Nathaniel Martin

Nathaniel Martin is the patriarch of the clan this website is devoted to. Accordingly, he gets special attention here. He is also a figure of special interest as part of the history of Green County, WI. In 1901, when Nathaniel was an old man, the following tribute to him was published in the Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Rock, Green, Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette, Wisconsin on pages 755-756. (The capitalization and abbreviation style has been altered to conform to modern common usage.)

NATHANIEL MARTIN, whose name in Cadiz Township, Green County, is “familiar as household words,” is a native of Virginia, born December 14, 1816.

James and Rebecca (Pearcy) Martin, his parents, were also Virginians, and came of Irish and English ancestry, respectively, Grandfather Martin having been born in Ireland, and Grandfather Pearcy in England. James and Rebecca Martin had ten children: Sidney, Redmond, Isaiah, Elias, Nathaniel, Rebecca, Nancy, Charles, Polly (who died in childhood), and one whose name is not given, all now deceased except Nathaniel and Rebecca (Mrs. Burrell), the latter of whom is residing in Nora, Illinois.

Nathaniel Martin was reared and educated in Virginia, whence, at the age of twenty, he went to St. Louis, MO, and chopped wood for one winter. In the spring of 1837 he removed to Stephenson County, IL, where for several years he worked at day wages. In 1848 he came to Green County, WI, and built a dam on the Pecatonica River, at a point where the present village of Martintown now stands, and the same year he erected a sawmill and later a gristmill. Here for over fifty-two years he has conducted a general milling business with remarkable success. Mr. Martin commenced life a poor boy, but by hard work, persistent and judicious economy he has become one of the wealthiest men of Green County, at one time owning 1200 acres of fine land, over 200 of which were under cultivation. However, he has given away most of his land, and is now devoting his time exclusively to operating the mills. For more than half a century he has been one of the leading business men of Cadiz Township, and the village of Martintown (known as “Martin” before the railroad was built to that point), where he has his home, was platted by and named for him.

On February 25, 1847, Nathaniel Martin married Miss Hannah Strader, daughter of Jacob and Rachel (Starr) Strader, who were among the early settlers of Green County, and fourteen children were born of this union, viz.: Elias, who lives at Cripple Creek, CO, married Lavina, daughter of Thomas Watson; Alice is deceased; her twin sister, Eleanor A., married John Warner, of Winslow, IL; Jennie Edith, now deceased, was the wife of Jacob Hodge, late of Minnesota; Horatio makes his home in Martintown, WI, being in partnership with his father in the milling business (he married Laura Hart, and has four children); William and Charles are both deceased; Emma is the wife of Cullen P. Brown, of Saint Marys, MO; Christa B. and Abraham L. are deceased; Mary L. is the wife of Elwood Bucher, of Illinois; James F. is deceased; Juliet B. is the wife of Edwin E. Savage, a machinist of Seattle, WA; and Hannah is deceased. There are twenty-eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. In politics Mr. Martin leans toward Prohibition, but was originally a Whig, later a Republican, and during his long career in Green County has always declined to fill any offices of honor and trust. In religious faith he accepts the strict interpretation of the Scriptures, and is opposed to all dogmas and creed doctrines. He and his estimable wife, who has been his faithful helpmeet for fifty-four years of joys and sorrows, live in the enjoyment of the respect and esteem of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

