USA > Wisconsin > Washington County > Washington County, Wisconsin : past and present > Part 7
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"Order, or no order," exclaimed Solon, "I wish you to understand, Mr. Speaker, that I am here to represent the interests of the great County of Washington; and, if my bill is not passed, I will tear this house down over your heads."
Some of his friends succeeded in calming him. He was brought to his room, where he could meditate over the fix his indulgence had put him into. His bill was afterwards passed, and so were a goodly number of others which he introduced and urged for passage "with great vigor and fair ability." Taken in all, he was an able, though somewhat rash, representative.
Alexander of the Wilds
It was upon a day in the autumn of the year 1845 when a young man of medium size, light complexion, and blue eyes-a pure Anglo- Saxon type-arrived on the bank of the Milwaukee river at the very spot where today the village of Barton stands. He threw his ax and surveyor's instruments down and sank weary into the tall grass. For days he had followed the endless windings of the river and hewn a path through the primeval forests of the bottom lands which never before the foot of a white man had trodden.
Barton Salisbury-this was the name of the blonde Anglo-Saxon -had, in 1839, come from the East to Wisconsin, and settled in the town of Mequon. His belongings consisted of a horse and a wagon wherewith he had traveled. Arrived at his chosen place, he sold his rig, and with the money bought a piece of land bordering on the Pigeon creek, or Mequonsippi, as the Indian name was, a tributary to the Milwaukee river. He built a small sawmill, and upon the
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completion of it, a log house. Into this he moved with his wife who had meanwhile, upon his bidding, arrived from Ohio. In it he also held primitive court sessions, having been elected justice. For two years he lived on the spot and followed the occupation of a sawyer; then he swapped his sawmill for one hundred and sixty acres of land with house and barn. The house was so roomy that he decided to start a tavern in it.
He was a "Jack of all trades," so to speak. He had tried his brawn and brain as a sawyer, a carpenter, a judge, a farmer, and a host before we saw him wearily stretching in the grass at the beginning of this sketch. Three years after he had taken to farming, he went on a surveying trip up the Milwaukee river. When he got to the point mentioned, he saw that here Nature had provided all the es- sentials for the start of a village, maybe a city. Every rushing wave in the river seemed to coax him: "Here is an excellent water power; harness me, and I will make things hum for you!"
Before Barton dropped himself tired in the fat grass of the river bank, he knew one thing: on this very spot he would build his next shanty. Thus arose in the fall of 1845, on the right bank of the river, opposite the roller mills of today, the first log house, and with it the village of Barton was founded. His wife and children he had sent back to her parents in Ohio to remain until the place would be a little populated. She had remonstrated against again moving into the wilderness, having had plenty of that sort of life. Her husband succeeded in attracting within a few months a considerable colony of settlers, and in June of the following year his wife returned with the children.
He now went at the erection of a flouring mill for which he had won two settlers, the Caldwell brothers, as partners. His brother, a millwright, whom he had come from Ohio, was entrusted with the management of the enterprise. Barton also built the first sawmill of the place.
But his mission as a founder did not end here. In the winter of 1847-48 he made arrangements to found a village farther down- stream. To a place, exactly marked by him, he sent a man to build a log house. It was the first house that went up on the site of the present village of Newburg. A sawmill, a flouring mill, an ashery, where pearlash was extracted of the potash gained from the ashes of the burned brush and useless wood of the clearings, a dwelling house for himself, and other buildings followed. He was the leading spirit of the new place.
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In the fall of 1849, Barton Salisbury was engaged in building a hotel at Newburg. He had entrusted two young men, relatives of his, with the work. But fearing that they were too inexperienced in carpentry, he himself took a hold of the band saw and the adze. So he met his fate. A rotten timber on which he stood, broke, and he fell from the roof of the building down into the cellar. Bleeding and unconscious he was picked up, and seven hours later he breathed his last, without having regained consciousness. He was but thirty- six years old.
