USA > Wisconsin > Green County > History of Green County, Wisconsin > Part 9
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away. Very soon, however, the wagon was made ready and the flight began. It was not much like the removal of patriarchs. They took no large flocks and herds, no rich treasure with them. As Mr. Paine expressed it, they threw in the women and children, and started. In a short time darkness overtook them. There were no roads except Indian trails. With a wagon, it was diffi- cult to follow the trails in the day time ; after dark it was impossible. They stopped for the night in a little grove on the Capt. Foster place in the village of Monroe. Here, without daring to strike a light, they sat in silence and waited for morning. Sometimes the long silence of the night was broken by a wild whoop in the distance. Once they saw Indians passing by, and great was their fear lest some movement of the horses or the children should betray them. But a strong wind carried all sounds of the little camp in an opposite direction. Morning came at last, and the travelers went on in safety to the fort, crossing the Pecatonica nearly as far north as Argyle. The day after their flight the deserted home was visited by soldiers sent out from the fort to warn and assist the settlers ; but they found the cabin burned and its contents destroyed. At this time, Mr. Clarno was in Illinois, where he had gone
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after his two sons. Hostilities having begun, he stopped on his return at Fort Hamilton, so-called in honor of a son of Alexander Hamilton, Col. W. S. Hamilton, who, as early as 1823 had distinguished himself by his bold enterprises in Illinois and Wisconsin, and who used to say, half in earnest, half in jest, that he might have been quite a man but for his distinguished father, with whom people always compared him. Mr. Clarno was made captain of a company of soldiers, and his son O. H. P. Clarno, then a little boy, had charge of a gun inside the fort.
After the war, the settlers returned to their homes, or rather to their land, for this was all they had. Mr. Clarno, who had neither oxen nor horses, helped his boys across the streams, and father and sons walked from the fort. In IS33 Mr. Paine induced James Hawthorne to come to Clarno. Mr. Hawthorne had come to the mines in the western part of Iowa County in 1827, had after- wards returned to New York state, and had again come west on hearing that Uncle Sam had given miners per- mission to work on the Dubuque side of the river ; but he was soon driven from Dubuque by the cholera, and during the war he was at White Oak Springs. When a boy of seventeen, Mr. Hawthorne served in the war of 1812 as a substitute for a drafted man, though, as substi. tutes were not accepted by the government, he was known through his soldier life by the name of the drafted man. In 1832, wishing to try again the life of a soldier, he offered $125 for a horse, but he could not get one for that amount, and, as a horse was an indispensable part
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of a soldier's outfit, he took no active part in the Black Hawk war.
During the winter of 1833-'34, O. H. P. Clarno was left alone on his father's claim. To while away the long evenings, the Indians undertook to teach him their lan- guage. After a time, he observed that the woods around his cabin were full of little piles of corn cobs, and now was explained the hitherto mysterious diminution of his corn. While some of his instructors were giving him a lesson, the habit had been for others to shell a few ears of corn, putting the corn into the bags or pockets always carried on their persons. This exercise being over, they went into the house, to relieve the teachers who had pre- ceded them. In 1834 Abner Van Sant and his son-in- law, John W. Deniston, moved to Clarno from Missouri, and in 1835-'36 they were joined by Matthew, William, and Peter Wells, Jonathan Snyder, A. De Haven, Calvin Hale, Adam and Levi Starr, and Joseph Kelly of Ohio, John Patterson of Indiana, T. S. and Wm. Bowen, natives of New York but directly from Illinois. O. J. White, Wm. Chilton, and Wm. Draper of Illinois. Jacob Starr of Virginia, Joseph Smith of Pennsylvania, P. C. Grupe of Missouri, Wm. and John Blunt, Wm. Brown, Henry Ater, and McDonald. Mr. De Haven returned to Ohio in 1836, and remained several years, during which time his brother-in-law, John Cam- eron, worked his Clarno farm. Besides these men who made homes, there were probably many single men, Certainly there were Cutler Wilkins of Missouri, Wm. Baird of Ohio, now, as for many years a prominent
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citizen of Sylvester, and James Campbell of New York, the first settler in the town of Albany. Whenever a new settler came, those here before him helped him raise his house. One of the best attended of the Clarno raisings was that at Mr. Starr's, where both house and barn were built the same day the logs were cut.
