Jonathan Clark House Museum

Happy Birthday, part 2: Cake!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

It was Jonathan M. Clark’s birthday!

Note: this post has been updated twice on November 30, 2020, see below.

This past Saturday was the 208th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan M. Clark. If you missed our special birthday post, click here and catch up on all the new and updated information about Jonathan that we’ve discovered and published here at Clark House Historian since 2016.

One of the highlights of Saturday’s post was this photo of Jonathan’s excellent 200th Birthday cake from 2012, courtesy of Anne Bridges:

Click to open larger image in new window. Photo credit Nina Look.

No doubt about it, that is one fine birthday cake. (Thanks, Anne!) But what if you wanted to bake a cake that Jonathan or Mary Clark, or one of their early Mequon neighbors, might recognize? That calls for another look into the first cook book written and published by an American:

Continue reading →

Happy 208th Birthday, Jonathan!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

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

CLARK, Jonathan M portrait

Jonathan M. Clark. Photograph courtesy Liz Hickman.

There he is. Jonathan M. Clark, builder and first owner of the handsome stone home that is now the  Jonathan Clark House Museum in Mequon, Wisconsin. He was probably born in Vermont—or Lower Canada—probably on November 28, 1812, and he died on September 20, 1857. Before coming to Mequon, he served in the United States Army at Fort Howard from 1833 to 1836. He married Mary Turck, eldest child of Mequon pioneer Peter Turck, on March 15, 1840. They had a large family. We even have a photograph of JMC as an adult (above). In some ways, we know quite a bit about Jonathan M. Clark.

Continue reading →

Harvest Time: 1850, part 2

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

Washington County farm output at mid-century

Today’s post is a continuation of our previous post, Harvest Time: 1850, part 1, which introduced us to the agricultural schedules that were part of the U.S decennial federal censuses of 1850-1880. If you missed that post, you might want to click the link and start there. And, as I mentioned in a footnote to Harvest Time: 1850, part 1, if you are wondering “Wait a minute! Mequon—and the Clark House—is in Ozaukee county. Why do you keep referring to Washington county census returns in 1850?” then it’s been too long since you read my April 21, 2016, blog post, Where are we?, in which I explain the convoluted history of the location of the Jonathan Clark House. In 1850 the farm was still in Washington county; by 1860, it was in Ozaukee. Click the link for more on that.

On to the data!

As I mentioned on Wednesday, you can find PDFs of the original 1850 federal census documents (but not the schedules themselves) by going to the Census Bureau’s website. Once there, you’ll note the bureau—for some reason—has not made a separate link to the 1850 Wisconsin statistical report pages. Of course, you can download the entire 1850 census statistical report (and if you can, do!, it’s full of interesting information), but the complete report runs 179MB and you may not want the whole file. No worries! I have made a handy, 5-page PDF extract of the Wisconsin agricultural information1. Just click this link to open and view the complete 1850 Wisconsin Table XI; download and save a copy for yourself, if you like.

On to the 1850 census’s Schedule 4. — Agriculture, for the Clark’s home county of Washington Co., Wisconsin. We’ll present the data in the original order of the schedule. Explanations of terms or schedule categories is taken from the 1853 census report (see note 1, below), pages xxiii-xxiv:

Continue reading →

Harvest Time: 1850, part 1

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

What did the Clarks grow on their farm?

Today’s and Friday’s posts are inspired by a question about Monday’s Harvest Time post. Reader Laura Rexroth asked: Any records of what they did grow? Animals? How much land did they have? A fine question, and the answer is yes, there are records.

How big was the farm?