Written only four years before Nathaniel’s death, the entry is a fairly accurate if brief description of the course of Nathaniel’s life. One detail that deserves correction is that Nathaniel was by no means the only person involved in building the sawmill on the Pecatonica that was to become the heart of the original Martintown. There were two other key individuals. First was Cyrus Woodman, the active agent for a Boston-based group of land speculators who owned the water rights to that section of the Pecatonica. Woodman had already been a great mover and shaker in the local area, all part of an on-going campaign to increase the worth of the investment holdings of his firm, Boston and Western Land Company. In 1844 he had platted and founded the town of Winslow (one mile south of where the village of Martin would rise) in order to boost the value of the 1200 acres that he and his partners had recently purchased. Now he needed to spur development along the river in order to be able to sell the rights at a profit, so he orchestrated the founding of the mill. The 1848 date mentioned above probably refers to his early efforts, prior to Nathaniel’s involvement. Once the project was underway, Woodman sold the water rights to Edwin S. Hanchett, who then proceeded with the scheme to dam the river and build the mill. Nathaniel became Hanchett’s partner in 1849 or in early 1850. Nathaniel helped finish the construction and then the two men operated the business together for a year or so. As far as can be determined from the vantage of a century and a half later, the transactions were handled amicably. Nathaniel apparently thought enough of Cyrus that the very next son born to the Martin family was given the name Horatio Woodman Martin in honor of Cyrus’s youngest brother, Horatio Woodman, a Boston lawyer (and editor of some of the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson).

The commemorative sketch and other tributes to Nathaniel constitute quite a handsome legacy, defining him as a noble and generous pioneer, not just a pillar of his community but the bedrock upon which it was laid. This portrait is consistent with the description offered by descendants who knew him, such as his grandson Albert Frederick “Bert” Warner, who spent most of his childhood and some of his early adulthood in Martintown and knew Nathaniel well -- Nathaniel did not die until Bert was twenty-one. Bert characterized his grandfather in glowing terms, calling him “quite a fellow” and leading any listener to believe that Nathaniel was the sort of person depended upon by the people around him.

But apparently, Nathaniel’s character and his life were more complex that that. According to court documents unearthed in 1972 by family researcher Mildred Yeazel (who believed her husband to be a relative on the Strader side) at the behest of family genealogist Howard Frame (a descendant of Nathaniel’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Strader), power over Nathaniel’s legal affairs was periodically granted to family members because, as a result of court petitions, he was declared incompetent to manage these matters on his own.

The first instance is noted in Green County Court File 229. On 18 January 1858, Nathaniel’s new stepfather, Lewis John Engert, filed a protest of the guardianship of Nathaniel apparently previously granted to Nathaniel’s brother-in-law, Jeremiah Frame (the husband of the aforementioned Elizabeth Strader). Engert wanted himself appointed. A John McBurwell similarly argued that Jeremiah Frame was not suitable because Frame had no business experience, but McBurwell suggested that Daniel Gaylord of Stephenson County, be tapped to serve. The court reporter’s notes indicate that one or the other, McBurwell or Gaylord, was a brother-in-law of “N. Martin of Cadiz.” In fact, they both were. The clerk made a huge mess of nearly all the names, and McBurwell -- the same man referred to as “Burrell” in the commemorative sketch -- was John Burwell, husband of Nathaniel’s sister Rebecca. Daniel Gaylord can only be Hannah's brother Daniel Strader, who was over twenty-one by the time of the petition and was therefore eligible to discharge such duties.

The need for a guardianship was apparently little in dispute. Daniel Strader -- his name now spelled correctly in the transcript -- testified that Nathaniel (as rendered in abbreviated sentences by the court recorder):

Jeremiah Frame retained guardianship in a decision rendered 20 January 1858. It is worth noting that Daniel Strader did, however, move into the Martin home. Nathaniel’s brother Charles was also there at that time. Both Daniel and Charles are listed as part of the household in the 1860 census. No doubt both men helped keep things on an even keel. The timing of their contribution was critical as no child of Nathaniel and Hannah was old enough yet to act as a firm hand should Nathaniel grow agitated. However, in the long run, neither Charles nor Daniel lingered. Later in 1860, Charles married Martha Jane Beasley and relocated to Indiana. Daniel perished in the Civil War. Nathaniel seems to have been able to hold his own through the 1860s, though apparently not perfectly, and not without building up some debt. Fortunately, by the time someone needed to step up, eldest son Elias Martin had come of age and was able to hold power-of-attorney. Court File 836 contains a petition dated 17 January 1870 asking that guardianship be granted to Elias, who then used this authority 28 April 1870 to sell a parcel of family acreage to Miles Smith (whose grandson Ray Burnette Smith would eventually marry Nathaniel’s granddaughter Vivian Blanche Martin), raising $1400 to pay debts for the estate of “Nathaniel Martin, Insane.”

