The Friends of the Jonathan Clark House February newsletter is here! Many thanks to all the volunteers, donors, and Clark House board members for their continuing work “to collect, preserve and share the history of the Jonathan Clark House and the early settlers of Mequon Thiensville.”
Once again, Clark House executive director Nina Look has done a wonderful job leading the work of the museum, coordinating the volunteers, and putting together an informative and generously-illustrated newsletter. Just click on this image of the first page to open your own downloadable pdf in a new window:
The original version of this post was the second-ever post on Clark House Historian. It represented what we knew at the time about Mary Turck, the daughter of Peter Turck and Rachael Gay, wife of Jonathan M. Clark, and mother of the eight Clark family children. The original April, 2016, post was pretty accurate, but we have learned a lot more about Mary and her Turck and Clark families in the meantime. So here is a revised version of that post with errors corrected and ambiguities clarified—where possible.
Please note that there are many more facts about Mary and her Clark and Turck families that I’ve written about in the past almost-5 years that are not linked to in this post. If you are looking for more information about Mary, I highly recommend using the blog’s SEARCH function and our new INDEX. And if you still can’t find the info you want, please ask me! Just use the Leave a Replybox, below, or the CONTACTlink, above.
Mary Turck Clark: Mequon Pioneer
Mary Turck Clark. Photograph courtesy Liz Hickman. Click to open larger image in new window.
Continuing our look at Mary Turck Clark and her family, today we look at a map of Columbia County, New York, the birthplace of Mary’s father Peter Turck, most of his eight siblings, and home of Mary’s paternal grandparents—Peter Turck’s parents—Jacob A. and Anna Maria “Maritje” (Klein) Turck. For more on the Turcks and New York, you may want to read our previous posts on Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck’s New York, 1829/32 and Mary Turck’s Greene County, New York.
Today we’ll be looking at Columbia County, one of the predominantly Dutch-American counties along the Hudson River, south of Albany, New York. Columbia County lies east of Greene county, just across the Hudson river. Here’s a detail from a map we looked at previously, showing the relationship between Greene and Columbia counties:
Burr, David H., Map of the State of New-York and the surrounding country by David H. Burr. Compiled from his large map of the State, 1832.[…] Entered according to Act of Congress Jany. 5th., 1829 by David H. Burr of the State of New York. Engd. by Rawdon, Clark & Co., Albany & Rawdon, Wright & Co., New York [detail]. Credit, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, non-commercial use permitted under Creative Commons license. Click image to open larger map in new window.
Our new map is from the same atlas, and shows many more details of Peter Turck’s Columbia County, circa 1829:
As we discussed last Monday, 2021 is the bicentennial of Mary Turck Clark’s birth. So this year I’d like to focus on Mary, her parents and her seven siblings: where they came from, how they got to Wisconsin, and where they went afterwards. Today we’ll start to get our Turck-family bearings with a look at an excellent map of Greene County, New York, an important place in the lives of Mary, her parents, and her extended family.
The Hudson River Dutch-Americans
Mary Turck’s parents and ancestors descended from Dutch-American families that had been in New York since colonial times. For more background and a fine 1829/32 map of the whole state, take a minute to re-read our previous Monday: Map Day!, Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck’s New York, 1829/32. The initial Dutch immigrants to New Netherland landed on Manhattan Island; it wasn’t long before Dutch settlers headed inland, west and north up the Hudson River. By the time Mary Turck was born in 1821, there had been generations of Dutch-Americans living along the Hudson. The story of Mary’s extended family—the Turck, Gay, Groom, and Van Loon families and their kin—is centered around a handful of Hudson River counties. Some of the boundaries and place names changed over the centuries, but much of the story of Mary Turck’s family will be found in the documents, maps and places of Ulster and Greene counties on the west bank of the river and Dutchess and Columbia counties on the east side.
