Walworth County, Wisconsin - Chapter 4: Settlement of the Old Northwest, 1912

Chapter 4: Settlement of the Old Northwest

An early sequence of the peace of 1783 was the removal of the generally hostile Iroquois tribes from old Tryon county and farther Xew York to Canada, and the restriction of the remnant families and part tribes of friendly Indians to small and but temporary reservations in Genesee Valley. The great wilderness westward of the counties along the Hudson and- the lower Mohawk were thus opened at once to peaceful settlement. Central, northern and western Xew York, and the bordering tier of Pennsylvania counties, filled rapidly with men of Xew England. Hunger for broader and more tillable fields, and thirst for the "unearned increment" of farm values and selling prices of village lots - better material conditions - were primary causes of this swift, noiseless flight from Egypt. But the secondary cause lay closely behind. These work-hardened men were organizers of towns, counties and states ; and their influence upon political, industrial and commercial life was felt immediately. As they followed the course of the sun, having all the west before them and Providence their guide, they threw off much of the burden of older colonial ideas, and wherever they halted, they founded a more liberal Xew England, one of the nineteenth century then at hand rather than of the outworn century of the Pilgrims. The great advance guard of the invasion having secured a first choice of farms and town sites, the later divisions of this grand army, reinforced by a yet small European immigration, found the great lakes an easy mad to the broad Northwest Territory. They carried with them their household goods and much besides. Caesar and his fortunes were but a light burden compared with theirs. If not all of these men were conscious of the near-lying possibilities ami responsibilities before them, there were among them men who hoped greatly for themselves, for their country and For humanity.

hour states had grown from the joint cession of territory by Virginia, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the fullness of time had arrived for \Visconsin, which was then known as an Indian country, a fair field for trade in furs and whisky, and as having in its southwestern corner a workable deposit of lead ores. 1 '['Ik- barbarous heraldry of the state seal quarters the mattock with the anchor, plow, and sledge hammer, with a miner and a sailor as supporters, almost the last device that could occur to men who knew the state's real resources. But the motto. "Forward," is English and significant, and nearly atones for the blazonry). The establishment of a land office at Milwaukee and the contract-letting to surveyors for the work of finding and followed by the long memorable business crisis and panic of J 837. Though this was truly a national calamity, it had some determining influence on the general character of the first great wave of immigration to southeastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois - the latter then hardly less a wilderness than the former - and in some way wrought not ill for our county. Settlements and nearly atones for the blazonry.) The establishment of a land office at tives, friends, and friends' relatives and friends - fleeing from commercial and industrial disaster in the East - to this rather than to some other segment of the western paradise. Many of these newer comers journeyed by the easy way of the lakes to Milwaukee, Racine and Southport, and thence by Indian trail or territorial road to their much desired journey's cud; for, fair and fertile as were the fields passed over, there were friends and equally fair prospects but a dav or two's travel forward. Xot a few- came overland from their old homes in covered wagons - "prairie schooners."

The stout-hearted men of 1836 and 1S37 had budded better than they knew, though they had not worked blindly nor without large purpose. They had taken the first step which costs and also counts at so many of men's beginnings, and which made the way of their followers a little easier than their own had been. A colonial clergyman, preaching an "election sermon" to men of .Massachusetts, in 1688, said that God had sifted a whole nation, that He might send choice grain into the New England wilderness. It was no inferior grain, sifted largely from the Eastern states with a not negligible quantity From the British empire and from Germany, which sowed this county with home-builders from whom was to proceed a generation of nation-defenders.

It is not now and here needful to exalt overduly the character and ability of the founders nor to set them greatly above the fair average of American citizens of their time, hew of them were saints, though a large pi them were God-fearing and man-loving, and nearl) all were well bred in obi ience to law and in respeel for social order: and all were in some wa\ useful, each to others. Their new situation called into readj action the ancient virl of hospitality to strangers at their cabin doors anil of neighborly helpfulness and indulgence: though they differed sturdily, like men of many minds, y interests, ami prejudices. Like comrades in arms, and like all who mec' like dangers and difficulties, these men soon learned each other's general or special value, and neither could nor would they suffer a foible or two to hide true worth wholly out of sight; for, just then, men were more wanted than ideal perfection in men's garments.

The pioneers had left orderly, well-governed communities, where churches, schools, public records, newspapers, mails, roads and all such agencies as bind men together in large and in small communities are human nature's daily needs; and such were the needs of the men and women of Walworth after their first provision for shelter, food and fuel. Another early need, too, has been noted - that of "allotting a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison," and these needs were not long neglected. The early settlers included men of such various callings that most of the work required by their simpler life could be done among them from passably well to skillfully. Besides the indispensable farmers, housebuilders, mill-wrights, sawyers, millers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and tailors, there came at once surveyors, physicians, preachers, teachers, lawyers, retailers, inn-keepers, and moneylenders. A community so meeting and forming on prairies and among venerable trees might be likened to houses framed, marked and shipped to a colony across the sea, there to "rise like an exhalation."

Birthplaces Of Earliest Men Of Walworth

As to the old homes, it may be said more specifically and without great inaccuracy that while every New England state, nearly every county of New York, and many counties of the Western Reserve of Ohio sent within a dozen years each its contribution, the greater number were from Vermont, western Massachusetts and Connecticut, the counties of northern, central and western New York, with those along both banks of the Hudson, the northern tier of Pennsylvania, and northeastern Ohio. But there were also noticeably men of New Jersey, the upper Delaware counties of Pennsylvania and of those along her southern tier; besides men who had first sojourned in Michigan. Indiana and Illinois. There were a few from "Kvangeline-land," descended from men of Connecticut and eastern Long Island who went in 1760-61 to make Xova Scotia of Acadie, and Cornwallis, Horton, and Aylesford from the parish of Grand Pre, and also to set up for Rev. Thomas Handley a pulpit in place of Father Kclicien's altar.

Men of foreign birth found their way here easily, though they were not :it first very numerous. As transportation improved, their movement this way was somewhat quickened, and more noticeably after the Irish famine of 1847 and the German revolution of [848-49. Irishmen diffused themselves throughout the towns and villages and most of them are now hardly known but as Americans. Germans lodged themselves at first in the towns along the ea > era county line, but have set themselves no such permanent limit. Hardly one of the thirty-two counties of Ireland is unrepresented here. Xeail German state, large and small, has furnished the county with some share ol its muscles and its mind, though the later arrivals appear to be chiefly fi the northern parts of the empire. Norwegians came in time to bu) government land, and their names are found mostly in town records of Lagrange, Richmond, Sugar Creek and Whitewater. There has never been a noticeable colored element of our population, owing, most likely, to the superior attractions of the greater cities along Lake Michigan and Rock river. How much our foreign-born citizens are of us as well as with us may he inferred fairly from some hundreds of names of soldiers of the Civil war. The number of foreign-born citizens now living here is but a small proportion of the whole population.