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History of Watertown,
Wisconsin
Boys will be
Boys
Written and contributed by Ben
Feld
This has been the most miserable August I have ever
experienced.
Every time I say that, Pa tries to tell me about how
bad things were when he was my age. He
says they didn’t even have cheese cloth like we have, to put over the windows
at night to keep the mosquitoes out.
Everything was colder or hotter, or longer, or more miserable back then,
I guess.
At least they were allowed to swim in the Rock
River. We aren’t allowed to do that now
because there is some kind of “ordinance” forbidding it. Pa says that is because the health officer
has found at least thirteen sewers flowing directly into the river. The health officer says that is one of the
causes for the sickness so many people are getting every summer.
I wish the City Council would do something about the
idea they came up with quite a few years ago when I was just a small boy. One Councilman suggested they build a
swimming pool near the center of town where it would be convenient and safe to
swim any time the weather is warm enough.
Pa says all the councilmen thought that was a good idea and they agreed
it would be a good idea to build it just south of
Ma says she is sure it will not be built anymore
before the twentieth century (whatever that is) begins in just nine more years.
In the meantime, we boys will just continue to do as
we have been doing; we will swim in the river when no one is looking. And I suppose we will continue to get caught
by Marshal (George) Henze like we were last
week. He says he isn’t trying to keep us
from swimming; he only wants us to obey the “ordinance” the city council
passed, which requires us to wear some kind of swimming clothing when we go in
the water. But have you ever tried to
swim in heavy denim pants? They soak up
so much water a guy can hardly walk. I
wish Ma would buy me a pair of special swimming pants but she says she is not
about to pay out 75 cents for something you can’t wear to church.
Last week we tried to fool old Marshal Henze. We each tied
a rope around our waist and jumped into the water. We weren’t skinny dipping. We were wearing something, weren’t we? Old Henze didn’t
think so. He took 15 of us to the police
station and lectured us good. One of the
gang, Ralph Blumenfeld, says he isn’t going to let that stop him. He explained to us that skinny dipping is against the law in the
city during daylight hours. It is
perfectly OK in daylight outside the city limits. Most boys eventually saw that this
anti-skinny-dipping law had to be obeyed and they did obey; but one Fourth of
July, when the weather was extremely hot, the thermometer registering 98
degrees in the shade, and the streets were so dusty pedestrians nearly
suffocated, four young men were arrested by Marshal Zautner
for bathing in the mill race on the west side.
Last Sunday evening some of us had a good time at St.
Paul’s Episcopal Church. While they were
holding services, we lit some fire crackers and threw them near an open
window. It must have surprised them,
because Ma and Pa said some people were angry about it and called us “evil
disposed ruffians”. In the Watertown Republican, the editor said
“Those who engage in such acts of maliciousness are entitled to no more respect
or consideration than the worm that crawls the earth.” I guess he was really mad.
But the best time we ever had was one night on
We knew then the jig was up and we took off running as
fast as we could -- most of us between the houses to
But the best prank, or stunt, or joke, or whatever you
want to call it, was the one we pulled on that snooty, stuck-up girl from
school. It took a lot of work and I
still can’t understand how we were able to do it without getting caught. Maybe someone did see us but was happy to see
someone pull something on Miss Know-It-All.
A bunch of us were hanging around the livery stable on
North First Street when we spotted Snooty and her mother driving into the yard
in a nice top-buggy to do their weekly shopping. It seemed each of us got the idea at the same
time. Here was an opportunity to pay her
back for all the times she had made us feel like dirt. Maybe now we could show her what it is like
to have someone laugh at you when you are the butt of a joke.
As we watched the two ladies (well, one lady and one
unbearable brat) unhitch their horse, we compared ideas among ourselves,
laughed, snickered and slapped each other on the back to emphasize the
ingenuity each was contributing to the plot.
We waited until her and her mother had the horse stabled, and they were
well on their way toward Main Street to do their shopping. We were quite confident their shopping spree
would take long enough to allow us to carry out our plan.
