Alcohol

The consumption of alcohol—beer in particular—featured in many aspects of early Mequon life.

Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

UPDATE: This was supposed to go out on Monday. I hit “publish” before the piece was ready. Here’s the updated 2025 version for your reading enjoyment. Sorry for any confusion (and, for you CHH subscribers, the premature email in your inbox).

Monday, September 1st, 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 this CHH piece from 2023. This Labor Day, as in 2023, I have to work a shift at our local mercantile establishment. You know, a store kind of like this one, only much bigger, stocked with just about anything you need for modern living:

Like many Americans, I don’t have the day “off” on Monday, and won’t be marching in a parade, but I’d still like to honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present. With that in mind, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark House Historian, 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 photo. Enjoy the photo galleries, and be sure to click each gallery—and photo—to open and peruse larger versions of each image. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts, filled with lots more information about the different skills, tools, and jobs, and the full image credits.

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The Clarks, a family of readers…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Some of our recent and upcoming posts are focused on reading and evaluating source materials. The first of these posts, JCH Sources, part 1, was illustrated with this drawing…

Whistler, James McNeill, artist, Reading by Lamplight, etching and drypoint, 1859. MetMuseum. Bequest of Julia H. Manges, in memory of her husband, Dr. Morris Manges, 1960

This is James McNeill Whistler’s 1859 Reading by lamplight, an evocative drawing of a young woman, reading by the light of an oil lamp, a cup of tea at her side. The lamp is supported on a tall, slender metal stand. It’s light is raised even further by placing the lamp stand on a large, overturned bowl.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was Caroline Clark, or one of her other well-read sisters. Caroline would have been about 19 years old in 1859, when Whistler made this drawing. She was in the middle of her pioneering two-year high school course in Milwaukee, a talented, energetic young woman on the way to living a remarkable life of service. Here she is circa 1889-1900, around age 50, in the prime of life:

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JMC: a soldier’s life at Fort Howard, 1834

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

In the summer of 1834, the U.S. Army’s Brevet Brigadier General Hugh Brady made an inspection tour of many of the posts under his command. One of those posts was Fort Howard, at Green Bay, in the then Michigan Territory. In an earlier post, I briefly mentioned the General’s July 17, 1834, visit to the fort and how “Gen. Brady reviewed all the troops, who made a brilliant display of military evolutions, highly gratifying to those who witnessed them, and evidently meriting the approbation they received from the worthy and excellent commander-in-chief.“

Gen. Hugh Brady, c. 1844-1851. Photo credit: see note 1

I have since located the official report of the inspection that Brady sent to his superiors back in Washington, DC. and I want to share it with you today. I think you’ll find that a close reading of the general’s report will give some insights into the daily lives and routines of soldiers—including our Jonathan M. Clark—as they served their country “on the frontier” in the mid-1830s.

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RBOH: some Beckmann & Cedarburg updates

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Revised 17 February 2025 to include some additional material about my Beckmann-related talk at the Cedarburg History Museum in Spring, 2023.

Cedarburg News, October 14, 1885, page 1

I’ve been spending time with historic local newspapers online, searching for those tasty tidbits of local news that never quite make it into the history books, but are often found in the 19th-century local press. Today I was browsing through 1880s to early-1900s issues of the Cedarburg News, Fred. W. Horn, publisher, and found some interesting random bits o’ history that are connected to the Clark House and to some work I’ve done for the Cedarburg History Museum.

Fred. Beckmann and kin

You may remenber a post I wrote back in July, 2020, about newly-married German immigrant Fred. Beckmann, who farmed and lived on the Jonathan Clark property from 1868 until 1873, at which time he and his growing family moved to Cedarburg, where he then owned and ran the Wisconsin House hotel for the better part of the next four decades. I followed that up with an April, 2023 presentation at the Cedarburg History Museum, where I spoke about the life and the extended circle of family, business associates and friends of Fred. Beckmann. His story connects the hardscrabble early days of our area’s Yankee, Irish and German pioneers (Jonathan and Mary Clark’s generation) with the following generation of established and settled German-American farmers, business owners and civic leaders, such as himself. And Fred also connected and illuminated the story of the Jonathan Clark House with those of nearby Hamilton—and its Concordia Mill—and the development of downtown Cedarburg in the 19th-century.

That 2023 presentation was followed by a March, 2024, illustrated talk I gave at the Cedarburg History Museum as part of their big 2024 Civil War exhibition and lecture series. My subject was “From the ‘Burg to the Battlefield…and Back: Cedarburg’s Beckmann Family and the Civil War.” In my talk, I tried to take a more personal and local look at the war by examining the military service of few of Fred. Beckmann’s Cedarburg relatives, including his brother Charles Beckmann, future brother-in-law, Charles Gottschalk, and future father-in-law Henry Hachfeld/Hackfeldt.

Well, I wasn’t really looking for more info on Fred. Beckmann today, but I stumbled across some interesting things, and thought I’d share them with you here…

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Hail, Smiling morn! – 2025 edition

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Happy New Year to all, and best wishes for an excellent 2025. I thought we’d start the year with a lightly edited re-post of an earlier CHH essay about a cheerful, festive song, one that may have been familiar to our Mequon settlers in the 1840s.1

A spot of Spofforth to ring in the New Year…

Our New Year’s sing-along number is “Hail Smiling morn” by the English composer Reginald Spofforth (1769-1827), a vocal quartet featured in the second part of the Milwaukee Beethoven Society’s March 23rd, 1843, premiere concert:

Milwaukee Weekly Sentinel March 15 1843, page 2. Click to open larger image in new window.

