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Records for “John Richards Watertown”

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Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin

Carl Christian Schurz

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.

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Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin

John Richards

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.

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