Santa Claus Visits, 1867: Reviewed

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

I hope you enjoyed our previous post: Santa Claus Visits Milwaukee, 1867, based on the diary of J. W. Woodworth.

Rev. Woodworth’s book is a unique and often entertaining source, but it’s always nice to back up personal recollections with additional contemporary documents. So I did a quick search of online Milwaukee area newspapers from the 1840s through about 1870 and found many mentions of Santa Claus and related traditions beginning in the late 1840s. And on page five of the Wednesday, December 25, 1867 edition of the Daily Milwaukee News I found this news item which adds a few piquant details in support of Rev. Woodworth’s diary entry: Continue reading →

Santa Claus Visits Milwaukee, 1867 (updated)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

Christmas is celebrated as an important religious and community holiday by many Americans. Christians worship and commemorate the birth of Jesus, and they and many other Americans enjoy a break from work and gather with family 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, and in Boston and other parts of New England any observance of Christmas was prohibited and, for a few years, illegal. The holiday was not generally accepted in many parts of the United States until after the federal government made December 25 a national holiday in 1870. Continue reading →

Rev. Woodworth’s Autobiography

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

James W. Woodworth (1813-1893) and his brother Ephraim were among the earliest settlers in Mequon. They came from Nova Scotia, as did several other early Mequon settlers and families, including Isaac Bigelow, Daniel Strickland and Stephen Loomer. On March 1, 1838, J. W. Woodworth married fellow Nova Scotia emigrant and Mequon neighbor Mary Cerena Loomer. The marriage was believed to be the first Christian marriage in old Washington county and was performed by Mary Turck Clark’s father, Peter Turck, “an anabaptist preacher.”

J. W. Woodworth, like so many Protestant Christians of his era, was a man in search of a powerful and authentic connection to God. He found his answer in the 1830s and ’40s through Methodism. And, after many years of intense self-instruction, camp meetings, private prayer and preaching at local worship services, Woodworth was certified as a Methodist minister.

For much of his life Rev. Woodworth kept a diary of both the spiritual and mundane events of his life. He published the diary in Milwaukee in 1878 as My Path and the Way the Lord Led Me.  Continue reading →

Fort Howard, November 1833

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Previous posts have discussed Jonathan M. Clark’s enlistment in the U.S. Army’s Fifth Regiment of Infantry, Company K (part 1, part 2, part 3) and his arrival at Fort Howard (Green Bay), in the Michigan (later Wisconsin) Territory (part 1, part 2, part 3) on October 20, 1833. Let’s rejoin the regiment and see what kept Co. K busy during Pvt. Clark’s first full month on duty, November, 1833. Continue reading →

Map of Ouisconsin Territory, 1836

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

UPDATED, February 11, 2024, to include a revised annotated map. But for the full update—with additional notes and corrections—please see the most recent version of this, posted on February 12, 2024.

In September, 1836, Sgt. Jonathan M. Clark was discharged from the U.S. Army at “Ft. Hamilton,” Wisconsin Territory, after serving his three-year term of service with Co. K, Fifth Regiment of Infantry.  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, building portions of 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 probably had seen—or helped draw—a variety of maps of the military road and its vicinity. But for a better overview of the larger territory, Jonathan or Mary might have sought out a map such as this:

Continue reading →

History Mystery! No. 1 (of many)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Jonathan & Mary & ? on the 1840 Census

Introducing a new feature on the blog: History Mystery! In which you, the reader, are invited to Help the Historian solve one of the many persistent mysteries surrounding Jonathan M. Clark, his family, and related bits of local history.  History Mystery! No. 1 seeks to answer the question: Who was that older guy living with newlyweds Jonathan and Mary Clark in June, 1840? Here are the clues: Continue reading →

Finding Your Mequon Roots (part 3)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

This is Part 3 of our short introduction to Finding Your Mequon Roots. If you haven’t already, I recommend starting with Part 1 and Part 2.

Before we take a break from our Mequon neighbors of the 1900s and return to Jonathan Clark and his family in the mid-1800s, let’s take a look at a few more “macro” and “micro” things one can find by taking a closer look at a U.S. census population schedule. Once again, here’s the Becker family of Mequon, as found on lines 32 to 34 of this 1900 U.S. federal census population schedule: Continue reading →

Finding Your Mequon Roots (part 2)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

And we’re back! Continuing our short series on Finding Your Mequon Roots. If you missed the first part of the series, I suggest you click here and read that first.

Part 1 was all about one of my favorite first-look documents when doing genealogy or local history research, the decennial U.S. Federal Census population schedule. The first census that exists for Annie Becker and her parents was the census of 1900. Click here for a full size image of the census page.

Continue reading →

An Explanation in Advance

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

or, the Author’s Lament…

I am once again working on new posts for Clark House Historian and apparently WordPress, the platform I use for this blog, has instituted a number of “improvements” to their site since my previous posts. This has resulted in several new inconveniences that make the creation and posting of new content more troublesome and time-consuming than before. One issue involves how images are displayed (and sometimes open as larger images in new windows). I think I have that fixed; we’ll see once the next post is published.

More importantly, I can’t always get draft posts to pre-publish in preview mode. This means I sometimes need to officially “publish” the post to the wide world before I can really see if there are formatting problems or proofreading mistakes.

So, as always, please excuse (and let me know if you find) any errors or formatting problems in the posts. I will make corrections and updates as soon as possible. Thanks.

Well, that took longer than expected…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

It’s been half a year since the last Clark House Historian post! My apologies for the long pause. Various professional and personal commitments (all good) may have kept me from writing, but not from researching. So now I have an even larger backlog of Clark House related discoveries and topics to write about…

So look for new Clark House Historian posts coming soon. Meanwhile, follow these links to the Jonathan Clark House homepage and Events page for upcoming Heritage Days events.

And if you support the mission of the Jonathan Clark House, consider becoming a donor and/or a supporting member of the Friends of Jonathan Clark House, Ltd.

Check back here soon and I will have more to say about Finding Your Mequon Roots and about Jonathan and Mary Turck Clark’s young family and early neighbors. Thanks for reading, and for your support of local history.