New England militiaman, one of many New Englanders (including, we believe, Jonathan Clark’s kin) that fought for the Patriot cause. More on this image, below.

PBS is commemorating the big anniversary by sponsoring and broadcasting “The American Revolution,” a six-part, 12-hour documentary film by Ken Burns and company, exploring the roots of the conflict, the military and diplomatic progress of the war, and the contributions to, and effects of, the war on its many military and civilian participants, including white, Black, and Native American men and women, both Loyalists & Patriots.

I’ve seen the first four episodes and found them lively, interesting, informative, and sometimes deeply moving. I’m no expert on the Revolutionary era, but I know quite a bit, and I find the series includes all the “important” events and persons that one would expect, along with all kinds of nuance and detail which are new to me.

It’s an excellent documentary, well worth your time, and is currently streaming—for free—on PBS.org. And in case you are wondering: yes, there are many topics in this Revolutionary War documentary that connect to, and later influence, the lives many of the early Mequon settler families, including the Clark and Turck families. In particular, be sure to watch the whole first episode, a clear and detailed explanation of the complex background and causes of the fight for American independence.

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