1860s

School supplies…and more, 1850

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Labor Day has come and gone, and for many this marks the unofficial “end of summer.” With that in mind, I thought you might enjoy a lightly revised and enhanced re-post of this CHH piece from 2023.

Many students start classes today. Others began school a week or two ago. Many Wisconsin families have spent the past few weeks (or months) preparing for the new school year, shopping for “Back to School” deals on clothing and school supplies at local, chain, and online retailers.

Harrison’s Columbian inks, black, scarlet, red, blue. [United States, publisher not transcribed], c. 1846. Library of Congress

Shopping for school supplies at the start of the school year is nothing new. But the origin of the now ubiquitous use of “Back to School!” as a marketing phrase is obscure. From what I’ve observed, it seems very much a post-World War II phenomenon. Yet with our current 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? For a fun comparison, let’s take a look at just two of the many relevant advertisements from the columns of the Clarks’ local papers, in this case the [Milwaukee] Daily Free Democrat, November 2, 1850, page 4…

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

UPDATE: This was supposed to go out on Monday. I hit “publish” before the piece was ready. Here’s the updated 2025 version for your reading enjoyment. Sorry for any confusion (and, for you CHH subscribers, the premature email in your inbox).

Monday, September 1st, is Labor Day, the holiday celebrating the working men and women of our nation, and I thought I’d commemorate the day with a lightly-revised re-post of this CHH piece from 2023. This Labor Day, as in 2023, I have to work a shift at our local mercantile establishment. You know, a store kind of like this one, only much bigger, stocked with just about anything you need for modern living:

Like many Americans, I don’t have the day “off” on Monday, and won’t be marching in a parade, but I’d still like to honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present. With that in mind, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark House Historian, highlighting a few of the many skills, trades, and occupations common during the Clark House era.

Since it is a holiday, I’m not going to add long commentaries to each photo. Enjoy the photo galleries, and be sure to click each gallery—and photo—to open and peruse larger versions of each image. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts, filled with lots more information about the different skills, tools, and jobs, and the full image credits.

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Memorial Day, 2025

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins.

Lest We Forget

Our annual Memorial Day post, first published in 2020, more relevant with each passing year.

Graves of Unknown Union Soldiers, Memphis National Cemetery, photo by Clayton B. Fraser, (Library of Congress), public domain. Memphis National Cemetery is the final resting place of Mequon’s Watson Peter Woodworth, and almost 14,000 of his Union Army comrades.

Today is the day our nation officially observes Memorial Day. For many Americans, Memorial Day represents “the first day of summer,” and is traditionally celebrated with trips to the lake, picnics, parades, and sales on cars, appliances, and other consumer goods.

But for many of us, Memorial Day remains rooted in its origins as Decoration Day. The first national observance was in 1868, when retired general John A. Logan, commander and chief of the Grand Army of the Republic—the Union veterans’ organization—issued his General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

On this Memorial Day, let’s take a moment to remember what this day truly represents.

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The Clarks, a family of readers…

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

Some of our recent and upcoming posts are focused on reading and evaluating source materials. The first of these posts, JCH Sources, part 1, was illustrated with this drawing…

Whistler, James McNeill, artist, Reading by Lamplight, etching and drypoint, 1859. MetMuseum. Bequest of Julia H. Manges, in memory of her husband, Dr. Morris Manges, 1960

This is James McNeill Whistler’s 1859 Reading by lamplight, an evocative drawing of a young woman, reading by the light of an oil lamp, a cup of tea at her side. The lamp is supported on a tall, slender metal stand. It’s light is raised even further by placing the lamp stand on a large, overturned bowl.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was Caroline Clark, or one of her other well-read sisters. Caroline would have been about 19 years old in 1859, when Whistler made this drawing. She was in the middle of her pioneering two-year high school course in Milwaukee, a talented, energetic young woman on the way to living a remarkable life of service. Here she is circa 1889-1900, around age 50, in the prime of life:

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“Dashing through the snow…”

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins.

Kimmel and Forster, publishers, “Winter Pleasure in the Country,” circa 1865. National Museum of American History, Peters Prints Collection, Smithsonian Institution.1

Talk of sleighs and sleighing in our recent CHH posts on Snow! and Shoveling out -and other winter chores, plus our January, 2022, essay on Stuff Happens – on a sleigh ride, got me wondering again about winter travel in old Washington/Ozaukee county during the Clarks’ era. Assuming most of the more successful farmers—such as the Clarks, Bonniwells and Turcks—owned a one- or two-horse sleigh, how easy was it to navigate that sleigh on the early county roads? Could you ride all the way to Milwaukee? And if you could, how long might that take?

