Kewaunee County & the Spanish-American War

Veterans' Memorial at Kewaunee County Courthouse, ca. 1908

General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865 and the Civil War was over. However the country was living in its aftermath 32 years later when President William McKinley* asked for 125,000 volunteers to fight a new war. It was April 1898 when without debate both houses of Congress passed a resolution providing for a regular and volunteer army. Wisconsin was asked to supply three regiments.

Some felt the President’s call was much like Abraham Lincoln’s on April 15, 1861 when he asked for 75,000 men. Purposes were different. This time it was for a war with Spain following the February 1898 sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor. In January, before the call for volunteers, Kewaunee County's Frank Slama and Ed Holek went to Milwaukee to enlist with the regular army. G.I. McDonald was the first Algoma resident to “go south” to enlist. Intending to enlist in the Navy, he apparently had a change of heart as he enlisted with Co. I, 1^st Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Emotions were running high when one prominent business man said he hoped the U.S. would get the “damndest licking it ever got” in the war with Spain. The editor said the man, who also served on the city council, should be “hung from his own lamp post p.d.q.”

The paper noted the flag pole Manager Perry raised at the Veneer and Seating plant. Perry said the flag would not come down until every Spanish soldier was driven from the hemisphere. Residents were displaying flags and children were carrying them. John Raether was in front of the Hotel Algoma on the southeast corner of 4th and Steele, when his horse was spooked by a child waving a flag. A runaway was averted, fortunately, and the only damage done was to his wagon pole.

Orrin Warner, Jr. was born into one of the first three founding families in the place that would become Algoma. Warner was living in Kewaunee at the time and came to Algoma, it was thought, to say good-by because he was answering the call to duty. Warner’s patriotism made the paper, but actually he was in town before he went to Pennsylvania to take a job selling stoves for a company that had operated in the county years earlier. The Alaska correspondent for the Record opined that men in that vicinity weren’t anxious “to manifest their patriotism” as they weren’t enlisting. One identified as Fritz said he’d go if he could get on a torpedo submarine, but the correspondent seemed to think Fritz was crazy, although a man could stay out of the enemy’s sight on such a “new-fangled diving machine.” According to the Green Bay Gazette, brothers Hugh and Robert Minahan had volunteered. The men had interests in both Green Bay and Kewaunee County. By the advent of World War l, the Minahan county interests spanned Algoma, Kewaunee and Casco and included a mercantile, a drug store, and with their brother William who would go down on the Titanic, a maple syrup camp.  Robert was a physician serving the medical needs of county residents and expected to be an army doctor. Hugh planned on the cavalry.

While the country needed men, the Record said the Secretary of War and the Surgeon General of the Army said they did not want women. Their decision was “unalterable” and women would not be employed or trained as nurses to care for the sick and wounded in the war, or be recognized in any other capacity. The paper said such an ultimatum was sure to cause a sensation within the country, and it did. Following the Civil War, there was a pool of nurses and the need for them was urgent.Things changed and by the war’s end, over 1,500 female nurses had served. The public outcry that men on the battlefields needed good care could not be ignored. In tribute, there is a Spanish-American War Nurses Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

During summer 1898 the men of General Shafer’s 5^th Corp were so sick it was felt the army would die if it remained in Cuba. It was felt that withdrawing to New York for a few weeks would restore health. Dysentery and malaria were rampant, however yellow fever was coming under control Since little attention was paid to Cuban sanitation, the Spanish were blamed for the diseases too.

The country needed chaplains. At an Evangelical Lutheran Synod meeting, it was decided the synod needed a representative with the army in Cuba. The synod’s choice was St. Paul’s Rev. F.J. Eppling who was appointed by Governor Scofield as Chaplain-At-Large. The Algoma congregation gave him a leave of absence on July 10, 1898 and appointed a pastor pro tempore. Eppling returned to Algoma much run down but glad he had served. Ten years later, Rev. Eppling resigned because of failing health and a general nervous breakdown. Following treatment he went to work in the missions in Oregon where he died in 1918. While Eppling didn't die in the war, his death was precipitated by it.

Paying for the war was going to require sacrificing just as the Civil War did. The Manitowoc Pilot said the sentiment of the hour seemed to be “Do things and make others pay for them.” It felt that if the war was so desirable, its burdens should be spread out. At question then was taxing breweries to pay for the war with Spain. After all, it wasn’t the brewers who started the war. That paper felt that some patriots would certainly not feel the consequences of such patriotism. Perhaps those who wanted to rid the country of demon rum thought they had an opportunity to do it.