Spofforth was a man of many talents, but was particularly known for his glees. A glee is a kind of convivial part-song, typically for three or more voices and usually—but not always—sung without accompaniment. I’ll have more to say about this particular composer and piece later, but for now, it’s well enough to know that “Hail Smiling morn” is—according to musicologist Nicholas Temperly—”possibly the most popular glee in the entire repertory,” and that’s saying something!

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Today 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 this piece from 2023.

This Labor Day, I’ll be at home, working on my upcoming lectures for the state DAR and the Cedarburg History Museum. Last year, I had to work at our local mercantile establishment. You know, a store kind of like this one, only much bigger, stocked with just about anything you need for modern living:

I don’t really have the day “off” today—too much writing to do—and won’t be marching in a parade, but I’d still like to honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present. With that in mind, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark House Historian, 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 photo. Enjoy the photo galleries, and click each gallery to open larger versions of each image. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts, filled with lots more information about the different skills, tools, and jobs, and the full image credits.

Continue reading →

Meet the neighbors: the Loomis family

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

I’m in the middle of several larger CHH research projects and I find myself swamped with information on early Mequon area pioneers. So rather than wait until I’ve got it all sorted out and then organize it into a big essay or two (or more!), I’ll be putting up some of these new bits and pieces on the blog as I find them.

Today’s subjects are the families of Jonathan Loomis (1776-1849) and his eldest child, Issac Chester Loomis (1802-1882), two of old Washington/Ozaukee county’s first white settler families. I’ve mentioned some of these folks in previous CHH posts. And while the Loomis name does appear in some of the early county histories and land records, so far I’d not been able to learn much about the family or how they came to the Wisconsin Territory in the 1830s. In fact, given that the mid-1800s penmanship on some of the source documents was often florid to the point of being unreadable, I was sometimes unsure whether documents discussing or signed by “J. Loomis” versus “I. Loomis” represented the same man, or two individuals. Today’s source goes a long way toward solving these questions.1

Descendants of Joseph Loomis in America

Loomis, Elias, and Charles Arthur Hoppin. Descendants of Joseph Loomis in America, and his antecedents in the old world. edited by Loomis, Elisha S [Berea? O, 1909], Library of Congress.

As luck would have it, I just ran across a useful digitized book in the collection of the Library of Congress, titled Descendants of Joseph Loomis in America, and his antecedents in the old world. I’m not an expert in Loomis genealogy, and thus not entirely sure how accurate this book is, but what I have read here mostly checks out when compared to what I have found elsewhere. With that said, below are the key bits of the book that are related to very early Washington/Ozaukee county history and, in particular, Isaac Chester Loomis and his family. What follows is taken verbatim from pages 193 and 390-391, though I’ve taken the liberty of expanding many of the abbreviations and adding a few paragraph breaks for ease of reading. I’ve also added a few footnotes to explain some possibly obscure references.

Let’s begin with the patriarch of the family, Jonathan Loomis…

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

Even thought it’s Labor Day, the holiday celebrating the working men and women of our nation, I’ll be at work, back at our local mercantile establishment. You know, a store kind of like this one, stocked with just about anything you need for modern living:

I don’t have the day off, and won’t be marching in a parade, but I’d still like to honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present. With that in mind, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark House Historian, 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 much commentary today. Enjoy the photos, and click the links to visit the original CHH posts with lots more information about the different skills and jobs, and for full image credits.

Continue reading →

I must have drifted off…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Inman, Henry. Rip Van Winkle Awakening from his Long Sleep, 1823. National Gallery of Art, gift of William and Abigail Gerdts. Public Domain.

A long “nap”

Unlike Rip van Winkle, I haven’t been asleep the whole time since our previous post. But we are well overdue for new blog material. I’ve got a big backlog of documents and images to share with you; all I need to do is get writing. But first…

Be sure to vote today!

It’s election day today, and your vote counts. If you haven’t already done so, get out of the house, over to your polling place, and vote. Voting is your right and responsibility as a citizen, and an indispensable element of our nation since the earliest days of the Republic.

Not surprisingly, voting and public service were an important part of life in the Clark House era. From 1840 onward, Jonathan M. Clark, Peter Turck, William T. Bonniwell and many other relatives and neighbors sought, and won, appointment or election to a wide variety of local, territorial and state offices. Voting—then limited to white males only—was a priority for Mequon’s early settlers, and they never failed to turn out in large numbers for each election. Their passion for civic engagement and electoral politics was, in turn, passed to the next generation.

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Hail, Smiling morn! – 2022 edition

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Happy New Year to all, and best wishes that 2022 will be an improvement on the past year. (A low bar, I know.) Anyway, when I first published this post, on January 1, 2021, I wrote: I’m almost done with my research on the second half of the 1843 concert by the Milwaukie Beethoven Society. (If you missed our earlier posts on that concert, links are here and here.) But it’s New Year’s Day, and I’m not quite done writing about “Part Second.”

Well, it turns out that “not quite done” was an optimistic estimate, as I became distracted by so many other research topics and posts and never got around to discussing the second part of the Milwaukee Beethoven Society’s concert. New Year’s Day is here again, and I’m still not done, alas, but I have not forgotten and—with luck—I will finish that post some time this winter.

A spot of Spofforth to ring in the New Year…

Meanwhile, let’s start the New Year on a cheerful note by reprising last year’s festive musical selection, drawn from that second part of the Milwaukee Beethoven Society’s 1843 premiere concert:

Milwaukee Weekly Sentinel March 15 1843, page 2. Click to open larger image in new window.

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