Carl Christian Schurz
Forty-Eighter and U.S. statesman; Watertown farm years 1850s (not the Octagon House / John Richards)
Net worth
$8,000
1879
About
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.
Notable facts
In 1855 he bought an 89-acre Watertown farm (Karlshuegel / Carl’s Hill) from John Jackson; the site is now 749 N. Church Street.
He lost a Republican run for Wisconsin lieutenant governor in 1857, was a Wisconsin delegate to the 1860 Republican convention, and left as minister to Spain in 1861.
Margarethe Schurz’s 1856 kindergarten began at N. Second and Jones in Watertown and was moved to the Octagon House grounds a century later; it was not Carl’s house.
What questions can this profile answer
- What makes Carl Christian Schurz notable?
- 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.
- What is Carl Christian Schurz's estimated net worth?
- Carl Christian Schurz's estimated net worth is $8,000 as of 1879.