I’m talking about history, again! – at the MCGS

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

I like to give illustrated talks about history, especially the history of the Jonathan Clark House, its occupants, their neighbors, and their lives in early Wisconsin territory and state. Back on Friday, April 24, 2026, I spoke to the members of the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society about the German immigrant experience in our area circa 1845–1910, as lived by the extended family of German immigrant—and 1868-1873 Clark House occupant and farmer—Fred Beckmann. The talk went well, and I’ve been invited to speak to the MCGS again, this Saturday, September 26, at 10:00 a.m., at Milwaukee’s Central Public Library Downtown.

Scenes from my previous MCGS presentation at the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, April, 2026. Photo credit: Laura Rexroth.

What’s it about?

This month’s MCGS presentation is titled From the ‘Burg to the Battlefield…and Back: A Local German-American Family and their Civil War Experiences.

The American Civil War is a huge topic, with many famous—and lesser-known—aspects, and no one talk can cover them all. So, rather than try and squeeze a grand overview of the war and its many battles into less than an hour, we will discuss some interesting and unusual aspects of the war—as experienced by some of Wisconsin’s German-American soldiers— that may have gotten lost over time. And we’ll do this by focusing on the Civil War experiences of one local family, the siblings and future in-laws of recent German immigrant Fred Beckmann.

You’re invited!

My Saturday, September 26, 2026, MCGS presentation will be held in the 1st floor Rotary Club of Milwaukee community meeting room of the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, 814 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee. The event will start with a short MCGS business meeting at 10:00 a.m. My presentation begins about 10:15 a.m. and will last about 45 minutes, followed by plenty of time for questions & answers. The meeting is free and open to the public, and I hope to see you all there.

Sound interesting? Click “continue reading” for more details.

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Wisconsin Wages, 1850

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Our most recent post, Labor Day – a photo essay, got me thinking about work and wages during Jonathan and Mary (Turck) Clark’s years in Mequon. For some time now, I’ve been trying to get a sense of where Jonathan and Mary got their money and how they spent, saved, and invested it during Wisconsin’s first decades as a territory and state. Consider this as the first post of several that will try and answer some of those questions.

Labor, wages & the Clarks, c. 1850

Back in 2019 we took a close look at the Clark family’s information as enumerated on the 1850 U.S. federal census population schedules. If you missed that series, or want to refresh your memory, here are some links: part 1, part 2, part 3. And in part 4 of that series, we noted that the Clark household included a “Laborer,” a 30 year-old immigrant from Germany named John Buck:

The Clarks were also able to hire an extra hand for the farm, John Buck. This must have been an essential expenditure, otherwise Jonathan—and the 16-year-old Arthur Clark—would have been the only adult males to work the Clark farm’s 160 acres. And Mary Clark had her hands full, raising five children of her own, feeding and clothing a household of eight, and attending to her full complement of exhausting daily domestic and farm chores.

So, how much did the Clarks have to pay John Buck for his labor? We don’t have any financial records from the Clarks’ household, but we do have some relevant information from this book:

The Statistical view of the United States…being a compendium of the seventh census, compiled by J. D. B. DeBow, superintendent of the U.S. Census, published in Washington, DC, 1854, pages 164-165.

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Monday, September 7th, is Labor Day, the holiday celebrating the working men and women of our nation, and I thought I’d commemorate the day with a lightly-revised re-post of our annual CHH Labor Day piece that first appeared in 2023. To honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark Heritage & History, highlighting a few of the many skills, trades, and occupations common during the Clark House era.

Since it is a holiday, I’m not going to add long commentaries to each image. Enjoy the image galleries, and be sure to click each gallery—and photo—to open larger versions of each. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts for each topic; they are filled with more images and lots of information about the different skills, tools, and jobs of the Clark family era, and include full image credits.

“Labor”

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word labor? Perhaps big men doing hard work with their hands, at a factory, on a job site, or in a workshop? In its early decades—except for the first sawmills, grist mills, stone quarries (and a brewery or two)—rural Mequon didn’t have much in the way of factory work. (Fun fact: Jonathan Clark’s father-in-law Peter Turck set up the first business in the county, a sawmill on Pigeon Creek, in 1838. See the essay on Peter Turck by Clark House young historian Spencer Holloway on pages 4-5 of the Jonathan Clark House April, 2021, newsletter for more.)

Pioneer Mequon did have plenty of men that knew how to use tools to make, improve, or repair all sorts of things. Notably, the Bonniwell family was filled with skilled carpenters, shipbuilders and other tradesmen, and Jonathan Clark and many of his Mequon neighbors had experience surveying, cutting out roads, and building simple bridges and dams. Some of those Clark-era trades and tools are shown in these photos of 1840s-1860s workers and their tools:

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Back to School, 1839!

