7 files on the desk from Watertown, Wisconsin. 7 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin
Forty-Eighter and U.S. statesman; Watertown farm years 1850s (not the Octagon House / John Richards)
$8,000
Carl Christian Schurz was the German Forty-Eighter whose American rise began on a Watertown hill farm before Lincoln sent him abroad. Union general, Missouri senator, and Hayes’s secretary of the interior, he is not a Watertown native and he did not live in the Octagon House.
He was born March 2, 1829, in Liblar, Rhenish Prussia. He had already sprung Gottfried Kinkel from Spandau, taught German in London, and married Margarethe Meyer when the couple crossed in 1852. Wisconsin’s German boom pulled them west. In 1855 he bought eighty-nine acres from John Jackson for an eighty-five-hundred-dollar mortgage and built a gingerbread villa on Karlshuegel—Carl’s Hill—overlooking the Rock River off North Church Street. He meant to plat lots; the Panic of 1857 ate the speculation. Neighbors still called him the country gentleman from Watertown: prairie-chicken hunts, billiards at the Buena Vista House, dinner-party charades. Daughter Marianne was born on the farm in 1857, a birth that nearly killed Margarethe.
That same year he lost the lieutenant governor’s race. He kept a Milwaukee law office with Halbert Paine, spoke for Lincoln in German, served as a Wisconsin delegate to the 1860 Republican convention, and left as minister to Spain in 1861. The house is gone; a bed-and-breakfast sits on the hill at what is now 749 North Church Street. Margarethe’s kindergarten, begun in 1856 at North Second and Jones, was moved to the Octagon House grounds in 1956. That brick house belongs to John Richards, not to Schurz.
Founder and President, title insurance / settlement services · Watertown, Wisconsin
Founder/president of EnTrust Title Group; Watertown HS Class of 1995.
$2 million+
Jeff Oiler founded EnTrust Title Group and built it into a nationwide independent title and closing shop with a dense Wisconsin footprint. Watertown Daily Times covered a chamber ribbon-cutting that identified him as owner when EnTrust joined the Watertown Area Chamber of Commerce.
A Watertown High School Class of 1995 graduate, he is listed as founder and president on business directories and as president/secretary on Florida corporate filings that also name Michael Oiler as vice president. EnTrust, founded in 2013, runs a Brookfield corporate office and local closing sites including Watertown, Milwaukee, Kenosha, Madison, and West Bend, plus Florida locations.
The company pitches local retail solutions alongside national lender services and markets itself among the larger independent title agencies in the country. Watertown remains the family's hometown and EnTrust's local storefront, even though corporate HQ sits in Brookfield.
Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin
Watertown mill owner who designed and built the Octagon House at 919 Charles Street
$687.50
John Richards was the pioneer mill owner who promised Eliza Forbes the finest house in the best town in Wisconsin Territory and then spent three years proving it. The Octagon House at 919 Charles Street, finished in 1854, and the mills on the Rock River are why Watertown still knows his name.
He was born in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, in 1806, attended Williams College, and joined the Massachusetts bar before reaching the Rock River in 1837. He fetched Eliza from Albany in 1840 and put her in a cabin while mill hands stacked brick. With Luther Cole and Heber Smith he opened the Rough and Ready flour mill in 1847, then a sawmill and linseed-oil mill on the east bank. The Octagon rose five floors with thirteen-inch brick walls, seventeen-inch stone foundations, a hanging cherry staircase from trees on his land, a rainwater cistern, and furnace heat without chimney breasts. Architect Rexford Newcomb later called it probably the best-planned octagon in the country.
He was Jefferson County’s first district attorney and, briefly, mayor. He died in Fond du Lac on February 18, 1874. Eliza died in the house on June 19, 1902. The family stayed until grandson William Thomas died in 1935; the Watertown Historical Society opened the house as a museum in 1938. The kindergarten building on the lawn is Margarethe Schurz’s, moved there in 1956. Richards never lived in Schurz’s villa, and Schurz never lived here. The mills and the house are the city claim.
Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin
U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and first FTC chairman; born and first practiced law in Watertown
$17,500
Joseph Edward Davies was the Watertown valedictorian who became the first chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was born in Watertown on November 29, 1876, to Welsh wagon-maker Edward Davies, whose shop sat at 311 South First, and evangelist Rachel Davies, known in Wales as Rahel o Fôn.