In April Algoma’s grocers noted that prices were going up. Large numbers of residents were stockpiling stores of food and beverages in anticipation of prices that would surely rise. The grocers said there were those ordering 100# or a barrel of sugar and 50 to 75# lots of coffee. One family bought 50# of tea. In one week sugar jumped 30 cents a 100 pounds, while flour was already 25 cents a barrel more and coffee had risen by 2 cents a pound.

Wenzel Strnad of Casco enlisted in Co. E, 16th Volunteer Infantry in the spring of 1898. By December he was back in Casco on a 30-day furlough, recuperating from malaria. His friends joined together to buy him a gold watch and presented it while he was home. They thought they’d never see him again, fearing for his life following the Battle of Santiago when his mother stopped hearing from him. Of the 84 men in Strnad’s company, only 35 came out alive.  In July George McDonald wrote from Camp Cuba in Jacksonville, Florida. He told how the men drilled 5 days a week, had inspections on Saturday and rested on Sunday. There were no saloons near the camp but there were canteens which sold the products normally found in one. Rio Creek’s James Stennard was in Cuba with the regular army in July. Former resident Fred Bosenberg was another enlistee. Fred was a child when his father owned the cigar store in the north side of the Bastar Hotel on the northeast corner of 4^th and Clark, but residents remembered the family. Strnad was furloughed when Ben Fagg, who served in the Civil War, answered the second call for volunteers and  enlisted in Co. B, 3^rd W.S. Infantry. Fagg had expectations of being sent to the Philippines where things were already heating up.

The Spanish-American War was short, lasting the summer of 1898. The Philippine-American War is a separate conflict fought between 1899 and about 1902.

About a year after the Philippine-American War was over, it seemed as if newspapers were looking forward to more wars when readership was informed in March 1903 that future battlefield gunshot wounds would be less awful. Dr. Nicholas Sen was one of five American delegates to a medical conference in Madrid where he was quoted saying, “War in the near future will lose a share of the horror.”There was a new method of treating wounds with an antiseptic that would be “a boon to humanity” since it helped prevent infection. Such a dressing had been used during the Philippine-American War and had achieved “wonderful results in preventing mortality” on the battlefield.

A few years later, May 1905, it was announced though Memorial Day had been mostly reserved to honor those who died in the Civil War, those who died in the Spanish-American War and the War with Mexico would also be remembered. The article pointed out that in the years following the Civil War, Memorial Day broadened to become a national event.

* William McKinley had a tie to Kewaunee Co. Ferdinand Haevers was a Belgium immigrant to Kewaunee Co. and in New Orleans when the Civil War began. Caught up in all the war hoopla, he enlisted in the Confederate army. While foraging he saw an officer ride into a clearing. Feeling it would be murder to shoot, he remembered his training, that an officer without a horse was as good as dead. So he shot the horse. The shots brought McKinley’s men. Haevers went to a POW camp for the 2^nd time in his military career. Had Haevers followed his first instinct and shot, the course of history would have been changed.

Veneer and Seating Plant became U.S. Plywood and is now Algoma Hardwoods.

Sources: Algoma Record newspapers; An-An-api-sebe: Where is the River?. c. 2001; History of Commercial Development in Youngs and Steele Plat and Other Selected Properties, Algoma, Wisconsin, c. 2006; Yours Truly, from Kewaunee County, c. 2012; Questions answered by R. Horton, Reference & Outreach Archivist, Wisconsin Veterans' Museum, April 2015. Postmarked in 1908, the postcard is part of the blogger's collection.

Kewaunee County & the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

One hundred fifty years ago this week, Kewaunee County was in the midst of the tumult enveloping the nation. But communications as they were, the county was not on the cusp of breaking news. Perhaps that’s why it took the Enterprise* so long to announce the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. By then most had heard the president was shot. Newspapers arriving via the schooners contained more information than the Enterprise ever did. When the Enterprise did carry news two weeks later, it was not headline news, however the columns on interior pages were edged with heavy black lines.

Although Abraham Lincoln won the popular vote in Wisconsin’s 1860 presidential election by a few tenths over 56% and 55% of Wisconsin’s vote in 1864, he was not popular in Kewaunee County. In May 1860 the Enterprize* reprinted an article from the Green Bay Advocate saying Lincoln’s nomination at the Chicago convention astonished everyone, even the party. The paper editorialized commenting that the nomination put a “wet blanket” on Republican election hopes and said that within a day’s drive, the paper could find 20 Wisconsin farmers who were equal to Lincoln.

