Homer, Winslow, A Winter-Morning,—Shovelling Out, 1871. Wood engraving. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Harvey Isbitts.
We had a winter storm yesterday, so I had to shovel the walks and driveway at our house a few times during the snowfall, and once again this morning.
Continue readingI’m still digging in the archives, trying to wrap up our ongoing exploration of the Bonniwell family adventures in the California gold fields, bring (almost) everyone back to Mequon, and finish our (unexpectedly long and thorough) look at the life of Jonathan and Mary Clark’s brother-in-law, Alfred T. Bonniwell.
I’m currently mining a rich vein of 1850 and ’52 census documents for California and Wisconsin, as well as contemporary ships’ passenger manifests and published newspaper announcements of maritime comings and goings. Once again, I have a large pile of raw material to sift through and write about, and it’s taking more time than expected. I hope to have things organized for you next week. In the meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy this painting, made in California at the same time as the Bonniwell expedition, Miners in the Sierra:
As always, be sure to click the image to open a larger, higher-resolution image in a new window.
Continue readingTonight is Christmas Eve, and I thought you might enjoy an expanded reprise of our 1867 Santa Claus story, originally posted December 25 and 30, 2017. Last year I combined the two original posts and incorporated some new illustrations and a few revisions of the text. Here it is again, for your holiday enjoyment. Ho! Ho! Ho!
Christmas in early America
For many years now, Christmas has been celebrated by Americans as an important religious and (increasingly secular) community holiday. Christians gather to worship and commemorate the birth of Jesus, and they and other Americans enjoy a break from work to gather with family and friends to feast and exchange gifts. But it was not always this way.
In many of the American colonies, Christmas was not observed as a religious or secular holiday. The seventeenth-century Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony considered Christmas to be non-biblical and pagan influenced. In Boston and other parts of New England any observance of Christmas was prohibited and, for a few years, actually illegal:
Penalty for Keeping Christmas, 1659
Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. Printed by order of the Legislature, edited by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, M.D., Vol. IV, Part I, 1650-1660, online at mass.gov (accessed 21 Dec. 2021). Click to open larger image in new window.
Transcription:
For preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries, to the great dishonor of God and offence of others, it is therefore ordered by this Court and the authority thereof, that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon such accounts as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the country.
Christmas was not generally accepted as a holiday in many parts of the United States until after the federal government made December 25 a national holiday in 1870.
On the other hand…
The Massachusetts Puritans may not have approved of “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way,” but Christmas was “kept in other countries” and increasing numbers of immigrants from those countries to the United States—particularly from Victorian England, Catholic Europe, and the German Lands—celebrated the day in their new American homes with many of their accustomed religious observances and national traditions.
Continue readingThe Holidays are upon us, and I’m taking time to celebrate and enjoy some time with family, That means I won’t have much new for you for the next week or so. (Don’t worry, we will wrap up the Alfred T. Bonniwell story in the very near future. I promise!) But in case you need a little Clark House history for fireside reading this week, I’m going to re-post several seasonal CHH favorites from past years. And since much of the Midwest is currently under a blizzard warning, I thought we should begin with this essay, which originally appeared in early 2021, was revised last February, and has been updated with an additional Currier & Ives lithograph for today’s post.
Snow, and often lots of it, was a feature of Jonathan and Mary Clark’s life in Wisconsin. And if you wanted to go to town or church or visit your neighbors during the snowy Wisconsin winter—or just enjoy a pleasant winter ride in the country—you’d need a sleigh.
Currier, Nathaniel (1813-1888), The road, winter / O. Knirsch, lith., 1853. New York: Published by Currier & Ives. Yale University Art Museum, Whitney Collections of Sporting Art, given in memory of Harry Payne Whitney (B.A. 1894) and Payne Whitney (B.A. 1898) by Francis P. Garvan (B.A. 1897) June 2, 1932. Public domain. Click to open larger image in new window.1
We don’t know if the Clarks owned a sleigh while they lived in Mequon. I suspect they did, though their sleigh—and their clothing—may not have been quite as posh as those in this Currier & Ives lithograph from 1853.
Continue readingProvenance
Provenance is an important concept for historians, collectors and museums. It refers to the chain of ownership of any collectible item, including manuscripts, artworks, official documents or, in our case, a family Bible. Establishing the provenance of an item—such as the Bonniwell Bible—from its creation to the present day is important for several reasons:
Who owned it first?
That’s still a bit of a mystery. On the one hand, we do have a solid—though perhaps not unbroken—history of Bonniwell family inscriptions in this Bible, beginning in 1697 and continuing through the early 1900s. First-person family recollections record the Bible’s direct descent from that time until the present day. And we know that this Bible was first in the possession of a related branch of the Bonniwell family and then owned by “our” Bonniwells no later than 1795:
Bonniwell Bible, detail, showing inscription by William Bonniwell, 1798, and ligature WBonniwell, 1795. photo credit: Kendalyne Gentile, 2022.
Continue readingHow do you make a historian happy? How about blue skies, sunny and warm fall weather, a visit to the Clark House, and a full day spent studying and inventorying the Bonniwell Family Bible and accompanying family papers and photographs?
And you can’t beat this for a pleasant and evocative work area:
Continue readingVeterans Day is today. For a perspective on the day—and our early Mequon veterans—here’s a post originally published at Clark House Historian on November 11, 2016, and revised, expanded and republished several times since.
Armistice Day
One hundred and three years ago, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour—Paris time—the Armistice of Compiègne took effect, officially ending the fighting on the Western Front and marking the end of World War I, the optimistically named “War to End All Wars.”