In October, 1835, occurred the first wedding in the county, being that of Mr. J. R. Blackmore and Miss Nancy Wallace. In the same month, Chas. Deniston, Green County's eldest son, was born. When he was but a few months old, a squaw stole him from his cradle, leaving her own baby in his place ; but timely pursuit forced her to make another exchange of children. Christ- mas was celebrated in 1835 by a dance at Mr. Deniston's. People came thirty and forty miles to attend it, and many of them waited in the vicinity a week in order to attend a New Year's ball at Mr. Paine's house in Monroe. Sometime in the winter of 1835-'36, John Patterson, who, with his family, lived on what is called the Goodrich farm, went to Mineral Point to enter his land. Coming home he lost his way, and was out all night. He suf- fered so much from cold that soon after reaching home he died. He was the first white person to die a natural death in Green County.
In the absence of other sources of amusement, the Indians were sometimes: found amusing. One of Mrs. Deniston's visitors was a squaw who wrapped her baby in a wolf-skin. The child's condition was not that of happy comfort which babies who listen to their mother's songs associate with rabbit-skins, and Mrs. Den-
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iston gave the mother clothes for the child. The squaw was pleased, but quite unable to use the gift, and a white girl offered to dress the baby, on condition that she was first allowed to wash it. The puzzled mother gave assent, and the pappoose was washed and dressed. Then the mother put it on the floor and for a whole hour danced around it in ecstacy of delight, accompanying the dance with such strange noises and contortions that those who went in to see her were convulsed with laugh- ter. Indian visitors were sometimes so loath to go away that Mrs. Deniston, the gentlest and kindest of women, was forced to keep a stick with which occasionally to clear her house. After one of his hastiest departures, a Winnebago chief flung back to her the name "cross squaw," and she was thenceforth known by that name among his followers. Until she had learned by expe- rience that they were not dangerous, the Indians were likely to impose upon a woman. A few Indians entered the house of Mr. Jesse Mitchell in Sylvester, just before supper one washing-day ; and seeing that Mrs. Mitchell was afraid, they took from the line where they were dry- ing, all the stockings of the family, filled them with mush from a kettle on the stove, and carried them away.
The first sermon preached in Green County was preached in August, 1835, at the residence of Matthew Wells, by Daniel Harcourt. In the summer of 1836 Rev. James McKane, who resided in Illinois, and belong- ed to the Rock River Conference, organized the first religious society organized in Green County. The mem- bers were Matthew Wells, his wife and daughter, Mrs. Maria Blunt, and Wm. Baird.
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Among the good gifts which nature has bestowed upon the town of Clarno are Richland and Honey creeks. The name of the former creek explains itself. Tradition says the other records the experience of a man who was looking for a place to make a claim. He felled a tree, upon which he walked across the stream. In the course of his travels he returned to the bridge, and drank from the brook. To his surprise, the water had the taste of metheglin, and, though examination showed the reason of this to lie in the fact that he had felled a bee tree for his bridge, he ever afterwards spoke of the stream as Honey creek, and others followed his example. It
was upon Honey creek that Van Sant and Deniston built in 1836 the first mill in the county. So great was the desire for a mill that nearly every man in the county offered his assistance in building it. Beginning as a feed mill, it soon grew into a flour mill. Van Sant and Den- iston hauled flour to Galena every week, and did business for their Green County friends at every visit to the city, until it seemed as though nothing could be done in the county without the assistance of these stirring, whole- souled men. In 1837 two saw mills were built on Honey
creek. One, near the grist mill, was built by Van Sant and Deniston and Henson Irion, the other, where Banta's mill is now, was built by Joseph Smith and Joab Enos. A year or two later, John Church built another saw-mill near Smith's mill. By 1838 Clarno farmers found in Madison a market for much of their produce, and Madison was largely dependent on Clarno. After the completion of the capital, the garrison at Fort Winne-
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bago afforded the best market, and then for many years there was a demand at the pineries for everything the farmers could produce.
A lady who moved to Clarno in 1838 gives a glimpse of things as seen through a housekeeper's eyes : We, like most families, brought flour, meat, and a little money with us. When our money was gone, we did without things. Flour was $13 (it had been $16), and pork $30 a barrel. Calico was fifty cents a yard, and other kinds of cloth were proportionally high ; but in many families the men wore buckskin clothes, tanning the skins themselves, and the women were so industrious with the spinning-wheel and the loom that the cloth of the family cost only what was paid for the warp of its linsey. I bought some soft soap and paid a dollar a gal- lon. The next year I made soap to sell, but it wasn't worth much then. At first butter was fifty cents a pound, and after awhile we had to do without butter; we had no money, and nothing to barter. By the time we had cows, butter was down to a shilling. That was the way with everything ; so high we couldn't buy it the first year, so plenty we couldn't sell it the next. The usual meat was bacon from Galena. After a year or two, men killed hogs here. Sometimes they went into the woods and killed those belonging to other people, much as they took other people's timber. Visits were all-day affairs.
