USA > Wisconsin > Milwaukee County > Milwaukee > History of Milwaukee from its first settlement to the year 1895 > Part 67
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In politics R. P. Houghton was a Republican from the time the party was organized to the date of his death, but his activities were in business, educational, and religious, rather than in political circles. For several years he was a member of the Board of Trustees of Ripon College, and was one of the most liberal, earnest and helpful friends of that institution.
Identified with Plymouth. Church from early manhood, he was for many years one of the pillars of that organization. Of his Christian character, of his worth as a man and a citizen, and of the impress which he left upon the community in which he had so long been a conspicuous figure, no better estimate can be given than is contained in the following tribute to his memory read by his friend and associate, Mr. Charles G. Stark, at a memorial meeting of the Plymouth Church :
"It is fitting that we should gather in this place at this time to express by our presence and united action our appreciation of the life and character of Royall P. Iloughton (our friend and brother), and our sorrow, because of the sudden call which has taken him from us. For many years he was a true and faithful member of this church and society, deeply interested in all that concerned their welfare, bearing always cheer- fully and gladly his full share of their burdens, rejoicing in their prosperity, and in the success and advancement, in every right way, of the membership. Kind, considerate, brotherly-these words most truly characterize him as associated with us in these organizations.
" His business life was marked by a firm ad- herence to those high standards which have been the foundation of every truly successful business man's character. Ilis principles were such as are based upon striet integrity, commanding the con- fidence and respect of all who in any way had business relations with him. The same strong and true spirit which governed him in his busi-
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ness, guided him faithfully in all his social and church relations. This society profited unmis- takably by his wise and judicious counsels for many years, and will greatly miss the same in the years to come. We would do well to consider his example, his reverent spirit and business methods, adhering closely to those broad and gen- erous principles which he ever manifested when with us."
The surviving members of Mr. Houghton's family are Mrs. Houghton-who was Miss Lucy Bishop, of Charlemont, Massachusetts, before her marriage-Miss May Houghton and Richard W. Houghton.
GARRET VLIET descended from Daniel Van Vliet-who emigrated with his brother, William, from Holland to New Brunswick, New Jersey, shortly before the Revolutionary war-was born January 10, 1790. His father, Jasper, was the fourth son of Daniel, and married Polly Black, the couple having six children-four sons and two daughters. Before the family had grown up, but after the birth of Garret, Mr. Vliet moved into Pennsylvania, near Wilkesbarre. That part of the state was then a very new and wild country, abounding in game, especially deer and bear, on which the early settlers were largely dependent for subsistence. A few enterprising men were venturing into the country to convert its magnifi- cent pine timber into merchandise and money, but few or none dreamed of the immense wealth that lay embowelled in its mountains, and under these circumstances Garret Vliet grew to man- hood with but the few privileges of frontier life, in a rugged, heavily timbered country. Ile early became a hunter, and many were the stories of hunters life which he recounted in after years. He was for a short time a soldier in the last war with Great Britain, serving with a company of sharp- shooters. Notwithstanding the poverty of his advantages he acquired a moderate education, and learned the theory and practice of land surveying, in which he afterward became an adept, being employed for a time in the survey of the Holland purchase in the state of New York.
