1880s

Caroline M. (Clark) Woodward – profile, 1891

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

In our previous post I made use of a paragraph from a recently rediscovered 1891 profile of Jonathan and Mary (Turck) Clark’s eldest child, Caroline M. Clark, later Mrs. C. M. Woodward. Caroline was the most publicly active, visible, and well-documented of all of the Clark siblings, and we have published a number of blog posts on her life and career, including this comprehensive piece: Caroline M. (Clark) Woodward: a closer look at that 1893 biography. I recommend reading that post and clicking all the links; they lead you to other, detailed CHH posts about specific moments and events in Caroline’s life.

Today I’d like to share with you the complete 1891 profile that I quoted in our March 26, 2026, post. It originally appeared as one long column of text on page 1 of the Lincoln, Nebraska, “New Republic” newspaper, on August 20, 1891. Caroline (1840-1924) was fifty years old when this article appeared, and had another thirty years of active work in the temperance and women’s rights fields ahead of her.

Given the amount of accurate detail in the article, I suspect that the information came directly from Caroline herself. In fact, given how well-written and how accurate the whole profile is, I would not be surprised if Caroline wrote most, or all of it herself. For ease of reading, I have divided the article into several sections, created paragraph headers, and added a few notes on some of the facts mentioned in each section.

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William Opitz – real estate agent (1855)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

I’m in the thick of researching and writing several series of illustrated posts for the blog, as well as for some upcoming public talks that I’m giving this spring and summer, and it’s kept me from posting lately. And as is often the case with these big projects, I find I have so much fresh material, and so many interesting, interconnecting, events and stories, that the problem becomes sorting and organizing all that information, and all those images, into coherent and not-overwhelmingly-long posts and presentations. (Heh. We’ll see about that…)

Anyway, while I continue my writing and editing behind the scenes, I thought you might enjoy this random bit of Mequon history I found while looking for some other, entirely different, information. It’s an advertisement originally dated May 21, 1855; this copy was published on page 3 of the Milwaukee Banner und Volksfreund [Banner and People’s Friend] on February 6, 1856. The ad announces a new business venture by one of Mequon’s earliest and most influential German settlers, Wilhelm Ferdinand “William F.” Opitz (1813 or 1816 – 1882):

How’s that? Your German language and Fraktur-reading skills are a bit too rusty to enjoy this historical advert? Well, just click and read on for all the details!

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How’d they get here? – Germany to Mequon, c. 1848 (part 1)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

UPDATED, Feb. 28, 2026, to correct erroneous dates of publication of the two Cedarburg News “letters.”

Hard Times in Coming from Europe

You may have wondered why I haven’t written much about the German immigrant history and heritage of our corner of southeast Wisconsin. After all, since the late-1830s, and especially following the “Revolutionary Year” of 1848 in Europe, waves of Europeans—including hundreds of thousands of emigrants from the German Lands— left their homes in the Old World and set out to make a fresh start in America. Many of these German-speaking emigrants would find their way to Wisconsin, where they and their descendants would leave a lasting imprint on the culture and development of the new state.

The story of the Jonathan Clark House, however, centers around the lives of the Clarks and their immediate neighbors and in-laws, especially the Bonniwell and Turck families. All were prominent players in the earliest days of white migration to and settlement of Mequon, old Washington/Ozaukee county, and the city of Milwaukee. The Clarks, Turcks and Bonniwells came to Wisconsin Territory from New York, New England, English-speaking Canada and the United Kingdom in the later 1830s. Their Wisconsin story was not so well known or documented, so I have spent much of my time over the past decade or so researching their families, lives, and the events of their day.

Having said that, we need to remember that these “Yankee-Yorkers” and other English-speaking pioneers were not the only early immigrants to our area. Irish and German families were, indeed, already present and establishing farms and businesses in old Washington/Ozaukee county by the late-1830s, including at the large German Freistadt Colony and the early Irish neighborhood centered between the Jonathan Clark House and the crossroads hamlet of Hamilton. All of these overseas immigrants were the Clarks’ neighbors, and their stories are intertwined throughout the early history of Mequon.

And one thing those 19th-century Irish and German and British immigrants all had in common was time spent on a ship, making the uncertain and difficult voyage from Europe to America. In the next few posts we will look at some first-person recollections of a school boy who came with his mother and brother from the German Lands to Mequon-Thiensville around 1848, as recollected and published in 1888.

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Elizabeth Turck’s husband: Densmore W. Maxon (1820-1887)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

The lives of Mary Clark’s sister Elizabeth (Turck) Maxon, her husband Densmore W. Maxon, and the Maxon children are deeply intertwined with the history of Washington and Ozaukee counties, and with the lives of many of the early settlers, especially the Clark, Turck and Clow families.

From the early 1840s until at least the 1880s, members of the Maxon family—and especially D. W. Maxon— played important, recurring roles in Clark and Turck family affairs. That being the case, I thought we might benefit from a reasonably detailed overview of D. W. Maxon’s life, and I found a good one in A. M. Thomson’s A Political History of Wisconsin, second edition (C. N. Caspar Company, Milwaukee, 1902).

D. W. Maxon

The biography spans pages 431-433. D. W. Maxon’s portrait, with signature (above), is found facing page 236. I have proofread the transcribed text and added some paragraph breaks and headers for ease of reading. Otherwise the text, displayed here in grey-background “quotation” paragraphs, is complete as published in 1902.

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Clark House 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

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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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JCH Sources: a look a local histories, part 2

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

This is the second part of a multi-part look at local (Mequon and Washington/Ozaukee County) history sources. If you missed Part 2, I recommend you click this link and read that first.

In today’s post, I’d like to guide you to and through another one of the local histories that I’ve bumped into over the last decade or so. As in Part 1, I’ll include a link to a PDF copy of the source, make comments on the range and quality of the information in the book, and sum it up with an overall grade for accuracy, style, and usefulness.

“All sources lie.” — Lawrence of Arabia (supposedly)

That provocative quote begins the forward of Elizabeth Shown Mills’s monumental Evidence Explained (third edition, revised, 2017), the “Bible” of genealogical research, source evaluation, and modern citation practices. It makes an arresting opening for her almost 900-page book, devoted to historical and genealogical sources and how to cite them.1 But what does the author mean by beginning her book with Lawrence’s (supposed) quote? Here is part of her explanation:

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The Clarks, a family of readers…

/ Clark House 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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JCH Sources: a look a local histories, part 1

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 7 Comments

If you are interested in the history of the Jonathan Clark House, there are a number of published local histories that you might consult. Many of them are available online, as free, searchable, PDF downloads from Internet Archive, GoogleBooks, the Library of Congress, and other digital repositories. This is pretty cool but, as you might expect, not all sources are equal. Some are more reliable than others. Some contain detailed information about early settlement, settlers, government and politicians, pioneer businesses and other local affairs, often drawing upon old primary sources, some of which have since disappeared. Other histories are more content to paraphrase (and sometimes mangle) earlier volumes. How do you know which to trust?

A guide for the perplexed

In today’s post, I’d like to guide you to and through several of the published histories that I’ve spent a lot of time with. I’ll provide links to PDF copies where available, make a few comments on the range and quality of the information in each book, and give each book an overall grade for accuracy, style, and usefulness.

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Shoveling out – and other winter chores

/ Clark House 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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