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.
1840
Beloit
- 1840 The Hanchett family came to Beloit, bought forty acres in Sec. 34, and Mr. Hanchett built the dam across Rock River at Beloit.
- August 7, 1840 Caleb Blodgett, the first white settler at Beloit, died.
- 1840 By fall, the Rock Prairie Norwegian settlement was established, consisting of five homesteads: Gravdal, Hallan, Odegarden, Lars Skavlem, and Gullik Halvorsen Blakstad (Skavlem); Gisle Hallan had taken possession of his new home in Sec. 6, Town of Beloit, and Gullick Halvorsen Blackstad (Skavlem) located on Sec. 28 during the spring and summer.
- October 1, 1840 Benjamin Brown arrived in Beloit with his wife (married May 14, 1840) and her daughter Lucy; the 1908 history also says his father first came to Beloit in 1840 and that Brown arrived in October.
Rock County
- September 1840 The parents of Paul M. Green came to Rock Co. and purchased 120 acres on Sections 4 and 5 (Milton).
- 1840 Easton and Gusta Johnson arrived in Rock county and settled in Avon township.
- Fall 1840 A church and parsonage were erected on a lot at the southwest corner of Section 36, known as the First Congregational Church of Rock County, at a cost of about $500.
- Spring 1840 Jacob West and John T. Baker came to the Evansville area; the 1879 history says Jacob West removed with his family to Rock Co. in 1840 and settled in Union Township in the fall of 1840 — the sources differ on the season.
The region
- 1840 The lands in Rock and Jefferson Counties came into market; the sale was at Milwaukee; settlers could first obtain title to the land that year.
- Summer 1840 An organized school was set up in the shanty first occupied by the Ogdens.
- 1840 Rock County members served in the Fourth (extra) Session of the Second Legislative Assembly (James Maxwell, Edward V. Whiton, John Hackett, Hugh Long).
- 1840 General Atkinson, with two and a half regiments of United States soldiers, forcibly moved 4,500 Winnebagoes to the west side of the Mississippi; from 1840 to 1848 six companies of soldiers were kept in Wisconsin.
Nation and world
- August 5, 1840 James D. Doty was re-elected Territorial delegate.
- 1840 A young lawyer purchased the Cortland "County Whig," a weekly newspaper, during the presidential contest between Harrison and Van Buren.
- 1840 The town received a large accession to its population by the arrival of a colony from Cortland, N.Y.
- 1840 The legislature's memorial to congress represented that the people were anxious to establish a common-school system; many schools were poorly organized for lack of funds.
Faces from the record
Engraved portraits from the county histories of 1879 and 1908. A different dozen each day.
Research in progress
2,413
documented events
41 years so far, 1820–1860
27
on the property itself
614 more in Beloit
9,847
people identified
across the sources
9
sources transcribed
1,456,854 words · 198 clippings