Our series of “How’d they get here?” posts is written to illustrate the nuts and bolts of how our early Mequon pioneers travelled from their original homes or ports of arrival in North America, to the newly opened federal lands in Wisconsin Territory, circa 1830-1850. See Note 1, below, for links to other posts in the series.
Village of Buffalo, 1825
In a previous post, we followed the newly-opened route for westward migrants from the New York City docks, up the Hudson River to Albany, and then along the new Erie Canal towards its terminus at the village of of Buffalo, New York, at the eastern end of Lake Erie. After seven days of travel on canal boats, the westbound traveler of 1825 would have looked up and seen this, the muddy streets and modest harbor of Buffalo:
Buffalo Harbour from the Village, in Cadwallader Colden, et. al., Memoir…at the Completion of the New York Canals, New York, 1825. Image from “extra-illustrated” edition in New York Public Library Digital Collections, scanned copy of standard edition of book via GoogleBooks. Public domain. Click to open larger image in new window.
After leaving the Deep Cut above Lockport, the last part of the Erie Canal merges with Tonawanda Creek, seen here flowing into the village from far left to center, in front of the line of distant trees, and then curving toward the viewer before exiting into the harbor, to the right. The original Buffalo lighthouse of 1818 can be see on a small peninsula, right of center, just above where Tonawanda Creek meets the lake.
One of the really neat aspects of researching and writing about Clark House history on this site is the feedback I receive from blog readers. I love hearing from you, whether you have a comment or a question about the topic at hand, or perhaps there is something else that you want to know more about.
[Occupational Portrait of a Salesman], Three-Quarter Length, Seated, Displaying His Wares. Daguerreotype, between 1850 and 1860, cropped and lightly color-adjusted. Library of Congress. Click to open larger image in new window.
“UPDATED…”
History is never “done.” No one can know it all. There are always new sources with fresh information, and new ways to look at well-known material. A question or a new bit of information from a reader will often prompt additional research or a correction to previous statements. The result is that this blog—and our knowledge of the Clark family, their neighbors, and their era—is constantly evolving.
Every now and then it pays to take a fresh look at familiar sources. One of the key sources for the early history of Mequon and its parent counties is The History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin […] Illustrated, published in Chicago in 1881. And even though I’ve been using this book for Clark House research for over a decade, I still discover (or, in this case, re-discover) facts about Mequon—and, specifically, Jonathan M. Clark—that I had either not known before, or had noticed, “filed for future reference,” and forgotten to write about. Today’s post fixes one such omission.1
The first meeting of the Town of Mequon, April 7, 1846
Page 525 of The History… contains a load of information about the beginnings of town government in Spring, 1846. Unfortunately, it’s the sort of densely worded, 19th-century “history” writing that makes the reader want to skip ahead to something less dry. Here, take a look; start with the first full paragraph, beginning “The town was incorporated”…
The History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin […] Illustrated, Western Historical Co., Chicago, 1881, page 525, pdf of full book via GoogleBooks. Additional online, pdf copies can be found at Hathi Trust, the Wisconsin Historical Society and Archive.org. Click to open larger image in new window.
That’s a lot of info: names, dates, job titles. Let’s break things up a bit and take a closer look at what’s going on as old Washington county transitioned from the original county-wide system of government to the new system, in which each town will be responsible for much of its own governance.
UPDATED August 12, 2021 (twice), with more information on Orange Dibble’s derrick, illustrated below. See my reply to the question from reader Chester T. Hartwell in Comments, below.
UPDATED July 29, 2021, to include some new general information and details about several of the images sent by reader Robert Randall, second vice-president of the Camillus Canal Society. For Mr. Randall’s full message, see Comments, below. For more on the society’s Camillus Erie Canal Park, click here.