As it was, Stephen Douglas carried Kewaunee County by 362 votes in 1860. Lincoln’s opponent – and one of his Civil War generals – George McClellan carried the county 753 to 157 in 1864. When Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, both Democrats and Republicans attended a celebration at James Slausson’s in Kewaunee. Guests came from Ahnapee and Carlton as well as Kewaunee. A few weeks earlier, a ball on George Washington’s birthday was designed improve the county's political discord. Whether the paper didn’t note attendees from the other towns or whether those from other towns just didn’t show up to toast Lincoln remains a question. Mr. Lincoln was even less popular in 1864 when he received 1 vote to McClellan’s 89 in the Casco precinct. Franklin wasn’t much better at 3 votes to McClellan’s 82. In 1862 Wisconsin was the only state allowing soldiers to vote outside of their state districts, or vote by what today is an absentee ballot. By 1864, 19 other states offered the same privilege.

Kewaunee County’s population was largely immigrant in 1860 and it had grown by 1864. The county was young, made up of families with young children. Few of the immigrants were Naturalized by 1860 and many of the new arrivals had yet to take out first papers called Declaration of Intent. This blogger’s first two immigrant families arrived in Wolf River (Ahnapee and now Algoma) in 1854. They were among the Germans fleeing conscription. One of Euren's settling families was said to have bribed border guards for the same reason. They weren’t alone. German immigrants knew much about subservience and could at least guess about the horrors of slavery. Most had never seen person of any other color so could not really identify themselves with others, however they knew they did not want war. They were new to American and the war was not theirs, yet my German ancestors and thousands of others were drafted and did go, willingly and unwillingly. My French Canadian ancestors were in Manitowoc County at Statehood, having arrived in Quebec in 1660, One great-grandfather fought on the side of the British in the War of 1812. His father was on the Plains of Abraham in the French and Indian War.They were awarded Canadian bounty land. Their sons and grandsons dressed as women by day to work the fields on their Manitowoc County farms and hid in the woods of when conscription gangs were around. They weren’t alone either.

When the men of Ahnapee got the news about Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, it was said they'd worked all day in Eveland’s swamp (today Perry Field) to cut and trim a victory pole to be used in celebration. After carrying the pole down Steele Street to Franz Swaty’s store at the corner of South Water(today Navarino) and Steele, the men were just ready to raise the flag when the Two Rivers mail carrier got to town with the news that President Lincoln had been assassinated. The flag was raised, but to half mast.

The April 12^th Enterprise ran a small article about Lee’s surrender, saying it was good news and that recruiting and drafting would cease. There were no headlines proclaiming the end of the war, nor headlines about the assassination. Since the first page of the paper was pre-printed, maybe that was why. The second page of the April 24^th paper had thick black lines between the columns with a column title announcing “Terrible News.” The president was shot on April 14th, dying in the morning of the 15th.

The Advocate ran a short article on April 20th telling about the president being shot at Ford’s Theater by “Q. Booth,” an actor. Calling him a desperado, the paper said he called on Secretary Seward who was ill. Gaining entrance to the home by indicating he was from the ailing secretary’s physician, he attacked the secretary’s son, “cut down” two attendants at the secretary’s door and cut the secretary’s throat. The paper went on to mention the wild excitement in Washington and how the vice president and the various secretaries were being guarded. An addendum to the article said the president died at 6:22 AM, that Secretary Seward died at 9:30 and that his son Fred had also died. That same paper ran letters between Generals Lee and Grant and notice of the surrender. There were no screaming headlines, and the brief article appeared near the bottom of page 2.

Once again on April 27 the Advocate carried an article near the bottom of page 3. The piece discussed “a nation’s bereavement for the Savior of the Country.” It was just under an article about the first vessel of the season!

History tells us that that the “facts” in the papers following the assassination were often incorrect. As the months and years rolled on, much more information came to light, some of which was chronicled by the papers. One hundred fifty years later, one could spend a lifetime researching Abraham Lincoln, his life and its ramifications.

*The Enterprize became the Enterprise in 1865.

Sources: An-An-api-sebe, Where is the River?, c. 2001; Ahnapee Record, Door County Advocate, Kewaunee Enterprize/Enterprise, Wisconsin Blue Books online at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI.WIBlueBks

Kewaunee County & the War of 1812

On June 18, 1812 President James Madison signed a declaration of war against Britain, and for the next 2 1/2 years the U.S. was involved in what came to be called the War of 1812. At the time, present-day Wisconsin was part of the Illinois Territory. Twenty-four years after the war began the Wisconsin Territory was split off from Michigan which achieved Statehood. Twelve years later, in 1848, the State of Wisconsin was admitted to the Union. Door County was set off from Brown in 1851 and Kewaunee County was separated from Door the following year.

