Milwaukee County

I’m talking about history, again! – at the MCGS

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

I like to give illustrated talks about history, especially the history of the Jonathan Clark House, its occupants, their neighbors, and their lives in early Wisconsin territory and state. Back on Friday, April 24, 2026, I spoke to the members of the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society about the German immigrant experience in our area circa 1845–1910, as lived by the extended family of German immigrant—and 1868-1873 Clark House occupant and farmer—Fred Beckmann. The talk went well, and I’ve been invited to speak to the MCGS again, this Saturday, September 26, at 10:00 a.m., at Milwaukee’s Central Public Library Downtown.

Scenes from my previous MCGS presentation at the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, April, 2026. Photo credit: Laura Rexroth.

What’s it about?

This month’s MCGS presentation is titled From the ‘Burg to the Battlefield…and Back: A Local German-American Family and their Civil War Experiences.

The American Civil War is a huge topic, with many famous—and lesser-known—aspects, and no one talk can cover them all. So, rather than try and squeeze a grand overview of the war and its many battles into less than an hour, we will discuss some interesting and unusual aspects of the war—as experienced by some of Wisconsin’s German-American soldiers— that may have gotten lost over time. And we’ll do this by focusing on the Civil War experiences of one local family, the siblings and future in-laws of recent German immigrant Fred Beckmann.

You’re invited!

My Saturday, September 26, 2026, MCGS presentation will be held in the 1st floor Rotary Club of Milwaukee community meeting room of the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, 814 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee. The event will start with a short MCGS business meeting at 10:00 a.m. My presentation begins about 10:15 a.m. and will last about 45 minutes, followed by plenty of time for questions & answers. The meeting is free and open to the public, and I hope to see you all there.

Sound interesting? Click “continue reading” for more details.

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Monday, September 7th, is Labor Day, the holiday celebrating the working men and women of our nation, and I thought I’d commemorate the day with a lightly-revised re-post of our annual CHH Labor Day piece that first appeared in 2023. To honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark Heritage & History, highlighting a few of the many skills, trades, and occupations common during the Clark House era.

Since it is a holiday, I’m not going to add long commentaries to each image. Enjoy the image galleries, and be sure to click each gallery—and photo—to open larger versions of each. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts for each topic; they are filled with more images and lots of information about the different skills, tools, and jobs of the Clark family era, and include full image credits.

“Labor”

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word labor? Perhaps big men doing hard work with their hands, at a factory, on a job site, or in a workshop? In its early decades—except for the first sawmills, grist mills, stone quarries (and a brewery or two)—rural Mequon didn’t have much in the way of factory work. (Fun fact: Jonathan Clark’s father-in-law Peter Turck set up the first business in the county, a sawmill on Pigeon Creek, in 1838. See the essay on Peter Turck by Clark House young historian Spencer Holloway on pages 4-5 of the Jonathan Clark House April, 2021, newsletter for more.)

Pioneer Mequon did have plenty of men that knew how to use tools to make, improve, or repair all sorts of things. Notably, the Bonniwell family was filled with skilled carpenters, shipbuilders and other tradesmen, and Jonathan Clark and many of his Mequon neighbors had experience surveying, cutting out roads, and building simple bridges and dams. Some of those Clark-era trades and tools are shown in these photos of 1840s-1860s workers and their tools:

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What are you doing tonight?

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Today is August 1st (already!), and I’m going to be speaking at the Cedarburg History Museum at 6:00 o’clock tonight. I’d love to see you there.

“Dirt Trails and Wooden Planks”

Come join us as we explore the history of some of Wisconsin’s first roads, vital transportation routes for waves of immigrant settlers in the 1830s, ’40s, and beyond.

The illustrated talk will cover aspects of several key routes, including the ancient Native American Chicago to Green Bay trail, the Old Military Road, and the complicated history of the Milwaukee to Cedarburg Plank Road, among others. As usual, I’m featuring all kinds of period images, including photos, drawings, and annotated maps, along with lots of details of when and how these roads were surveyed, constructed, paid for, and put to use.

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Bonniwell Gold Rush news – auf Deutsch!

