In our most recent blog post, Another family portrait! Caroline (Clark) Woodward, c. 1890s, we located and discussed the history of a previously unknown photo of Jonathan M. and Mary (Turck) Clark’s eldest child, Caroline Mary Clark, later usually known as Mrs. C. M. Woodward:
Townsend Elite Studio, [Portrait, Caroline M. (Clark) Woodward], inscribed “Mrs. C. M. Woodward, Supt. Work among Railroad Employes, N.W.C.T.U.”, photograph, circa 1889-1900. Photo courtesy Frances Willard House Museum & WCTU Archives, Evanston, Illinois. Click to open larger image in new window.
Caroline’s life was the most public—and perhaps best documented—of all the members of Jonathan M. Clark family, and is overdue for a closer examination. So today we begin a multi-part look at Caroline’s story, starting with three biographical sketches that were published during her lifetime.
UPDATED, Oct. 4, 2021, with a few minor edits and to add an additional footnote.
I’m still working on some longer posts; they should be ready soon. Meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy two lovely images, beginning with this nineteenth-century print, a view that would have been very familiar to a surprising number of our early Mequon immigrants:
UPDATED, September 17, 2021, to add a few details about the Morrison children, Jennie’s dental practice in the 1880s and ’90s, and the date of her divorce from second husband A. G. Widger.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, I won’t be blogging much this week. (Let’s just say that the cause of my hiatus has inspired today’s post, featuring a brief introduction to the life of the Clarks’ youngest child, Dr. Jennie M. Clark, D.D.S.)
Unknown photographer, [Dentist], daguerreotype with applied color, circa 1855. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment. CC0. si.edu. Click to open larger image in a new window.
Clark House dentists
I’m not sure who Mequon’s first dentist was, or when he set up shop. It’s entirely likely that the Jonathan Clark family did not visit a dentist until they moved to Milwaukee (and they still may not have seen a dentist once there). But Mequon’s Jonathan Clark House plays an important part in the lives of two Mequon/Milwaukee area dentists.
Every now and then it pays to take a fresh look at familiar sources. One of the key sources for the early history of Mequon and its parent counties is The History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin […] Illustrated, published in Chicago in 1881. And even though I’ve been using this book for Clark House research for over a decade, I still discover (or, in this case, re-discover) facts about Mequon—and, specifically, Jonathan M. Clark—that I had either not known before, or had noticed, “filed for future reference,” and forgotten to write about. Today’s post fixes one such omission.1
The first meeting of the Town of Mequon, April 7, 1846
Page 525 of The History… contains a load of information about the beginnings of town government in Spring, 1846. Unfortunately, it’s the sort of densely worded, 19th-century “history” writing that makes the reader want to skip ahead to something less dry. Here, take a look; start with the first full paragraph, beginning “The town was incorporated”…
The History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin […] Illustrated, Western Historical Co., Chicago, 1881, page 525, pdf of full book via GoogleBooks. Additional online, pdf copies can be found at Hathi Trust, the Wisconsin Historical Society and Archive.org. Click to open larger image in new window.
That’s a lot of info: names, dates, job titles. Let’s break things up a bit and take a closer look at what’s going on as old Washington county transitioned from the original county-wide system of government to the new system, in which each town will be responsible for much of its own governance.
There was still some daylight left after the annual “Pie on the Patio” event at the Clark House last week, so I thought I’d stop by Mequon’s historic Isham Day House on my way home. Isham Day was one of Mequon’s first settlers, and he built his tidy home, sometimes known as the “Yankee Settler’s Cottage,” in 1839. It’s a town landmark, and I’d never been to see it.
While enjoying my first look at the Day House, I also took the opportunity to meander through the adjacent Settlers Park. It’s a beautiful little park, with an accessible boardwalk that leads down to and along the west bank of the Milwaukee River. It’s a short, easy stroll; I highly recommend it. By the time you reach the riverbank you’ll forget you are in a busy 21st-century downtown.
Photo credit: Anna Perkins, 2021. Click any photo to open gallery and access larger versions of the images.
UPDATED, February 11, 2024, to include a revised version of the annotated detail map of Ouisconsin, 1836. But for the full update—with additional notes and corrections—please see the most recent version of our discussion the Ouisconsin map of 1836 on our post of February 12, 2024. UPDATED, July 6, 2021, to answer a reader’s question: “Where was Jonathan Clark just before he went to Fort Howard?” Scroll down to Comments for the answer.
How the early settlers came to Mequon, c. 1835-1850 (part 1)
Clark House education director Margaret Bussone and our education team are putting together a project centered on how our Mequon pioneers traveled to southeast Wisconsin in the early days of white settlement, between roughly 1835 and 1850. I thought I’d help out by gathering some relevant materials and sharing them with the education team—and you—here on the blog.1
So this week we’re going to look at how the settlers found their way here, and how they traveled on land, lake, or river. Rather than writing lots of words about each map or image, I’d like to gather a whole bunch of useful items in each post and put them out there as resources for all to use. Later in the week, we’ll look at various modes of travel on land and on water. Today we’ll look at some maps.2 Some of these maps were readily available to our would-be immigrants, others might have been one-of-a-kind or otherwise hard to obtain.
