1820s

Taking a short break…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

It’s been a busy summer here at Clark House Historian, with lots of research, writing, editing, and posting, and most of the essays illustrated with unique historical maps, documents, and images. And more Clark House history posts are queued up in draft form, awaiting final touches.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a short break, starting with a cool drink while watching the birds in the backyard. Here’s one frequent visitor to our house:

Havell, Robert, engraver, after John James Audubon, Yellow Bird or American Goldfinch, 1828, plate 33 from The Birds of America (1828-1838), hand-colored engraving and aquatint on Whatman wove paper. National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mrs. Walter B. James. Public domain. Click to open larger image in new window.

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How’d they get here? Walking & riding

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

This is another installment in the transportation-themed series that began with our July 6, 2021, Monday: Map Day! – How’d they get here? and continues from there.

Queen, James Fuller, [A Man and a Woman Standing at the Entrance to a Trail Through a Forest] (detail), graphite drawing on cream paper, circa 1850-1870. Library of Congress

I’m still writing the next two (or three) longer, narrative installments of our “How’d they get here?” series, which I began working on to assist Clark House education director Margaret Bussone and our education team as they develop a transportation-themed project for use at the Jonathan Clark House later this summer.

For quite a while I was worried that I would not be able to find enough visual material to adequately illustrate our early Mequon immigrants’ journeys of the 1830s and ’40s. It turns out that I now have a lot of material to share with the education team—and with you. Rather than hold on to it until my longer posts are complete, I thought I’d do something different today.

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Happy 200th Birthday, Mary!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

Today, May 3, 2021, marks the 200th birthday anniversary of Mary Turck, the eldest child of Peter Turck and Rachael (Gay) Turck, and future spouse of Jonathan M. Clark. Mary and Jonathan were married in old Washington county on March 15, 1840, and began to farm their Mequon land the same year. They went on to build their handsome stone house—now the Jonathan Clark House Museum—in 1848.

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Jonathan got the vaccine…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

There were a lot of deadly, infectious diseases in 19th-century North America. When Jonathan M. Clark was young, the causes and cures for most of these illnesses were a mystery. Germ theory was unknown, and for many people hygiene was, at best, a hit-or-miss affair. But even in that era, we can be certain Jonathan M. Clark was inoculated against one of the worst recurring plagues of all time: smallpox.

General Regulations of the U.S. Army, 1821, Art. 73, no. 90

As a new recruit to the U.S. Army, Jonathan M. Clark was subject to the army’s regulations, including article 73, number 90:

Click to open larger image in new window. Original via Internet Archive

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The Turcks sell their Palmyra land, 1832

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

The Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family in Wayne Co. deeds (part 2)

Today’s post continues our series where we use deed records to follow the lives of the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family—including young Mary Turck—from the 1820s through their emigration to Mequon in 1837. This post will make more sense if you read our previous Monday: Map Day! and The Turcks – Catskill to Palmyra, 1828.

Earlier, we discovered that on April 21, 1828, Peter Turck of Catskill, Greene county, New York, bought 76 acres of land in Palmyra Township, Wayne County, New York. He paid $1,475.00 “cash in hand” to the sellers, Ellera and Catherine Potter. The record of this transaction was found on pages 266-267 of the Wayne County, New York, Deed Books, Vol. 12.

Four and a-half years later…

Today’s 1832 deed, in which Peter Turck sells the same land that he purchased in 1828, is recorded in the same deed book, immediately following the (apparently delayed) recording of his 1828 transaction. This new 1832 land sale covers parts of pages 267-268 of Vol. 12 of the Wayne County, New York, Deed Books:

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The Turcks – Catskill to Palmyra, 1828

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

The Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family in Wayne Co. deeds (part 1)

This post will make more sense if you read our previous Monday: Map Day! post first. And then grab a hot beverage and settle in for some quality time with old legal documents…

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you may have noticed that I usually like to gather various bits of evidence, think about them for a bit—”behind the scenes,” so to speak—and then present them to you as a coherent (I hope!) narrative that sheds light on some aspect of the history of the Clark House, its inhabitants or their community. For years, I’ve wanted to do that with the story of the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family and their migration to Wayne County, New York in the late 1820s, but we have very few records of the family from this period.