We know the size of the Clark farm from information in their land records, including their two federal land patents, a variety of maps from the mid-1800s through the 20th-century, and the Abstract of Title for the Clark property that was prepared by the Ozaukee County Abstract of Title Company, now in the collection of the Jonathan Clark House museum. For most of their time in Mequon, about 1840-1860/61, Jonathan and Mary Clark owned 160 acres of land. Much of this land was originally forested, and I assume that the Clarks cleared and farmed more and more of their 160 acres over time. How much was under cultivation in 1850? For that we need to see:

Continue reading →

Harvest Time

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 10 Comments

No new map today. I spent a good part of my early-October weekend cleaning up the family garden after our final harvests of tomatoes and peppers. The bush beans produced their last good beans a few weeks ago; they got tough and stringy after about mid-September.

It’s just the sort of thing Mary Turck Clark and the Clark children would have done in the 1840s and ’50s at the Jonathan Clark house, though I assume the Clarks grew and “put by” a good deal more in their family garden and root cellar than we do in our suburban backyard and chest freezer.

When I finished work, I put my tools and garden supplies in the garage for the winter. The Clark family didn’t have a garage. They had this sturdy fieldstone barn:

Continue reading →

Now, where were we? – the search for JMC’s roots

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

As I mentioned in our previous post, Monday: Map Day!, we still have some essential mysteries to solve in the JMC timeline, the most important of which are: who were JMC’s parents and where was he born and raised? As it’s been a while since we last looked at this, I thought it might be useful to repost our original O!…Canada? History Mystery! No. 3, in which I collected and organized images, transcriptions, and links to the various documents that indicate Jonathan M. Clark’s (two!) “official” birth locations: either Derby, Orleans Co., Vermont or Stanstead Co., Lower Canada [now Province of Quebec].

Smith, Jones… Clark

One of the nicer assignments a genealogist or historian can receive is to trace the history and family of someone with a unique or distinctive surname. It is so much easier to trace families with surnames like Turck, Strickland, Rix or Clow, even if there are common variant or erroneous spellings like Turk, Stickland, Ricks and Clough/Claw/Klauw. But our man Jonathan, he who built the fine stone home in Mequon in 1848, carries one of the most ubiquitous surnames in New England and English-speaking Canada: Clark.

Over the past seven years or so, researchers including Nina Look, Liz Hickman, I—and others—have been trying to find the Jonathan M. Clark “needle” in the massive New England and Lower Canada “haystack” of Clark families. I think it’s time to finally collate our results, organize and set aside the “wrong” Clark families from the search, and see if we can discover Jonathan M. Clark’s roots.

This “sorting of the Clarks” may take quite a few posts.1 We will look at many sources, many family trees, and assorted maps and books to try and find Jonathan’s family. Along the way we’ll have diversions to other topics from time to time, I’m sure. But now, let’s get things started by taking another look2 at what we currently know about Jonathan M. Clark’s birth and family:

Continue reading →

Clark House Museum Update

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

It’s been “one of those weeks” here at the Clark House Historian’s actual house. Nothing unfortunate, but assorted “real life” tasks have kept me from finishing several more substantial posts. (Yes, there will be another photo analysis post or two featuring Cyrus Clark. And tintypes, too.)

News from Clark House Museum director Nina Look

Fortunately, Jonathan Clark House museum director Nina Look has just written and distributed the September, 2020, newsletter for the Friends of the Jonathan Clark House, and I can share it with you today. It’s filled with news and photos about the Clark House and some of our current and future projects.

If you’d like to open and/or download the complete, five-page PDF, click here. Or, if you want to catch up with your Jonathan Clark House news here on the blog, click “Continue reading” (below) and enjoy.

Continue reading →

Last days of summer…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

I’m taking the day off today. Feel free to catch up on our recent posts. It’s been a productive summer for research and blogging.

Meanwhile, here’s a nice view of the front (south) side of the Jonathan Clark House, looking to the east.

Photo by Reed Perkins. Click to open larger image in new window.

Enjoy your weekend.

_______________

And don’t forget, we enjoy weekends because of decades of effort by union organizers and workers. Take a moment to remember—and appreciate—labor on Labor Day weekend.

Continue reading →