3156 S Riverside Dr · Beloit, Wisconsin
Once upon a house — and every word of it on the record.
One piece of land beside the Rock River: the Ho-Chunk village of Standing Post, the trader Joseph Thibault, the Blodgetts who founded Beloit, William S. Yost's farm and cobblestone house, the Yost Park resort, and the Riverside Motel built around it. Every event below links to the page of the source that records it.
The land through time
…–1835
The first people
The Ho-Chunk village of Standing Post beside the Rock River.
"Indian Manufactures": a canoe, tools and garments of the upper Great Lakes nations, engraved for Schoolcraft's journal of 1821. Not specific to the Ho-Chunk. Source
Schoolcraft, Henry R. Narrative Journal of Travels through the Northwestern Regions of the United States, Extending from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes, to the Sources of the Mississippi River, Performed as a Member of the Expedition under Governor Cass, in the Year 1820. Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1821. Library of Congress copy via the Internet Archive, archive.org/details/narrativejournal01scho.1634–1836
Contact and the fur trade
French, British and American traders; Joseph Thibault.
Sault de Ste. Marie, engraved for Schoolcraft's account of the 1820 Cass expedition through the fur-trade country. Source
Schoolcraft, Henry R. Narrative Journal of Travels through the Northwestern Regions of the United States, Extending from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes, to the Sources of the Mississippi River, Performed as a Member of the Expedition under Governor Cass, in the Year 1820. Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1821. Library of Congress copy via the Internet Archive, archive.org/details/narrativejournal01scho.1836–1843
The Blodgetts
Caleb Blodgett buys Thibault's claim; Selvey K. Blodgett farms the land.
"A Map of Beloit": the early village beside the Rock River, reproduced in Brown's Rock County, Wisconsin (1908). 1843–1897
The Yost farm
William S. Yost settles, farms and builds the cobblestone house.
"Wm. S. Yost" on the 1858 map of Beloit Township, Sections 11 and 12. 1898–1930
Yost Park
The riverside resort: picnics, dances and the interurban.
"Yost Park" lettered by the river on the 1904 plat, beside John A. Yost's Park Stock Farm.
1830
Beloit
- January 13, 1830 E. Wilson was born; the passage notes he was later living in Turtle.
Rock County
The region
- Spring 1830 Black Hawk and his band, returning from an unsuccessful winter's hunt, found their town demolished and the site ploughed up; the passage states that during the preceding winter, squatters after seven years of illegal occupancy had preempted several quarter sections at the mouth of the Rock covering the village site and the Sac corn fields.
- 1830 Farmer's "Map of the Territories of Michigan and Ouisconsin" was published; it gave the river draining the four lakes as the "Goosh-ke-hawn," noted Lake Koshkonong ("the lake we live on"), and marked a Winnebago village at the mouth of that river.
- 1830 A party of Menomonees and Sioux murdered some of the British band of Sacs; the passage states that in 1831 Black Hawk's war party retaliated by killing twenty-seven Menomonees near Fort Crawford.
- 1830 The Sacs and Foxes ceded to the United States a strip of land twenty miles wide from the Mississippi to the Des Moines, on the north side of their territory.
Nation and world
- May 29, 1830 An act of Congress concerning pre-emption of public lands was approved on May 29, 1830.
- Summer 1830 A report recorded 154 cases of fever in the third quarter of 1830; the same quarter of 1836, with greater strength, afforded one case.
- January 1830 John Poole commenced the hotel business in Johnstown, carrying it on successfully for sixteen years.
Faces from the record
Engraved portraits from the county histories of 1879 and 1908. A different dozen each day.