In order to make an accurate timeline of the Turcks’ years near the Erie Canal, I need to—finally—wade through the few records that do exist: land deeds recorded in Vol. 12 of the Wayne County, New York, deed books. The legal prose in these deeds is often so thick and convoluted that it’s hard to just skim them and find the useful bits. So since I need to transcribe, read, and interpret a number of handwritten deeds anyway, I thought I’d share the process with you, here on the blog. Today will be the first of several posts featuring transcriptions of the old deeds. Once we’ve transcribed them, we’ll sort through each and see what we can find out about the Turcks’ lives in the eight years before they came to the Wisconsin Territory.

The Challenge

Here’s the first page of today’s deed. Peter Turck’s contract (“indenture”) to purchase land begins about a third of the way down the page, just below the horizontal double-line:

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Monday: Map Day! – Wayne County, 1829

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

Before Mequon: finding Mary Turck’s home in upstate New York

Tracing the lives of Americans in the first decades of the 19th-century can be challenging. Whether along the expanding frontier, or in long-established and settled areas such as New York’s Hudson River valley, there are often many unhelpful gaps in the paper trail. Even the federal census—which counted, every ten years, “all persons” living in America—only recorded the name of the “head” of each (white) family, and the sex and age ranges of other members of the household.

So what do we know about the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family in the years before they arrived in Mequon? As we discussed previously, we know the family had deep roots in the traditionally Dutch-American communities of the Hudson River valley’s Ulster, Greene, Dutchess and Columbia counties. We know Mary Turck was born in Athens, Greene county, in 1821, the eldest child of Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck. By tracing the baptismal registers (where they exist) and other biographical records of her younger siblings, we know that by 1833 the family was in Palmyra, Wayne County, New York.

Wayne County: Palmyra and Macedon

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Mary Turck Clark—updated

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 10 Comments

The original version of this post was the second-ever post on Clark House Historian. It represented what we knew at the time about Mary Turck, the daughter of Peter Turck and Rachael Gay, wife of Jonathan M. Clark, and mother of the eight Clark family children. The original April, 2016, post was pretty accurate, but we have learned a lot more about Mary and her Turck and Clark families in the meantime. So here is a revised version of that post with errors corrected and ambiguities clarified—where possible.

Please note that there are many more facts about Mary and her Clark and Turck families that I’ve written about in the past almost-5 years that are not linked to in this post. If you are looking for more information about Mary, I highly recommend using the blog’s SEARCH function and our new INDEX. And if you still can’t find the info you want, please ask me! Just use the Leave a Reply box, below, or the CONTACT link, above.

Mary Turck Clark: Mequon Pioneer

CLARK, Mary TURCK portrait

Mary Turck Clark. Photograph courtesy Liz Hickman. Click to open larger image in new window.

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Monday: Map Day! – Columbia County, New York, 1829

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 8 Comments

Peter Turck’s Home

Continuing our look at Mary Turck Clark and her family, today we look at a map of Columbia County, New York, the birthplace of Mary’s father Peter Turck, most of his eight siblings, and home of Mary’s paternal grandparents—Peter Turck’s parents—Jacob A. and Anna Maria “Maritje” (Klein) Turck. For more on the Turcks and New York, you may want to read our previous posts on Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck’s New York, 1829/32 and Mary Turck’s Greene County, New York.

Today we’ll be looking at Columbia County, one of the predominantly Dutch-American counties along the Hudson River, south of Albany, New York. Columbia County lies east of Greene county, just across the Hudson river. Here’s a detail from a map we looked at previously, showing the relationship between Greene and Columbia counties:

Burr, David H., Map of the State of New-York and the surrounding country by David H. Burr. Compiled from his large map of the State, 1832.[…] Entered according to Act of Congress Jany. 5th., 1829 by David H. Burr of the State of New York. Engd. by Rawdon, Clark & Co., Albany & Rawdon, Wright & Co., New York [detail]. Credit, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, non-commercial use permitted under Creative Commons license. Click image to open larger map in new window.

Our new map is from the same atlas, and shows many more details of Peter Turck’s Columbia County, circa 1829:

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