It may seem odd, but let me draw a little parallel between this "Alexander of the Wilds" and the great Macedonian of historic fame. He, too, started out to conquer, but with an ax, and not with a phalanx. With it he cut his way through the wilderness. He, too, founded communities when he found conditions favorable to their life and growth. The pioneers who trusted his star, followed him. He, too, planted a higher civilization beside the crude totem mounds. He, too, died young; it was, however, no death amidst triumph and revels at Babylon, but a sober, tragic death amidst strenuous work and great plans for the future. Of the places which he founded, none has attained to importance, else his figure would be cut in marble, or his name emblazoned in bronze. Unsculptured he sleeps in some forgotten grave. He is not forgotten altogether, though, for a village bears his given name. His is the fate of innumerable heroes that went down into obscurity. Once in a great while fate places such a man in a larger field of activity, and he develops into an Alexander, a Napoleon, a Lincoln, or a Bismarck.
An Operetta Revolt
Bent over a fifty-year-old newspaper file, an amiable old gentleman holding a high office in Washington, D. C., sat in the sanctum of the "West Bend News." The tawny sheets with their faded and blurred print brought memories of boyhood to his mind; they furnished the keys to unlock secret drawers of the memory, and things that happened long ago lay before him in the bright colors of the nonce. Then he would pass remarks to one of the editors on this or that item which lie found true to his recollection. Thus he came to speak of Wm. A. Pors, a member of the "Latin Settlement" in the town of Farm- ington, and his experiences at the draft in Port Washington in 1862. . The occurrences at that draft have a bearing on similar occurrences,
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though on a much smaller scale, in West Bend. They were the signal for a little riot on this side of the border line.
"And when they could not find him at home, they chopped off the heads of all the chickens in the yard, and not even did they spare the canary bird. Thus they quenched their bloodthirst," the gentleman corroborated with a chuckle.
Before the listeners rose pictures of turbulent times. It was on the Ioth of November, 1862, and the Civil War had been raging for a year and a half. Over at Port Washington was to be a draft to get recruits for the Wisconsin regiments. In the Court House sat the draft commissioner, Wm. A. Pors, and the examining physician, Dr. S. Hartwig, of Cedarburg.
To the Luxemburgers, good-natured and loyal otherwise, who were the majority of the population, the draft was an odd thing- part of a conundrum, and part of a foul play. In the first place, they could not understand why there should be war, since no enemy was attacking the country. Then the question arose: When the North and the South fight each other, who is right? Then they could under- stand but little or no English, and their German papers-I am sorry to say-decried the draft and covertly or openly encouraged resist- ance. Finally, they had suspicion that there was no fair play at the draft, and that a fellow with a pull or money back of him could get away easily.
These were the reasons why on the morning of the draft day a mob of nearly a thousand heads and armed with many kinds of weapons appeared before the Court House, and, without any parley, stormed it. To do this, it did not take much bravery, for the build- ing was in an utterly defenseless condition. And if there was any- body who felt a lack of courage, he readily filled it up from his bottle. The leader seized the draft lists and tore them up to shreds. They shoved Commissioner Pors through the door and threw him down the steps. Under a shower of stones he fled, bruised and battered, to the postoffice and hid in the cellar, the rabble after him. They had to give up the chase when they found the cellar door locked and bar- ricaded, their victim safely behind it. But now they turned to his residence. The erstwhile "Latin Farmer" who had studied law and built up quite a lucrative practice owned a neat home. But when the infuriated mob left it, the furniture was reduced to kindling wood. Nothing that was not nailed down, was spared. They wanted to see blood, and so they slew the canary bird and the chickens. Several other houses, the owners of which were suspected to have a hand in
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the draft, shared the same fate. With a flag on which a painter was made to paint the words "No Draft," the rabble marched through town. It was now conceived to hunt down all the Freemasons who had pledged for peace and order. This turn was the psychological moment for those with more cool reason and intelligence left to sep- arate from their blinded brethren.
