Decatur, Wisconsin

The history of Decatur begins with the history of Centre ville, " a paper city " laid out in 1836 on the west bank of Sugar river, within half a mile of the place where the village of Decatur arose some years later. Upon the plat of Centreville, which was exhibited in Milwaukee, Detroit, and the eastern cities, were represented steamboats, churches, warehouses, and blocks of stores. Thus portrayed, the place was the cause of inanv a yearning for a western home, and a brisk sale of high priced business lots and four acre out lots began. Careful, prosperous farmers and tradesmen, wealthy speculators, and penny-saving laborers all embraced the opportunity to make a good investment, and purchased real estate in what the agents called the growing, bustling city of Centreville. One by one the purchasers learned that they were the victims of a fraud, that their land was no better than might have been bought at the government price. And so undesirable did it seem, when the unsettled state of the country was made known, that although their titles were unquestionably good, yet, so far as can be ascertained, not one of the purchasers of Centreville lots ever claimed a foot of the much lauded city, or ever settled within the limits of Decatur township. The place had indeed been surveyed and divided, as the plat showed, but the red stakes marking these divisions were the only marks of their presence which wThite men had ever left in the so-called city. Possibly too, though its social advantages were hardly of the kind to attract immigrants from the east, the city wTas as populous as its owners had claimed, for it was an Indian hunting ground. Here were found the marks of Indian labor which endured longest in Green County. The remains of an Indian council house and blacksmith shop could be seen here until 1847, when they were destroyed by a prairie fire. In one place in this vicinity, the first settlers found an acre or two of holes dug in the sand, which it is supposed the Indians had used as store houses for their corn; and Mr. Wm. Jones found, on attempting to cultivate one of their old corn fields, that they had entirely exhausted the soil. Aside from the arrow heads which are occasionally turned up by the plow, few relics of the Indian are ever found in Green County. Mr. Jonas Shook remembers seeing an Indian burying ground north of Dayton in 1837, and in '41 Messrs. John B. Perry and brother, Thos. Gillett, and others opened some mounds on "lost prairie," a little east of the village of Exeter, and found bones that it seemed to them must have belonged to a race of giants. The mounds were in two rows, one row on each side of the opening or prairie, with twentyfive mounds in one row and twenty-six in the other.

Passage source: History of Green County, Wisconsin, published 1877.

The first settlers in Decatur township settled on Jordan prairie, near the Little Jordan creek. The first claim was that of John Moore of Ohio, made in 1839 on section twenty. In the following year he was joined by his sonin-law, Thos. Chambers, by John J. Dawson, and by Samuel Rowe. The first person born in the township was Caroline Chambers, born in 1840. In 1841 Robert Mattox and E. T. Fleek settled on section seventeen. In the winter of iS4i-'2, a post office was established, which the postmaster, Mr. Moore, named Decatur, in

Passage source: History of Green County, Wisconsin, published 1877.

To Decatur belongs the honor of having the first bridge in the county. It was built in 1842, a little northeast of the site of the village of Decatur, at the place where the river was crossed by the Indian trail from Sand Prairie to the northern part of the county, and by the territorial road from Janesville to Galena. The next settler, Win. Jones, came in 1842. Soon after his arrival he built on Sugar river, section fifteen, the first saw mill in the township. The first grist mill was built by Edson and Brown, but was not begun until 1S49. In i842-'3-'4, Donald Johnson, David Bigelow, Wm.

Passage source: History of Green County, Wisconsin, published 1877.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Decatur Town - it names this place 36 more 36 times.