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Recently, in preparation for my upcoming (April 24th) talk at the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society, I was doing some research in historic newspapers from old Washington/Ozaukee and Milwaukee counties, including some of Milwaukee’s German language papers. I found many on-topic items and, as luck would have it, the following interesting little announcement on page 2 of the Friday, April 12, 1850, edition of the (Milwaukee) Taglicher Volksfreund. It has nothing to do with my MCGS presentation, but it adds a surprising amount of new or additional information to our previous discussions of the combined 1849 and 1850 expeditions to the California Gold Rush that were organized and led by Clark House neighbor William T. Bonniwell, Sr., so I thought I’d share it with you today.

Off to the Land of Golden Hopes!

(Milwaukee) Taglicher Volksfreund ,Friday, 12 April 1850, page 2

What’s it say? Click to continue reading and get all the details!

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I’m talking about history – at the MCGS

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

I like to talk about history, especially the history of the Jonathan Clark House, its occupants, and their lives in early Wisconsin territory and state. Sometimes I get invited to share my research with others, and I put together an illustrated presentation. This coming Friday, April 24, 2026, I’ll be talking to the members of the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society about the German immigrant experience in our area circa 1845–1910, as lived by the extended family of German immigrant, and Clark House occupant, Fred Beckmann.

You’re invited!

My April 24th MCGS presentation will be held in the 1st floor Rotary Club of Milwaukee community meeting room of the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, 814 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee. The event will start with a short business meeting at 1:00 p.m. My presentation begins about 1:15 p.m. and will last about 45 minutes, followed by plenty of time for questions & answers. The meeting is free and open to the general public, and I hope to see you all there.

Is there more to say about Fred Beckmann?

Indeed there is!

As you may recall from earlier CHH blog posts like (this one) and (this one), Fred Beckmann and his new wife, Lena Hackfeld, lived in the Clark House, and farmed the Clark farm, from 1868 until 1873. Their story connects the history of the early Anglo-American settlement of Mequon with the subsequent influx of German-speaking immigrants to the area.

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Bitter cold? Sounds like fun!

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

In an earlier post, “Intensely Cold Weather,” we examined the negative effects of several episodes of bitterly cold winter weather during the Clark family’s era and shortly afterwards. Today we look at some of the positive aspects of frigid winters in our part of the Old Northwest.

It’s no secret. Wisconsinites like to do stuff outdoors in the winter cold. Ice fishing. Skating. Cheering for the Packers.

But the Green Bay Packers professional football team wasn’t organized until 1919, a full eighty years after Jonathan M. Clark bought his first parcel of Mequon land in 1839. So what did our intrepid Wisconsin pioneers do back in the mid-1800s when those deep snows fell and cold north winds began to blow? Well, if you believe the newspapers of the era, there was no finer way to occupy a clear, frosty day—or moonlit evening—than to bundle up, go outside, and enjoy a…

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Meet the Neighbors: the Desmond family (part 2)

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

In our previous post, we were introduced to the Desmond family, early Irish immigrants to old Washington/Ozaukee county and neighbors of Jonathan and Mary Clark. To our good fortune, one of the Desmond sons, Humphrey Desmond, wrote a memoir of his father Thomas that includes some unique family genealogy and tales of pioneer days in our area.

If you missed Part 1, I suggest you go ahead and read that post first. Then return here to continue with Part 2 of selections from A Memoir of Thomas Desmond, with a chapter on The Desmond Genealogy, by Humphrey J. Desmond, 77 pages, Milwaukee, 1905. And remember: you can read the complete memoir at this link, which is a part of the admirably organized and comprehensive online genealogy project The Desmond Archives.

Pioneer Days

Chapter 3 of Desmond’s memoir will be of particular interest to CHH readers. It relates various early Mequon events, some involving the Desmond family’s Catholic faith, their Bonniwell neighbors, and the local school that the Bonniwells helped build in the early 1840s. That first “Bonniwell School,” located less than a mile west of the Jonathan Clark house on what is now the southeast corner of Bonniwell and Wauwatosa roads in Mequon, was sketched in 1864 by Evander Bonniwell. The sketch (above) is reproduced here from page 71 of George B. Bonniwell’s comprehensive family history, The Bonniwells: 1000 Years. (Used by permission.)

