It’s already the second week of May, 2024, and summertime will soon be here. At our southeastern Wisconsin home the first spring flowers are done, and the next round of blossoms have been blooming for a week or two. The peas will soon be in the ground, and we already harvested enough rhubarb to make two and a half small jars of jam. The tomato and pepper seedlings and the squashes will go in soon, and I need to put up a trellis or two so we can start the big patch of green beans. So even though it’s “early” by the standards of previous years, we’ve got gardening on the mind here at the Historian’s house, and I thought you might enjoy a slightly-belated repost of this annual favorite, which first appeared here in April, 2021. Cheers!
Planning the garden
It’s early April, and the growing season is not far off. For a farmer like Jonathan M. Clark, it’s a little early yet for plowing and sowing, but not too early to make plans and sharpen the tools. For a farmer’s wife, like Mary (Turck) Clark, it’s not too soon to think about the farm garden, its crops and layout.
Garden at the Turck-Schottler House, 1870s Hessian Immigrant Farm, Old World Wisconsin. Photo credit Reed Perkins, 2022.1
I don’t know if Mary and Jonathan were regular readers of the popular and affordable farmers’ almanacs of their era; I wouldn’t be surprised if they were. There were many to chose from. Perhaps they had a copy of something like:
Advertisement, “Choppers Wanted,” Milwaukee Sentinel, August 27, 1839, page 3.
After years of searching for original reports and drawings or photographs of early Wisconsin road construction, I find myself entangled among piles of information and images on just that topic. Now, the challenge is to organize the best of this material into a few CHH blog posts and wrap up—for now—our most recent excursion along Wisconsin’s earliest roads.1
Like contractor George E. Graves in Sauk Harbor [Port Washington] in 1834 (above), I could probably use the assistance of some (digital) “axe-men” to clear my way forward. Perhaps some hearty fellows such as these…
Time for one more follow-up to our recent posts Monday: Map Day! – Wisconsin’s Federal Roads in 1840 and JMC, the Army, and the Military Road, 1835-1840. As I mentioned in that “Monday: Map Day!” post, I recently found some unique maps and related documents in the digitized collections of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), in particular a group of maps and drawings created in 1840 by members of the army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers under the supervision of Capt. T. J. Cram.
Before they get lost in my files, I thought I’d share the other documents from Capt. Cram’s 1840 survey that have survived and been digitized by NARA. I’ve already said quite a bit about these 1840 maps and drawings; now I’m most interested in gathering the remaining 1840 documents and their bibliographic citations here for reference. So not much commentary today, but lots of images. And—as always—I recommend clicking on each item to open a larger, higher-resolution image in a new window.
Bridges on the Green Bay Road
The first item is of particular interest for Clark House history fans, as it provides additional details about old Washington/Ozaukee county’s first federal road, the north-south route connecting Fort Dearborn, Chicago, to Fort Howard at Green Bay. The drawing is part of a larger document; this portion is titled “Road from Ft. Howard, by Milwaukee & Racine, to the Northern boundary of Illinois.”
The drawing illustrates construction details of the simple wooden bridges that were part of the Green Bay Road, circa 1840. This road, and these bridges, comprised the main north-south transportation route for the U.S. Mail and for immigrants and settlers of the new counties of southeast Wisconsin Territory. The Clarks, Turcks, Bonniwells and other early Mequon pioneers would have crossed bridges like these on their trips to and from Milwaukee, Grafton, Port Washington and beyond on the Green Bay Road.
I spent much of January and February preparing my March 9th, 2024, Civil War presentation at the Cedarburg History Museum. In that talk I tried to take a more personal and local look at the war by examining the military service of few of the Cedarburg relatives and future in-laws of 1868-1873 Clark House resident Fred Beckmann. In my research, I found some unique stories of their years of Union service in the 9th and 26th Wisconsin Infantry Regiments, as well as the impact of the war on families and friends back home in Wisconsin.