These kept up tearing up and down the streets. In the saloons they gulped whisky in enormous quantities. Outside they shouted: "No draft! Burn up the Court House!" They caught hold of a poor barrister and clubbed him, and would have killed him, had a saloon- keeper in his pity not jerked him into his house. They compelled the editor of the English paper to print a sign reading "No Draft, No Destruction of Property." This compulsory piece of job work nearly cost him two months' imprisonment at Madison, but, as he put it, "when a man's life is at stake, he is willing to take chances on the law." A little four-pound cannon that in times of peace had added to the glamour of Fourth-of-July celebrations was loaded with the only ball that could be found, and dragged to a pier at the harbor, clear for action. Woe to the warship that should dare an attack from the lake!
Meanwhile Commissioner Pors had crawled out of his hiding place, and in a closed carriage had started on his flight to Milwaukee. On his report of the riot, eight companies of soldiers who were camping in Milwaukee were sent on a steamer to the place of the trouble. They reached Ulao, four miles south of Port Washington, at mid- night, where a portion of the troops were landed. These marched toward the village and enclosed it, while the others steamed on and layed by at the pier with its threatening Fourth-of-July cannon. There was no bombardment, for the heroes of the riot had come to the conclusion that to take to their heels was the better part of courage. About one hundred and twenty of them were caught and for some months kept prisoners at Camp Randall near Madison.
Governor Salomon in a proclamation warned the citizens of Ozau- kee county of the danger and folly of further resistance. And now the change came over their minds, and the county and its seat vied with the other parts of the State in the patriotic endeavor to support the cause of the Union.
Commissioner Pors returned. The past was buried. For a long time afterwards he served his fellow-citizens in a very honorable posi- tion, on the very scene of the operetta revolt.
CHAPTER XIII
THE GERMAN ELEMENT
It was in the forties of the last century when the maelstrom of German immigration sent one of its branches into Washington county. Close up to the southern and southeastern borders German colonists had already settled, as in the colony of the Lutherans at Freistadt. This attracted their countrymen who, backed by the settlers, pushed into the country across the border, buying whatever Government land was left or inducing the Yankees to sell their farms at what was in those days considered a fair margin of profit.
They came from many parts of Germany, from the north, south, east, and west, not to forget the Saxons of the middle. They did not shirk a long, wearisome, and sometimes even fatal sea voyage, to build a new home in a country with more room and liberty, on a soil that in its natural wealth and hidden vim was craving for man to empty on him its cornucopia. They were mostly common people, sons and daughters of the soil, men with callous hands and women trained in the severe side of life, who in spite of hard labor had little chance at material independence in their native land. But it was just such people that their new home needed. After the pioneers had hewn their clearings in the vast forests, and the virgin soil had produced its first rich harvests, the custodians of higher culture could gain a footing. It is true, there were exceptions. Occasionally the settlers were accompanied by their pastor, or young men of an academic edu- cation were among them, wrestling with the wilds, a treatise in one hand and the ax in the other.
They must have been energetic, enduring and frugal, and the product of generations of toilers, these sturdy Germans in incipient Washing- ton county. It was an immense change to drop from the high state of development of the fatherland into the beginnings of a civilization. Most of them, certainly, were in the same fix the soldiers of Cortez had been : their ships had been burnt behind their backs, that is, they would not have been able to return, had they wanted to, for their
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means were all but exhausted. So it was a case of fighting or dying. They fought and were victorious, most of them anyway.
When the first and hardest part of pioneering was done, the achieve- ments of civilization came in its wake. Highways and railroads, schools and churches were built. Sawmills and gristmills arose where a rivulent or river offered a waterpower, and around this nucleus hamlets and villages and cities grew. Many are the communities that trace their origin to a sawmill, and should name as their founder some enterprising sawyer. Some of the places, at the outset extremely promising, have fallen into decay, or had their cannily planned sites returned to the plow. It had to be taken into the deal.
The old German settlers remained as true to their descent as was possible far away from the source of German culture. This essence their children inherited to a great degree. But it must be considered that the first owners of the soil, the Anglo-Americans, nicknamed Yankees, exacted a great and lasting influence, and that things foreign to its culture have, strange enough, so often seemed imposing to the German mind. The Yankees spoke the language of the country and lived up to its customs, and the country had welcomed the newcomers on an equal footing with them. And the newcomers did not want to be ingrates. They put themselves a double task: to preserve their mother tongue and customs, and at the same time adapt themselves to the new conditions, to the American citizenship, and learn as much of the country's language as possible. Because of their sequestered life in the country, aside from their love for the home with its narrow bounds, they easily managed to stay German in their core and manners. But not everywhere in the county did public life show a distinct German stamp. There have always been places where the American predominated. Take for example the two cities of the county. Hartford always was more of an American community than West Bend. Taken as a whole, and considering the degree of their education, the German settlers have played their part honorably and well.