Court File 1446, dated 18 February 1878, contains an authorization to commit Nathaniel to the Mendota State Hospital for the Insane in Madison, visitors other than his wife not allowed without court approval.

These incidents, preserved in the court record, conflict with family memory. They don’t portray the same Nathaniel Martin that other accounts describe. It is a puzzle. If his dementia as described in the 1858 case had been debilitating, how then did he manage to persuade Hannah to have another six children with him? If he spent much of his life in guardianship, how did he retain enough of a reputation to earn him the laudatory biographical sketch, apparently written by an objective historian? If he was in Mendota State Hospital (a facility whose modern incarnation exists today on the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison) in the late 1870s, how could he be so influential as to requisition and pay for the building of a church in Martintown in 1879? (See next paragraph.) However, the black-and-white documentation leaves little doubt that Nathaniel did, in fact, experience such severe episodes of deranged behavior that his family felt compelled to get a judge to declare him unfit to manage his own legal affairs. That this aspect of his life was later obscured was probably a classic instance of hiding the “skeletons in the closet.”

Back in Nathaniel’s era, people could get declared insane for all sorts of spurious reasons. A wife might be sent to the bin just for being uppity toward her husband. Sometimes incarceration was a method of controlling runaway alcoholism. And there were toxins in the environment. Many southern Wisconsin men worked in the Lafayette County lead mines and became thick-witted from exposure to the metal. It is ironic that Jeremiah Frame was chosen to act on Nathaniel’s behalf in the 1850s, because Jerry was one of those Lafayette County lead miners and therefore himself at risk of impaired mental function. It is tempting to explain Nathaniel’s affliction as the result of toxic build-up in his bloodstream from the contaminated water (and/or the fish) of the Pecatonica River. Martintown was downstream from the mines. However, the symptoms of lead poisoning are typically such things as lethargy, pain, nausea, and confusion, rather than the sort of manic and/or hysterical behavior Nathaniel exhibited. Nathaniel’s problem was probably genetic. His daughter Jennie Edith Martin Hodge was committed to Mendota State Hospital in the late 1870s and died there in 1882, at age thirty-one, under circumstances that suggest she committed suicide. Julia Beard Martin Savage was temporarily confined at Bangor State Hospital in Maine in her late middle age. At least two of Nathaniel’s grandchildren committed suicide, and so did at least two great-grandchildren. Others had troubles of the brain, running from migraines to anatomical aberrations. Nathaniel must have been “quite a fellow” indeed to have overcome his challenges so well that he retained an outstanding reputation and an exalted place at the head of his clan.

To address the general scope of his life a little more systematically: Nathaniel’s youth is barely touched upon in the commemorative account. His birthplace, Harpers Ferry, which became part of West Virginia rather than Virginia during the Civil War, was apparently a place the family had been drawn to for a limited time. His parents were from the boundary region of Bedford County and Franklin County, VA, farther south in the state, and all indications are they returned there later in the 1810s. That must have been where Nathaniel spent the majority of his boyhood. (If not there, then in nearby parts of Appalachian Virginia.)

Nathaniel apparently came west to St. Louis, MO and then on to Stephenson County, IL on his own, without the company of parents or siblings, with the possible exception of his brother Isaiah. He was the type of man able to act boldly and independently.