I also found several new online collections of unique maps and historical documents. Today’s map is from one of those online sources, the digitized map collection of the National Archives and Records Administration (more on NARA and its holdings, below). This map was made 20 years before the Civil War, in September, 1840, and is one of the earliest—if not the earliest—maps of the federal roads in Wisconsin Territory.1
Today’s Monday: Map Day! revisits and makes a correction to an interesting map that we first discussed here on October 29, 2017, and then re-visited on July 11, 2020. And for unknown reasons, that original 2017 post—according to my monthly WordPress statistics report—was the most-viewed post on this site for the month of January, 2024, with 341 views (!).
Burr, David H. Map of the Northern Parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and that part of the Ouisconsin Territory lying East of the Mississippi River, 1836, detail of title & author. Library of Congress.
The 2020 re-post was originally conceived as a kind of addendum to our June-July, 2020, multi-part discussion of the earliest Wisconsin territorial, state, and federal censuses. It also served to locate Jonathan M. Clark in Wisconsin Territory during his U.S. Army service from September, 1833, to September 19, 1836.
Today’s post includes one particular correction that I’ve been meaning to make for a while. When I added my original annotations to a detail of this map (in red), in 2017, I made an error. I mislabeled Sgt. Jonathan M. Clark’s location at the time he mustered out of service, a temporary army camp along the under-construction military road from Fort Howard (Green Bay) to Fort Winnebag0 (Portage). JMC’s muster-out location was always referred to in the records of the Fifth Regiment of Infantry as “Camp Hamilton.” For some reason, when I made my annotated detail map, I incorrectly labeled this place “Ft. Hamilton.” A minor error, but worth correcting , especially now that this map is receiving fresh attention.1
It’s 1836. Where’s…Wisconsin?
In September, 1836, Sgt. Jonathan M. Clark was discharged from the U.S. Army at “Camp Hamilton,” Wisconsin Territory, after serving his three-year term of service with Co. K, Fifth Regiment of Infantry.2 One year later, in the autumn of 1837, Jonathan’s future wife Mary Turck would make the long trip from Palmyra, New York, to Milwaukee and finally Mequon, Washington County, Wisconsin, with her parents Peter and Rachael Turck and six younger siblings. By the end of 1840 Jonathan and Mary would be married and starting their family in Mequon.
That seems simple enough, until you take a moment to wonder how much Jonathan—or especially Mary and her family—knew about this new Wisconsin Territory. Jonathan had been in the territory since October, 1833, mostly on post at Ft. Howard. In the last year or so of his service he was busy cutting trees and building bridges for the military road along the Fox River waterway from Ft. Howard (Green Bay) towards Ft. Winnebago (near modern Portage). As a road-building soldier, Jonathan might have done some surveying and seen—or helped draw—a variety of maps of the military road and its vicinity. But for a better overview of this new territory, Jonathan or Mary might have sought out a map such as this:
Time for a few Random Bits of History: Early Mequon Settlers’ Disambiguation Edition.
John Weston & John Western
Mequon’s first postmaster, John Weston, is mentioned many times in the essential local history book, the History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin … Illustrated. Western Historical Publishing Co., Chicago, 1881. Using the “Find” function on my PDF copy of the book,1 I found results for “John Weston” on pages 475, 476, 523, 524 and 545.
There is also an entry for “T. Weston” among the names on the “First Poll-List of Washington County” on page 316. I am confident that this is a typographical error and that “T. Weston” is actually John Weston.
The same source also records, among the early area settlers, one “John Western,” on pages 316, 477 and 478. Is this the same man as John Weston? I have carefully compared a number of sources, including the early minutes of the county road supervisors and deeds in the Washington/Ozaukee county deed books, and I am convinced that during the early years of settlement in the Mequon-Milwaukee area, “John Weston” and “John Western” are the same person, namely John Weston, born in New York about 1800, and married to Deborah Milliner in Milwaukee County in April, 1838. I’ll have examples from the documents that explain my reasoning in a future post.