An overview, The U.S. in 1834
When the following map was published in 1834, Jonathan M. Clark was finishing the first year of his three-year enlistment in the U.S. army. He was stationed at Ft. Howard, on the Green Bay of Lake Michigan, in what was then the civil District of Huron, a soon-to-be-outdated term for the western portion of the Michigan Territory.3
Mequon’s earliest settlers would be coming to lands that were poorly mapped and little understood by most European-Americans. The most this map could show—in a very general way—is where the “open” areas were for future migration and settlement.
Norris, William, and Daniel K Minor. Map of the railroads and canals, finished, unfinished, and in contemplation, in the United States. New York: Railroad Journal, 1834. Map. Library of Congress. Click to open larger map in new window.
I need to make a correction. In one of the previous posts of our Infrastructure! series, I wrote:
In early 1841, before the commissioners approved county roads Nos. 1, 2, and 3, there was already one federal road in the county. The Green Bay road was a federal road […]. It ran generally south to north, joining Ft. Dearborn in Chicago to […] Ft. Howard in Green Bay. Along the way it passed through a number of growing settlements including the three villages that would become Milwaukee, and the future towns of Mequon, Cedarburg, and Grafton.
That’s almost accurate. To be precise, I should have said there was one federal road in the southeast corner of the county—the part that would become the towns of Mequon, Cedarburg and Grafton—the Green Bay road. But, if you consider the whole of old Washington county, there were not one, but two federal roads prior to 1841, the north-south Green Bay road and the east-west Dekorra road.
Both of these roads appear on the first map of Wisconsin Territory drawn from official government surveys, published in 1837. The two federal roads are indicated on the original map by closely-spaced parallel gray lines. On the detail below I’ve highlighted the then-existing eastern portion of the Dekorra road in blue, and the Washington county portion of the Green Bay road in green:
This is a revised and updated version of a post that originally appeared here on May 25, 2020. Please be sure to read the Notes & Updates, below, for new information.
Lest We Forget
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.
As we begin to recover1 from the worst pandemic in a century, a quick glance at the news will show that many Americans are celebrating this “Memorial Day Weekend” in our now usual way, as “the first day of summer.” Beaches and parks are open, stores entice customers with deals and sales, and people are crowding shoulder to shoulder in swimming pools and along ocean boardwalks.
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.”
This Memorial Day, let’s remember those Clark House family, friends, and Mequon neighbors who served in the Civil War, and what they fought—and died—for. The History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties (1881) lists these 65 volunteers from Mequon:
Another episode in our Infrastructure! series, a group of posts focused on the first government “improvements” in old Washington/Ozaukee county. If you need to catch up, start with Monday: Map Day – The First County Roads, 1841, then Marking Out the Roads, and our most recent post, Roads into the Woods, 1841, where we rediscovered the routes of old Washington/Ozaukee county’s very first roads.
First federal and county roads
In early 1841, before the commissioners approved county roads Nos. 1, 2, and 3, there was already one federal road in the county. The Green Bay road was a federal road, cut by the troops of the U.S. army’s 5th regiment. It ran generally south to north, joining Ft. Dearborn in Chicago to the regiment’s headquarters at Ft. Howard in Green Bay. Along the way it passed through a number of growing settlements including the three villages that would become Milwaukee, and the future towns of Mequon, Cedarburg, and Grafton. On the map below the Green Bay road is west of and occasionally parallels the Milwaukee River. It is sometimes labeled Green Bay Road, and sometimes—in the southern part of this map—Plank Road (the planking came later, in the 1850s).
Mapping out the first three Washington/Ozaukee county roads is not difficult. The proposals by the road supervisors, as recorded in the official minutes1, were quite precise. Clear starting and ending points were given, using the standard terminology of towns, ranges, sections, quarter sections and so on, and the lengths of each proposed road had been precisely measured in miles, with fractional miles given as a number of additional chains, rods or links. A map of those first three roads—superimposed on a later map of Washington and Ozaukee counties from 1874—looks like this:
Our Infrastructure! series— a short group of posts focused on the first county government “improvements” in old Washington/Ozaukee county began (almost a month ago!) with Monday: Map Day!, discussing the 1841 appointment of the first county road supervisors and the organization of the county’s first seven road districts. That was followed up with a discussion of surveyors, their tools, and Jonathan M. Clark’s experiences as a military road builder. Today we’ll take a look at the first few roads laid out and built in old Washington/Ozaukee county in early 1841.
Clark House Historian 