Documents & Sources

Meet the Neighbors: the Desmond family (part 2)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

In our previous post, we were introduced to the Desmond family, early Irish immigrants to old Washington/Ozaukee county and neighbors of Jonathan and Mary Clark. To our good fortune, one of the Desmond sons, Humphrey Desmond, wrote a memoir of his father Thomas that includes some unique family genealogy and tales of pioneer days in our area.

If you missed Part 1, I suggest you go ahead and read that post first. Then return here to continue with Part 2 of selections from A Memoir of Thomas Desmond, with a chapter on The Desmond Genealogy, by Humphrey J. Desmond, 77 pages, Milwaukee, 1905. And remember: you can read the complete memoir at this link, which is a part of the admirably organized and comprehensive online genealogy project The Desmond Archives.

Pioneer Days

Chapter 3 of Desmond’s memoir will be of particular interest to CHH readers. It relates various early Mequon events, some involving the Desmond family’s Catholic faith, their Bonniwell neighbors, and the local school that the Bonniwells helped build in the early 1840s. That first “Bonniwell School,” located less than a mile west of the Jonathan Clark house on what is now the southeast corner of Bonniwell and Wauwatosa roads in Mequon, was sketched in 1864 by Evander Bonniwell. The sketch (above) is reproduced here from page 71 of George B. Bonniwell’s comprehensive family history, The Bonniwells: 1000 Years. (Used by permission.)

[31]        III.   PIONEER DAYS

THE "hazard of new fortunes" undertaken by the Desmond family involved the clearing away of woods with the ax of the pioneer and the building of a commodious log house.
    The pioneers of this neighborhood were the Bonniwell brothers, who had settled there about 1835 [sic, 1839], and it was known as the Bonniwell settlement.
    Indians still roamed the forests of southeastern Wisconsin in 1843. My [32] father, then ten years old, alone in the house one day, was visited by a brave to whom he gave a large loaf of bread. The Indian loosened his belt as he ate the loaf, and when it was all gone departed peaceably on his journey.
    There was a log school house to which my father went. Books were not plentiful in those days. He studied his spelling lesson during the noon hour from the book of a desk mate. He had to start at the foot of the class, but one day he got to the head and kept his place.
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Meet the Neighbors: the Desmond family (part 1)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

In an earlier post, I mentioned a local history source that was previously unknown to me, the Memoir of Thomas Desmond, written by his son Henry Desmond. It was cited by Walter D. Corrigan in the bibliography of his otherwise error-prone and forgettable History of the town of Mequon, Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, brought down to about 1870.

I was intrigued. I already knew that Thomas Desmond and his brother Dennis were pioneer residents of the Town of Mequon and neighbors of the Jonathan Clark family for several decades. The Thomas and Dennis Desmond farm parcels were located in the NW quarter of Section 3, T9N-R21E, Town of Mequon. The Desmond farms, and the adjacent John Corcoran farm, were situated due north of the Jesse Hubbard, Jr., farm, due west of the Ferdinand and Friedrich Groth properties, and immediately adjacent to the northwest corner of the Jonathan and Mary Clark farm, which occupied all of the southeast quarter of section 3.

You can see the Thomas Desmond and Dennis Desmond parcels in the upper left quadrant of this detail from the Shoolmap of the Town of Mequon / School Map of the Town of Mequon, pre-1872, UW-Milwaukee–AGS Digital Map Collection, showing Sec. 3, T9N-R21E. The southeast quarter section is labeled “Widow Clark,” and suggests that the map was made sometime after Jonathan Clark’s death in 1857, but before Mary Turck Clark and her daughters sold the property in 1872. (For more on this unique, useful map, see our post Monday: Map Day! – “Shoolmap” of Mequon, c. 1872.)

