Revised May 13, 2022 to correct spelling of Nathaniel Currier’s name.
It’s mid-May in southeastern Wisconsin, and with luck the last frost is behind us. For the past weeks and months farmers and gardeners have been tending to the soil and preparing for planting. At this time of year in the 1840s and ’50s, Jonathan M. Clark would have done much the same, hitching up his team of oxen to a steel-bladed plow to cut and turn over the tough prairie grasses and break up the soil of his newly-cleared lands.
We’ve been looking at the influence of the Erie Canal on the early lives of both Jonathan M. Clark and the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family (here and here), and the Bonniwell family (here), I thought I’d share more stories of Mequon settlers that used the canal to make their way westward to the wilds of the Wisconsin Territory in the 1830s and ’40s. Today’s focus is on immigrants from Nova Scotia, particularly the Woodworth brothers, Ephraim and James.
We’re going to need a bigger map!
We’ve had numerous occasions to quote from the memoirs of early Mequon pioneer—and Turck and Clark family friend—James W. Woodworth. Unlike many pioneers who came west, bought land, and never returned home, James W. Woodworth and various members of his family made the round-trip journey between Nova Scotia to the newly opened lands of the midwestern U.S. several times in the 1830s and ’40s. Descriptions of three separate trips can be found in Rev. Woodworth’s book, and they give additional color and detail to our understanding of what immigration to “the West” was like in that era. But to give you a proper feel for the hardiness of these 19th-century migrants, we’re going to need a bigger map!
Eastern Canada and the Northeast United States, c. 1835
…and I’m still “snowed under” with research and writing.
So here’s another seasonal image from 19th-century America’s favorite printmakers, Currier and Ives:
Currier & Ives. Snowed Up: Ruffed Grouse in Winter. , ca. 1867. New York: Published by Currier & Ives. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001706217/ (cropped and edited for better color). Click to open larger image in a new window.
It’s a covey of ruffed grouse, sheltering under snow-covered firs. A scene like this would have been familiar to Peter Turck and his growing family in New York’s Hudson River valley, young Jonathan M. Clark in Vermont or Lower Canada, and the settlers in Mequon and points farther north and west.
Clark House Historian 