Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
Charles Herrick
Mount Pleasant farmer and town supervisor (1870, 1872); Wisconsin Senate special election 1873; Racine businessman; died Nov. 14, 1886
$350
Charles Herrick was Mount Pleasant’s nineteenth-century business-civic name—a Massachusetts transplant who farmed the town for nearly three decades, sat on its board, and briefly held a Wisconsin Senate seat before dying a Racine banker. He is what the village actually had before Case High started minting athletes, not a modern founder myth. He left Westford, Massachusetts, in 1836, logged the Muskegon and White Rivers, and in 1841 set up in Racine selling produce and cattle. He married Ann Ball of Virgil, New York, on December 14, 1846; they had three sons. From 1849 to 1854 he manufactured fanning mills—the machine that cleaned grain so a wheat county could sell it—and served as village trustee, city alderman, original school-board member, and director of the new Racine Gas-light and Coke Company. In 1857 he moved to the neighboring Town of Mount Pleasant and farmed. He sat on the Mount Pleasant board in 1870 and 1872. In 1873 he won a Senate special election as a Liberal Republican, 2,423 to 1,519 over Philo Belden, then lost the seat back to Robert Hall Baker a year later (Baker 2,706, Herrick 2,130 on the short-lived Liberal Reform ticket). The Madison stretch was one Senate session, not a long legislative career. He died of heart failure in a Racine house on November 14, 1886, vice-president of Union National Bank; the Bankers’ Magazine ran the obituary. He is buried at Mound Cemetery in the city of Racine, not Mount Pleasant. The place claim is the 1857–1886 farm-and-board stretch in Mount Pleasant, with Racine as the earlier business base and the place of death.