A Memoir

A memoir of any early Mequon settler, especially a Clark family neighbor, is always something I’d like to read. But the Desmond memoir was privately published, in 1905, in an edition of only 50 copies, to be distributed only to the immediate family. I checked Worldcat, and it had a citation for the book, but did not know of any libraries that had a copy. Might someone, somewhere, have this little book? Well…

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“Dashing through the snow…”

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

As I write this, southeastern Wisconsin is in the midst of our first substantial snowfall of Winter, 2025-2026. In Jonathan and Mary Clark’s lifetime, the day after a storm like this meant it was time to hitch up the sleigh and have some fun “dashing through the snow.” Here’s a lightly-revised and expanded repeat of a post that celebrates Clark-era “sleighing time” and “jingle bells.” (And be sure to click the highlighted links for more vintage wintertime images and info.)

Kimmel and Forster, publishers, “Winter Pleasure in the Country,” circa 1865. National Museum of American History, Peters Prints Collection, Smithsonian Institution.1 Note the modest straps of jingle bells on the one-horse sleigh and the much more ostentatious—and louder—straps of bells on the two-horse sleigh.

Last winter, our earlier CHH posts Snow!, Shoveling out -and other winter chores and Stuff Happens – on a sleigh ride, got me wondering again about winter travel in old Washington/Ozaukee county during the Clarks’ era of the mid-1830s through the 1860s or so. Assuming most of the more successful farmers—such as the Clarks, Bonniwells and Turcks—owned a one- or two-horse sleigh, how easy was it to navigate that sleigh on the early county roads? Could you sleigh ride all the way to Milwaukee? And if you could, how long might that take?

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Home to Thanksgiving

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. To celebrate the holiday, I thought I’d reprint a lightly revised version of our now-annual CHH Thanksgiving post, to share with you a few vintage recipes and a nice Currier & Ives lithograph from the period.1

Thanksgiving, 1867

Durrie, George H. and John Schutler, Home to Thanksgiving, ca. 1867, New York, Currier & Ives. National Gallery of Art, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Public Domain. Click to to open larger image in a new window.

By 1867, when this sentimental lithograph was first published, the Clark family had been living in the City of Milwaukee’s seventh ward for about six years. Family patriarch Jonathan M. Clark had died a decade earlier, and his only son, Henry M. Clark, had been gone for about a year and a half. Family matriarch Mary (Turck) Clark was living in a house in Milwaukee with her unmarried daughters, Libbie, Persie, Theresa, Laura, Josie and Jennie.

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Finding what you want: a few tips for readers

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Sometimes a blog is like a labyrinth…

JCH Bonniwell family Bible, MS inscription “John” and drawing of a Labyrinth, First […] Concordance, sig. A1 verso (detail)

I’m looking forward to blogging more regularly, and I hope you enjoy the upcoming posts. But I’ve been publishing Clark House Historian for almost ten years (!), and I know it can be hard to navigate the blog and find the particular historical information, photos, maps and other images that you might be looking for. Today’s post has a few tips to help you make your way through the twists and turns of the Clark House Historian information labyrinth.

Tip No. 1: Click the links!

If you’d like to view a larger, clearer version of almost any image on the blog: click the image (or, sometimes, the link in the caption), and a new full-size image will open in a new window. Other links (highlighted in the blog’s signature minty-green color) will connect you with related blog posts and online sources for further information.

And by the way, you can read the blog on your phone and open and zoom in on the photos, drawings, maps and other images. But I create the CHH posts on a device with a good-sized screen, and I recommend viewing on the largest screen that you can.

Finally, and most importantly, be sure to click the Continue reading—> link, typically found after the first image and paragraph or two. There is a lot more to be found “below the fold.”

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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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July 4th – Independence Day

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Just a reminder…

249 years ago today, representatives of all thirteen of Britain’s American colonies, gathered “in congress” in Philadelphia, and publicly declared our independence from “George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and so forth,” and his distant and unresponsive legislature. The Americans proposed to separate—forever—from their Divinely appointed King, and form a new and independent nation, the “united States of America.” This decision was bold, completely unprecedented in a world dominated by autocratic monarchs, and potentially fatal for anyone that supported this Declaration of Independence. From the King’s point of view, the authors, his subjects, were committing treason.