About the year 1818 Mr. Vliet left his old home and pushed west, stopping the first winter in Eastern Ohio. The next year he went down the Ohio river and up the Mississippi to St. Louis. There were but few steamers on the rivers at the time, and he made the trip on a keel boat, which
was propelled by rowing. poling and towing. Spending only a few months in that region, and being detained at Cape Girardeau several weeks by severe illness, he returned to Miami county, Ohio, where he subsequently married Rebecca Frazey. Soon after his return to Ohio the canal improvements of that state were inaugurated, and Garret Vliet was employed in the construction of the Miami canal. Thus he became acquainted with Micajah T. Williams, chief of the canal com- missioners of the state, Byron Kilbourn, Increase A. Lapham and Samuel Farrer, and formed friend- ships which lasted through life. After the com- pletion of the canal he took charge of the four locks at Lockland, ten miles from Cincinnati, and afterward was elected and re-elected surveyor of Hamilton county. In the spring of 1835 he came with Byron Kilbourn to that part of the Northwest territory now known as Wisconsin, and proceeded with him to Green Bay, where they attended the land sales. Mr. Kilbourn having acquired a consid- erable quantity of land on the west side of the river at Milwaukee, Mr. Vliet came from Green Bay and laid out a portion of it into town lots, after- ward returning to Green Bay and making a care- ful examination of the water power along the Fox River, with the view of purchasing some part of it. IIe concluded, however, that there was too much of it for any portion to become immediately valuable, though entertaining a high opinion of its ultimate usefulness. In the fall he returned with Mr. Kilbourn to Cincinnati, and soon entered into a contract with the surveyor-general to survey for the government towns 7, 8 and 9 of ranges 18, 19 and 20, and town 7, range 21, being the towns of Delafield, Pewauke, Brookfield, Wauwatosa, Merton, Lisbon, Menomonee, Erin, Richfield and Germantown, in the present counties of Milwau- kee, Waukesha and Washington. In January, 1836, he started with his party to execute the con - tract. Their route was down the Ohio and np the Wabash, by steamer, to Lafayette, Indiana, and thence with teams. IIe proceeded across the country on horseback, meeting the party at La- fayette, and from that point accompanied them to Wisconsin. This survey was completed during the season of 1836. In the spring of 1837 he went to Dubuque, and began the laying-out of that town-site, for which, together with four other towns on the Mississippi and in Wisconsin, he had taken a contract from the government. What at
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the present time would be called a "ring" had been formed with reference to the towns on the Mississippi, and they wished to control the sur- vey and procured an order suspending his work. This suspension and annulling of his contract en- tailed upon him a considerable loss, for which he obtained but partial and tardy indemnity.
Returning to Cincinnati, he closed up his affairs there, and on the 23d of August, 1837, started with his family for their new home in Milwaukee.
For many years Mr. Vliet lived in this city, re- spected and loved, but avoiding any act which would tend to bring him into public life, though he was a member of the first Constitutional Con- vention, in 1846. He died a quiet and painless death, August 5, 1877.
THOMAS A. GREENE .- In a volume in- tended to commemorate the names and lives of those who have contributed to Milwaukee's growth and prosperity, it is appropriate that Thomas Arnold Greene should receive mention. as he was not only one of the best known of her men of business, but also an unassuming student of science and a careful and precise thinker.
Mr. Greene was born on the 2nd of November, 1827, in Providence, Rhode Island, and died at his residence in Milwaukee on the 7th of Septem- ber, 1894. IIis parents were Quakers, and though for nearly forty years he had not been a member of that society, in his life and business he was an exemplar of the gentle and peaceful teachings of the Friends. His mother died when he was but seven years of age, and he was sent to the Friends' Boarding School near Providence, Rhode Island, where he remained for eight years. The instruc- tion was good, the discipline rigorous to an ex- treme, and of home-life he knew little during the most impressionable years of his boyhood. In his fifteenth year he was placed in a collegiate in- stitution at Point IIill, Rhode Island, where the religious instruction was paramount. His school life ended in his seventeenth year; his father wished him to study medicine, a choice that was not in accord with his own taste. When in that year he entered the retail drug store of Chapin & Thurber, in Providence, it was his purpose to ob- tain a practical knowledge of materia medica. Both of his employers were scholarly men and good chemists for that time, and like most drug- gists of that date made many of their medicinal preparations from the crude drugs. Mr. Greene's
attention, care and industry enlisted their active interest, and in order that he might become thoroughly informed in regard to their business affairs they gave him access to their books. By means of this and other favors, he was able to complete his pharmaceutical studies in less than the usnal time, and in later years he valued highly the business education derived from his confiden- tial relations with his old employers.
During his connection with Chapin & Thurber, Mr. Greene had given up all idea of entering the medical profession, and now having become a pre- scription druggist he was anxious to establish him- self independently. The city of Providence offered little inducement to a young man with small cap- ital, and he made up his mind to seek his fortune in the new West, hoping to obtain employment in Milwaukee or Chicago; or, if opportunity offered, to open a store of his own.
