Mequon

Memorial Day, 2021

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 7 Comments

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:

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Another Road into the Woods, 1841

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

An Infrastructure Week Fortnight Month mystery!

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:

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Roads into the Woods, 1841

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

Infrastructure Week Fortnight Month continues!

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.

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Marking out the roads

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

Infrastructure Week Fortnight Month continues…

It’s been a busy few weeks here at the Historian’s (actual) house, and I’m (very) slowly transcribing handwritten documents and making maps to illustrate the work of Jonathan M. Clark and his fellow road supervisors as they mapped and built old Washington County’s first roads in early 1841. While you’re waiting for those posts, check out our previous installments in this series — County Government – Early Records and Monday: Map Day! — for some interesting background, maps, and first-hand records.

Jonathan Clark – surveyor?

What did Jonathan Clark know about surveying and road building? Probably quite a bit. Like most farmers—then and now—Jonathan would not have been successful without a good understanding of maps, distances, land boundaries and how to best use and navigate the fields, forests and wetlands of his property.

If you recall our earlier posts detailing JMC’s military service (starting with Fort Howard, October 1833 (part 1) and including Ouisconsin Territory, 1836), you’ll remember that his unit, the U.S. Army’s 5th infantry regiment, was responsible for laying out and cutting the new military road that would ultimately connect Ft. Howard in Green Bay, Ft. Winnebago near Portage, and Ft. Crawford at Prairie du Chien. Jonathan’s Co. K was involved in this work for the better part of his final two years of service (1835-1836). This assignment would give him hands-on experience in surveying, map-making, grubbing out roads and building serviceable bridges with the materials at hand. By the time he arrived in Mequon, in late 1839, it’s possible that Jonathan Clark was the most experienced road builder (and one of the better surveyors) in early Washington/Ozaukee county.

A surveyor and his tools…

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Monday: Map Day! – The First County Roads, 1841

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

Infrastructure Week! — part 1

Last week’s Monday: Map Day! discussed the Milwaukee and Superior railroad, and the right-of-way through the middle of the Clark farm property that it purchased from Jonathan and Mary Clark in 1857. Even if you already read it, take another look. I’ve recently updated that post to include corrections and new information from reader Sam Cutler (thanks, Sam!).

Today’s post begins Infrastructure Week! a short series focused on the first infrastructure projects in old Washington/Ozaukee county, beginning with the 1841 appointment of the first county road supervisors and their districts.

Old Washington/Ozaukee County, 1837

In order to proceed with county business, the original county commissioners must have had an authoritative map that showed the official county and township boundaries. I would not be surprised if they owned a copy of the 1837 Topographical map of Wisconsin Territory, showing the lands that had been surveyed by, and were available for purchase from, the federal government. As we discussed earlier, this was the first large-scale map of the Wisconsin Territory based on actual surveys. Here’s a detail from that map, showing old Washington county as the 1841 county commissioners would have understood it:

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County Government – Early Records

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

The Jonathan M. Clark House is located in Mequon, Ozaukee (formerly Washington) County, Wisconsin. In our previous post, Mequon – What’s in a name?, we looked into how Mequon became a political entity and how its goverment evolved from the county system to the town system.

From…which archives?

Where do you look when you’d like to read (and download) the handwritten minutes of the meetings of old Washington county’s commissioners, circa 1841-1846? How about…the Washington Co. Highway Department!

This actually makes more sense than you might think, since many of the county’s earliest decisions and expenditures involved proposing, surveying and cutting roads to connect new settlements to each other, to the rest of Wisconsin Territory, and beyond. So—in a fine example of professional organization and public service—the Washington county highway department has gathered together and put online many of their oldest records.

The County Highway Register was an attempt to search out, correlate, and record all known information concerning the laying out of all roads in the county. Some of these books have not been updated since the mid to late 1950’s. Read the forward in the index to understand how these books were created.

(link)

If you follow the link, you’ll find an long list of pdfs, organized by Washington County towns, that contain the collected official highway records and some of the earliest records of county government.

But…Washington County?

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Mequon – What’s in a name?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

UPDATED, April 20, 2021 to include another historic misspelling of “Mequon,” this one from the 1837 first official map of Wisconsin.

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Mequon is the home of the Jonathan M. Clark House. Mequon is a unique name, and its source, pronunciation, spelling—and, occasionally, location—are the source of a fair amount of confusion and error. So I thought I would gather a few pertinent facts about the name that might help readers avoid some of the pitfalls in Mequon research.

As a reminder:

Baldwin, Thomas and J. Thomas, M.D., A New and Complete Gazetteer of the United States […], Philadelphia, 1854, p. 687. Via GoogleBooks.

That’s a pretty accurate, “just the facts,” description of Mequon in 1854. (Although it looks like Gazetteer editors Baldwin and Thomas didn’t get the news that on March 7, 1853, the east part of Washington county—including the Town of Mequon—had split from its parent county to form the new Ozaukee county. And the town vs. township distinction could be more precise, too.)

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Monday: Map Day! – 1874 map of Washington and Ozaukee Counties

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

Today’s map is another unique and wonderful map from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, American Geographical Society Digital Map Collection. It is map of Washington and Ozaukee Counties from 1874, and it is packed with information and unique details.

Map of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin 1873-4 / drawn, compiled and published by G.V. Nash & M.G. Tucker ; engraved & printed by J. Knauber & Co. ; colored and mounted by E.M. Harney. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, American Geographical Society Digital Map Collection. Full copyright notice here, presented in this post as a public domain item and/or under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Click map to go to the UWM collection and open larger image in new window.

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