As rapidly and as quietly as we could, we took the
wheels off the buggy. Now you must
realize that for special reasons, the front wheels of a buggy are always larger
than the back wheels; that is what made this idea so great. And you must also realize that a top-buggy is
a fairly light piece of machinery and can be easily lifted by the likes of us.
So we took all four wheels off and then proceeded to
replace them with the back wheels in front and the front wheels in back. The result was a strange looking vehicle
which had a front end much higher than the back end. It was drivable but it could not turn
corners. And it was very difficult to
get into.
We waited about two hours for those two females to
complete their shopping but it was well worth the wait. From our hiding place in one of the stalls in
the livery stable we saw them put their purchases in the buggy and heard the
mother remark that this buggy had seen its day and would soon need to be
replaced. They hitched the horse to the
buggy and then -- would you believe it?
-- they climbed into the buggy and drove a sort distance -- a very short
distance -- until they realized what made the ride so unusual.
We couldn’t hear what they said, but we saw them walk
to the blacksmith shop next door, say a few words to the smithy there, and
watch him put the small wheels in front and the large wheels in back.
We noticed he was smiling broadly as he refused the
money they offered him and we heard him laughing loudly as he talked with the
stable boy. Ever since that day, my
buddies and I have wondered how we were able to switch those wheels without
being seen by some adult.
But it didn’t change Miss Snooty one bit. We often thought we should tell her that we
had done it, but somehow we never worked up the courage.
What do people mean when they say “Discretion is the
better part of valor”?
GIRLS WILL BE
GIRLS
Boys, when they are thoroughly bored, can’t find
anything to do and want to take part in some sort of adventure to while away
the time, frequently turn to some activity which, although perfectly reasonable
and innocent to them, is often destructive or downright naughty. And they get away with such things. They are excused because “boys will be boys”.
Not so with girls.
When we have exhausted the inevitable “I said – he said” conversation,
and after having confided all we dare to confide to our current best friend, we have a more
difficult time finding something more dignified, more feminine, or, as we say,
“decidedly toney”.
And that is what happened to four of us one frosty
Sunday afternoon in December, 1876.
My best friend and I, out of boredom, made a bet with
the other two girls that we could, even though it was late afternoon, walk to
Oconomowoc and back that day. We knew it
was quite an undertaking, about 24 miles round trip, but we saw no reason why
we couldn’t do it in five hours. What
fools we were to think we could complete such a walk in 5 hours! In retrospect, we were even bigger fools for
not realizing our shoes were thin-soled, not made for walking, and our clothing
was not intended for walking in such cool weather over such rough surface. So with the innocence and enthusiasm
possessed by the young and/or uninformed, we set off for Oconomowoc.
We shall be forever grateful to our two friends with
whom we had made the bet for, after too many hours had passed they became
worried and sought the assistance of an acquaintance that had access to a horse
and light carriage. In the dead of night
they set off looking for the two of us and found us on our way home with a good
distance yet to walk.
Did we acknowledge we had lost the bet and accept a
ride home? -- We aren’t saying!. What
time did we finally arrive at home? It
was after dark! How did our parents feel
about our escapade? -- That is family business!
Did any of the male Watertown braggarts attempt to duplicate the
feat? Not a one. Did the two of us ever try it again? NOT ON YOUR LIFE!
We would like to take this opportunity to commend the
staff of The Watertown Democrat for
their gallantry. Although they knew each
person involved in the escapade, they refrained from publishing our names.
We were fortunate.
Newspapers weren’t always so considerate. For many years they took great delight in publishing
evidence that the female mind was inferior to the male mind and was not at all
up to the task of reasoning and thinking clearly. Let the ladies make one small mistake and the
editors, aware of their obligation to report all the news to the discriminating
readers (the males), would gleefully give a full account of the latest female
peccadillo. But every gallant man knew
the reputations of the weaker sex needed protection; therefore their identities
were often kept a mystery as long as possible.
But sometimes the editors just could not contain themselves.
That was the case some years after our Oconomowoc trek
when the editor of The Gazette, Mr.