How the early settlers came to Mequon, c. 1835-1850 (part 3)
Our series of “How’d they get here?” posts is written—in part—to help our education team put together a Clark House Museum educational activity. The idea is to illustrate the nuts and bolts of how our early Mequon pioneers travelled from their original homes or ports of arrival in North America, to the newly opened federal lands in Wisconsin Territory, circa 1835-1850. (If you missed ’em, the previous parts are here and here, with a bonus image, here.)
Erie Canal images – 1825!
Finally!! For years, I’ve been searching for images of the unique, low-draft, narrow-sided, low-height, lock-length boats designed for and used in the earliest years of the Erie and Champlain canals (c. 1825-1840). And year after year, I had no luck finding such images…until this week.
You might be thinking, “hasn’t Clark House Historian already spent quite a bit of time on the Erie Canal?,” and you’d be correct. But it’s hard to overstate the national and international importance of the Erie Canal on world trade and American westward expansion in the decades after its opening in 1825. And while we have used maps to illustrate the migration routes of some Mequon settlers (such as the Turck, Gay, Bonniwell, and Woodworthfamilies), I wasn’t able to adequately illustrate the details of how they travelled in the early days of the canal era. Until now.
Today’s treasure trove of early canal images is from Cadwalleder Colden, et. al., Memoir…at the Completion of the New York Canals, New York, 1825. Many of these images are from the “extra-illustrated” edition in New York Public Library Digital Collections; you can download and enjoy a scanned copy of the standard edition of the book via GoogleBooks. Yes, these images are a bit early for our generally 1835-1850 “How’d they get there?” timeframe. But these are, by far, the best visual representations of early New York canal travel that I have seen. Even though Jonathan M. Clark, and the Woodworth and Bonniwell families and other Mequon settlers did not travel on the canals until the 1830s, these images depict scenes they would have experienced along the Champlain and Erie canals.
Please take a close look at each image for the “big picture,” then click on each and zoom in on the details. All the images can be clicked on to open as a larger, downloadable, image in a new window. All images are believed to be in the public domain, and I encourage you to enjoy, download, save, share and use them as you see fit.
Canal Boats
Here is an excellent view of a group of the new canal boats, loading freight and soliciting business at the North [i.e., Hudson] River docks, New York City, before heading up the Hudson to Albany and the canals:
Canal boats on the north river, New York, in Cadwallader Colden, et. al., Memoir…at the Completion of the New York Canals, New York, 1825. Image from “extra-illustrated” edition in New York Public Library Digital Collections, scanned copy of standard edition of book via GoogleBooks.
As we learned in our previous post, Henry Clark—only son of Jonathan M. and Mary (Turck) Clark—was buried “in Cedarburg” on Monday, April 23, 1866. But if you seek Henry’s final resting place, you’ll find him next to his father, mother, and sister Josie in the Clark family lot at historic Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee. How this came to be, and what this tells us about Clark family history, is the subject of today’s post.
Clark family graves, lot 3, block 44, section 10, Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo courtesy Liz Hickman, 2016. Click to open new image in larger window.
I need to make a correction. In one of the previous posts of our Infrastructure! series, I wrote:
In early 1841, before the commissioners approved county roads Nos. 1, 2, and 3, there was already one federal road in the county. The Green Bay road was a federal road […]. It ran generally south to north, joining Ft. Dearborn in Chicago to […] Ft. Howard in Green Bay. Along the way it passed through a number of growing settlements including the three villages that would become Milwaukee, and the future towns of Mequon, Cedarburg, and Grafton.
That’s almost accurate. To be precise, I should have said there was one federal road in the southeast corner of the county—the part that would become the towns of Mequon, Cedarburg and Grafton—the Green Bay road. But, if you consider the whole of old Washington county, there were not one, but two federal roads prior to 1841, the north-south Green Bay road and the east-west Dekorra road.