[31]        III.   PIONEER DAYS

THE "hazard of new fortunes" undertaken by the Desmond family involved the clearing away of woods with the ax of the pioneer and the building of a commodious log house.
    The pioneers of this neighborhood were the Bonniwell brothers, who had settled there about 1835 [sic, 1839], and it was known as the Bonniwell settlement.
    Indians still roamed the forests of southeastern Wisconsin in 1843. My [32] father, then ten years old, alone in the house one day, was visited by a brave to whom he gave a large loaf of bread. The Indian loosened his belt as he ate the loaf, and when it was all gone departed peaceably on his journey.
    There was a log school house to which my father went. Books were not plentiful in those days. He studied his spelling lesson during the noon hour from the book of a desk mate. He had to start at the foot of the class, but one day he got to the head and kept his place.
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“Intensely Cold Weather”

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

We’re having some very cold weather this weekend, not unusual for Wisconsin in mid-winter. But it got me thinking, wondering what sort of winter weather did the Clarks and Turcks and Bonniwells experience, and what effect the did the cold have on their daily lives?

To find out, I started by searching digitized old newspapers, looking for the phrase “below zero,” in Wisconsin, between the years 1833-1899. Oh boy, did I get results! After narrowing my search to more local sources, I found this news item on page 2 of the Wednesday, January 2, 1884 issue of the Cedarburg News:

This article suggests that the winter of 1883-1884 was expected to be somewhat mild; an “open” winter was one with little or no snow cover on the ground. All the signs and predictions thought this would be the case. Apparently, the local muskrats had built their houses differently in 1883, as muskrats do when they expect a milder winter. The “universal opinion” of the “local weather prophets”—including Milwaukee’s famed “Ice Bear,” Henry Kroeger—thought so, too. But on the night of December 28-29, 1883, the thermometers in Cedarburg—just a few miles from the old Jonathan Clark farm—dropped to 25 degrees below zero (Farenheit). It was the coldest morning in decades.

But by the 1880s many of the older members of the Clark, Turck, and Bonniwell families had died, and many of the younger generation had left Ozaukee county and relocated to Milwaukee, Chicago, Minnesota, and elsewhere. Some or most of them may have missed this late-1883 cold snap. But this short article also mentions another, similar record cold spell, one that Mary Turck Clark and her children actually lived through, in Milwaukee, around the New Year of 1864.

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Happy New Year!

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

180 years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1846, this amusing woodcut appeared on page 3 of the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, advertising the shop of pioneering Milwaukee merchant—and local character—Bazille “Uncle Ben” Throop:

That same morning, Jonathan and Mary Clark awoke to their fifth New Year’s Day together as a married couple. Living with them were their first three (of an eventual eight) children: Caroline (5 years old), Henry (almost 3) and Elizabeth “Libbie” (9 months). They were probably still living in their original log cabin home; it would be at least two more years until Jonathan M. Clark carved his name and “1848” in the keystone above the front door lintel of the two-story stone house that is now the Jonathan Clark House Museum.

Did the Clarks see “Uncle Ben’s” ad on January 1st? It’s not impossible, but I’d be at least mildly surprised if our young farm couple spent their earnings on a subscription to a Milwaukee daily newspaper. On the other hand, given their love of lifelong learning, it would not be out of character if they did. But we really don’t know.

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“Dashing through the snow…”

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

As I write this, southeastern Wisconsin is in the midst of our first substantial snowfall of Winter, 2025-2026. In Jonathan and Mary Clark’s lifetime, the day after a storm like this meant it was time to hitch up the sleigh and have some fun “dashing through the snow.” Here’s a lightly-revised and expanded repeat of a post that celebrates Clark-era “sleighing time” and “jingle bells.” (And be sure to click the highlighted links for more vintage wintertime images and info.)

Kimmel and Forster, publishers, “Winter Pleasure in the Country,” circa 1865. National Museum of American History, Peters Prints Collection, Smithsonian Institution.1 Note the modest straps of jingle bells on the one-horse sleigh and the much more ostentatious—and louder—straps of bells on the two-horse sleigh.

Last winter, our earlier CHH posts Snow!, Shoveling out -and other winter chores and Stuff Happens – on a sleigh ride, got me wondering again about winter travel in old Washington/Ozaukee county during the Clarks’ era of the mid-1830s through the 1860s or so. 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 sleigh ride all the way to Milwaukee? And if you could, how long might that take?

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