That was southern fashion. Invitations to spend the afternoon were never given here until New England people became numerous. At first the eastern and south-
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ern people seemed like oil and water, but circumstances soon made them good friends and neighbors.
In 1840 Daniel R. Howe, now pastor of the Christian church in Monroe, taught the first district school in Clarno. There were other district schools in the county that year, but it is thought that Mr. Howe's school was the first to begin. Before the school began he was requir- ed to pass a written examination, the arithmetical part of which consisted of the question, How much would twenty bushels of oats come to at thirty cents a bushel ?
The part of Clarno's history most widely known_is that which relates to the Hawthorne burglary. The bur- glars entered Mr. Hawthorne's bed-room between mid- night and daylight, July 25. 1857, moved a cradle which stood near the bed and in which was a sick child, drew from under the bed a trunk containg $1500, and carried the trunk to the barn, where they took out the money. It was evident the theft was committed by some one acquainted with the house, and two men, Samuel Jackson, who had worked for Mr. Hawthorne, and his friend Wm. Garrington, were arrested the next morning. The money was not found in their possession, and, as they proved by the clerk of the Monroe House that they were in their room at I o'clock that night and came down to breakfast at the usual time the next morning, they were discharged. But several circumstances indicated their guilt. The track made by the thieves from the barn to the house showed that the thieves had only socks on their feet ; and wet and dirty socks, which a washerwoman identified as Garrington's, were found near the barn. Moreover, a
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peculiar boot-track from the barn towards town was like a track which one of the men had been seen to make at the hotel. A detective policeman was employed. He introduced himself to Garrington and Jackson as a coun- terfeiter, and so far gained their confidence that they entered into partnership with him. Davis, so the officer called himself, then went away to engage a woman to assist them. In his absence, and by his direction, the suspected men were re-arrested, Monday, August 10, and put under bonds so heavy that bondsmen could not be found. Davis returned, and passed a counterfeit bill, for which he was arrested Friday, August 14, and put into Garrington's cell. Davis then wrote a letter to a friend, asking to be bailed out. This letter he read to Garring- ton. The next morning Davis' friend, a second detective officer, appeared and granted his request. Later in the day, in accordance with a promise which Davis had made Garrington the day before, the friend visited Gar- rington in jail. Garrington's bail was $2,000. His vis- itor told him that he had $1,500 good money ; that he would add to it $500 in counterfeit bills, deposit it all in the bank, and, with the certificate of deposit, pro- cure Garringron's release, if Garrington would, as soon as he was out, go with him to the place where Mr. Hawthorne's money was concealed, and get him $500 in gold, with which he could redeem the counterfeit bills before their real nature was discovered. Garrington gladly agreed to this plan, and was released just at dark. The greater part of the money was buried near Smith's mill- pond. That night Garrington went with the policemen
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and dug it up, and, while thus engaged, told his new friends that he had a short time before killed a man in "Ohio. As they were returning to town, merry as larks, a number of men sprang from the brush on either side of the road, and took Garrington prisoner. On the 28th of August, Wm. Morgan, alias Wm. Jones, Wm. Marcy, and Wm. Garrington, was given up to an officer who came with arequisition from the governor of Ohio. He left behind him a complete set of burglar's tools and a knife, which Mr. Hawthorne, believing it was meant for 'him, cherishes with peculiar care. Garrington was sent to the Ohio prison for life, since which he has attempted to kill one of the wardens. He is regarded as one of the worst men in the prison. Jackson was sentenced on the 8th of September to nine years in the penitentiary, but two days later he made his escape from jail, and he has never been retaken.
The only village in Clarno is Shueyville, a place which Mr. Van Sant first selected for a milling town, before he went to Cadiz, and of which J. W. Shuey 'built the first house in 1847-'48. It is a village only in name, and the place derives its only importance from the saw-mill and flour-mill which Mr. Shuey built near it on Richland creek, both of which are now owned by Henry Truempy. Besides these two, there are four other mills in Clarno : the flour-mill of Jared Banty, and the saw-mills of M. Bowers, H. Beckman and David Fritz.
There were in 1876, four cheese factories in Clarno : Jacob Niklaus made Swiss cheese, F. Lenherr made both Limburger and Swiss cheese, and Zumbrunnen and Wittmer had two Limburger factories.
