Hard Times in Coming from Europe

You may have wondered why I haven’t written much about the German immigrant history and heritage of our corner of southeast Wisconsin. After all, since the late-1830s, and especially following the “Revolutionary Year” of 1848 in Europe, waves of Europeans—including hundreds of thousands of emigrants from the German Lands— left their homes in the Old World and set out to make a fresh start in America. Many of these German-speaking emigrants would find their way to Wisconsin, where they and their descendants would leave a lasting imprint on the culture and development of the new state.

The story of the Jonathan Clark House, however, centers around the lives of the Clarks and their immediate neighbors and in-laws, especially the Bonniwell and Turck families. All were prominent players in the earliest days of white migration to and settlement of Mequon, old Washington/Ozaukee county, and the city of Milwaukee. The Clarks, Turcks and Bonniwells came to Wisconsin Territory from New York, New England, English-speaking Canada and the United Kingdom in the later 1830s. Their Wisconsin story was not so well known or documented, so I have spent much of my time over the past decade or so researching their families, lives, and the events of their day.

Having said that, we need to remember that these “Yankee-Yorkers” and other English-speaking pioneers were not the only early immigrants to our area. Irish and German families were, indeed, already present and establishing farms and businesses in old Washington/Ozaukee county by the late-1830s, including at the large German Freistadt Colony and the early Irish neighborhood centered between the Jonathan Clark House and the crossroads hamlet of Hamilton. All of these overseas immigrants were the Clarks’ neighbors, and their stories are intertwined throughout the early history of Mequon.

And one thing those 19th-century Irish and German and British immigrants all had in common was time spent on a ship, making the uncertain and difficult voyage from Europe to America. In the next few posts we will look at some first-person recollections of a school boy who came with his mother and brother from the German Lands to Mequon-Thiensville around 1848, as recollected and published in 1888.

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