In the United States, the commemoration of the war dead and the Allied victory began in 1919 as Armistice Day, by proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson. Congress created Armistice Day as a legal holiday in 1938. Starting in 1945, a World War II veteran named Raymond Weeks proposed that the commemorations of November 11 be expanded to celebrate all veterans, living and dead. In 1954 Congress and President Eisenhower made that idea official, and this is what we commemorate today. There are many veterans with a connection to the Jonathan Clark house. We honor a few of them in this post.
Jonathan Clark, Henry Clark, and the U.S. Army
Jonathan M. Clark (1812-1857) enlisted as a Private in Company K, Fifth Regiment of the U. S. Army, and served at Ft. Howard, Michigan (later Wisconsin) Territory, from 1833 until mustering out, as Sargent Jonathan M. Clark, in 1836. In the 1830s, Fort Howard was on the nation’s northwestern frontier. Jonathan’s Co. K spent much of the summers of 1835 and 1836 cutting the military road across Wisconsin, from Ft. Howard toward Ft. Winnebago, near modern Portage, Wisconsin.
Fort Howard, Wisconsin Territory, circa 1855, from Marryat, Frederick, and State Historical Society Of Wisconsin. “An English officer’s description of Wisconsin in 1837.” Madison: Democrat Printing Company, State Printers, 1898. Library of Congress. Click to open larger image in new window.
Continue readingIt’s been a while since we explored the documentary record of Mequon’s Alfred T. Bonniwell and his family and friends. Previously, we learned that the Bonniwells’ gold rush saga involved not one, but two, expeditions. The second trek westward was overland, chronicled in George Bonniwell’s gold rush diary. That trip, and the diary, began with the party’s departure from Milwaukee on April 12, 1850, continued through their arrival at the California diggings in mid-August, and closed—still searching for gold—with a final entry dated Tuesday, September 24, 1850. For more details, take another look at Gold! – The Bonniwells go west…but when? and who?
The first journey involved a smaller group, which included Alfred T. and Henry V. Bonniwell. As we discussed in A (new) Bonniwell Gold Rush timeline, that trek appears to have begun in April, 1849, with an overland wagon trip from Milwaukee to points unknown, with the party eventually arriving in New Orleans. On September 6, 1849, this first party continued West, mostly via ship: New Orleans to Chagres (Panama), by canoe and overland trail across the isthmus to Panama City, and then by steamship to San Francisco. They appear to have made it to California no later than November 4, 1849. They likely docked at San Francisco and then headed up to Sacramento, the main point of entry to the gold fields, which looked something like this:
Parsons, Charles and George Victor Cooper. Sacramento city, Ca. from the foot of J. Street, showing I., J., & K. Sts. with the Sierra Nevada in the distance / C. Parsons ; drawn Dec. 20th , 1849, by G.V. Cooper ; lith. of Wm. Endicott & Co., N. York, before March 2, 1850. Library of Congress. Click to open larger and very detailed, image in new window.
Forty-niners!
Alfred and Henry Bonniwell, together with Mequon-area neighbors P. M. Johnson, Thomas Day and Richard Taylor and perhaps one or two others, made it to the gold fields in 1849, as part of the first wave of fortune seekers. They are, therefore, bona fide “Forty-niners.” George, Charles and both William T. Bonniwells (senior and junior), and the rest of their overland party would not arrive until August, 1850. It would appear that Alfred and the rest of the Wisconsin 49ers had a lucky head start on the others. Or did they?
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Inman, Henry. Rip Van Winkle Awakening from his Long Sleep, 1823. National Gallery of Art, gift of William and Abigail Gerdts. Public Domain.
A long “nap”
Unlike Rip van Winkle, I haven’t been asleep the whole time since our previous post. But we are well overdue for new blog material. I’ve got a big backlog of documents and images to share with you; all I need to do is get writing. But first…
Be sure to vote today!
It’s election day today, and your vote counts. If you haven’t already done so, get out of the house, over to your polling place, and vote. Voting is your right and responsibility as a citizen, and an indispensable element of our nation since the earliest days of the Republic.
Not surprisingly, voting and public service were an important part of life in the Clark House era. From 1840 onward, Jonathan M. Clark, Peter Turck, William T. Bonniwell and many other relatives and neighbors sought, and won, appointment or election to a wide variety of local, territorial and state offices. Voting—then limited to white males only—was a priority for Mequon’s early settlers, and they never failed to turn out in large numbers for each election. Their passion for civic engagement and electoral politics was, in turn, passed to the next generation.
Continue readingIn an earlier post I wrote: I’m still on the hunt for the elusive parents and kin of Jonathan M. Clark. Based on what we know so far, we are looking in the area of Derby, Orleans County, Vermont and its northern neighbor Stanstead Township, Lower Canada, circa 1800-1830 or so.
Well, the hunt continues, and today I thought I’d share with you another Back to School tidbit, a “hot tip” that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. The tip—and its source—comes from Clark-Turck family descendant and Clark House Museum supporter Liz Hickman1, who kindly gave me a copy of this fascinating book:
Kathleen H. Brown’s comprehensively researched and encyclopedic Schooling in the Clearings: Stanstead 1800-1850 is devoted to the early history of public and private education in Quebec’s Eastern Townships and, in particular, Stanstead Township. That might seem like a highly specialized corner of North American history on which to focus, and I suppose it is. But Ms. Brown’s heroic labors in the archives are now a readable and invaluable resource for those of us trying to learn more about the early settlers in the Eastern Townships and their children including, possibly, the earliest record of Jonathan M. Clark known to date.2
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Clark House Historian 