Both of these roads appear on the first map of Wisconsin Territory drawn from official government surveys, published in 1837. The two federal roads are indicated on the original map by closely-spaced parallel gray lines. On the detail below I’ve highlighted the then-existing eastern portion of the Dekorra road in blue, and the Washington county portion of the Green Bay road in green:
Another episode in our Infrastructure! series, a group of posts focused on the first government “improvements” in old Washington/Ozaukee county. If you need to catch up, start with Monday: Map Day – The First County Roads, 1841, then Marking Out the Roads, and our most recent post, Roads into the Woods, 1841, where we rediscovered the routes of old Washington/Ozaukee county’s very first roads.
First federal and county roads
In early 1841, before the commissioners approved county roads Nos. 1, 2, and 3, there was already one federal road in the county. The Green Bay road was a federal road, cut by the troops of the U.S. army’s 5th regiment. It ran generally south to north, joining Ft. Dearborn in Chicago to the regiment’s headquarters at Ft. Howard in Green Bay. Along the way it passed through a number of growing settlements including the three villages that would become Milwaukee, and the future towns of Mequon, Cedarburg, and Grafton. On the map below the Green Bay road is west of and occasionally parallels the Milwaukee River. It is sometimes labeled Green Bay Road, and sometimes—in the southern part of this map—Plank Road (the planking came later, in the 1850s).
Mapping out the first three Washington/Ozaukee county roads is not difficult. The proposals by the road supervisors, as recorded in the official minutes1, were quite precise. Clear starting and ending points were given, using the standard terminology of towns, ranges, sections, quarter sections and so on, and the lengths of each proposed road had been precisely measured in miles, with fractional miles given as a number of additional chains, rods or links. A map of those first three roads—superimposed on a later map of Washington and Ozaukee counties from 1874—looks like this:
Our Infrastructure! series— a short group of posts focused on the first county government “improvements” in old Washington/Ozaukee county began (almost a month ago!) with Monday: Map Day!, discussing the 1841 appointment of the first county road supervisors and the organization of the county’s first seven road districts. That was followed up with a discussion of surveyors, their tools, and Jonathan M. Clark’s experiences as a military road builder. Today we’ll take a look at the first few roads laid out and built in old Washington/Ozaukee county in early 1841.
Revised May 13, 2022 to correct spelling of Nathaniel Currier’s name.
It’s mid-May in southeastern Wisconsin, and with luck the last frost is behind us. For the past weeks and months farmers and gardeners have been tending to the soil and preparing for planting. At this time of year in the 1840s and ’50s, Jonathan M. Clark would have done much the same, hitching up his team of oxen to a steel-bladed plow to cut and turn over the tough prairie grasses and break up the soil of his newly-cleared lands.
It’s been a busy few weeks here at the Historian’s (actual) house, and I’m (very) slowly transcribing handwritten documents and making maps to illustrate the work of Jonathan M. Clark and his fellow road supervisors as they mapped and built old Washington County’s first roads in early 1841. While you’re waiting for those posts, check out our previous installments in this series — County Government – Early Records and Monday: Map Day! — for some interesting background, maps, and first-hand records.
Jonathan Clark – surveyor?
What did Jonathan Clark know about surveying and road building? Probably quite a bit. Like most farmers—then and now—Jonathan would not have been successful without a good understanding of maps, distances, land boundaries and how to best use and navigate the fields, forests and wetlands of his property.
If you recall our earlier posts detailing JMC’s military service (starting with Fort Howard, October 1833 (part 1) and including Ouisconsin Territory, 1836), you’ll remember that his unit, the U.S. Army’s 5th infantry regiment, was responsible for laying out and cutting the new military road that would ultimately connect Ft. Howard in Green Bay, Ft. Winnebago near Portage, and Ft. Crawford at Prairie du Chien. Jonathan’s Co. K was involved in this work for the better part of his final two years of service (1835-1836). This assignment would give him hands-on experience in surveying, map-making, grubbing out roads and building serviceable bridges with the materials at hand. By the time he arrived in Mequon, in late 1839, it’s possible that Jonathan Clark was the most experienced road builder (and one of the better surveyors) in early Washington/Ozaukee county.
Clark House Historian 