He learned his letters from his mother at home, then attended the public schools and carted Globe Mill flour for her kitchen. Senior year he caught typhoid and lost every hair on his head; classmates voted to wear mortarboards at commencement so he would not stand out. He was valedictorian of the class of 1894. At the University of Wisconsin he was freshman-class president, law-class president, and commencement orator in 1901. He opened rooms over the post office, spent four years as Jefferson County district attorney, and planted flower beds on South Second before leaving for Madison and Washington.
Woodrow Wilson made him first FTC chairman in 1915–16. Roosevelt sent him to Moscow from 1936 to 1938; Mission to Moscow sold widely. He married Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1935, sat at Potsdam at Truman’s elbow, and kept sending money home, including five hundred dollars for the Octagon House porches in 1941 and the Joe Davies scholarships that still walk out of Watertown High. He died in Washington on May 9, 1958. Birth, raise, and first practice are Watertown; the diplomatic career was national.
Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin
Medical-research philanthropist and Lasker Foundation co-founder; born in Watertown
$10 million
Mary Woodard Lasker was the Watertown banker’s daughter who became one of the most consequential medical-research philanthropists in American history. She co-founded the Lasker Foundation, helped remake the American Cancer Society, and spent decades pushing Congress to fund the National Institutes of Health on a scale that reshaped postwar medicine.
She was born on November 30, 1900, at 400 North Washington Street. Her father, Frank, ran the Bank of Watertown; her mother, Sara, helped found two of the city’s three parks, which is why the girl grew up treating flowers as a civic duty. The childhood left scars. Recurrent ear infections arrived before antibiotics. At four she was taken to see the family’s cleaning woman after a double mastectomy and never forgot the helplessness of that room. She graduated from Radcliffe in art history in 1923, worked at Reinhardt Galleries, and built Hollywood Patterns before marrying advertising titan Albert Lasker.
Together they founded the Lasker Foundation in 1942, turned a sleepy cancer society into the American Cancer Society, and helped shove the NIH budget from about $2.4 million in 1945 toward $5.5 billion by 1985. She backed the National Cancer Act of 1971 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. On May 15, 2009, the first-day ceremony for her 78-cent stamp was held on the front lawn of the Woodard house. She left more than $10 million to the foundation. Watertown is the raise; the science and the lobbying were national.
Title insurance executive (VP); former college baseball pitcher · Watertown, Wisconsin
Watertown HS / UW–Milwaukee baseball alum (Brewers draft); VP of EnTrust Title Group alongside Jeff Oiler.
$1 million+
Mike Oiler is part of a Watertown baseball family that later built a multi-state title business. A right-handed pitcher out of Watertown High School and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, he was drafted twice by the Milwaukee Brewers—in the 52nd round in 1997 and the 35th round in 2000.
Corporate records list Michael Oiler as a vice president of EnTrust Title Group, Inc., the independent title and closing company founded by Jeff Oiler. The firm runs Wisconsin offices including Watertown and a Brookfield corporate headquarters, and markets itself among the larger independent title agencies nationally.
Watertown is the family hometown and the site of EnTrust's local chamber presence, even as corporate filings point to Brookfield.
Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin
Alabama men’s basketball coach; born and raised in Watertown, Wisconsin, at Maranatha Baptist
$7.25 million
Nathanael Justin “Nate” Oats is the Watertown-raised coach who took Alabama men’s basketball to its first Final Four in 2024. He was not a Watertown High Gosling. He was a Maranatha kid whose whole childhood and first adult job sat on one Baptist campus: church, classroom, and gym.
He was born in Watertown on October 13, 1974, the son of Larry Oats, a Maranatha Bible professor and seminary dean who never left the school, and Colleen. At Maranatha Baptist Academy he started three seasons and went 24–0 as a senior. He stayed for college as a math-education major, team captain, and all-conference player, then earned a master’s in kinesiology from Wisconsin in 1999 while still on the Maranatha staff. Weeknights meant youth-prison Bible study at Ethan Allen; summers meant roofing and more gym time.
He assisted at Maranatha from 1997 to 2000, coached at Wisconsin–Whitewater, taught math for eleven years in Michigan, and won a Class A state title at Romulus in 2013 at 27–1. Buffalo and then Alabama followed. The Watertown claim is birth, raise, and that first adult coaching job, not a later mailing address from Tuscaloosa.