5 files on the desk from Caledonia, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin
U.S. Representative (WI-10); born Franksville / Caledonia, career in Antigo
$7,500
Elmer Addison Morse was a Racine County farm kid who became a three-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin’s cutover north. Franksville—inside today’s village of Caledonia—was the childhood and the superintendent’s office; Antigo was the House career.
Born in Franksville on May 11, 1870, he attended the common schools of Racine County, graduated from Ripon College in 1893, and served two terms as county superintendent of schools (1893 and 1895) while reading law at the University of Wisconsin. Admitted to the bar in 1900, he did not stay. Antigo made him city attorney from 1900 to 1906 and, in 1906, sent him to Congress from the Tenth District. He married Myra Tradewell in Mount Pleasant on March 31, 1897; they had one daughter, Catherine.
He served three House terms, March 4, 1907, to March 3, 1913, talking like a Progressive about trusts, monopoly, and natural resources. A Democratic wave and a redrawn district ended it in 1912. He went home to Antigo and stayed in law, insurance, and real estate under the Morse-Tradewell name until an operation in Rochester, Minnesota, killed him on October 4, 1945. He is buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Antigo. The Caledonia stretch is childhood and the superintendent’s office, not the Capitol years.
Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin
Caledonia farmer and town board chair; Wisconsin Assembly 1864; Racine County state senator 1867–1870; died July 10, 1875
$350
Henry Stevens was a New Hampshire farmer who gave Caledonia two decades of civic leadership and two terms in the Wisconsin Senate. Born in Wilton, New Hampshire, on January 26, 1818, and raised there, he moved to the town of Caledonia in 1855, put in a farm, and became chairman of the town board. In the middle of the Civil War the National Union ticket sent him to the Wisconsin Assembly for the 1864 session. Voters then elected him to the state Senate in 1866 and again in 1868 for Racine County’s seat; he succeeded Jerome I. Case in the Seventh District and declined a third term in 1870, after which Philo Belden took the seat.
His public life was local and legislative rather than urban: the farm, the town chairmanship, one Assembly session, and the two Senate terms. Caledonia was still a town, not a village, and the cabbage country and Bohemian settlement were already the district’s facts. Stevens was the Yankee farmer the voters sent to Madison. Exact farm acreage and street address do not survive in the standard obituaries, but the stretch is residence and office in Caledonia, not a Racine-city career and not a Wisconsin birth.
On July 10, 1875, at fifty-seven, he hanged himself from a tree near his Caledonia home. Contemporary papers reported that he had been depressed for some time. The Wisconsin State Journal of July 12 ran the news under the plain heading “Death of Hon. Henry Stevens.” Burial is at Mound Cemetery in Racine; some later summaries list the death place as Racine, but the obituaries place the act near the Caledonia house. The civic record is the farm and the Senate years; the death closes the page without becoming the opening.
Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin
Caledonia town chairman and two-term Assembly Democrat; Racine-born teacher; died at his Caledonia home
$15,861
Marcel A. Dandeneau was the Racine-born teacher and Democrat who made Caledonia his adult political address—town board, Assembly seat, and the house where he died. He sat on the Caledonia town board from 1971 to 1977, returned in 1990, and chaired the town from 1992 to 1995. Parallel to local office he represented the 63rd Assembly District for two terms (1975–1979), then stayed in the Capitol as chief clerk of the Assembly from 1979 to 1981.
He was born in Racine on June 28, 1931, the eldest of six children of French-Canadian parents, and graduated from St. Catherine’s High School. He served as a rifle sergeant in Korea from 1951 to 1955, then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Dominican College of Racine. From 1960 to 1989 he taught—first at Sturtevant Grade School, later English, history, and science at Mitchell Junior High—and after retiring at fifty-seven he kept substitute-teaching full days. A 1975 campaign-finance misdemeanor cost him a five-hundred-dollar fine; a 1976 felony misconduct charge was dismissed. He had beaten incumbent Republican Henry Rohner for the Assembly in 1974 and lost the seat to E. James Ladwig in 1978.
For more than twenty-seven years he held an informal Saturday breakfast at DeRango’s on Douglas Avenue, a standing date for politicians and businessmen with no agenda but the county. In 1982 he took 75,258 votes (9.24 percent) in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary against William Proxmire. An Honor Flight in 2016 carried him from the Korean War Memorial to Arlington. He died of cancer at his Caledonia home on February 9, 2017; Shirley Leach and six children survived him. Birth and schooling were Racine; the board, the chairmanship, and the deathbed were Caledonia.
Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin
Composer and first dean of Northwestern’s School of Music; born in Thompsonville (Caledonia), Racine County
$75,000
Peter Christian Lutkin wrote the benediction still sung at American commencements, The Lord Bless You and Keep You, with its sevenfold amen. He was born on March 27, 1858, in Thompsonville, a Racine County hamlet inside what is now the village of Caledonia. His parents, Peter Christian and Hannah Olivarius Lutkin, had left Denmark in 1844. The family moved to Racine when he was one and to Chicago when he was five.
He sang in the choir of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church by nine and was its chief organist by fourteen, after both parents died when he was thirteen. Chicago public schools and early church work carried him to a piano instructorship at Northwestern at twenty-one, then to Berlin’s Royal Academy of Arts, where he was the only foreigner admitted that year. He returned to Chicago posts at St. Clement’s and St. James and to the American Conservatory before Northwestern brought him back in 1891. He became the first dean of the School of Music in 1895 and held the post through 1928.
In 1906 he founded Northwestern’s A Cappella Choir and spent decades arguing to the Music Teachers National Association that unaccompanied singing was the point. The national music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda took its letters from his name. Library of Congress counts put him at more than thirty hymn tunes and sixty-five anthems; he also co-edited a Methodist hymnal. He married Nancy Lelah Carmen on October 27, 1885. He died of a heart attack at his son’s house in Evanston on December 27, 1931, and was buried at Rosehill in Chicago. Thompsonville is the birth claim; Chicago raised him after age five.
Profile · Caledonia, Wisconsin
Early Caledonia settler and Racine County sheriff central to the 1854 Joshua Glover rescue; later Wisconsin state senator
$2.50 a day
Timothy D. Morris was the Racine County sheriff who treated the 1854 seizure of Joshua Glover as a kidnapping and helped set in motion the jailbreak that sent the escaped enslaved man to Canada. Born in De Peyster, New York, on July 4, 1818, he came west in the fall of 1838, staked a claim in the town of Caledonia with his brother, and cleared what local memory calls the first farm in that corner of Racine County. He married Ellen Emerson, whose Vermont family had paused in New York, in 1843. They raised at least eight children. He farmed the western Caledonia land until lung inflammation killed him in that house on April 26, 1876; he is buried in Racine’s Mound Cemetery.
The night that made him famous began when Glover, living freely in Racine, was seized by his former captor and a U.S. marshal and locked in the Milwaukee jail under the Fugitive Slave Act. Morris, then sheriff on a Whig ticket, tried to arrest Benammi Garland and the federal men, then loaded about a hundred Racinians onto a boat for Milwaukee. Abolitionists took the jail with pickaxes. Morris arrested Garland on the spot. Glover was already on a boat to Canada before federal court could remand him south. Garland later sued; in United States ex rel. Garland v. Morris the district court ordered Garland released—after the rescue had already succeeded.
Morris declined a 1854 re-election run after that year, then won the sheriff’s office again in 1856 as a Republican and the state Senate in 1862 over Philo Belden, serving 1863–65 before Jerome Case took the seat. Caledonia’s claim is the pioneer farm and the death at home; Racine County’s is the badge and the Glover night.