Iron Works - Tunnels

 I'm told that, north of the bridge,  there are still tunnels which go from the east side of North Main Street where the Coke stoves and the briquetting plant  were located over to the Iron Works west of the street.  If anyone has evidence to support this, let me know.  

St. Peter's Chapel - Milwaukee

 

My great, great grandfather, Joseph Schussler,  and great, great grandmother, Fanny Neukirch (daughter of pioneer Franz),  were married here in 1848.  I would like to make a pilgrimage to Old World Wisconsin to see it.  This also interests me because Solomon Juneau had donated the land.  The Solomon Juneau Theresa/Mayvillle Husting -  Milwaukee connections are some of my favorite strands of local history, and here it touches my own family.  The old French Canadian Fur Trader, Juneau,  was also much loved and respected by the Native Americans in the Green Bay area. 

Photo credit: UW-Milwaukee

St. Peter's Chapel was built in 1839, and originally stood on the northwest corner of Jackson and State Street. It was the first Catholic church in Milwaukee, built on land donated by Solomon Juneau. In 1874, the chapel was sold to Saints Peter and Paul Parish, and moved to a location at Murray and Bradford Avenue. When that parish eventually built a larger church in 1939 the chapel was moved to the St. Francis Seminary. In 1975 the chapel was moved to Old World Wisconsin in Eagle, WI.  

I thank Kristine Kampa and the Milwaukee History Lovers FB page for posting this history and picture.

Making Barrels

Joseph Schuessler

 I am interested in the making of barrels, the work of the cooper, because when the beer  business was bad in Oshkosh, that 's what my great-great grandfather, Joseph Schuessler, or Schuessler, had to do, to support his wife and eight children up to about 1870 when he moved to Fond du Lac and owned a successful brewery there for 20 years.

This is from the Age of Wood, by Roland Ennos (Simon & Schuster, 2020):

Wooden barrels, made by joining together curved wooden staves, were probably invented around 350 BC by the Celts and quickly proved far more practical. They were strong, could be rolled along the ground to move them, and could readily be stacked. The key to their success is the curvature of the staves, which allows the center to bow outward, enabling the longitudinal stiffness of the wood to resist the internal pressure of the liquid inside. To make a barrel, coopers had first to precisely carve each stave to shape, using specially made drawknives to give it the desired curved cross section, and a jointer to cut the sides at an angle so when put side to side the staves formed a circle. They then joined the staves together, inserting them into a temporary hoop at each end, and heated the staves until they fitted together snugly. Finally, the cooper made the ends and fitted them onto the ends of the barrel of the staves and reinforced the structure at the ends with iron rings. Barrels proved to be the lifeblood of commerce in preindustrial times, the equivalent of the tin cans, plastic bottles, and shipping containers of today combined.

 Source:   Oshkosh Beer: Joseph Schussler’s Road to Oshkosh

Mayville and the Van Brunts - Quick History

Thanks to my good friend, W.J. ("Bill") Lee for these remarks which he prepared for other local history enthusiasts.  Bill is a John Deere alumnus whose love for Deere and for the Mayville-Horicon area is legendary.

    Early Settlers: Daniel and Mary Faucet Van Brunt 

By 

William J. Lee 

The family of Daniel and Mary Faucet Van Brunt, from upper NY State, homesteaded in the Town of Williamstown in 1846. That's a year after the Fosters and Mays came to what is now Mayville. They had  a son born in Williamstown. His name was Willard Van Brunt. Daniel was a wagon maker by  trade. 

Long story short, when iron was discovered south of Mayville, a blast furnace was built (a very  small one), close to the river for cooling water. With a furnace producing a product, pig iron, what do you do with it on the frontier? 

The iron had to be moved to the closest rail head which was Oconomowoc. How do you  transport iron to market? Wagons. Big, heavy-duty, wooden wagons. But wooden wagons had  iron parts. So the wagon maker left his homestead to build wagons in the new place called  Mayville named after George Mays from Fort Atkinson. At first it was Maysville but soon  became Mayville. Of course Williamstown was named for William Foster of the Foster and Mays that came to what is now Mayville in 1845. Think Foster Park in downtown Mayville! So, William for the township and Foster for the Park. 

