1830s

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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RBOH – Social Calls by Canoe, 1833

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Another in our occasional series of Random Bits of History, illustrating life as experienced by the early Mequon settlers and their contemporaries. Today’s RBOH is an example of how strong early Wisconsin women could be, and how they used that strength to maintain community and social relationships across the vast distances between military posts.

Jonathan M Clark served with the U.S. Army’s 5th Regiment of Infantry at Fort Howard, Green Bay, Wisconsin Territory, from 1833-1836. The Fifth Regiment was responsible for four major outposts in the Old Northwest: Ft. Dearborn (Chicago), Ft. Howard (Green Bay), Ft. Winnebago (at the Fox and Wisconsin river portage) and Ft. Crawford (at Prairie du Chien).

We expect a soldier’s life on the frontier to be spartan and difficult, and in many ways is was. Generally speaking, enlisted men like JMC were unmarried and lived in together in the post’s barracks. But quite a few of the regiment’s officers were married, and brought their spouses—and children—to live with them on post or, occasionally, in homes in the adjacent village. As “officer’s ladies,” these women often lived separate lives from the civilian women of nearby settlements, such as Green Bay. So they formed their own bonds to provide mutual aid, comfort, society and entertainment while living in some of the army’s most isolated outposts.

And they did not let their social bonds break, even when friends were transferred to other forts. Here are some examples from about 1833:

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Erie Canal – the Woodworth family, 1835 (part 2)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

Continuing our look at the influence of the Erie Canal on the lives of Mequon pioneers such as Jonathan M. Clark and the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family (here and here), and the Bonniwell family (here). Today’s post continues our look at the first of two migrations of brother Ephraim and James Woodworth from Nova Scotia to their eventual home in Mequon. This post will make more sense if you read Part 1 first. The Woodworths were among many immigrants from Nova Scotia—including the Strickland, Loomer, Bigelow and West families—that came to Mequon and other parts of old Washington/Ozaukee county, Wisconsin Territory, during the early decades of settlement. 

Setting the scene: Eastern Canada and the Northeast United States, c. 1835

Here’s an annotated version of the map we featured in Part 1. As always, be sure to click the map to open a larger, high-resolution version in a new window. (If you’d like to see an enlarged, zoomable version of the original map, just click here.) Today’s annotated map illustrates the Woodworths’ 1835 trip as recorded in James W. Woodworth’s published diary.1 Later in this post we have another—more detailed— map to show the brothers’ wanderings in Ohio.

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Erie Canal – the Woodworth family, 1835 (part 1)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

We’ve been looking at the influence of the Erie Canal on the early lives of both Jonathan M. Clark and the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family (here and here), and the Bonniwell family (here), I thought I’d share more stories of Mequon settlers that used the canal to make their way westward to the wilds of the Wisconsin Territory in the 1830s and ’40s. Today’s focus is on immigrants from Nova Scotia, particularly the Woodworth brothers, Ephraim and James.

We’re going to need a bigger map!

We’ve had numerous occasions to quote from the memoirs of early Mequon pioneer—and Turck and Clark family friend—James W. Woodworth. Unlike many pioneers who came west, bought land, and never returned home, James W. Woodworth and various members of his family made the round-trip journey between Nova Scotia to the newly opened lands of the midwestern U.S. several times in the 1830s and ’40s. Descriptions of three separate trips can be found in Rev. Woodworth’s book, and they give additional color and detail to our understanding of what immigration to “the West” was like in that era. But to give you a proper feel for the hardiness of these 19th-century migrants, we’re going to need a bigger map!

Eastern Canada and the Northeast United States, c. 1835

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Erie Canal – the Bonniwell Family 1832-39

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 7 Comments

Inspired by our earlier looks at the influence of the Erie Canal on the early lives of both Jonathan M. Clark and the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family (here and here), I thought I’d share more stories of Mequon settlers that used the canal to make their way westward to the wilds of the Wisconsin Territory in the 1830s and ’40s. Today’s focus is on the Bonniwell family.

England to Montréal to New York

Originally from Chatham, Kent Co., England, the William T. B. and Eleanor (Hills) Bonniwell family came to Lower Canada by ship, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean and up the St. Lawrence River to Montréal. Shortly after arrival in 1832, family patriarch William T. B Bonniwell died there of cholera.

Following her husband’s untimely death, Eleanor (Hills) Bonniwell, decided to leave Montréal and take her children south to New York City, via the Richelieu River, Lake Champlain and the new Champlain Canal connecting Whitehall, New York, to the Hudson River. Two of her sons, George and William Bonniwell, had already located and found work in New York City.

After living for a bit in New York City, Eleanor moved upriver to the town of Esopus, Ulster County, on the west bank of the Hudson River. Sometime around 1835 Eleanor Bonniwell married a second time. Her new husband was a widower, Captain Christopher Hyde, of the town of Hyde Park, just across the river in Dutchess County.

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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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When was Mary Turck born?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 7 Comments

Just when you think you know the answer…

A few days ago, Clark House museum director Nina Look asked me a simple question: when, exactly, was Mary Turck Clark born? So I looked in my database and I came up with…two answers: Mary Turck Clark was born on either May 4th, 1820 or May 3, 1821. So I reviewed my dates and sources, and today’s post is about what I (re-)discovered, and what I still have to investigate.

Haven’t we been over this before?

Why, yes, we have. Here are links to earlier posts on essential sources of Mary Turck Clark birth date and birth year information, starting with my second Clark House Historian post, this now-outdated post about Mary from 2016. Other, more recent, posts have gone into detail examining Mary, her family, and their likely birth dates as found on the U.S. federal decennial censuses:

I’ve not yet blogged about Mary’s 1870 or 1880 federal censuses—both enumerated in Milwaukee—but I’ve seen them and used them in my research. More on these in a moment.

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