Instances of the self-centered mind of these settlers furnish the German names given to many localities in the county. Although they were mostly surnames, they were better known than their English originals. A locality between Schleisingerville and Cedar creek was named "Hunsrueck;" the town of Germantown furnished names like "Goldenthal," "Teufelseck," "Scholleklopper," and "Schnappsberg." Richfield contributed the weird name of "Blutgericht ;" St. Lawrence was called "Buckel." Addison contributed "Gansburg" and "Froesch-
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loch." Barton was well known by the name of "Salzburg," a corrup- tion of Salisbury, the name of the founder of that village. St. Mathias's surname was "Vielnoethig;" Mayfield, named after Maien- felden, the home of its Swiss founder, is up to this day well known by the name of "Katzbach." Some of the names are obviously nick- names bred by the stern humor of the privation-ridden settlers, but they were generally accepted.
Generally speaking, the different German tribes lived mingled, with- out any attempt to separate. In some places, however, larger numbers from the same parts of Germany congregated, like the Bavarians at St. Lawrence, the Saxons at Fillmore, the Hessians in the towns of Germantown and Polk, and the Rhenish-Prussians from the banks of the River Moselle west of Big Cedar lake.
The most noteworthy, although very short-lived, German settle- ment in the county was the so-called "Latin Settlement" in the town of Farmington. It received that name because its founders were uni- versity students, who understood Latin. The settlement will be the subject of the following chapter.
To the old settlers of the county the preservation of their German tongue seemed vital. For years this was tended to in the family and in the church. Later most every place had a German turners' or a shooting society. But these have all but one disappeared. The ex- ception is the "Farmington Turnverein" of Fillmore. Singing so- cieties have flourished and withered; there is not one of any im- portance left. Some of these societies possessed quite large German libraries. In passing, the benevolent societies and lodges who used, and those who still use, the German language in their meetings may be mentioned.
After the oral word, the written word is the most effective means to bind a race together. So we get to the German press of the county. Whoever stops to think over the predicament of that press needs to be no pessimist to have his misgivings as to a bright future of it. There appear two German weeklies as against five English ones. The first German weekly, "Der Phoenix," was started in West Bend in 1858 by Gustav Grahl. It appeared for about a year and that was all. In 1861 the experiment was repeated by F. Orthwein. He bought the printing outfit of the defunct Port Washington "Adler." The name of the paper was "West Bend Democrat." Whether the publisher did not find enough support, or whether he felt an irrepressible desire to exchange his pen for the sword is hard to say at this late hour. After the paper had come out a few times, he locked up the shop and Vol. I-6
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enlisted in a regiment to help squelch the rebellion. Later it was tried to publish a German weekly in connection with the English "West Bend Post." But before two years were over, it was abandoned for want of support. The next attempt in this line was made in 1888, when the Washington County Publishing Association, the president of which, Mr. Ernst Franckenberg, was always an ardent advocate of the preservation of the German tongue, bought the "Beobachter," a weekly which since 1880 had appeared in Fond du Lac and had numerous subscribers in Washington county, and made West Bend the place of publication. This venture proved more successful, and the paper up to now has managed to hold its own. In 1895 another German, weekly, "Das Echo," was launched in West Bend, but as there was apparently no demand for it, the publication was discon- tinued six months afterwards. In 1897 a German weekly of smaller compass, "Der Botschafter," was started in Schleisingerville.
A most potent factor in the preservation of German, one that is often overlooked or little credit given, were the parochial schools of the Catholics and the Lutherans, as well as the Sunday schools of the Reformed, the Methodist and the Evangelical congregations. With very few exceptions, German is not taught in the public schools.
