The
banner town in Door
County is undoubtedly Sevastopol. Here the land
is deep, rich and gently rolling, excellently
suited to agriculture. Here are many of Wisconsin's
largest and best managed orchards. Here the
improvements are substantial and the highways
excellent. Not many towns in Wisconsin are superior
to Sevastopol for farming operations or results.
But
not all the land in Sevastopol
is suited to agriculture. Along Lake Michigan
is a broad belt of low and indifferent land
which has not yet been put to any important
use. Here, however, is where Sevastopol's first
permanent settler made his home.
Up in
the northeastern corner of the town lies a large
and beautiful lake, known as Clarks Lake. The
northern part of the lake extends into the Town
of Jacksonport.
Between this lake and Lake Michigan lies a tract
of inferior low-lying land. Here, on the shore
of Lake Michigan he settled and developed a very
interesting fishing station.
John P. Clark
was one of the first white settlers on this
peninsula, having located here in
1838. He
had previously been fishing at Two Rivers and while so
engaged was informed by an Indian that there
was a better place farther down the shore. Taking
his informant with him Mr. Clark visited the
spot which is
now known as White Fish Bay, and finding that
he had been correctly informed he
determined to locate there. In order to have
plenty of elbow room, and to control the grounds
he bought large tracts of land along the shores,
his purchases ultimately amounting to about
twenty-five hundred acres and extending along
the beach for nine miles.
In 1842 he
was accompanied to the fishing ground by his
brother, Isaac S. Clark, who continued to take
an active interest in the business from that
time. They landed at Two Rivers in April of
that year from the steamer Cleveland, which
was running between Buffalo and Chicago. At
that time and for some years following they
began to fish at Two Rivers in April and there
remained until
August, when they removed to White Fish Bay
where they operated for the remainder of the
season, which closed about the middle of November,
after which they returned to Detroit for the
winter.
Fishing
was then done entirely with seines, which varied
in length from 40 to 160 rods,
or half a mile in length, though nets of medium
size were found to work most satisfactorily.
They were carried
into the lake and set from the boats, then afterward
hauled in by windlasses on the beach, the operation
taking several hours. Large hauls were frequently
made, a single
sweep of a net
having on one occasion brought in 175 barrels
of 200 pounds each, all fish being at that time
put up in full barrels. Although the seines
brought in every kind of fish, none was picked
out but whitefish, all others
being hauled to a field
for use as fertilizer. Sometimes the oil was
extracted for
tanning and other purposes, it being worth $1
a gallon.
Most
of this work was done by Indians, two or three
hundred of whom assembled at the bay to manufacture
oil, in the
fishing season, the proceeds of which they spent
for whiskey in order that they might get drunk "just
like the white man." The Messrs. Clark
employed from thirty to forty fishermen and
several coopers, and their annual catch at Two
Rivers and White Fish Bay was from fifteen hundred
to two thousand barrels. The schooner Gazelle,
owned by John P. Clark,
was engaged in carrying the fish to Cleveland
where most of them were sold, the price in 1838, and
for several years afterwards, being $18 per
barrel.
The
use of seines continued until within the past
fifteen or twenty years, when they were discarded
and pond nets used in their stead, these being
found much more economical to use, while the
hauls made in them were as large as had previously
come from the seines.
When Mr. Clark
began operations in this region there were but
few white persons in Door County. Excepting
Indians, Mr. Clark's only neighbors where wild
animals, and of these the woods mere full. The
howling of wolves was heard every night, and
the occasional loss of a pig or a calf served
to keep the colony in a state of pleasurable
excitement, conjecturing that when the domestic
animals were consumed the wolves might insist
upon having fresh baby for supper every evening.
Deer
and bears were scarcely less abundant than wolves.
The refuse fish carried
to the field attracted the bears, and as many
as eight were at one time seen engaged in getting a square
meal from a pile
of offal. As usual when the Indians come in
contact with the whites they rapidly deteriorated.
Civilization and shotgun whiskey were altogether
too much for the constitution of the red men.
In addition to the meanest kind of fire water
the whites brought with them the smallpox and
cholera, while dissipation caused the hitherto
rugged native to become a prey
to lung diseases.
About 1860 an
Indian named Nimniquette camped with his family
on the north point of White Fish Bay during
the fishing season, himself and many others
of the tribe having come on one of their annual
oil making expeditions. Nimniquette was addicted
with consumption, which had reduced him to a
mere skeleton. He died a short
time after his arrival, and the burial ground
of the tribe, being at sand Bay, south of Kewaunee,
his friends applied to Mr. Clark
for the use of a boat
in which to convey the remains to the cemetery.
