Henry Stevens

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.