In June, 1848, being then in his twentieth year, he started for the West, making the trip by boat to New York, thence by steamboat to Albany, where he took the canal for Buffalo. From Buf- falo the journey was made by steamer to Milwau- kee, where he arrived on July 4th, and thus noted in his diary : " Milwaukee I like from my very brief stay better than any other place I ever was in. * The city appears very thrifty, neat and beautiful ; new and tasteful residences form the most thickly settled portion of the city on the river." From Milwaukee he went to Chicago and Kenosha in search of employment. Chi- cago repelled him on account of its flat, marshy environment, and he returned to Milwaukee, where he bought out the retail drug store of Henry Fess, on East Water street, where the Pabst building now stands. In the autumn of the same year, Dr. Harry II. Button, whom he had known during the doctor's student days at Brown University, came West and a partnership was formed under the firm name of Greene & Button, which was terminated only by the death of Dr. Button in 1890. For some years they did a retail business, then during the fifties, as oppor- tunities offered, they gradually worked into a small jobbing trade, which grew so rapidly that they were soon able to drop the retail part alto- gether. In 1873 their drug business was incorpo- rated as Greene-Button Company, and became one of the most substantial of Milwaukee's jobbing honses.
Thomas a Greene
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By his careful and methodical method of hand- ling affairs, Mr. Greene won the confidence and esteem of his business associates. Generalities never satisfied him; facts and figures were the data from which every business judgment was made, and his office was the training school in which several successful men gained the best ex- perience. At the time of his death Mr. Greene was president of the Greene-Button Company, a director and member of the Finance Committee of the Northwestern National Insurance Com- pany, vice-president of the Wisconsin Trust Com- pany, vice-president of the Milwaukee Cement Company, and was president of the Milwaukee Gas Light Company at the time of its sale to an eastern syndicate.
Mr. Greene's Quaker ancestry and education greatly influenced his character. His life was marked by a strict singleness of purpose and ab- solute integrity, by careful and systematic atten- tion to business, by thriftiness and simplicity of living. His sense of justice and honesty, and almost morbid conscientiousness made him often seem stern in his intercourse with others. His abhorrence of flattery or any form of insincerity rendered him undemonstrative and reserved. When opposing what he thought to be injustice and wrong he was found to have invincible strength of purpose unmoved by any motives of policy or expediency, intuitively detecting the false. He was punctual and systematic in the smallest details of daily life as well as in his partici- pation in the larger affairs of the world. A man of few words, his aye was aye and his nay, nay. He was more severe with himself, and demanded more of himself than he demanded of others. Those who knew him best realized his gentle, sensitive and affectionate disposition, which was always ready, in an unostentatious way, to share in trouble and to lend assistance by deed, as well as by counsel. Little children always recognized in him a sympathetic friend.
The extreme conscientious principles which gov- erned him would be perhaps best illustrated by his attitude toward political affairs. His aversion to war, due probably to his Quaker inheritance, would not allow him to take part in the civil war. He felt, as he could not conscientiously fight for his country, he ought not to have the privilege of voting for it. No one rejoiced more than he in the abolition of slavery, but he could
not bring himself to approve the means to that end. He did not vote until memories and diffi- culties growing out of the war had disappeared ; voting, first, the Citizen's ticket in 18SS. He kept himself well informed on political issues, but held himself aloof from all party discussions, though in sympathy he was a Republican.