It is not known just when Nathaniel met Hannah Strader, but it is likely to have been in the mid-1840s, when he was in his late twenties, and she in her mid-teens. Hannah and her nine siblings and her parents Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr Strader had come to Stevenson County, IL in 1836 or 1837. (The 1840 census has the household in Waddams Grove.) By the mid-1840s they were in Jordan Township, Green County, WI. Nathaniel is not known to have lived in Green County prior to the building of the mills, so it stands to reason he encountered his prospective bride when she was still living in Illinois. The difference in their ages was not unusual. Men of Nathaniel’s generation often took the trouble to establish themselves financially before taking on the burden of supporting a wife. Nathaniel probably spent the late 1830s and most of the 1840s accumulating his nest egg as a bachelor laborer. By the time this phase of his life was complete, he was thirty and Hannah seventeen. As stated above, the wedding took place 25 February 1847. The justice of the peace was a local farmer named John Kennedy. Ninety years later Nathaniel’s granddaughter Emma Warner Hastings, after consulting with Juliette Martin Savage, the last surviving child of Nathaniel and Hannah, wrote this name down as Canada. Half a century later another family genealogist concluded the wedding must have taken place in Canada. The actual locale was Jordan Center. This settlement has since vanished, and even in those days the community could better have been described as a crossroads. Jordan Township still exists as a district, and consists of the part of Green County immediately north of Browntown and west of Monroe -- one township north of Cadiz, which contains Martintown. Now the only town of Jordan that appears on maps of Wisconsin is the suburb of Stevens Point up in Portage County in the central part of the state.

The couple lived in Winslow about two years. Some time after the births of twins Nellie and Alice in May, 1849, the Martin family made its historic move a mile or so north. A history of Martintown published in the 1970s places the relocation in the spring of 1850, which is consistent with the 1850 census. In the next few decades, Nathaniel owned and operated the sawmill, adding a gristmill in approximately 1854. A bridge was built in April 1856 that spanned the Pecatonica about a hundred yards east of the mills. The southern approach to the bridge served as a kind of main street to a gradually expanding settlement. In 1868, Nathaniel platted a grid of streets, establishing a formal plan for a village of forty-seven acres. Business structures were quickly added.

Nathaniel’s parents came west to Martintown in the 1850s. James Martin spent only a limited time dwelling near his son, because he perished 9 October 1856. His tombstone, now no longer fully legible, stated he was seventy-seven years old at death. He is thought to be the first person to be buried in the cemetery plot created for the Martin family near the crest of the hill upslope from Nathaniel and Hannah’s residence, looking down on the bridge, dam, and mills. (One local legend says the graveyard was created to served as the resting place of a small child who had fallen out of a wagon while crossing the river in the years before the bridge existed, but there is no indication now of such a grave.) Within just a few years the cemetery would be home to several more graves as Nathaniel and Hannah continued to lose children very young. Sadly, equally young grandchildren would one day be buried there as well.

Rebecca was not a widow long before she married John Lewis Enger, the man who attempted to gain control of Nathaniel’s legal affairs in 1858. (The court transcript mangled his name, too. Lewis was from the Lappland region of eastern Norway. His name appears as Anger in the 1860 census, and in other sources as Johnson, according to the Scandinavian pattern, because his father’s name was also John.) The wedding took place 21 March 1857 in Cadiz, the no-longer-extant hamlet just north of Martintown. (Cadiz was platted in 1846, but does not seem to have ever become a real village. Even at its height it boasted only a post office, a store run out of a home, and perhaps a schoolhouse and a church.) It is not known when Rebecca died. She does not appear to have been buried in the Martin cemetery. Other Martins who lived in the town in its early decades included Nathaniel’s brothers Isaiah and Charles. A stonecutter by profession, Charles may have been the person who engraved the marker for his father James.

Shown at right is the church Nathaniel built in 1879 -- “built” in the sense that he requisitioned it, donated the land, and was the single largest source of the $1800 spent by the Church Society of Martin for construction and acquisition of the furnishings and the bell. Originally a United Brethren house of worship, it was neglected after Nathaniel’s death, then restored by a coalition of three faiths in the 1940s. The husband of a great great great granddaughter of Nathaniel became pastor in 1993. Photo taken by Dave Smeds 2 November 2005.