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Clarno is the best farming town in the county. Other towns have as good land, but in none of the others is all the land of the best quality, as it is in Clarno.
LARGEST FARMERS IN CLARNO IN 1876.
NAME. NO. OF ACRES.
NAME. NO OF ACRES .
George Adams. .320
Jacob Adams 380
Peter Lichtenwalner. ISS
George Reach. 215
John McCammant 290
Eli Chapin .. 200
James Moreland 260
O. H. P. Clarno 357
G. W. Clingman 234
Levi Deal ... 240
Frederick Staver 160
Alpheus De Haven .360
Henry Thorp .. 240
T. G. De Haven ... .266
A. J. Trickle .. . 240
Martin Dribelbis. 160
Edward Trickle
400
David Fritz 165
Henry Truempy 315
George Goodrich. 340
T. B. Wells.
. 200
James Hawthorne 480
O. J. White. .279
WVm. Hogan .. 194
John Whitehead. .180
Joseph Kleckner.
257
James Wilkins .. .230
LARGEST STOCK GROWERS.
T. J. Anderson. O. H. P. Clarno. James Moreland.
Henry Thorp. O. J. White.
Clarno has one of the three town-houses in the coun- ty. It was completed in the spring of 1858. The first annual town meeting was at the residence of Isaac Cal- lender, and the elections were held that year at the res- idence of John Blunt.
OFFICERS FROM 1849 TO 1877 INCLUSIVE.
CHAIRMEN.
THOS. S. BOWEN, 3 years.
HENSON IRION.
ISRAEL SMITH.
SIMON BARTLETT, 2 years. WM. J. HODGES.
ISRAEL SMITH.
A. ALBRIGHT. SAMUEL WAGNER.
THOS. S. BOWEN.
ISRAEL SMITH, 2 years.
W. J. HODGES.
JACOB MASON.
T. H. EATON.
W. BEEKMAN.
THOS. S. BOWEN, 7 years.
SIMON BARTLETT, 2 years. JACOB ADAMS.
THOS. S. BOWEN.
Daniel Leiby .. 240
H. C. Morse.
.180
Samuel Raymer.
287
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CLERKS.
J. W. SHUEY, 5 years.
ALFRED WRISBERG, 2 years.
J. W. SHUEY, 3 years. WM. MCDOWELL.
J. W. SHUEY, 3 years. HIRAM TICKNOR.
.J. W. SHUEY.
JACOB ADAMS, 4 years.
J. H. McVEAN.
JACOB ADAMS.
PETER GNAGI.
JOSEPH KLECKNER, 4 years. C. H. ADAMS, 2 years.
CADIZ.
As is evident from the history of Exeter, Monroe, and Clarno, many of the earliest settlers came to the county from the mines to the west of us. It was probably in 1834 that George W. Lot of Pennsylvania came from the mines and made, in the south-east corner of the town- ship, the first claim made in Cadiz. Wm. Boyles from Indiana, and Stephen G. and Nicholas Hale and Bennett Nolen directly from the mines, but before the Indian war from Illinois, settled near him. Next, in the spring of 1836, came Jesse W. Shull, a Pennsylvanian, who came to Green County from a trading house, which he had kept several years, and around which was growing up the village called for him Shullsburg.
The second wedding and the first school in the county were in Cadiz. In August, 1836, Mr. James Hawthorne and Miss Massy R. Boyles were married. . Preparatory to the wedding, Mr. Hawthorne went to Mineral Point to get a license, and, arriving there in the absence of the functionary who was to give it, was obliged to wait two
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or three days. In consequence of this, the wedding- guests were at Mr. Boyles' before him. As he approach- ed the house he met many who had tired of waiting and come a few miles to meet him. The ceremony proved that the minister had spent the long hours of waiting in preparing himself to shine when the bridegroom came. When everything else had been said and done that could be said and done, he had the bridal pair kneel on the puncheons while he made a prayer, in the course of which he repeated the whole of the fifth chapter of Ephesians.
The school was taught by Ralph Hildebrant in the summer of 1837, in a smoke-house built on a root-house. The house, or houses, belonged to Mr. Nolen, and the school included Clarno as well as Cadiz children. There was a store "in the state" at this time, so near the terri- torial boundary line that its owner, Geo. Curdner, board- ed at Mr. Shull's. The first death in Cadiz was that of the merchant's brother, Christopher Curdner, in 1837.