Why did they come to the Mayville location? Water power!! From the south end of what is now  the city the Rock River falls 17 feet. Think about it! The upper dam was built for a grist mill and  a saw mill. A dam was built of wood and a canal was dug around the dam for the water to flow. Two flumes of water fed the two businesses. Later a lower dam was built to feed more water to  the blast furnaces at the end of Furnace Street. 

Upper Dam - Mayville  1909 postcard
  St. Mary's Church atop the hill

There is a third dam in Kekoskee. That's where the paddle wheelers on Lake Horicon had to  stop. There they unloaded goods and passengers. As it turned out, there is more fall at Mayville  than at any location on the Rock River basin. That's why the Fosters and Mays came to the area  and staked out land claims. By the way, where the Rock meets the Mississippi River was the  location of Saukenauk, the main village of the Sauk and Fox Indians of Chief Blackhawk's fame. 

With this background there is an interesting part for Williamstown. Daniel Van Brunt and  brother George built the heavy duty wagons to haul pig iron to Oconomowoc. A trail (not much  of a road) was cut through the wilderness to Oconomowoc. That is today's State Road 67. But  originally the road (trail) cut off at Browns Corners and went south through Neda, Iron Ridge,  Woodland, and then on south following Route 67 into Oconomowoc. 

Daniel Van Brunt and his brother George (from Burnett) experimented with a way to sow seed  faster and hide the seed from the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that ate the seed as fast as the  farmer could sow it with hand seeders. They came up with a seeder that measured seed out and  covered the seed with soil - thus foiling the damned pigeons. They built the first six in Mayville  and left for Horicon (as in Mayville they had no money nor big enough building) and a partner there who kept them  alive as they established the Van Brunt works in Horicon. Again a note, that by the 1860s a railroad  was being built through Mayville to Fond du Lac. The brothers had to come up with something else as the need for big HD wagons would soon disappear. So off to another twist and turn in  ones life. 

Lower Dam - North Main Street Bridge
 Postcard 1908

Daniel also founded the Horicon State Bank. In 1901 he died. His son, Willard, took over the  business and sold it to John Deere in 1911-12. Willard ran the business into the 1920s. He  retired to California and died in 1936. His was a cremation burial and he is buried in Graceland Cemetery in  Mayville with his mother and two infant brothers. The three, mom and two babies died of  frontier fever between 1849 and 1852. Daniel never had another son although he buried two  more wives. Life was hard, to say the least, in the 1800's. 

The factory the family founded in Horicon became the John Deere Horicon works. Not bad for a  family to homestead, build a life on the frontier and then build a business that is part of a world  class multinational company known today as Deere & Company.

Bethlehem Steel Furnaces - They Used to Make Money Here

Now they spend money.

July 31, 2007 Bethlehem PA, just before demolition for a casino.
Credit: By Jschnalzer at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3069664

Mayville Historical Society - Bonau and Whereatt

The December,  2018 newsletter of the Mayville Historical Society has a section on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.  There they report:  "The end of the war found two Mayville men buried on the battlefield, Frank Bonau and Walter Whereatt."  Buried at war, on the spot. So terrible.  Freedom comes at such great cost.   May the memory of Frank Bonau and Walter Whereatt be a blessing.

Briquetting Plant

Here my friend W.J. Lee explains the Mayville Iron Works briquetting plant:

The Briquetting Plant made briquettes of iron ore for charging the furnace to make pig iron.  The ore taken from our mines at Neda was high in phosphorous which caused the ore when handled to turn to dust.  When the ore was dumped into the furnaces (from the top) by the carts called skip jacks it created a tremendous cloud of dust.  Everyone in those days had laundry hung outside to dry.  Continuous complaints about the dust, from wives doing laundry to workers breathing in the stuff,  caused the Iron Company to build the Briquetting Plant.  There the ore was compressed into briquettes which cut down on the dust dramatically.  Think of today’s charcoal briquettes.

There were no bricks of clay made in the plant.  After the plant closed the wood building on top of the foundations was moved to the Clark farm on Bayview Road.  There it stood until it was finally taken down two or three years ago.  

South of the foundations in the open field of Andrew Thomas stood the Ironman baseball stands.  In the 1930's the stands were moved to Fireman’s Field and there they stand proudly to this day.  

***

Message to this blogger from W.J. Lee 10/25/2018