A generation or two ago, when the average U.S. history high school classes learned about the war, it was about the British burning the capitol, Dolley Madison rescuing the painting of George Washington and Francis Scott Key writing the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner. The War of 1812 got so little class attention that some only passed the test because of Johnny Horton’s 1959 hit song The Battle of New Orleans and how “we ran through the brambles and we ran through the bushes”……. to chase the British through the town of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.

So what does Madison’s declaration of war and that which became known as the War of 1812 have to do with Kewaunee County? Nothing that invites national monuments, tourism and summer vacations, yet there is a connection.

With the exception of French explorers Jean Nicolet, Pere Marquette, Samuel de Champlain, and Robert de LaSalle among others, there isn't any history of Europeans in what is Kewaunee County until the days of the Michigan Territory.  On the frontier as they were in 1812, the two oldest settlements in what would become Wisconsin - Green Bay and Prairie du Chien which had residents of European ancestry - were important to the U.S., to the French and to the British alike. Before the war, Native Americans and the French fur traders in today’s Wisconsin had pelts to market, thus needing both the British and the Americans. Inter-marriages meant there were also social relationships.  And, while naval battles were being fought in the eastern Great Lakes, the British topsail sloop Felicity patrolled Lake Michigan, including off the coast of today’s Door and Kewaunee Counties. Although the sloop carried four swivel guns and its crew numbered only 12 men, the Felicity was a show of force. But, a show a force to whom?

The Felicity, piloted by Samuel Robertson, is believed to have been patrolling years before the war ever started. One story is that the sloop's presence was intended to prevent the Pottawatomie from joining the Americans. Another is that after the war began the patrolling ship’s captain had reason to believe the Pottawatomie near today’s Two Rivers had large stores of corn for which he hoped to trade rum and tobacco and then take the corn to the garrison at Mackinac Island. Did it happen? The Felicity was said to set sail after the Indians convinced the captain that supplies were low and they only had enough for the winter, but who really knows? Histories mention the British ships Welcome and Archangel sailing Lake Michigan serving in similar capacities. Though crews were small, the booming guns were considered more than enough strike fear among the Indians.

Mackinac Island today
digitalmi.com

Had the captain managed the trade for the corn, he would have been popular at Mackinac Island. In July, the month after Madison’s war declaration, the British captured Fort Michilmackinac on Mackinac without a fight. Though about 400 Indians from 5 or 6 tribes were there to aid the 200 British in the capture, they didn’t have anything to do. The 60 or so Americans on the island became aware of the British only after they fired a single canon shot and as the Americans were outnumbered 10 to 1, they couldn’t do much but surrender the fort. It was retaken in 1814.

Chief War Thunder is well known in Kewaunee County history. Lesser known is his brother Wampun. History tells us that the bands of Pottawatomie along the western shore of Lake Michigan were building boats and storing corn with plans to support the Americans. History also says as friends of the Americans, the brothers took their bands to Mackinac in an effort to offer help. What happened then is a another question.

With the Americans and the British at war, Indians and trappers had to choose sides and most chose the British, although some tried to remain neutral. Green Bay residents generally sided with the British as did bands of Sac, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa and Ojibwa. Wisconsin’s Pottawatomie supported the Americans, while flip-flopping alliances at times. The Pottawatomie, Ojibwa and Ottawa made up the Three Fires Tribes, however they saw things differently. Tribes banding together in support of the British were often at odds among themselves, but their common goal was working together to prevent American settlement, which appeared to be a far greater threat than British settlement. As the Americans pushed westward, the Indian people knew it did not bode well for them.

As it was, Indian civilization was already disrupted as the settlers kept moving. In the previous 50 years alone they had been affected by the French and Indian War, by the Revolutionary War, by loss of their lands and by disease. While the Native Americans were trying to protect their interests, John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company already was operating on Mackinac Island. Knowing about President Madison’s declaration, Astor ordered his stores to be moved south to the mainland of Michigan.

While the British ships were patrolling Lake Michigan, a future resident of Kewaunee County was serving in the war. Joseph McCormick was born in Pennsylvania in 1787. He became a river pilot, running lumber from New York to the Chesapeake Bay. He fought in the war, achieving the rank of major. When it was over he relocated to Indiana and then to Manitowoc while Wisconsin was still part of the Michigan Territory. By then the Black Hawk War was over, the Indians had ceded their land, and life for Wisconsin's Native Americans had changed forever.