Nathaniel’s mills did well. Apparently his fits of dementia did not chase away customers, though one wonders if his co-managers had to cover for his unexplained absence from time to time. His partner in the early years was his brother Isaiah. Later his son Horatio stepped in. By the 1890s Horatio took over active management of the gristmill; the sawmill was rented out to and operated by William Kiel. During his tenure, Nathaniel was touted throughout the region as a superlatively honest businessman. It was said of him, “Nate Martin would sooner give all the toll to a patron of his mill, than take an ounce too much.” That is to say, when a person brought his raw grain in, it was added to the rest of the supply going through the machinery and at the end of the process it was impossible to say precisely how much flour the customer’s contribution yielded -- so Nathaniel characteristically erred on the side of generosity. Locals found him so reliable that he re-outfitted his facility with state-of-the-art roller mills in later decades, with a capacity of a thousand barrels of flour a day.

Martintown as a whole thrived throughout these decades. The first post office was opened by William Hodges in 1865. In 1868 Nathaniel hired a surveyor and had the village formally platted. Within the year several businesses were established, including a general merchandise store. The latter enterprise, founded by J.W. Mitchell then briefly run by William Hodges and a relative of his with the same surname (i.e. the store was known as Hodges & Hodges during their tenure), was operated in the early 1870s by Nathaniel’s son Horatio Woodman Martin and son-in-law Jacob Hodge. In later decades other descendants would oversee its operation. By Martintown’s prime in the 1890s, the community boasted a cheese factory (which doubled as a creamery), an elementary school, two dozen residences (not counting the outlying farmhouses), a funeral home, a second general merchandise store, and various shops including those of a wagon maker, a blacksmith, and a cabinet maker. Another enterprise was contemplated in the 1870s, a woolen mill to go with the sawmill and gristmill, but it does not appear to have been completed, probably because a scheme to bring rail service to the village failed, and it was impractical to operate the sort of substantial woolen mill Nathaniel had in mind without trains to bring in raw material and ship out finished product. It was the eventual establishment of rail service in 1888 that brought on the greatest period of prosperity. Flour, lumber, cheese, and other goods could be shipped affordably to a far larger area. The existence of the railroad also eased the transport of the rock and lime that was harvested from the quarry near the mills. It was as part of the establishment of the depot that the name of the village was officially changed from Martin to Martintown.

Over the decades Nathaniel continued to act as Martintown’s leading citizen and guiding force, as farmer, as businessman, as sponsor, as founder of the church, and more. He gave each of his children eighty acres as wedding gifts. He lived out his retirement years as a rich man. A measure of just how wealthy he was in his prime is the 1870 census. That year’s survey, unlike those of other years, had a column for the worth of a householder’s real estate and a column for the worth of his personal estate. To the right of Nathaniel’s name are the figures $60,000 worth of real estate and $6500 in personal wealth. This dwarfed the means of his immediate neighbors listed in the accompanying pages. In most cases those neighbors owned only their houses and the lots beneath them, which were typically worth between two hundred and eight hundred dollars depending on age and construction quality of the buildings, and seldom topped a thousand dollars. The largest landowners of the nearer parts of Green County had acreage worth only one-sixth to one-half of the Martin holdings. An example not too far away was Hannah’s sister Anna Catherine Strader and her second husband Henry Rush, whose real estate value in the census was reported as $11,000.

Nathaniel was known for his musical talent, which appears to have run in the Martin family. He and all his brothers played violin (fiddle). Nathaniel was reputed to be able to do buck and wing dances equal to a stage artist.