Moore, saw fit, in one interesting
incident, to keep the names of
the participants a secret, but did go so far as to reveal they were employees
at the post office, knowing full well that anyone who frequented that office
knew the names and lineage of each worker on the meager postal staff.
The scenario of the case was this: Four young ladies of Watertown, (I was not
one of them) looking for something to spice up their lives after a warm
September day, decided to take a short train ride, a ride which would require
no ticket, no fare, no advance preparation.
Accordingly, they boarded the 8:30 pm train going south at the Chicago
& Northwestern railway depot less than a block from West Main Street, and
ride it to the Junction where the east-west tracks crossed the north-south
tracks, and where a stop was usually made to take on water for the locomotives. Here they planned they would alight and
stroll to their homes in the cool, evening air.
But they quickly became engrossed in their chatter, as
girls often do, and failed to notice that this train did not make the expected
water-stop at the Junction, but continued on its run south with the girls
aboard. They didn’t become aware of
their predicament until the train was gathering speed well south of the
Junction.
What were they to do?
Were they in deep trouble? Were
they guilty of a crime the consequences of which were growing larger and larger
as the miles flew by?
The worst that could happen, they optimistically
concluded, was that they would be put off the train at the first opportunity,
leaving them to fend for themselves.
That would take care of the difficulty they may be in with railroad, but
there remained the even greater problem; the problem of angry parents. The solution, they all agreed, was to find a way
to arrive home before they were even missed.
But how was the necessary return trip to be accomplished in such a short
time?
Answer --- ride a returning train! But the next train north, they learned,
wasn’t due for a good number of hours during which their absence from their
abodes would almost certainly be noticed.
But with true American grit, editor Moore said, they
decided to charter a different means of locomotion -- a hand car -- one used by
the “section crew”, the men employed to patrol and keep in good running order a
certain section of track. Granted, such
cars were not propelled by a steam locomotive, or even a gasoline engine (which
was in its earliest infancy at that time), but was powered by sheer muscle
power which, through some mechanical connections transferred the motion of the
raising and lowering the ends of the cross-arms to the wheels of the
vehicle. True, hard physical labor was
required, but they were a group of four young ladies, all in good physical
condition, and should be able to make the trip back to Watertown in a short
time
The girls, Moore reported, arrived home at reasonable
hour after expending more labor than they were accustomed to, but without
raising the suspicions of their parents.
They were, announced the editor, now considered experts on propelling a
handcar.
But he was wrong.
They were not experts in propelling a handcar. In the next issue of his paper, he admitted
he had only assumed the facts of the return trip. While he did not revise his report about
arriving home at a reasonable hour, he felt obliged to correct the “handcar”
bit. The car they had to use was not the
expected handcar, but a “four-wheeled flat (push) car that they manipulated by
each taking turns at pushing while the other three rode”. He made a point of not revealing their
identities, but let it be known that the curious could get more information
from the staff at the post office.
One can’t help but wonder how well the girls sorted
the mail the morning after their excursion to Johnson Creek, but girls being
girls we can be sure they did it well.
AND MEN WILL BE
MEN
When the young people pull some kind of prank, almost
always it is just pure foolishness -- skinny
dipping in the river, switching wheels on a buggy, hitching a ride on a
train. But when we men think up a prank
ten to one there is a logical purpose for it.
Oh sure, we have had some bits of tom-foolery, like election bets when
the loser had to put the winner in a wheelbarrow and wheel him down the street
with half the town cheering them on.
Come to think of it, many of our “pranks” were part of a routine we
developed to impress on some citizen the waywardness of their actions -- a way
of putting the fear of the law into them without involving the law. Often Editor Norris [Wm. Norris, editor of Republican] or Editor Moore would be the
instigator by making comments in their papers -- “A man like that should be
horsewhipped”, or, “Those two are living in sin deserve to be tarred and
feathered.” Some people referred to our
actions as “taking the law into their own hands” But it was really doing our
part to keep certain people on the straight and narrow and allowing the law
officers to take care of more serious things.