Fun fact: Mary (Turck) Clark’s father, (Baptist) “Elder” Peter Turck, was the officiant at the Weston-Milliner wedding in 1838. It was the fortieth marriage recorded in the first volume of marriage records for Milwaukee county (and its still-attached for judicial purposes neighbor counties, including old Washington/Ozaukee county).2
With the Weston & Western mystery solved—for the moment—let’s see what other bits of error and confusion we can clear up…
I’m in the middle of several larger CHH research projects and I find myself swamped with information on early Mequon area pioneers. So rather than wait until I’ve got it all sorted out and then organize it into a big essay or two (or more!), I’ll be putting up some of these new bits and pieces on the blog as I find them.
Today’s subjects are the families of Jonathan Loomis (1776-1849) and his eldest child, Issac Chester Loomis (1802-1882), two of old Washington/Ozaukee county’s first white settler families. I’ve mentioned some of these folks in previous CHH posts. And while the Loomis name does appear in some of the early county histories and land records, so far I’d not been able to learn much about the family or how they came to the Wisconsin Territory in the 1830s. In fact, given that the mid-1800s penmanship on some of the source documents was often florid to the point of being unreadable, I was sometimes unsure whether documents discussing or signed by “J. Loomis” versus “I. Loomis” represented the same man, or two individuals. Today’s source goes a long way toward solving these questions.1
Descendants of Joseph Loomis in America
Loomis, Elias, and Charles Arthur Hoppin. Descendants of Joseph Loomis in America, and his antecedents in the old world. edited by Loomis, Elisha S [Berea? O, 1909], Library of Congress.
As luck would have it, I just ran across a useful digitized book in the collection of the Library of Congress, titled Descendants of Joseph Loomis in America, and his antecedents in the old world. I’m not an expert in Loomis genealogy, and thus not entirely sure how accurate this book is, but what I have read here mostly checks out when compared to what I have found elsewhere. With that said, below are the key bits of the book that are related to very early Washington/Ozaukee county history and, in particular, Isaac Chester Loomis and his family. What follows is taken verbatim from pages 193 and 390-391, though I’ve taken the liberty of expanding many of the abbreviations and adding a few paragraph breaks for ease of reading. I’ve also added a few footnotes to explain some possibly obscure references.
Let’s begin with the patriarch of the family, Jonathan Loomis…
I’m working on a subject suggested by my friends Sam Cutler and Bob Blazich from the Mequon-Thiensville Historical Society. Among other projects over the last few decades, they and their colleagues at the MTHS have restored what is believed to be Ozaukee county’s oldest building on its original foundation, the historic Isham Day house, and developed its interior into the Mequon River Postal Museum. Now my friends at the MTHS want to know more about the life of Mequon River Post Office’s original postmaster, one of Mequon’s very first pioneer settlers, John Weston.
Isham Day house, exterior, west front. Photo credit: Anna Perkins, 2021
So for the last several weeks I’ve been doing a great deal of behind-the-scenes reading and re-reading of primary and secondary sources, as well as a lot of searching for additional relevant documents, including early Milwaukee and Washington/Ozaukee county deeds and other land records. In the process, I’m learning a lot about John Weston, Isham Day, Henry Thien, and some of our other first white settlers. But I’m not quite ready to write a John Weston profile, and I still need to clear up some mysteries about Isham Day’s land and house, too.
First Postmaster(s)
New post office…at Mequan River…John Weston appointed postmaster, Milwaukee Advertiser, Oct. 10, 1840, page 2
Let’s get our bearings by making an accurate list of the county’s first postmasters and their terms of office. Our source is from the National Archives in Washington, DC, the Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832-Sept. 30, 1971; Records of the Post Office Department; Record Group Number: 28; Series: M841; Roll Number: 144. County: Polk – Wood, Vol. 12B, circa 1832-1844, pages 794-795, currently available via Ancestry.com as U.S., Appointments of U. S. Postmasters, 1832-1971 [database on-line], 2010, image 428 of 583 (accessed 18 Jan 2024). Here’s the microfilmed image of the two-page ledger recording Washington county’s first post offices and postmasters, slightly retouched to make for easier reading:
Click the image for a higher-resolution view, and then read on for more details about old Washington/Ozaukee county’s first two post offices and their original postmasters.
Tonight 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. In 2021 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.
Veterans 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. For Veterans Day, 2023 I have added several new links and one new photograph.
Armistice Day
One hundred and five 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.
Clark House Historian 