By the 1890s, Nathaniel was deep into his “grandpa” phase. By the beginning of the decade, nearly all of his grandchildren had been born. The eldest turned twenty-one in 1890 itself. Nathaniel was famous for being a doting grandfather. The clear majority of his grandchildren were a steady part of his weekly existence, as they resided either in Martintown itself or within three miles of it. By the middle of the decade great-grandchildren would begin to appear -- and again, they were near at hand, which undoubtedly pleased him. It was surely as he embraced his evolving status that he grew his beard and adopted the “distinguished elder” aspect you see in the photograph at near left. A surviving letter, written 4 August 1897 by Nathaniel M. Hodge (the aforementioned eldest grandchild), addresses this change in appearance. The younger Nathaniel, who was a resident of Pasadena, CA and had not seen his Martintown kin for fifteen years or more, was writing to his aunt Emma Ann Martin Brown. He commented, “I received pictures of Grandfather and Grandmother from Aunt Julia today. I think that they are both very good looking old people. Grandfather looks fine with a beard. I remember him always with a clean shaved face.” The image Julia sent to her nephew surely was the same as the one reproduced here. Copies were well distributed among the clan. The scan of this one was made by Gary Frame from a print preserved among the genealogical artifacts belonging to his father, Howard Frame. The original must have been sent by Hannah to her nephew Elias Frame in California. Elias Frame was the grandfather of Howard Frame.

If Nathaniel had one great misfortune, it was that he outlived too many of his descendants. The dead included the majority of his children as well as five grandchildren. Over the long run, the longevity shown by him and by Hannah would be reflected among the grandchildren and great-grandchildren (over a third of this group would live to be over eighty-five years old, fifteen would top ninety, and three would live more than a century), but he must have had small reason to think his clan would be so blessed as he looked back in his late eighties at what he had experienced during his time on Earth. He also eventually had to witness the exodus of most of his clan from Martintown. Aside from extended visits, the only two children who remained nearby in his twilight years were Nellie and Horatio. Horatio passed away less than fifteen months after his father. By then, Nellie had already moved to Sanger, CA. Several households of Nathaniel’s grandchildren lingered in Martintown or Winslow well into the 20th Century, but they represented a fraction of the total number. Happily, even today some descendants remain there, but before his days were done, Nathaniel must have been confronted by the knowledge that many of his great-great grandchildren would never know the place he had founded.

Nathaniel expired at home of an apparent heart attack Friday evening, 13 January 1905, and was laid to rest in the Martintown cemetery Sunday, 15 January 1905. (The funeral and death certificate both being completed on the 15th caused some family members to cite the 15th as his date of death when they created the first genealogical charts of his family several decades later, and the error has unfortunately been widely propagated.) His tombstone cites 1817 as his birth year, which must be an error because every other source cites 1816. Hannah died 12 November 1919, having survived her husband by nearly fifteen years. (This was mostly a result of her being born so much later than he; her total lifespan was only slightly longer than his.)

This is the only portrait available of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader posing together. This was scanned from one of the several tintypes made at the time of the original photography session. A tintype, also known as a ferrotype, consists of a positive image etched onto a metal plate. This sort of photography became widely used beginning in the mid-1850s and remained the standard until the mid-1880s, when it was supplanted by film-negative photography. Ferrotypes from 1855-1870 were usually grey as shown here. Ones taken 1870-1885 were usually sepia-toned. (The absence of smiles in ferrotypes is because they required the subject to remain motionless for forty-five seconds or more, too long to maintain a steady smile.) Crude though the photographic industry was back then, the method could capture fine detail in the hands of a professional. This one has suffered some corrosion as tintypes often do over time, but it still retains an astonishing fidelity considering that the original is only two inches tall by one-and-a-half inches wide. (You will not be able to appreciate that fidelity through your web browser, of course. It would be quickly apparent if you had the full-resolution version of the scan in your computer and kept hitting the magnification tab.) Judging by their apparent ages, Nathaniel and Hannah probably sat for this picture in the mid to late 1860s. It resembles the wedding portrait photograph of their daughter Nellie and her bridegroom John Warner, taken in 1869. (The other photos of Nathaniel on this page, with the exception of the one of him in his eighties, were also tintypes to begin with, but the scans for this website were made from prints created at various points over the decades; unfortunately that means not all detail was preserved.)