Mr. Greene was not only a conservative man of business-he was much more. Few knew, on account of his reticence and modesty, his scien- tific attainments. From early boyhood he had shown a deep love for botany and geology. This deeper characteristic of his nature he, with a strong consciousness, stifled during his early career, saying that business and the necessities of livelihood demanded not only all his time but his best mental effort. Soon, however, after estah- lishing his own home he gave a portion of his time to these studies, which were a passion to him. He had gathered together as a result of patient study and hard work, perhaps the largest minera- logical collection in the West. Every specimen he knew well, and his collection was arranged with strictest nicety and order. During the fif- teen years of his life he chiefly devoted his atten- tion to palaeontology, studying especially the Niagara and Hamilton groups about Milwaukee. His collection of the fossils of these formations is, without doubt, the best in this country. For many years before his death Mr. Greene was a trustee of the public museum and actively inter- ested in its welfare. He had been for a long time a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Although of a weak physical constitution and obliged more than most men to consider his health, Mr. Greene has accomplished what few successful business men have been able to do-he has in the realm of science attained a high posi- tion, and his collection proved a valuable aid to professor and student.
Mr. Greene was a good botanist, knowing inti- mately the flora of Wisconsin and of his native New England, taking more pleasure in a day in the country than in all the amusements a city could offer. He was fond of floriculture as his garden testified. He always kept a diary devoted almost exclusively to observations upon the blooming of his plants and a record of the weather of which he was a keen observer.
As a spectator, Mr. Greene was interested in
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out-door sports, but in the old Scotch game of curling-undertaken at first for the benefit of his health-he became actively interested, and was one of the most enthusiastie members of the Mil- waukee Curling Club.
Mr. Greene was for thirty-eight years a member of the Unitarian Church. He was present in 1856 at the meeting when the movement toward the present church in this city was made. He believed strongly in the essentials of the Unitarian faith, and while never intruding his opinions, could state his views logically and eoneisely. Every Sunday found him with unfailing regularity an interested listener in his pew. He was greatly interested in religious and theological questions, and had read extensively on these subjects. He was a believer in organized effort to help the poor, and was a director on the board of the Associated Charities.
In 1857 Mr. Greene married Miss Elizabeth Lyner Cadle, who came to Milwaukee from New York in 1849. Mrs. Greene was of a quiet, affec- tionate nature, and sympathized deeply with her husband in all his interests. Two children survive them, Mary, wife of Iloraee A. J. Upham, and IToward Greene. It was in the family that the few who really knew Mr. Greene admired him most. Quiet, retieent, earing little for society, Mr. and Mrs. Greene made their home the center of their deepest interests. The friends who en- tered their home will always remember its pure, unselfish atmosphere. There it was Mr. Greene threw aside the cares and restraints of life and proved himself a genial, loyal and sympathetic friend.
The happy home life of thirty-five years dura- tion was broken by the death of Mrs. Greene in 1892. Mr. Greene survived his wife but two years, his funeral taking place on the second anniversary of her death.
WILLIAM E. SMITH began life as a mer- chant, and during his long residence in Wisconsin was actively engaged, nearly all the time, in mer- eantile pursuits. A native of Scotland, he was born June 18, 1824, and when eleven years of age came with his father's family to this country. They landed in New York, where all remained but the father, who went westward in search of a home. A quarter section of land was secured in Michigan, near Detroit, on which a rude log cabin was soon erected, and in the spring of 1836 the family took possession of it, and commenced
the labor of making a new farm. Hard work was a matter of course, and the young son who was destined to become the chief executive of a great state, performed with willing hands his full share of the toil; nor did this break the fibre of even one of so fine a nature, but his eourage met hard- ships bravely, and surmounted all difficulties. For several years he thus worked, attending school a portion of the time, and taking a deep interest in a village debating club. In 1841 he was offered a clerkship in a small store, and entered upon the duties of the position with a fixed deter- mination to do his full share of work. In this place he formed those industrious and methodical business habits that characterized his whole life and made it so complete a success. During his term of service in this capacity he availed him- self of a town library, and read extensively works of history, travel, science, etc., and also kept a close watch of the newspapers. He re- mained in this clerkship about five years, and being frugal in his habits, saved a large portion of his small salary, which was voluntarily handed over to his father.