Just
as the party was ready to leave a violent storm
arose and continued for several days. Before
it abated one of the fishermen happened to visit
the camp and was horrified by the discovery
that the Indians were smoke-drying the dead
man. Being otherwise unable to preserve the
dead man until it could be transported to its
destination, they had enclosed it in a box
and were treating it as though it were a sugar-cured
ham. When the funeral party was ready to start,
the lamented"stiff" was
so thoroughly dried that he could safely be
warranted to keep in any climate until the Angel
Gabriel summons mankind to come
to judgment.
Nothing
now remains to mark Clark's fishing station.
The quaint old houses-some of them built without
a single nail or piece of iron in them-have
disappeared, the surging waves have beaten the
piers to pieces and the forest growth has conquered
the clearings. The recollections of this interesting
and long established business are now only a
vague and fleeting memory.
More
than ten miles away, in the extreme western
part of the town, on the shore of Green Bay,
Mr. Clark had his nearest neighbor. This was
Mil McMillen, a fisherman
like Clark. It is
likely, howerer, that Mr. Clark never met his
neighbor and fellow townsman as they
were separated by a trackless forest of ten
miles of huge trees by land and by a journey
of 100 miles
around "the Door" by water.
It was
this huge forest of ancient growth that the
farmers had to conquer before they could make
Sevastopol the land of milk and honey it is
today. When the Norwegian Moravians of Fort
Howard moved to Sturgeon Bay in 1852
four of them settled a few
miles north of the future city in the Town of
Sevastopol near the mouth of Sturgeon Bay. These
four were H. P. and
Jacob Hanson,
Louis Klinkenberg and Salvi Salvison. The next
year they were joined by John and Thomas Garland.
John
Garland had been a sea captain and was of a roving,
romantic disposition. He came from Canada and
knew nothing of the West but what the interesting
curves on the chart told him. Feeling the call
of the wild he loaded his possessions, including
Brussels carpets and ornate china, into a boat
and sailed for the setting sun. When he arrived
at the mouth of Sturgeon Bay he thought nature
had created such a perfect picture that a lovelier
scene was not
to be found.
He
pitched his habitation on the spot now occupied
by Dudley S. Crandall's
house and built a pier. He felt sure that a great
port would here be developed as a result
of the Buffalo trade.
The
next year, 1854, the little settlement at the
mouth of the bay was augmented by the arrival
of Alexander and Robert Laurie. They came in
a hooker
from Buffalo "looking for a place
where there was no fever and ague." They
found it at the mouth of Sturgeon Bay. From
the year of their arrival the Lauries have been
prominently identified with the history of the
county. They built some of the earliest vessels
that floated on Green Bay and were leaders in
almost every enterprise.
Alexander
Laurie was drowned in a storm on Green Bay in
1862 but Robert Laurie, the father of the present
county highway commissioner, John M. Laurie,
lived to attain a ripe age. He had in his youth
been a salt water sailor, visiting many strange
ports and heathen lands. His wife had brought
with her into the wilderness many old files
of the London Illustrated Weekly. In the evenings
it was quite common for the neighbors to gather
in the Laurie home where Mrs. Laurie would read
of the manners and customs of the dusky denizens
of the Orient, while Robert Laurie would sandwich
in personal observations from the same ports.
In
this manner the evenings were most enjoyably
spent by many of the old pioneers of Sturgeon
Bay and Sevastopol. When the county board in
1859 set off the Town of Sevastopol the board
gave it the name of Laurieville in honor of
the Lauries. The Germans of the eastern part
of the town were not consulted in this, however,
and the name was later changed to its present
nondescript appellation.
So far
the history of the Town of Sevastopol has dealt
only with men who settled on the shore, whose
principal industry for many pears was fishing
or sailing, with whom farming was a minor
side line. In 1856, however, we come to the
men who felled Sevastopol's great forest and
converted the land into the rare farming tract
it now is. About the first of these was George
Bassford, ever since a leader in the town, who
in 1856 led a party
of land seekers from Fond du Lac to Sturgeon
Bay.
When
they reached Green Bay the road came to an end.
With remarkable persistence, however, they pushed
on through the primeval jungle on foot,
wading through swamps, fording creeks and crawling
over the innumerable rotting windfalls. After
three days and nights during which time they
never saw a human
habitation or open clearing they finally emerged
on the shores of Sturgeon Bay. They crossed
this and pushed on for five miles farther into
the primeval woods.
Here
they finally came to land so excellent, judging
by the growth of the
timber, the topography of the ground and other
indications, that no better could be sought.
Bassford bought 240 acres
and at once became the biggest owner of lands
for farming purposes-a title he has almost always
held. With him or about the same time came A.
Sacket, the Stephenson brothers and several
others who
later moved to other parts.