In those days the vicinity of the Pecatonica would have answered almost all the requirements of a hunter's paradise. Even in a summer evening, one had only to float down the river for a little while, to get a shot at a deer, and years after the settlement of the county there was one place where two men speared a wagon-load of fish in a single night.
The wolves were exceedingly troublesome. It was with, if not to, their music that the hunter marched home when he carried his game from the woods. At night they serenaded him to a most unreasonable length, and, for
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their trouble, were often shot through the port-hole near his door. Traps of various kinds were set for them, but the number caught was much smaller than the number of domestic animals carried away. Mr. E. T. Gardner, who went to Cadiz from Illinois in 1840, had a large lit- ter of pigs that he took great care to save. When they were small, he covered them at night with a wagon-box ; and when this enclosure was outgrown, he built them a high, tight pen by his cabin. One night there was a great noise among the pigs, and Mr. Gardner fired his pistol into the darkness. The report was followed by a pattering of feet that sounded like rain, and the pigs became quiet; but the next morning they were all gone. Horses had to be watched almost as carefully as the pigs, for the streams were so miry that a horse that went alone to the brook was not likely to come back. Hay-and the best of wild hay grew on the bottom lands-was cut where even oxen could not stand, and carried away on pitchforks.
In 1839 Mordecai Kelly and Wm. Bridges settled in Cadiz, and before the end of 1841 John Billings, Philip Michaels and Elias Deyo were there. They all came from Indiana. Before 1840, Martin Burt and Felix O'Fling from Illinois, had begun on Skinner creek, where Geo. Michael's saw-mill is now, the first mill in the town. It was not finished until 1841, before which time it be- came known as Gardner & Burt's mill. Cadiz has almost always had more mills than any other town in the county. Around four of its mills, four small villages have grown ยท up. The saw-mill owned by C. R. and J. C. Deniston
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in the village of Cadiz, on Honey creek, was built in 1844 by Van Sant and Deniston. Mr. Van Sant hoped to build up there a manufacturing town, for which he chose the Spanish name of Cadiz ; but both he and Mr. Deniston died within two years after the mill was built. The first man who went to Cadiz with his family was David Cline. The next was John Saucerman, who lived in a tent while his house was building, and whose family suffered a great fright one evening because the baby was missing and it was believed the wolves had carried it away. Now, quite a number of dwellings are clustered around the mill ; but Cadiz, though a platted village, has never had either hotel or store. South-west of the vil- lage is David Klassy's saw and grist mill.
The saw and grist-mill at Martin was built in 1845- 46, by Isaiah and Nathaniel Martin. The village of Martin was platted in 1869, and in the summer of 1876, had within its limits twelve families, a store and post- office, N. Martin's mills, including an unfinished woolen mill, and Hasse's furniture factory. The Pecatonica, which enters Cadiz after draining over half the lead region of Wisconsin, and which gives Martin its excel- lent water power, is always turning, seemingly to see where else in Cadiz man is preparing to make use of its strength to do his work. As yet it looks in vain. The resources of the town can never be fully developed with- out a railroad. A company called the "Lone Rock, Dodgeville, and Freeport Railway Co." has been organ- ized, and during the present year its project of building a road along the Pecatonica valley, from Dodgeville via
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History of Green County.
Argyle and western Green County to Freeport, has given rise to several town meetings and some voting ; but there is no immediate prospect of a road.
Browntown and Franklin are unrecorded villages. Browntown, on the left bank of the Skinner, dates its beginning from a mill built in 1846-'47 by Wm. Brown, Henson Irion, and John Wood, and consists of Emanuel Divan's flour-mill, the usual store and blacksmith-shop of country villages, and dwellings enough to make a total of ten buildings. The store and dwellings of Franklin find the reason of their being in the saw-mill of J. E. and Geo. L. Shattuck, which is also a factory of wagon fel- oes and broom handles. At a very early day speculators bought a large tract of land in Clarno and Cadiz, and borrowed money of the Franklin Bank in Illinois to pay for it. They were never able to pay the bank, and so gave up the land, which was thenceforth called the Franklin land. Before the organization of the towns, the Methodists divided the county into circuits, and the name of the circuit in which this land lay was Franklin. The usual place of holding meetings in the circuit was a school-house on what is now section one of the town of Cadiz, and gradually the name was restricted to this par- ticular place. A steam saw-mill, built there in 1854 by Benjamin Chenoweth and Henry Barber, was called the Franklin mill, and when a post-office was established there, the people wanted to call it Franklin. The post- office department objecting, it was called Lamar ; but the place is Franklin still.
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