In 1846 Mr. Smith was tendered a position in the well-known dry-goods house of Lord & Taylor, in New York, where he spent one year, when he accepted an important position in the wholesale house of Ira Smith & Company of that city. Here he established a character for integ- rity and business ability of a high order, winning the entire confidence of his employers and of all with whom he had business transactions. In the fall of 1849 he started a general store at Fox Lake, Wisconsin, and from that time made this state his home, and the record of his life is a part of its history. In the fall of 1850 he was elected a member of the Assembly, and during the season of 1851 took an active part in shaping its legisla- tion. Ile was ever at his post, and possessed a full understanding of the business before the legislature. He was a member of the State Senate in 1858 and 1859, and again in 1864 and 1865. In that body he was marked for his strong common sense and constant efforts to secure such legislation as should give substantial ehar- acter to the state. He took a deep interest in the cause of education, and was chairman of the committee on that subject. In the fall of 1865 he was elected state treasurer, and was re-elected in 1867. thus serving four years in that impor-
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tant position. His discharge of duty was prompt and satisfactory, and his honesty and integrity as well as his ability commended him to the people. In the Republican state convention of 1869 he was a prominent candidate for governor, but was not successful in securing the nomination. At the expiration of his term as treasurer he re- turned to Fox Lake, and in the fall of 1870 was again elected to the Assembly, and on the meeting of that body in January, 1871, was made speaker of the House of Representatives. He went to Europe in 1871, and on his return his friends urged his nomination for governor, but without success. In 1877 he received that nomination without opposition, and was by a handsome majority elec- ted, and re-elected in 1879. Of his first canvass for governor the Milwaukee Sentinel said some years later:
" Mr. Smith was the representative of a prin- ciple which made his election an event of much greater significance than usually attaches to a state election. It was, indeed, an important event in the history of national politics. The greenback movement was then in its height, and its leaders were confident of victory. The business of the country was at its lowest point of depression, and it was confidently predicted that unless the act of Congress providing for the resumption of specie payments on the first of January, 1879, was re- pealed, universal bankruptcy would follow. In the West, especially, the greenback wave threat- ened to sweep everything before it. In this state the Democrats adopted a platform calling for the repeal of the Resumption Act, and nominated Hon. James A. Mallory as their candidate for gov- ernor. In the Republican strongholds of the state greenback clubs had been organized in nearly every town, and thousands of Republicans had joined them. The Republican politicians were badly demoralized, and the state convention adopted an ambiguous platform, hoping by that means to retain the Republican greenbackers. It was under these circumstances that Gov. Smith came before a public meeting in this city early in the canvass, and made a speech in which he boldly and unambiguously committed himself in favor of resumption. He subsequently canvassed the state, making resumption the leading issue of the campaign, and speaking in all the strongholds of greenbackism. It was thought by many to be an unwise and impolitic course, but while he lost
thousands of votes of men who up to that time had sustained the Republican party, he rallied around him the friends of an honest currency, and was triumphantly elected. The result was a noti- fication to the country that there was still a large number of sane people in the Northwest, and was one of the most serious blows given to the greenback policy."
In his discharge of the duties of the executive office, Mr. Smith was practical, safe and faithful. Nothing was left undone. All persons were treated with great courtesy and the rights of all were respected. His administration of state affairs was a creditable one, reflecting honor upon himself and giving satisfaction to the people.
In addition to those already named, Governor Smith filled many other places of public trust of importance to the state. He was twenty-one years a regent of normal schools, and four years a director of the state prison. He also served as trustee of the Wisconsin Female College at Fox Lake for twenty-six years; of the Wayland Uni- versity at Beaver Dam; of the Milwaukee Female College, and of the Chicago University. For many years he was a trustee and member of the Execu- tive Committee of the Northwestern Life Insur- ance Company; was at one time vice-president of the Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce; was one of the vice-presidents of the National Board of Trade, and was long a member and once president of St. Andrew's Society.
The life of Governor Smith was a busy and successful one. Few men have occupied so many and so responsible positions, and discharged the duties of all of them with so much satisfaction to the public. Ilis official record is without a stain. His practical sense, his affability at all times, his real interest in all subjects pertaining to public matters, his admiration for his adopted state, and his zeal in the promotion of its welfare, rendering him deservedly popular as an official and as a man.
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