After a public reading of the Declaration of Independence at Bowling Green, on July 9, 1776, New Yorkers pulled down the statue of King George III.

The authors of the Declaration were clear-eyed about the stakes, yet unwavering in their desire to separate from the King. They closed their—our—Declaration of Independence with their unanimous avowal that, […] for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The Declaration of Independence is our pivotal foundational document. People risked their lives and fortunes by creating and signing it. Thousands of Patriots died in the subsequent War of Independence in order to make the “united States of America” a reality. A large number of British-Americans, still loyal to their monarch, fled the 13 colonies and migrated to the King’s remaining possessions to the north, including Nova Scotia and the Province of Quebec.

Through it all, the ideals expressed in the Declaration inspired generation after generation of Americans, including Jonathan Clark and his ancestors, as attested in this excerpt from daughter Caroline (Clark) Woodward’s 1893 biographical sketch:

[…] Jonathan M. Clark, was a Vermonter of English descent, who, born in 1812, of Revolutionary parentage, inherited an intense American patriotism.

Jonathan Clark and his Mequon neighbors—including native-born “Americans,” as well as more recent immigrants from Ireland, the German lands, the United Kingdom, Nova Scotia, and elsewhere—knew the Declaration, read it aloud at patriotic events (in English and German!), and shared its anti-monarchical sentiments.

This July 4th, before you head to the beach or light the barbecue, why not refresh your memory and read the document that created our nation, and forever declared our freedom from the “absolute Despotism” of kings?

In Congress, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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Memorial Day, 2025

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Lest We Forget

Our annual Memorial Day post, first published in 2020, more relevant with each passing year.

Graves of Unknown Union Soldiers, Memphis National Cemetery, photo by Clayton B. Fraser, (Library of Congress), public domain. Memphis National Cemetery is the final resting place of Mequon’s Watson Peter Woodworth, and almost 14,000 of his Union Army comrades.

Today is the day our nation officially observes Memorial Day. For many Americans, Memorial Day represents “the first day of summer,” and is traditionally celebrated with trips to the lake, picnics, parades, and sales on cars, appliances, and other consumer goods.

But for many of us, Memorial Day remains rooted in its origins as Decoration Day. The first national observance was in 1868, when retired general John A. Logan, commander and chief of the Grand Army of the Republic—the Union veterans’ organization—issued his General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

On this Memorial Day, let’s take a moment to remember what this day truly represents.

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JCH Sources: a look a local histories, part 2

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

This is the second part of a multi-part look at local (Mequon and Washington/Ozaukee County) history sources. If you missed Part 2, I recommend you click this link and read that first.

In today’s post, I’d like to guide you to and through another one of the local histories that I’ve bumped into over the last decade or so. As in Part 1, I’ll include a link to a PDF copy of the source, make comments on the range and quality of the information in the book, and sum it up with an overall grade for accuracy, style, and usefulness.

“All sources lie.” — Lawrence of Arabia (supposedly)

That provocative quote begins the forward of Elizabeth Shown Mills’s monumental Evidence Explained (third edition, revised, 2017), the “Bible” of genealogical research, source evaluation, and modern citation practices. It makes an arresting opening for her almost 900-page book, devoted to historical and genealogical sources and how to cite them.1 But what does the author mean by beginning her book with Lawrence’s (supposed) quote? Here is part of her explanation:

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Saving Stuff

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

I’ve been preoccupied with all sorts of archival work lately, and I thought I’d pass along a few preservation tips for those of you that might have some “stuff” that you’d like to protect and save for the future.

Know your archival plastics!

Do you have photographs, artwork, manuscripts, letters, coins or currency that you’d like to preserve for years to come? Perhaps you’d like to enclose those items in a protective plastic enclosure, so that they may be viewed and handled with minimal damage? That’s a fine idea, but you should know that when it comes to archival storage, there are good plastics, and (very) bad plastics. With that in mind, I thought I’d share this helpful infographic, hoping that some of you may find it useful.

As always, feel free to click the image for a clearer, downloadable and/or printable version of the image.

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