Month: August 2020

1864/65: A Directory Divertimento

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

Today’s post started out as a simple continuation of earlier posts (here, here, here) looking at Mary Clark, her children, her father Peter Turck and her brother James B. Turck, living and working in Milwaukee in the early 1860s. We discussed the years 1861-1863, using as an important source the Milwaukee city directories compiled in those years by A. Bailey and published by Starr & Son. Today we take a detour from our search for Clarks and Turcks in 1860s Milwaukee, to learn a few things about how city directories were made, and about the revised Milwaukee street numbering system of 1865.

1864: Missing directory

It appears that there was no Milwaukee directory published in 1864. Did the previous publisher go out of business? Did the war years cause manpower shortages that made canvassing for information impossible? Do any of our readers know more about this missing 1864 directory? If so, please reply. I’d like to know more.

1865: New publisher, and more…

The 1865 edition of the city directory introduced big changes, both for the book and for Milwaukee’s street addresses. The new publisher was Richard Edwards, who was also responsible for similar volumes in other major cities such as St. Louis, Louisville and New Orleans. He announced his new Milwaukee venture—after a dozen pages of advertisements—with this handsome title page:

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Clarks and Turcks, 1863

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

Still together, in Milwaukee

In our earlier posts 1861/1862: Moving Time and Monday: Map Day! we followed Mary Clark and her children as they left the Clark house and farm in Mequon and moved to Milwaukee, sharing a home with Mary’s twice-widowed father, Peter Turck.

The next edition of the Milwaukee City Directory was for the year 1863. By the time Mary’s only son, Henry Clark, celebrated his 20th birthday on February 21, 1863, the nation had been immersed in the violence of the Civil War for almost two years, with no end in sight. That summer, Henry—a resident of Milwaukee’s seventh ward—would register for the Union’s first nationwide military draft.

Page 47 of the Milwaukee City Directory for 1863 gives Mary’s address as:

Clark Mrs. Mary, 474 Jefferson.

This is the same address as found in the 1862 directory. (In 1863, there is no other “Clark, Mary” listed in the directory as there was in 1862.) It is almost certain that all the unmarried Clark children are at 474 Jefferson with their mother. Besides Henry, there are six girls still at home. Libbie, the oldest, is 18. Jennie, the youngest, is only 5 years old.

Peter Turck

On page 246 of the directory we find Peter Turck—misspelled, not for the first time, as Turk—still living with Mary and the family at 474 Jefferson.

Click to open larger image in new window.
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Monday: Map Day! – Milwaukee Street Map, 1859

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

In our most recent Clark House Historian posts, 1861/1862: Moving Time and Fred Beckmann, Sr., we began to look investigate how in 1861/62, Mary Clark and her children left the Clark farm in Mequon and moved in with her widowed father Peter Turck in Milwaukee. Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the various homes occupied by the Clarks and by Peter Turck during the decade of the 1860s, I thought I should make a quick answer to the question: who lived and farmed the Clark farm from about 1861 to 1868?

Well, it turns out that the answers to that question are more complicated, and the evidence more sparse and in need of interpretation than I anticipated. So we are going to pause our investigation of the “who was Mary Clark’s tenant farmer?” issue for a moment, as I sort through maps and census schedules and consult with Clark House museum director Nina Look and others.

On the street where you live…

Meanwhile, I thought today’s Monday: Map Day! item should be a street map of Milwaukee from about the same time that Mary Clark and the children moved to the city in 1861/62. You may remember our post featuring the 1854 Panoramic Map of Milwaukee. I find that map really interesting and informative in a general way, but it has one shortcoming: none of the streets are labeled. That’s not very useful if we are trying to follow the Clark family’s progress from place to place in the 1860s and beyond. So how about this map?—

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