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Once again, summer has flown past, even faster than before, with only a few CHH posts to show for it. Sorry about that. I my defense, I have been busy—with gardening, assorted family business, and a good deal of Clark Heritage & History research and public presentations—but I haven’t found time for much blogging. (And in case you’re wondering: it has been a very good year in our garden for tomatoes (5 heirloom varieties), patty-pan squash, rhubarb, basil, giant sunflowers and our first-ever garlic crop (3 varieties!), an okay year for cucumbers, but a surprisingly weak year for our usually hyper-productive bush green beans. Go figure.)

Anyway, now that summer activities are ending and the garden is slowing down, I mean to return to regular CHH blogging. I have lots of partially finished posts waiting for completion, and a long queue of Clark-era documents that need transcription, interpretation, and shaping into coherent posts. Thank you for your patience during this long, quiet, CHH blog summer. Looking ahead, we’ll have lots more early-Wisconsin history coming soon to CHH, so stay tuned. In the meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this lightly-revised reprise of our “Back to School, 1839!” post from September 9, 2020.

Currier & Ives. God Bless Our School. United States, ca. 1874. New York: Published by Currier & Ives, 125 Nassau St.

Currier & Ives. God Bless Our School. United States, ca. 1874. New York: Published by Currier & Ives, 125 Nassau St. Library of Congress. This image first appeared on Clark House Historian as part of our 2021 post Caroline M. Clark’s classroom & curricula, 1858-1860

Daniel Strickland hires “the first teacher“

There are a number of conflicting claims to the title of “first teacher” in Mequon. One of the first was Mary Turck Clark. She led classes for her siblings and four neighbor children in the loft of her father’s cabin in the summer of 1839.

The History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, relates a number of other “firsts” for area schools and teachers. Among them is this story of how the school committee,1 led by Daniel Strickland (father of Sarah A. Strickland Clark), hired its first teacher.

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What are you doing tonight?

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Today is August 1st (already!), and I’m going to be speaking at the Cedarburg History Museum at 6:00 o’clock tonight. I’d love to see you there.

“Dirt Trails and Wooden Planks”

Come join us as we explore the history of some of Wisconsin’s first roads, vital transportation routes for waves of immigrant settlers in the 1830s, ’40s, and beyond.

The illustrated talk will cover aspects of several key routes, including the ancient Native American Chicago to Green Bay trail, the Old Military Road, and the complicated history of the Milwaukee to Cedarburg Plank Road, among others. As usual, I’m featuring all kinds of period images, including photos, drawings, and annotated maps, along with lots of details of when and how these roads were surveyed, constructed, paid for, and put to use.

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July 4th – Independence Day

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My apologies for the long silence. I have many Clark Heritage & History projects in progress and hope to start blogging about them shortly. In the meanwhile, please enjoy our annual Independence Day tribute. Be well, and thanks for reading.

Just a reminder…

250 years ago today, representatives of all thirteen of Britain’s American colonies—gathered “in congress” in Philadelphia—approved the final text of the document that publicly declared our independence from “George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and so forth,” and his distant and unresponsive legislature. The Americans proposed to separate—forever—from their Divinely appointed King, and form a new and independent nation, the “united States of America.” This decision was bold, completely unprecedented in a world dominated by autocratic monarchs, and potentially fatal for anyone that supported this Declaration of Independence. From the King’s point of view, the authors, his subjects, were committing treason.

After a public reading of the Declaration of Independence at Bowling Green, on July 9, 1776, New Yorkers pulled down the statue of King George III.

The authors of the Declaration were clear-eyed about the stakes, yet unwavering in their desire to separate from the King. They closed their—our—Declaration of Independence with their unanimous avowal that, […] for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The Declaration of Independence is our pivotal foundational document. People risked their lives and fortunes by creating and signing it. Thousands of Patriots—including Black Americans and Native Americans—fought and died in the subsequent War of Independence in order to make the “united States of America” a reality. And after the war, a large number of British-Americans, still loyal to their monarch, fled the 13 colonies and migrated to the King’s remaining possessions to the north, including Nova Scotia and the Province of Quebec.

A living document

Through it all, the ideals expressed in the Declaration inspired generation after generation of Americans, including Jonathan Clark and his ancestors, as attested in this excerpt from daughter Caroline (Clark) Woodward’s 1893 biographical sketch:

[…] Jonathan M. Clark, was a Vermonter of English descent, who, born in 1812, of Revolutionary parentage, inherited an intense American patriotism.