But the phenomenon that is witnessed in every other part of the country with a foreign-born population is also evident here. The young generation is drifting into the ranks of English-speaking Amer- ica. It must be regarded as an exception when a boy or girl, besides speaking it, is so versed in German as to enjoy its literature, or write a good style. This latter would be considered almost a marvel. There are plenty of the second generation, who are classed among Germans and who could not read a German paper or book. An im- pure German, reminding of the Pennsylvania Dutch, is still widely spoken among the old folks, while the children's range, construction and accent of the language does not differ much from that of their Anglo-American playmates. I have known Irishmen who could talk German fully as well as some of the second-generation Germans. Even the best German spoken is deteriorated to some extent. Their best writers-few as there are left-find it almost impossible to evade the Americanizing influence in their diction. On the other hand, most everybody now-a-days understands common English.
It is small wonder that all this should be. Most people are far from being linguists who master several tongues; all they want in that line is to know enough of one to fetch them through life. The exi- gencies of the country are that English should have the first place.
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It is actually a business proposition with Americans. And what little German is learned, is done so mainly for business' sake. It may be too that, contrary to the German, the average American does not believe in the widening of the mental horizon, that is claimed to follow the study of more than one language, which claim is still open for dis- cussion in spite of a German emperor's saying that "as many languages he learned, as many lives he lived." But, after all, it seems a pity that a tongue which in point of perfection is considered second only to Latin should be wantonly thrown away, while it could be cultivated with little effort in a county peopled almost entirely by Germans and their offspring.
It is conceded by Germans of high standing that the third genera- tion is lost to the German cause. The country has assimilated them, the Americanizing process is complete, the melting pot has done its duty. Yet they show a reverence for German things that is touching. It strikes one like the reverence for a dear departed family member. If there is a library in the house, one may still find Schiller's works be- side those of Shakespeare.
While the old settlers with their fondled recollections of Germany and its advanced civilization very often were seized by a kind of mild homesickness in spite of the American freedom and abundance, their children learned to love the new country as well as anybody can love his native land, for America is their home country. They could but respect their parents' love for the fatherland, and try to understand it by means of analogy.
There is no doubt that the higher American culture has a great fas- cination for the progeny of the immigrants of German and other nationalities. Its influence is as strong in the country as in the cities, and the means by which it is exercised are the public schools, the ideals of which are the same all over. Whoever did not come in touch with the higher German culture will surrender unconditionally. Because the immigrated parents were, rare cases excepted, not in a position or educated enough to disclose to their children the priceless treas- ures of German literature, there was for the brighter ones who felt a desire for a better education but one way to walk on, and this led to the intellectual life of cultured America.
The fact that the county became overwhelmingly settled by Ger- mans or their descendants did not change things. The old folks stayed in the old ruts, they piled up material wealth, but did not rise a modicum intellectually to counteract the leaven left by the original Yankee settlers and to increase their influence in order to
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at least retard the English-speaking tide and the estrangement of the young generation to the notions and ideals of the elders.
But this is, as already said, no localism. It may be noticed in this country wherever foreigners have settled. That invisible Ameri- canizing power is at work everywhere. It seems to be aided by Nature. And in point of amalgamation the Germans are at the head of all other nationalities. Attempts have been made of late to band them together to arouse their racial pride, to get them to voice their views in the political arena, warning them not to give up their characteristics unreservedly, pointing to the valuable help German leaders and soldiers have rendered this country in the Revolutionary War and in the War of the Rebellion. It seems uncouth to think that a race who has given to the world writers and poets like Goethe and Schiller, philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer, composers like Beethoven and Wagner, and painters like Duerer and Holbein, should be just good enough to clear the wilderness, live a little longer in a Cindarella-like lowliness, and disappear without a trace in the great crucible. But the attempts to prod them into activities are little short of failures. They come rather late. The old gen- eration who fully could comprehend the movement is rapidly dying out; the second generation is half estranged to it; and the third generation is American pure and simple. The immigration from Germany, which alone could infuse new life blood to such a move- ment, is reduced to an insignificant figure, and there is little prospect that it will be increased.
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