Here’s the Summer | August, 2023 edition of the Jonathan Clark House Museum newsletter. It’s filled with Clark House news, notices of upcoming events, and recaps and photos of a variety of summer happenings. Click the image below to view and/or download your own PDF copy of the complete newsletter.
Thanks to all involved in producing a summer full of Jonathan Clark House activities, especially museum director Nina J. Look and our wonderful crew of docents, volunteers and board members. And a tip of the hat to Nina (and our savvy graphic designer, Shayla Krantz) for this latest edition of the newsletter.
Almost three weeks remain until Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer, and already many Wisconsin families are preparing for the new school year. “Back to School” promotions and special merchandise can be found in many local, chain, and online retailers. The history of “Back to School” as a marketing theme in the U.S. is obscure, but from what I’ve observed, it seems very much a post-World War II phenomenon.
With our current the focus on three-ring binders, zippered pencil cases, and boxes of 64 Crayolas (with the built-in sharpener!), have you ever wondered what kind of school or office supplies might have been necessary or useful for Jonathan and Mary Clark, their children, and their neighbors? Just for fun, here are just two of the many informative advertisements from the columns of the local papers, in this case the [Milwaukee] Daily Free Democrat, November 2, 1850, page 4:
Your local book & stationery shop
Milwaukee book & stationery retailer Rood & Whittemore had a fine selection of supplies for the scholar, letter writer, or professional man or woman of 1850:
Something for everyone, including the “country traders” and teachers that often served as buyers and distributors of school textbooks for their rural areas. For their efforts, the traders and teachers received “liberal terms,” presumably some sort of discount (for cash accounts, of course), from Rood & Whittemore.
And as you might expect, even from its earliest days Milwaukee was not a one-store town. In the words of the immortal Ron Popiel…
Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately. My week began with several days devoted to an unexpected and very stressful issue that has now been resolved (or, at least, much improved) and I am researching and writing once again.
I’ll have more history for you here presently, and I have a brief but interesting piece coming up shortly in the next Jonathan Clark House newsletter. What’s that about? Let’s just say that something in today’s portrait of a rather posh Philadelphia silversmith is more relevant to the Clarks’ era—and the Jonathan Clark House Museum collection—than you might think.
I’m still thinning out my backlog of Bonniwell-related documents that currently crowd my computer desktop. Today’s post includes some multimedia links, too. I hope you enjoy them.
A long, narrow, disagreeable, ill-built town…
Unlike the glowing prose of the description of Chatham we discussed earlier in Bonniwell background: Chatham, Kent 1832, not everyone was impressed by the Bonniwell’s home town, at least not in the late-1700s. For example, Edward Hasted (1732-1812), in his monumental History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (second edition, vol. 4, Canterbury, 1798, pp. 191-226) had this to say:
THE TOWN OF CHATHAM, the greatest part of which has been built since the reign of queen Elizabeth, adjoins to that of Rochester, which, with Stroud [sic, Strood], makes one long street of more than two miles in length, of which Chatham is one, being commonly called the Three Towns, through which the high road leads from London to Dover, as above mentioned.
It is situated close to the bank of the Medway for about half a mile, after which the river leaving the town flows north-north east. It is like most sea ports, a long, narrow, disagreeable, ill-built town, the houses in general occupied by those trades adapted to the commerce of the shipping and seafaring persons, the Victualling-office, and the two breweries, and one or two more houses, being the only tolerable built houses in it.
The 12 volumes of the second edition of Hasted’s complete magnum opus have been digitized and made available at British History Online. The quoted bits above are a brief excerpt from Hasted’s almost 9,000 words devoted to the parish history of Chatham. Click the link for online access, or download a PDF copy here.
I discovered Hasted’s sour appraisal of 1798 Chatham while watching an interesting YouTube video devoted to the history of two major disasters that befell the town—and our Bonniwell and Hills families—in the early 1800s:
Time for some housekeeping. I’m trying to wrap up my “brief” survey of the documentary life of Mequon pioneer (and Clark House brother-in-law) Alfred T. Bonniwell, and I need to thin out my collection of “not-specifically-Alfred, but still interesting and Bonniwell-related” documents that currently crowd my “to do” list. Today’s gem is a view and description of the Bonniwell family’s hometown of Chatham as it was in 1832, the year they left England and sailed to North America:
While researching the life of one of Mequon’s first white settlers, Isham Day, I ran across the following breathless bit of regional puffery and promotion, penned by Milwaukee co-founder Byron Kilbourn. It’s from page 2 of the November 17, 1836, edition of the Milwaukee Advertiser:
Lawyer Pettibone has, indeed, grown some astounding turnips (“Ruta Baga”), ‘taters, and carrots in the fertile soil of Milwaukee. Likewise Mr. Douglass with his enormous radishes and “common English” turnips. Have others done anything comparable? Indeed they have, and Mr. Kilbourn has the details…
UPDATED, May 28, 2023 with additional information about Panama (City) and Postal Museum hours.