The
same year came John Haus (Hocks), Jacob Crass
and Joseph Zettel. The first was Dutch, the
second German and the third Swiss. Zettel came
from Washington Island where he had worked for
a year for the Ranney Fish Co.
Joseph
Zettel deserves particular mention because it
was due to him more than to any other man that
Door County became famous as a fruit growing
section. He started to plant fruit trees in
1862 and
by 1890 he
had forty-five acres in apples-the largest orchard
in the state. In 1893 his
display of more than twenty varieties attracted
much attention and many premiums at the Worlds
Fair in
Chicago, his apples keeping their flavor and
appearance better than those of any other exhibition.
It
was due to Mr. Zettel's thirty years successful
esperience in growing fruit that A.
L. Hatch,
Professor Goff and other fruit growers a few
years later came in and developed that boom
in fruit growing which made Door County famous.
In
1857 there
was quite a number of pioneers who moved into
Sevastopol to clear farms. Most of these were
Germans. Among them were Peter J. Simon, Leonard
Heldman, Nicholas Armbrust, John Meyer, and
Luke Coyne. This year the first Irish families
also moved in of which there are now quite number
in the town. These were Henry Martin, Andrew
Finnegan and James Gillespie E. C.
Daniels and Alexander Templeton also settled
here this year. Of others that came before the
war were Anton Long, George King, Dennis Crowley,
Richard Ash and James R. Mann.
Sevastopol
was organized as a town
November 17, 1859. Its
first name was Laurieville. This name did not
suit the farmers of the
town. A special meeting of the new town was
held to choose a fitting
name for the town. Several names were mentioned
without meeting favor. A few years previous
to this the events of the Crimean war had been
the leading news items in the papers and J. P. Simon
had gained a fragmentary knowledge of it. Sebastopol,
the great Russian seaport and fortress which
had been captured by the French and English
in 1856 after
a siege of eleven months, loomed big in his
mind and he suggested this name as a fitting
suggestion of the town's future greatness.
This
name was adopted. In getting it on the records,
however, an error in the spelling occurred and
thus we have Sevastopol, a shining
example of the pitfalls of little learning.
In the same manner the Russian name of Malakoff was later
applied to a post office in the town. The fact
that the two post offices of the
town were marked with Russian names on the map
of the state made many strangers believe that
here was a large
Russian settlement. However, it is doubtful
if there has ever been a Russian family in the
town.
This
Peter Joseph Simon was a man who took himself
very seriously. In 1868 there was a
great landslide of democratic voters to Grant
and Simon's vote was also carried along by the
flood. He announces
his change of heart in matters political in
the Advocate of October 1, 1868,
in the following precious announcement:
:
"Wonder!
Wonder!! Wonder!!!
"I, Peter
Joseph Simon, originator of the name of the Town of
SevastopoI, say I have
lived in said town for nearly twelve years. I was
one of the first settlers there. I have
been a man
who has voted for the democratic ticket for the last
twenty-five years. I have
also used my influence in favor of the democrats. I therefore,
after taking asurvey
of all matters and circumstances, have thoroughly
changed my views upon my former politics. Now
and henceforth I am
a Grant man ! Grant
is my man! Hurrah for Grant!
"PETER J. SIMON."
Peter J. Simon
was not only an energetic politician; he was
also a progressive
farmer and had the honor of growing the first
bushel of wheat in Serastopol. In
1873 he
gained much deserved credit for purchasing the
first mower in use north of Sturgeon Bay. For
four years he enjoyed the glory of having brought
the first mower into the town . Then his light
was eclipsed by Luke Coyne who scraped the bottom
of his credit by bringing the first grain binder
into the county.
This
grain binder was the third step in the evolution
of the present self binder. First came the reaper
which cut the grain and left it in swaths on
the fields to be bound into sheaves by slow
and painful hand labor. Then came the Marsh
Harvester. This reaper elevated the grain and
placed it on an elevated table attached to the
machine where two men were stationed whose laborious
task it was to bind the straw into sheaves as
fast as it dropped
on the bench. This machine was both a
man killer and a horse
killer, being very heavy and was early in the
'70s superseded by the wire binder.
This
machine was a great stride forward
and bound the sheaves in almost the same
manner as the present binders, wires
being used, however, for tying the bundles.
Soon, however, complaints came in from
farmer in districts where the wire binder
had been used, telling of thousands
of dollars lost by those whose cattle
had been killed by the wire swallowed
with the straw. Flour mills
also refused to grind the wheat cut by a wire
binder because small fragments of wire in the
grain cut the bolting cloths and also sometimes
caused explosions by friction
in the machinery.
It was
such a binder that Luke Coyne one day in August,
1877, brought
into his fields to the great edification of
his assembled neighbors. His triumph, however,
did not last long. The binder refused to work.
He was unable to pay for it and lost the farm.
