Cleveland's Hall and Blacksmith Shop

Of at least five of the sixteen townships in Green County, the first settlers were by birth the children of Ohio. The first of the Buckeyes in Brooklyn was J. W. Haseltine, who, though he did not begin to make a home there until 1845, bought, in December, 1839, the land on which he is living now. At Mr. Haseltine's solicitation, another Buckeye, W. W. McLaughlin, the first settler in Brooklyn, went to the township in the autumn of 1S42, taking with him a flock of sheep and thirty-four head of cattle. He completed his first cabin and moved into it the first day of November, just five days before "the hard winter" began. His house was on the line of travel from the southern part of the county to the pineries, whither a large part of the produce of the county was hauled; and, though Mrs. Mc Laughlin was the only woman the family saw for three months, men stopped at the house several times every week, and whatever supplies the family needed were obtained from them. The stock was not so easily provided for. Mr. McLaughlin hauled straw fifteen miles, but, in

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

Among the next settlers were Chas. Sutherland, A. D. Kirkpatrick, Henry Montgomery (whose death the next year is thought to have been the first in the township), and his sons Tracy and Cyrus A., who all came in 1844. Prominent among the settlers of 1845 were Jas. F. Eggleston, Stephen H. Ludlow, Jeremiah Anderson and his son Amos, Wm. R. Smith, sen., Wm. R. Smith., jun., Leroy Hudson, John Sawin, Monroe Carpenter, and Martin Flood. Most of these settlers were in the northern and eastern parts of the town. They went to mill and to market in Dane and Rock Counties much oftener than in Green, and when they were sick their hopes centered in Dr. Fox in Dane County. Many of them lived on Jug Prairie, a fertile prairie in Rock County and the eastern half of Brooklyn, which derives its name from a remark of one of the first settlers who went one day to Rock County to trade. So many of his neighbors had sent by him for vinegar and molasses that by the time he reached his destination he had nearly a dozen jugs in his wagon. To a joke of the bystanders, as he drove up to the store, he replied, oh, yes, I come from jug prairie ; and in spite of the effort of the good people on the prairie to change the name to temperance, the name jug has stuck ever since.

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 Brooklyn Town - 15,113 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.