McCormick was living in Manitowoc in 1834 when he learned from the Pottawatomie about the lands to the north. Their stories piqued McCormick’s curiosity, prompting him, and others, to want to see such a place for themselves. Sailing north, they came to the present Ahnapee River. Somehow they negotiated the sand bar at the mouth of the river and sailed up-river for a distance of 9 miles, an impossibility today. Near what is now Forestville, the men came across a small island which they named McCormick in honor of their leader. After doing some exploring, the party returned to Manitowoc with glowing reports about the heavily timbered land, the game and the overwhelming numbers of fish. While northern Kewaunee County sounded like nirvana, there were no takers until the spring of 1851 when John Hughes and Orrin Warner decided to check out the area themselves. A few months later, the Hughes and Warners were two of the first three founding families of the city now called Algoma. Hughes built his log cabin on the bluff on the north side of the river, near the site that would become the lighthouse keeper’s home 50 years later. Hughes’ neighbors were Pottawatomie, the best neighbors the early settlers could have had.

As for McCormick – history says he was impressed by the beauty of the north side of the river and felt it was the place to start a town. Things didn’t turn out as he envisioned and when he returned 20 years later in 1854 he went to the area that is now Forestville, making his home along the Ahnapee River, near the county line, before eventually relocating to Ahnapee. The war changed the old veteran’s life also, but not nearly in the way it changed his Pottawatomie neighbors.

In 1870 at age 84, McCormick was the oldest person ever elected (at that time) to the Wisconsin Assembly. The year also marked a visit from McCormick’s 80 year old brother Col. Henry McCormick of New York. It had been 42 years since the Major saw his younger brother the Colonel who had also served in the War of 1812.  Whoever said, “You can’t keep a good man down,” surely had a man like McCormick in mind because within a year the elderly man was so ill there were fears for his life. He bounced back. Appropriately, on July 4, 1873, Ahnapee celebrated the 87-year-old Major McCormick's contributions to the area with a picnic at Rosia Park. It was said forty men paraded with an open carriage to call for McCormick at his residence. Though he was suffering physical problems resulting from a carriage accident sometime earlier, McCormick's mental acumen was not affected. Before a thunderstorm came up curtailing activities, speakers recognizing McCormick were calling the well-respected man the "Father of Ahnapee." A month later McCormick's visit to Kewaunee prompted the Enterprise to presume he hadn't aged, saying that at 87 he was "just as fresh and vigorous on public matters as he was 50 years ago." McCormick died in 1875 and is buried in Algoma’s Evergreen Cemetery.

When McCormick died, there were few Pottawatomie left in Kewaunee County. They had been driven out for non-payment of property taxes, losing their lands in the westward push just as so many tribes feared. Though the Pottawatomie left the area, they left their history in arrow heads and tools, and in the land deed rock on display at Kewaunee County Historical Museum. Letters exist. Exactly 100 years after Madison’s declaration, Jacob Jakubovsky was planting potatoes on the north slope of the south bluff of today's Algoma when he found a peace pipe. Carved from pipestone, the pipe was said to have a reddish tint. If that pipe was smoked with a British captain seeking to trade, nobody ever knew about it.

After the war, soldiers who served were awarded land, and there was plenty of it in Wisconsin. Samuel G. Goodrich was a Private in Captain Johnson's Co., Connecticut Militia, during the War of 1812. On February 9, 1860 President James Buchanan's signature was affixed, via his secretary, to Warrant #65034 whereby Goodrich assigned his 120 bounty land acreage to John Crawford. Goodrich's land comprised 120 acres in the SE 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of Section 20 and the W 1/2 of the NW 1/4 of Section 26 of Township 22, Range 23 in the District of Lands subject to sale at Menasha. The Warrant became (land) Patent #65934, United States to John Crawford.

T. Duescher photo, c. 2009

The marker originally put on McCormick’s grave deteriorated and disappeared. His grave site appeared to be forgotten until in recent years his great-grandchildren marked the spot with a new monument which seems to be Kewaunee County’s only remaining tie to the War of 1812. February 2015 marked the 200th anniversary of the end of the war.


Note: About 80 years later Simon Pokagon addressed the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A recognized author, Pokagon was referred to as the last hereditary chief of the Pokagon Band of Pottawatomie Indians. Pokagon called the advance of the Americans, "The cyclone of civilization rolled westward." More about him, his writings and speeches can be found by Googling his name.

Sources: Algoma’s newspaper archives; An-An-api-sebe: Where is the River?, c. 2001; Mackinac Island history; Wikipedia; Map of Mackinac Island was taken from digitalmi.com; McCormick's stone is courtesy of T. Duescher and the Warrant was originally in the blogger's files.