I remember one incident we had back in the early
1850’s. A man in the Second Ward, the
area near where the brewery was later built, had spent many weeks cutting
wood. “Cutting wood” meant sawing or
chopping down hundreds of trees (sometimes it seemed like thousands), chopping
off the branches, sawing the logs into lengths suitable for the kitchen stove where
the cooking was done, or maybe a little longer for the heater or furnace which
provided heat for the house. Then those
chunks of wood had to be split, sometimes with an ordinary ax, sometimes with a
splitting maul, and sometimes, if they were especially large chunks, using a
wedge. But that wasn’t the end. To finish the job, all that split wood must
be piled in long, high piles and from there it was carried, a little each day,
into the house and deposited in the wood-box or piled in the basement. And then, our neighbor, “Old John”, used to
say -- and then, after all that work, what does the wife do? -- She burns it !! Implying it was all for naught.
But it had to be done.
That was part of life. It was a
big job, one which the industrious men liked to wade into and finish. The pile
of wood was expected to be large enough to last until the next winter (the
popular time to make wood) So is it any
wonder that the resident of the Second Ward was a bit perturbed when he saw
evidence that some less-than-honest person was helping himself to the wood pile
the resident had accumulated? He was so
perturbed, in fact, that he prevailed upon newspaper editors to print an
announcement warning the anonymous thief that in his pile of fuel were several
sticks of wood which contain a mixture of saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur. He warned
that burning one of those stick would result in “an excitement”.
That did the trick.
No more wood piles were pilfered for a long time and the warning was
eventually forgotten as a new generation of home-makers came into being. But just a few weeks less than twenty years
after the Second Ward resident had published that warning, the same newspapers
reported that a “Mr. Nameless,” in an unidentified ward of the city, had been
in the habit of “borrowing” fire wood from a neighbor. One night he happened to pick out the wrong
stick of wood from his neighbor’s pile, a neighbor who had not seen fit to
forewarn the public he was planning retaliation for the wood-stealing going one. It was not learned exactly what he had added
to the wood, but, according to the Watertown
Democrat, “the wood burned well as did the powder which had been put in
it. An explosion took place, his stove
flew to pieces, and now he was counting he cost of buying wood and adding a new
stove to his kitchen”. Although the
culprit was not identified in the newspaper, it is doubtful he was able to keep
his identification a secret. That
happened before the telephone came to Watertown but even in those days news of
an exploding kitchen stove traveled quite rapidly.
But that didn’t stop the wood stealing
completely. I remember seventeen years
later, during the winter of 1893, it was reported that there was still quite a
bit of petty crime going on in the city and the Watertown Gazette predicted that one of these days some
unscrupulous persons would have to pay considerably more than their winter’s
supply of fuel would cost them if obtained honestly.
You may call that taking the law into our own hands,
but what we really were doing was teaching certain individuals that actions
have consequences, an axiom that should be thoroughly taught to every
generation. We weren’t able to eradicate
all crime; not by any means. Certain
crimes eventually disappeared due to the change of our way of living, and some
crimes were just renamed thereby making them seem to disappear. In 1887, Mr. Moore, the editor of the Watertown Gazette called down fire and
brimstone on the low-life who stole his dog.
Dog stealing, Mr. Moore declared, was a reprehensible crime. Although it may be just as prevalent as in
1887, we hear very little about it, probably in part, because now it has been
given the more refined identification of “dog-napping”.
I said, at the beginning, that the pranks of men
usually have some logical reason for existing.
Let me modify that a bit: there are men and there are small boys who
resemble men only in having lived many years.
Sometimes there may be a purpose underlying a prank, but even so, that
does not negate the fact that it is not a prank, but a crime -- like the act of
one (probably more) who entered the smoke-house of Mr. C. R. Lewis of
Pipersville and made off with ten hams.
He probably was hungry. A few
nights later one or more entered the smokehouse of Frank Seefeldt
and made of with a barrel of pork.
