Documents & Sources

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. / 4 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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JCH News & Events – Spring, 2025

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Howdy! Sorry for the long blog silence. It’s not that I’m lacking for topics or material to share with you all, but I’ve been busy “behind the scenes” at the Clark House for the last month or so.

In particular, I’ve been working on two big projects. JCH executive director Nina Look and I have just published the Spring | May 2025 issue of the JCH Newsletter, and Nina and I have been collaborating with JCH intern Nicole Buerosse on a major, archival-quality upgrade for the preservation and display of the museum’s irreplaceable Bonniwell Family Bible.

Scaffolding at the Clark House? What’s up with that? Read on for more info…

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The Clarks, a family of readers…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

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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Help the Historian: Mysterious (Bible?) Fragment – a clue!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Among the real pleasures of writing a blog like this are the comments I receive from CHH readers. Recently, I heard from reader James Cornelius of nearby Grafton, Wisconsin,1 who had some thoughts about our January 24, 2025, post “Help the Historian: Mysterious (Bible?) Fragment.” 2

As the original post explained, I had been examining a number of loose Bonniwell papers, scraps, and other ephemera that were donated to the Clark House along with the Bonniwell family Bible itself, and I was particularly interested in one little fragment of printed text that had me baffled.

The mysterious fragment, sides A & B, photo credit: Reed Perkins, 2022.

In my original post, I examined the text and typography of the fragment and estimated that the it was published sometime between the late-sixteenth century (at the very earliest) and—at the very latest—the first decades of the nineteenth century. And the mentions of “Moon” and “motion” and such suggested a source that might be more scientific or philosophical, and not necessarily a sacred text, but I couldn’t think what that might be.

A new possible source: Almanacs!

In his comment, James observed: My hunch is that this triangular scrap /bookmark came from an almanac, likely as common in 1800-1820 U.K. as in U.S. a half-decade later. Many fairly good or detailed ‘scientific’ discussions appeared in the old almanacs or ‘farmer’s friends.’

I think James is on to something. Almanacs seem like a very plausible source. But how common were farmer’s almanacs in the UK, and how likely was it that the Bonniwells had access to these annual “farmer’s friends” in Chatham, Kent, England, in the years before their 1832 immigration to North America?

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“Dashing through the snow…”

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Kimmel and Forster, publishers, “Winter Pleasure in the Country,” circa 1865. National Museum of American History, Peters Prints Collection, Smithsonian Institution.1

Talk of sleighs and sleighing in our recent CHH posts on Snow! and Shoveling out -and other winter chores, plus our January, 2022, essay on Stuff Happens – on a sleigh ride, got me wondering again about winter travel in old Washington/Ozaukee county during the Clarks’ era. 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 ride all the way to Milwaukee? And if you could, how long might that take?

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Fred Beckmann, Sr. – updates & clarifications

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

Today’s post is an updated, corrected and expanded version a post I wrote in July, 2020, outlining what we knew (at the time), about the life of Fred Beckmann, Sr., the man that occupied and farmed the Jonathan Clark farm between 1868 and 1872. Then, in early 2023, I was asked to talk about the Clark House and its Cedarburg connections at the Cedarburg History Museum. I chose to center my talk on Fred Beckmann and his extended German-American immigrant family, as I believe they exemplify a number of important themes in the transformation of Ozaukee county from the initial Anglo-American dominated first wave of local settlement in the 1830s and early ’40s, into the subsequent decades of primarily German-American settlement and development.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, and learned a lot, in preparing that 2023 talk. And one of the things I learned is that there was some doubt about the year and date of Fred Beckmann’s death. So I recently investigated the issues and have updated images, text, and information for you about the life—and death—of Fred Beckmann, and I managed to solve at least one mystery in the process…

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

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

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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