09/08/2026
HOME TOWN Recollections of Watertown by Ralph Blumenfeld
My Watertown was founded in 1836 by the usual enterprising settlers from New England, daring adventurers recalling the Pilgrim Fathers, and they were named Timothy Johnson, Philander Baldwin, Reeve Griswold and Charles Seaton.
The frontier village went on adding a few dozen people a year until late in 1848, when the revolutionary unrest on the European Continent threw up thousands of young and liberty-seeking students who had either been forced to emigrate or else chose to take their chances in the new promised land of America.
Thus it was that a young Heidelberg student arrived at Watertown over the plank road from Milwaukee. His name was Schumann. He liked the little place and wrote to some fellow-student revolutionaries about it. They came along, a dozen or more, all young doctors of medicine, of philosophy, of jurisprudence and the like. The newcomers brought more friends, most of them would-be professionals. A man named Bertling opened a fairly large frame-built hotel which he called the Buena Vista House, after a battle in the recent war with Mexico.
The Buena Vista was presently the nightly scene of fervent political oratory and discussion. Here were enough young lawyers, physicians, chemists and literary geniuses to stock a great city. Most of them had a little money with which they hoped to found a career in the new land of romance.
As time went on the discussions grew in intensity, the recruits to the membership of the community increased in number and the pockets became more attenuated. Gradually the physical demands outgrew the spiritual compass and so step by step, too, the once-hopeful Solon or Cicero ceased to think of making laws or speeches and took on any odd job that offered itself.
In due course it came about that a young doctor, late of Gottingen, had decided to open a little b**r saloon; that Philip Schmidt, the pride and hope of his college, being an analytical chemist, was ready for business in a druggist’s shop; that young Herr Biedermann, who was a classical scholar of Leipzig, was prepared to mend the rapidly perishing boots and shoes of his fellow-clients of the Buena Vista, and that Otto Linde, the poet-sculptor, late of Munich, who was also an artist in the culinary line, had opened shop as baker and confectioner, where he performed wonders with iced-cakes.
More and more young doctors found it easy to open saloons where they regaled their friends with b**r, w**e and elevated conversation. I remember one day looking in at the door of a little boot-repairing shop where, seated on the bench and busy hammering nails into a shoe, sat a classical scholar, “disputating” in Greek with a gentleman wearing on his coat a great tin star, denoting the policeman. The two were so busy arguing while I stood puzzling myself with the meaning of the strange words that they did not even notice me.