It wasn’t only pork being stolen. One night the hen house of S. Z. Piper of
Pipersville was entered and 150 chickens were reported missing the next
morning. About that same time, thieves
entered the smoke-house of Erdmann Grube, in the town
of Watertown, and took some hams, some goose-breasts and, strangely, large
quantity of shingles. What were shingles
doing in the smoke-house?
Hen house raiding became such a nuisance that it
prompted one citizen to have the following published in the Watertown Republican:
Mr. Editor:
Will you allow me a few lines of space in your valuable columns to say a
word to the river hoodlums? I do not
mind their stealing my boat to take a little ride, but when they make use of it
to rob a hen-roost, and tie the boat up
under it, it is a dead give-away on me, and I do not like it.
Featherly yours,
CHAS.
A. JUDD
And so we see that pranks are not the exclusive
property of the males, or the females, the young or the old, or even of
positions in society, as evidence: the ministerial students at Northwestern
University who one night gave a professor’s mule an extreme make-over and the
professor learned, to his surprise, that he now owned a zebra-striped mule
temporarily housed on an upper floor of one of the campus buildings.
As a wise man once said: A little nonsense now and then, is relished
by the best of men.
AND WOMEN WILL
BE WOMEN
To hear my husband tell about it, one would think a
major catastrophe had visited that home at
Let me tell you what really happened: Several days before this big brouhaha, a
group of ladies had attended a cooking school in another part of town. There they had been instructed in a new
method of cooking which involved using hot lard. I had learned this cooking method some time
previously and had used it successfully a number of times. I mention that only to explain why I was
considered an expert in the art of cooking with especially hot lard.
On this fateful day they had assembled at this
The fire was quickly extinguished and after it had
been determined that the lady with the singed eyebrows had suffered no further
injury, the ladies fell to planning their next course of action. Should they just give up, put this kitchen in
order and return to their respective homes, or should they continue the day as
it had been planned? Being sensitive to
public opinion, and especially sensitive to the opinions of their spouses, they
decided on the latter. Resolving to make
a success of that puff, or die in the attempt, they decided to enlist the help
of one whom they considered an expert at making puff but, unfortunately, had
not attended this gathering. I was that
“expert” they decided to consult. But
they made the mistake of appointing the most excitable woman in the group to do
the consulting. Thank goodness telephones
were becoming quite common in Watertown by then. I shudder to think how her heart would have
survived if she had had to run, actually, physically run, half way across town
to talk with me.
But the telephone saved her; she did consult me via
“the wire” although she did a less than good job of explaining the purpose of
her call. In her agitated state she got
things all mixed up and I could only conclude that something horrible had
happened. What could I do but relate the
message, as best I could, to my husband, who just happens to be a doctor. It is possible I got one or two facts wrong
but I related the situation to him as best I could. And he, being professionally obligated as
well as being a compassionate man, lost no time in dashing to the scene of the
hot lard explosion where he heard the true facts of the incident and, after
determining no serious injuries had been sustained, he left shaking his head
and, he told me, wondering if there was any merit to the women’s suffrage
movement.
The ladies, however, were not daunted by their
experience and quickly made two admirable decisions:
1. In the
future, at their cooking socials they would bar “puffs”.
2. They
would not reveal to anyone what had happened on this particular day.
As far as I know, they kept the first decision. I cannot recall ever hearing of “puffs” being
prepared in hot lard after that day.
Doughnuts or “fry cakes” as they are sometimes called, are not quite the
same as puffs.
But the second decision was next to impossible to
keep. After all, they had already
involved a man -- the doctor -- my husband -- and knowing men, it is foolhardy
to even try to keep a story like that a secret.
Someone, and I wouldn’t say this in my husband’s presence, leaked the
secret, and, not surprisingly, in the next issue of the Watertown Gazette,
Since not any of the group will admit to supplying the
second corrections, we can only surmise it was a figment of the editor’s
imagination. The published “correction”
contained the phrase “the husband of one particular lady who afterwards tested
the merits of those puffs, required the services of a dentist forthwith”. Do you suppose it was my husband who came up
with that typical masculine comment?
IT BETTER NOT BE !