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Shoveling out – and other winter chores

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

We’ve had some snow in my corner of southeastern Wisconsin, several modest snowfalls over the past few days. I’ve had to shovel the walks and driveway at our house a few times this week, and there’s more snow—and shoveling—in the forecast. With that in mind, I thought you might enjoy the snow-related images and stories from a revised edition of this post, which originally appeared here in February, 2023.

Homer, Winslow, A Winter-Morning,—Shovelling Out, 1871. Wood engraving. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Harvey Isbitts.

Winter chores

I empathize with the lads in this 1871 engraving by Winslow Homer. Unlike these fellows, with their (homemade?) wooden shovels, I have a lightweight, sturdy, ergonomic, plastic and metal snow shovel to work with. And although we do get snow in 21st-century Wisconsin, I haven’t had to deal with shoulder-high accumulations like the ones in Homer’s picture since I lived in western Massachusetts in the early 2010s. It looks like our 1871 snow shovelers are dealing with the kind of snowfall that Clark family neighbor Rev. James W. Woodworth described in these January, 1871, diary entries:

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Fred Beckmann, Sr. – updates & clarifications

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

Today’s post is an updated, corrected and expanded version a post I wrote in July, 2020, outlining what we knew (at the time), about the life of Fred Beckmann, Sr., the man that occupied and farmed the Jonathan Clark farm between 1868 and 1872. Then, in early 2023, I was asked to talk about the Clark House and its Cedarburg connections at the Cedarburg History Museum. I chose to center my talk on Fred Beckmann and his extended German-American immigrant family, as I believe they exemplify a number of important themes in the transformation of Ozaukee county from the initial Anglo-American dominated first wave of local settlement in the 1830s and early ’40s, into the subsequent decades of primarily German-American settlement and development.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, and learned a lot, in preparing that 2023 talk. And one of the things I learned is that there was some doubt about the year and date of Fred Beckmann’s death. So I recently investigated the issues and have updated images, text, and information for you about the life—and death—of Fred Beckmann, and I managed to solve at least one mystery in the process…

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RBOH: some Beckmann & Cedarburg updates

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins.

Revised 17 February 2025 to include some additional material about my Beckmann-related talk at the Cedarburg History Museum in Spring, 2023.

Cedarburg News, October 14, 1885, page 1

I’ve been spending time with historic local newspapers online, searching for those tasty tidbits of local news that never quite make it into the history books, but are often found in the 19th-century local press. Today I was browsing through 1880s to early-1900s issues of the Cedarburg News, Fred. W. Horn, publisher, and found some interesting random bits o’ history that are connected to the Clark House and to some work I’ve done for the Cedarburg History Museum.

Fred. Beckmann and kin

You may remenber a post I wrote back in July, 2020, about newly-married German immigrant Fred. Beckmann, who farmed and lived on the Jonathan Clark property from 1868 until 1873, at which time he and his growing family moved to Cedarburg, where he then owned and ran the Wisconsin House hotel for the better part of the next four decades. I followed that up with an April, 2023 presentation at the Cedarburg History Museum, where I spoke about the life and the extended circle of family, business associates and friends of Fred. Beckmann. His story connects the hardscrabble early days of our area’s Yankee, Irish and German pioneers (Jonathan and Mary Clark’s generation) with the following generation of established and settled German-American farmers, business owners and civic leaders, such as himself. And Fred also connected and illuminated the story of the Jonathan Clark House with those of nearby Hamilton—and its Concordia Mill—and the development of downtown Cedarburg in the 19th-century.

That 2023 presentation was followed by a March, 2024, illustrated talk I gave at the Cedarburg History Museum as part of their big 2024 Civil War exhibition and lecture series. My subject was “From the ‘Burg to the Battlefield…and Back: Cedarburg’s Beckmann Family and the Civil War.” In my talk, I tried to take a more personal and local look at the war by examining the military service of few of Fred. Beckmann’s Cedarburg relatives, including his brother Charles Beckmann, future brother-in-law, Charles Gottschalk, and future father-in-law Henry Hachfeld/Hackfeldt.

Well, I wasn’t really looking for more info on Fred. Beckmann today, but I stumbled across some interesting things, and thought I’d share them with you here…

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