Month: October 2024

Who’s Who at Forts Howard & Winnebago, 1829-1837

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

I’m getting back into the blogging groove, and one of my first projects is to continue our series “Not our Jonathan: other “J. M. Clarks” in 1830s & ’40s Wisconsin.” And in my research for that, I’m looking into the identities of one or more men named “J. M. Clark” that served as chaplain at the 5th Regiment’s post at Fort Winnebago.

An important primary source for this research are the monthly “Returns” or reports, sent from the 5th Regiment’s posts at Forts Howard and Winnebago back to the army’s chief bureaucrat, the Adjutant General, in Washington, D.C. We’ve examined these Returns several times on Clark House Historian, including this post from 2016 which discussed this October, 1833, bit of U.S. Army record-keeping, the Return of the Regiment [for the 5th Regiment Infantry, at Fort Howard], October, 1833, verso:

NARA, Washington, D.C.; Returns from Regular Army Infantry Regiments, June 1821 – December 1916; Microfilm Serial: M665; Roll: 54 Military Year : 1832-1842. Return of the Regiment [for the 5th Regiment Infantry, at Fort Howard], October, 1833, verso, from Ancestry.com (pay site).

What’s that name???

For our purposes, one of the most useful features of these monthly Returns is the top left section of the form, which lists the officers of the regiment by [Company], Rank, Name, Post or Station, and with a space for Remarks about their assignments, temporary duty, leaves of absence, and so on. There’s a lot of useful information here, especially the names of the officers and the companies that they lead. But click the image to open a larger version of this image, and see if you can actually read those names:

On the one hand, the regimental clerk that filled out this October, 1833, form had pretty tidy penmanship, and the digitized microfilm image is not too bad. But even so, some of the names are hard to decipher. And knowing these names can be really useful, for example when looking for correspondence between these regimental officers and the Adjutant General’s office in D.C. (See our post here, for more on this archive.)

So how do we learn “Who’s Who” on the monthly “Returns from Post” and “Returns of the Regiment”? Fortunately, the government put all that info into a series of very useful books, which are now available, for free, online…

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Talking about the Old Military Road, the DAR…and JMC

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

UPDATED October 5, 2024, at 9;30 pm to correct a number of typos and other infelicities.

Phew! What a busy September! I got to talk about some very interesting topics last month, to some very enthusiastic and attentive audiences. Lots of work, but very enjoyable. The first of these events was my September 13, 2024, after-dinner presentation at the Fall Workshop of the Wisconsin Society, Daughters of the American Revolution (WSDAR). My topic was “Building the Military Road, Wisconsin Territory’s First Federal Road.”

Photo credit: Laura Rexroth

I incorporated into the talk some important parts of the 1830s and ’40s army and road-building information that I’ve blogged about here at CHH, as well as new primary source materials and a whole bunch of relevant photographs and illustrations.

The WSDAR and the Military Road

An important, ongoing part of the WSDAR’s mission over the decades is historic preservation and education. The Wisconsin Society DAR’s main historic preservation effort involves the care and presentation of the last bit of Fort Winnebago still standing, the historic Fort Winnebago Surgeon’s Quarters.

“Fortifying the Border,” slide from my “Old Military Road” presentation.

This image of Fort Winnebago, at the Portage between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, was created in the mid-nineteenth century and reproduced on a 1909 postcard. In the detail shown here, the building that is now the WSDAR’s historic Fort Winnebago Surgeon’s Quarters museum is indicated by green arrow. The uncropped full image—including a view of the Historic Indian Agency House—is available from the Library of Congress.

The WSDAR also has an interest in Wisconsin’s Old Military Road that dates back at least to 1930, when Columbia County’s Wau-Bun Chapter, WSDAR placed a series of handsome cast-steel markers along their portion of the route of the Old Military Road. As you might imagine, these have suffered from almost a century of Wisconsin weather and random damage or theft. State regent Sandra Snow has made the restoration and replacement of the 1930 markers one of her signature projects. Here’s a before and after of one of those markers:

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