I’m still organizing a final roundup of what we know about the Bonniwell gold rush expeditions and when everyone returned to Wisconsin. Until that’s ready, here are three random bits of history that might interest you. All are closely tied to the homecoming experiences of the Clark House neighbors that went prospecting in California between 1849 and the mid-1850s. And if you missed our series of Farewell to California! The Bonniwell party returns, you can catch up with these links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
Piracy
In a follow-up question to part 4 of this series, reader Laura Rexroth asked: “Reading about the robberies on land, traveling from San Francisco to New York, I’m wondering if there was any piracy at sea with all these ships carrying so much gold dust?”
That’s a good question. As I mentioned in my original reply, the U.S. Mail Steamers that served the Pacific and Atlantic sides of the California mail route were considered the latest and greatest in ocean transportation and I suspect they could probably out run most other ships of the day. That said, I did find this interesting news item, “Arming of the Chagres steamers” on page 2 of the September 10, 1851, Milwaukee Weekly Wisconsin:
Audubon, John James, artist, and John T. Bowen, printer, Lepus Sylvaticus, Bachman, circa 1845-1848, Smithsonian Institution, Peters Prints Collection, Creative Commons CC0 license.1
There they are: Mr. & Mrs. Cottontail and one of their many offspring. The Eastern Cottontail and its relatives were a common sight in Jonathan and Mary Clark’s world, just as they are today.
We seem to have a bumper crop of rabbits in our suburban Wisconsin yard this year and, no doubt about it, the bunnies are cute and entertaining. But for the gardener, rabbits mean trouble. If you are trying to raise vegetables and fruits to feed your pioneer family, these amusing little fur balls are the enemy. They can consume huge amounts of seedlings and sprouts in just a day or two. What’s a gardener to do?
Last year—after they ate through the plastic fence around our vegetable garden and then devoured our entire crop of green been sprouts—I went to the local big box store and got a roll of metal wire rabbit fencing and some steel posts to hold it up. That worked great for us, but it made me wonder: what did Jonathan and Mary Clark use to keep the ravenous rabbits at bay? Well, I don’t have any documentation from the Clarks’ farm, but during my researches, I have noticed some popular 19th-century methods of rabbit control.
In the 1800s there were no corrugated cardboard boxes or padded shipping envelopes. If you needed to store or ship any liquid—and most dry goods—the barrel (and its larger and smaller cousins) was almost always your container of choice.
Anderson, Alexander, engraver. Five Men on a Flatboat With Barrels and Sacks; One Man Operates the Keel from Above the Boathouse, the Others Are Resting on the Freight, circa 1830-1860, Library of Congress.
And when you needed a barrel, hogshead, keg, cask or firkin, or just an oaken bucket for your well, you would get it from a cooper.
Unknown photographer. Occupational Portrait of a Cooper, Three-Quarter Length, With Barrel and Tools, circa 1840-1860, Library of Congress.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and to celebrate, here’s an update of my CHH post from March 17, 2021. Slàinte!
Today is St. Patrick’s Day, originally the religious observance of the feast day of the principal patron saint of Eire.1 In honor of the day, let’s take a look at a few aspects of Irish life in early southeast Wisconsin and the involvement of Mary (Turck) Clark’s father Peter Turck in a civic effort to relieve Irish suffering during the Great Famine.
Irish immigrants in early Wisconsin
The first white visitors to Wisconsin were seventeenth-century French-Canadian explorers, priests and fur trappers, at home along Wisconsin’s lakes and rivers. They were followed by a smattering of British and French settlers in the mid- and later-eighteenth century. Cornish lead miners arrived in the southwest corner of the territory around the turn of the nineteenth-century. And in the mid-1830s, when the federal government officially “opened” the southeast corner of Wisconsin for settlement, there was a large influx of New Englanders and New Yorkers.
There were also a substantial number immigrants from across the sea among the Wisconsin pioneers of the 1830s and ’40s, including settlers from Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the German-speaking lands, and Ireland. By the time of the 1850 federal decennial census, Irish men, women, and children comprised the second-largest group of foreign-born immigrants in the state, surpassed in number only by immigrants from the German-speaking lands.
Clark House Historian 