Profile · Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
Robert Samuel Houston
Pleasant Prairie dairy farmer; Wisconsin Assembly 1874 and 1891; town board chairman
$500
Robert Samuel Houston was a Pleasant Prairie dairy farmer who twice reached the Wisconsin Assembly and spent his adult life on land he settled in September 1857. Massachusetts-born, he made butter, cheese, hay, corn, and oats; the butter and cheese took medals. He chaired the town board and kept the school-district books until his death in Milwaukee on January 5, 1902. He was born in Charlemont, Massachusetts, on August 7, 1820, worked six years as a stonecutter in Meriden, Connecticut, then came west. In 1873 the Liberal Reform coalition—Democrats, Grangers, and Liberal Republicans—sent him to Madison with 1,005 Kenosha County votes to 777 for former state senator Francis Paddock. He sat on railroads the year the Potter Law capped freight rates and created a railroad commissioner, the session that first put Democrats in charge of the Assembly since before the Civil War. He declined a 1874 run, lost in 1876, then won again in 1890 as a Democrat (1,597 to 1,453 over Republican J. Cavanaugh) and sat on agriculture. In 1895 state testers condemned thirty-eight of his cows for tuberculosis; he learned the carcasses had been sold for beef, sued, lost in circuit court and at the Wisconsin Supreme Court, lobbied Governor Scofield, and spent most of what remained of the money on the fight. He had married widow Lucy Smith in 1849; after her death in 1894 he married her niece Isabella. Two adopted daughters survived him. He died of edema in Milwaukee and is buried at Green Ridge Cemetery in Kenosha. Pleasant Prairie claims the farm stretch, not the birth.