This farm, one of the very best in the county,
is now owned by H. Fehl.
Among
the famous old pioneers of Sevastopol was also
Fred I. Schuyler,
one of the first men to come to Sturgeon Bay.
Fred Schuyler is best known for his inimitable
story telling and for his infinite love of a
good joke. He was
in early days much given to playing pranks on
others, at which he was quite successful.
For
instance, once-when he was in A. W.
Lawrence & Co.s
store he heard L.
M. Washburn
who was one of the proprietors complain of the
large number of rats on the premises and was
asked if he could not find some stray cats.
Schuyert thought he could and with a twinkle
in his eye went on a cat
hunt. Finally he had captured about a couple
of dozen. These he tied in bags and carried
into the store. The bag that he brought in looked
suspiciously large and heavy but thinking he
had brought only a couple
of cats Mr. Washburn thankfully told him to
let them out. Schuyler did so and instantly
there was a mad
scramble accompanied by yowls and hisses.
The
cats frightened out of their wits by their close
confinement made for the topmost shelves scattering
dishes right and left. Now and then they would
come to a tight place and then followed a cat
fight with more crashing crockery to the infinite
entertainment of the bystanders. Before the
cats were evicted they had smashed more than
twenty dollars worth of crockery and left a
stink that stayed for weeks.
While
Schuyler usually got the best of it in a joke,
the laugh was once on him with a vengeance. This
happened as follows: For a time, while farming
in Sevastopol, he had for neighbor an Irishman by the
name of Jack Hurley who lived across the road.
The big Yankee and the little
Irishman were the best of friends except for
occasional spats about trespassing pigs and
poultry. One day in Schuyler's absence the Irishman
had severely punished an inquisitive pig belonging
to Schuyler. When the latter in the evening
returned home and learned what had happened
he became very angry.
Scattering
lurid imprecations he strode across the road to pay
the Irishman back in kind. The Irishman saw
him coming. Just inside of the door was a trapdoor
to the cellar. Believing discretion to be better
than valor he blew out the light, opened the
trap door and awaited developments. Schuyler
did not stop to knock but kicked the door open
and marched in. The next moment he found himself
shooting down the trap door which the Irishman
quickly closed and barricaded with cupboards
and woodboxes.
Then
he went to bed.
The next morning a truce was patched up entirely
satisfactory to the
triumphant Irishman who sat upon the trap door
while telephoning to Schuyler who during the
night had had ample time to cool off while perched
upon a bin
of potatoes.
When
reminded of this adventure Mr. Schuyler
reminiscently remarked, "That Jack
Hurley was the smartest Irishman that
ever crossed the ocean."
In early
days Sevastopol had three shipping points which
now are used no longer. These were Podunk, Lily
Bay and White Fish Bay. Podunk was a small lumbering
village in the extreme northwestern corner of
the town. Geo. W. Marsh
built a pier
here about 1867 and
got out a great deal of pine.
As it was difficult to make
a road up and down the limestone ledge behind
the banking grounds a slide was constructed
down which the logs were sent.
Podunk
was later called Thayerport in honor of its
owner, Capt. C. R. Thayer,
and continued to
ship cordwood and cedar until the close of the
century.
Lily
Bay in the southeastern corner of the
town became a great shipping point about
1884. Horn
and Rashek started the business here which
was shortly taken over
by V. and
C. V. Mashek
of Kewaunee. A mill
and pier were built, a dam was put across the
creek so as to raise the water almost five feet
and almost a hundred men were employed in the
woods to get out logs and cedar. During the
winter of 1885 more
than a million
feet of logs were banked at the mill and a vast
quantity of cedar and cordwood was made ready
for shipment.
A store,
blacksmith shop and a number of dwellings were
erected near the mill. The Goodrich boats made
regular calls at Lily Bay which for some years
served as a lake port for Sturgeon Bay
in winter. Of the evidences of its former importance
nothing but a desolate,
ruined building or two
remain. It is
literally a hole in the ground, the strong southeast
winds having scooped immense holes in the ground
into which the old boarding house threatens
to engulf itself at any time.
Lily
Bay was originally called St. Joseph
in honor of Mr. Joseph,
a partner of Wm. H. Horn.
When Mr. Joseph retired from the partnership
the name was changed
to Lily Bay in honor of Mr. Horn's daughter,
Lily.
V. and
C. V.
Mashek
became very large owners of Door County lands:
buying out the seven miles of water front owned
by I.
S. Clark
besides other lands. At White
Fish Bay they
also had a mill
and a pier owned for a time in company with
Wm. H. Horn.
This mill was the original Crandall & Bradley
Mill, the first one built in Door County. It was
moved to White Fish Bay and later to some point
in the northern peninsula of Michigan.