Jonathan Clark and his Mequon neighbors—which included native-born “Americans,” as well as more recent immigrants from Ireland, the German lands, the United Kingdom, Nova Scotia, and elsewhere—knew the Declaration, read it aloud at patriotic events (in English and German!), and shared its anti-monarchical sentiments.

This July 4th, before you head to the beach or light the barbecue, why not refresh your memory and read the document that created our nation, and forever declared our freedom from the “absolute Despotism” of kings?

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CHH News!

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Greetings and welcome to the 500th (!) post on this blog, originally titled “Clark House Historian” and since June 1, 2026, known as “Clark Heritage & History.” I have lots of history to share with you on the blog in the coming months, but for the moment I only have time for a short post, because…

I’m speaking in Portage on Sunday, June 7th.

Once again, my friends from the Wisconsin Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, have asked me to speak, this time at their Fort Winnebago Surgeon’s Quarters (FWSQ) museum, as part of their big celebration of early Wisconsin history, called “Becoming Wisconsin — A Revolutionary Path.”

I will be one of several presenters, at one of five different stations at the event. My focus will be on the extended family of Francis LeRoi (or LeRoy), the man that built the log cabin home and fur-trading post that later became the historic Fort Winnebago Surgeon’s Quarters. The story of Francis LeRoy and his family is a fine example of the complicated and intertwined French-Canadian, Métis, and Native American roots of many families that lived in this part of the future state of Wisconsin in the 18th- and 19th-centuries, and should appeal to anyone with interests in early Wisconsin history or genealogy. See the poster, above, for details, or continue reading…

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Farewell Old Cottage…

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Farewell old cottage, cover image (detail) for the Stephen Foster song of the same title, published by Firth, Ford, & Co, New York, ca. 1851. Library of Congress

Changes

There’s been a change in my relationship with the Jonathan Clark House Museum, and that means that change is also coming to this blog, created and published by me since March, 2016, as “Clark House Historian.” In fact, this post is my 499th—and final—post under the blog title of “Clark House Historian.”

However, I will continue to write and publish this blog, under a new title, at the same web address, https://jchmhistorian.com/ and we will continue to explore many of the same Clark-era historical topics—and more! But the title of the blog will change. As of June 1, 2026, instead of “Clark House Historian,” this blog will be known as “Clark Heritage & History.”

If you are already a regular reader or free subscriber to the blog, thank you for reading! I value your support and interest. Subscribers, please let me know if you have any difficulty receiving the usual email announcements that appear in your inbox whenever a new post goes live. If you have active spam-blocking in your email inbox, you may want to change the “approved sender” for these CHH email announcements from the old “Clark House Historian” name to the new name: “Clark Heritage & History.” If you have any questions, comments, technical issues that need solving, please Contact me.

What’s going on?

Why the changes? Continue reading…

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Memorial Day, 2026

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Lest We Forget

Our annual Memorial Day post, first published in 2020, more relevant with each passing year.

Graves of Unknown Union Soldiers, Memphis National Cemetery, photo by Clayton B. Fraser, (Library of Congress), public domain. Memphis National Cemetery is the final resting place of Mequon’s Watson Peter Woodworth, and almost 14,000 of his Union Army comrades.

Today is the day our nation officially observes Memorial Day. For many Americans, Memorial Day represents “the first day of summer,” and is traditionally celebrated with trips to the lake, picnics, parades, and sales on cars, appliances, and other consumer goods.

But for many of us, Memorial Day remains rooted in its origins as Decoration Day. The first national observance was in 1868, when retired general John A. Logan, commander and chief of the Grand Army of the Republic—the Union veterans’ organization—issued his General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

On this Memorial Day, let’s take a moment to remember what this day truly represents.

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I’m speaking…again!

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Sorry about the long silence. I’m still in the thick of making revisions to the text, and putting final touches on the graphics, for my new, upcoming presentation at the Cedarburg History Museum. It’s this Saturday, May 9th, at 6:00 p.m., at the museum, N58W6194 Columbia Road, Cedarburg, WI 53012.

Admission to the talk, and to the museum and its 2026 premier exhibit “First Nations,” is free to all.

Beyond the clichés…

I’m going to give an overview of the First Nations that lived in what we now call Wisconsin, with a special emphasis on the people that called old Washington and Ozaukee county “home” before—and after—the arrival of European-Americans, following the War of 1812. There will be a special emphasis on using old and new sources to clear up some errors of fact, while doing our best to avoid reinforcing or repeating historical clichés, stereotypes, and other nonsense.

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