Burr, David H., Map of the State of New-York and the surrounding country by David H. Burr. Compiled from his large map of the State, 1832.[…] Entered according to Act of Congress Jany. 5th., 1829 by David H. Burr of the State of New York. Engd. by Rawdon, Clark & Co., Albany & Rawdon, Wright & Co., New York [detail]. Credit, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, non-commercial use permitted under Creative Commons license. Click image to open larger map in new window.
A few days ago, Clark House museum director Nina Look asked me a simple question: when, exactly, was Mary Turck Clark born? So I looked in my database and I came up with…two answers: Mary Turck Clark was born on either May 4th, 1820 or May 3, 1821. So I reviewed my dates and sources, and today’s post is about what I (re-)discovered, and what I still have to investigate.
Haven’t we been over this before?
Why, yes, we have. Here are links to earlier posts on essential sources of Mary Turck Clark birth date and birth year information, starting with my second Clark House Historian post, this now-outdated post about Mary from 2016. Other, more recent, posts have gone into detail examining Mary, her family, and their likely birth dates as found on the U.S. federal decennial censuses:
I’ve not yet blogged about Mary’s 1870 or 1880 federal censuses—both enumerated in Milwaukee—but I’ve seen them and used them in my research. More on these in a moment.
November 28, 2020, is the 208th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan M. Clark. To celebrate, I’m reposting a revised, expanded and annotated version of one of my first Clark House Historian posts. Since this was first published, on April 20, 2016, we have learned much more about the lives of Jonathan Clark, Mary Turck Clark, their family and their neighbors. Please check out the footnotes and click on the links for some of this newer, more accurate, information.
Happy Birthday, Jonathan! (and thanks to Nina Look for the timely reminder).
JMC: Man of Mystery
Jonathan M. Clark. Photograph courtesy Liz Hickman.
I’m working with one of our young Clark House Museum volunteers to examine the life of early Mequon settler Peter Turck and his large family. Peter Turck was a man of many talents and trades, which we will look into in more depth in future posts. He was also Mary (Turck) Clark’s father and Jonathan M. Clark’s father-in-law.1
The Turk/Turck family is an old Dutch-American family that first came to the New World in the 1660s, settling on the island of Manhattan, then known as New Amsterdam, part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The Turk/Turck family maintained a presence in Manhattan well into the twentieth-century.2 Some Turk/Turck descendants migrated to the Hudson River valley in the 1700s and stayed for many generations.
For our purposes, I thought it would be useful to have a map that gave an overview of the places that Peter Turck and Rachael Gay lived before coming to Wisconsin Territory in 1837:
I am descended from European immigrants to the “New World.” From the mid-1600s through the 1800s, they came to North America from over a half-dozen European lands. Like Jonathan M. Clark, Mary Turck Clark, and their nineteenth-century Mequon neighbors, I’m here because my ancestors left Old World homes, families, and communities behind and made difficult voyages to America. There is much to admire in their individual stories of migration and settlement in a new nation. There are aspects of their lives that are less than exemplary, too. Discovering and sharing their stories is, for me, one of the most interesting aspects of studying history.
But stories of European immigration are only one part of the history of our continent and our nation. It’s essential we remember that when Europeans began to “discover” the Americas in the late-1400s, there were already large numbers other peoples already here. Their ancestors made the trip here much earlier; it is currently believed that Paleo-Indians migrated to the Americas at least 15,000, and possibly as many as 30,000 years ago. Today’s map is a tribute to—and a call to remember—the many peoples, cultures and communities that existed in the future United States prior to European colonization:
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 the story of how the school committee1 hired its first teacher, led by Daniel Strickland (father of Sarah A. Strickland Clark).
In the sprit of our previous Back To School salute to education, here is that tale:
As we discussed previously, it appears that there was no Milwaukee directory published in 1864. Did the 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.
Clark Mary Mrs. r. 474 Jefferson
As you can see in the new and improved Edwards’ Annual Director […] in the City of Milwaukee for 1865, Mary still resided at 474 Jefferson street in Milwaukee’s seventh ward.
Clark House Historian 