Wilder-Clark Collections
Two of the most prominent families in Evansville at the turn of the twentieth century were the Wilders and Clarks. Each of them established businesses in town in the mid-nineteenth century. They were active in civic and cultural affairs in turn-of-the century Evansville and built fine houses that still stand on Main Street and First Street. The Grove Society maintains extensive collections of papers and artifacts from both families at its museum in the historic Baker Building.
One of the founders was Charles Harrison Wilder (1824-1906), who first moved to Wisconsin in 1858 with his wife, Annette Noyes, and settled a farm in Green County. After Annette died in 1864, Charles sold the farm and moved to Evansville. He was reportedly a “strong temperance man.” He married his second wife, Betty Annette Lee, in 1867. In the late 1870s Charles and Betty built the house that still stands at 143 W. Main Street in Evansville. They lived there until 1900, when they moved to a house at 132 W. Main Street that belonged to their neighbor, Levi Leonard, who built it in 1868.
Charles Harrison Wilder
Charles built southern Wisconsin’s first cheese factory shortly after moving to Evansville. The business was successful and began exporting Wisconsin cheese to England in 1873. Charles and Betty lived upstairs from the factory at first; their daughter Louise Lee Wilder was born there in 1870. Charles sold the cheese factory in 1877; the building was later converted to a tobacco warehouse.
In 1877 Charles bought a lumber business; one of three in Evansville at the time. This business also prospered, importing lumber by rail and distributing it for construction, especially of barns and other farm outbuildings in the area.
The collection contains a number of tools that Charles used at the lumberyard. One of his managers remembered him as a generous employer. Charles sold the business, apparently because his health was failing, in the 1890s. He died at home in 1906, at the age of 82.
Charles Wilder’s wife, Betty Annette Lee Wilder (1837-1924), was a New York native who lived in Allen’s Grove when she married Charles in 1867. Her father, Zebulon T. Lee, had brought his family to Wisconsin in 1841-42, operated a farm, and was for several years a Justice of the Peace in Evansville. Charles and Betty Wilder raised four children, including a son from Charles’s marriage to Annette and two sons and a daughter of their own. Betty was active in the Congregational Church and something called “The Afternoon Club.” Her granddaughter remembered that she did all of her own yardwork and that she was “a big talker . . . positive in her ideas and didn’t mind expressing them.” After Charles’s death she continued to live at 132 W. Main until she sold the house in 1920. She died in 1924.
Louise Wilder Clark (1870-1963) was the only daughter of Charles and Betty Lee Wilder. She was born while the family lived upstairs from Wilder’s cheese factory. Reportedly “a young lady of unusual amiability and attractiveness,” Louise attended the University of Wisconsin but dropped out as a Junior to help care for her ailing father. In 1895 she married William James Clark, who was a partner in a dry goods firm located at 1 West Main Street. The wedding took place at the Wilder home. Charles H. Wilder purchased land for the couple’s home at 45 N. First Street; he paid $450 for the lot and $2500 to build the house (equivalent in all to about $110,000 today). The property remained in the Wilder family until 1936. Louise died in Evansville in 1963, at the age of 93. She is buried, along with her parents and her husband, in Maple Hill Cemetery in Evansville.
William James Clark (1862-1932) was born in Janesville. In 1885 he moved to Evansville and opened a general store on E. Main Street. “A young man of pleasant and genial appearance,” Will Clark and a partner, Cummings, moved the store to the southwest corner of Main and Madison Streets in 1887. The business sold dry goods such as clothing, wallpaper, carpets, and groceries.
Will married Louise Wilder in 1895. In 1901 he bought Cummings’s share of the business with money borrowed from C.H. Wilder and continued operating the business until he sold it in 1922. Will Clark died at home of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1932; he is buried next to Louise Wilder Clark in Maple Hill Cemetery.