Where Was Camp Utley?

PRESERVATION - RACINE, INC. NEWSLETTER SUMMER 1986 125 Years Ago Where Was Camp Utley? In the summer of 1861, during the first weeks of the Civil War, a camp was established in Racine where the Fourth Wisconsin Regiment mustered before it left the state for Baltimore and nearly five years of active service in the Union Army. This place of rendezvous was named "Camp Utley" in honor of William L. Utley, the state senator from Racine who was then acting as Adjutant General for Wisconsin and later became the commanding officer of the Twenty-Second Wisconsin Regiment. According to Eugene W. Leach, Racine's most accomplished early historian, the camp was located "south of the city on the lake shore, on the farm of Truman G. Wright, and occupied 75+ acres, extending south from Sixteenth street to the grounds of Racine college—then a little south of the present location of DeKoven avenue—and reaching back one-fourth mile or more west from the lake." His situation of the camp is roughly correct, but it is misleading. "In attempting to visualize the site of Camp Utley in I86I," Leach cautioned his readers, "it should be remembered that the bank of the lake was then 800 to 1,000 feet east of where it is now." He thought that half or more of the land which was a part of the camp had been washed away by the lake. That is not so. For the site of the camp Leach relied solely, it seems, on an account printed on June 12, 186 1, in the Racine Weekly Advocate which described the grounds as "those adjacent to the college, on the farm of T. G. Wright, Esq. They are finely located on the bank of Lake Michigan, at an elevation of forty or fifty feet and comprise some 75 acres." Leach evidently interpreted "on the bank of Lake Michigan" to mean "on the shoreline." He apparently did not see another account printed the same day in the Weekly Journal which commended "the attractive grounds of Truman G. Wright, Esq. •- comprising some forty acres of prairie, almost immediately on the bank of Lake Michigan." While the two reports agree on whose land was used, they differ widely on their estimates of the acreage and they disagree precisely as to whether the camp was "on the bank" or "almost immediately on the bank" of the lake. Other descriptions—to be found in letters written from Camp Utley by soldiers sojourning there—are equally divided. "Our camp is situated immediately on the Lake shore,"' wrote one. Another placed it "on the fair ground near the lake." A third referred to "the lake lying to the east of the camp"; a fourth set it "on the shore of the Lake and in the center of a large grove"; and yet another wrote: "Camp Utley is very pleasantly located almost within a stone's throw of Lake Michigan." The more precise references to the camp indicate that it did not extend to the shoreline of the lake, and the legal descriptions of the lands on which it stood bear that out. In 1861 the farm on which Camp Utley was established was only nominally the land of Truman Wright. Legally, title to the farm was still held by the estate of his brother. 2 WHERE WAS CAMP UTLEY? Charles S. Wright, who had died in 1855. At one time Charles owned all the land from the lake west to the tracks of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and north from Twenty-First Street to the north line of Section 21 in the Town of Mount Pleasant. (The north line of the section lies approximately one half block south of Sixteenth Street.) In 1850 Charles platted all of his land lying along the lake east of Main Street as a subdivision called "South Racine" and sold almost all of the lots. Not long after, the bluffs along the lake began to erode seriously. Some of the lots slid down to the shoreline and disappeared. Few of them ever had houses built on them; so Wright's view of the lake remained unimpaired. In 1852 Charles donated ten acres in the southeast corner of his remaining land to the Episcopal Diocese of Wisconsin as a site for Racine College. In 1861, therefore, the college comprised only a bit more than a quarter of the lands which the DeKoven Founda tion occupies today. They extended only about half way to DeKoven Avenue north from Twenty-First and half way to Grand Avenue west from South Wisconsin (formerly South Main Street). Thus, the "farm of T, G. Wright, Esq." on which Camp Utley stood included nearly two hundred acres and was bounded on the north by the section line, on the east by Main Street, on the west by the railroad, and on the south by the grounds of Racine College and the present line of Twenty-First Street. The lands immediately along the lake were no longer a part of it. This map is a combination —put together by Don Rintz—of two maps of Racine which date from the late 1850s. The style: "Camp Utley, Racine, Wis." and the illustration of "Badger Boys On the road to Dixie's land," which appears at the address block of this newsletter, come from the letterheads of stationery which could be bought in 186 1 at the shop of S. B. Steers, Bookseller, Titus' Block. It is possible, therefore, to establish clearly two of the boundary lines of the camp: they were the northerly and easterly boundaries of the Wright farm. On the north, Wisconsin, Pearl (College), Chippeway (Park), Villa, Campbell (Grand), Center, and Racine—the only streets which ran to the city limits at that time—all ended at the fence of the farm. "Where the main entrance to the camp will be we know not," wrote the Advocate; "at present a gate at the termination of Wisconsin street opens into the grounds." That gate would have blocked the way where the house at 1632 South Wisconsin now stands. On the east, a fence ran along the west side of Main Street to the grounds of the college. Within the fence was a private race track which became the parade ground for the camp. The tents for the recruits were "placed in military order," according to the Advocate, "on a ridge parallel with Main street, on the west side of what was the race course." Continued on page four. 827 Lake Avenue The house at 827 Lake Avenue is an architectural gem, in spite of the asphalt siding and the removal of an elegant porch: on that Susan Carr, Russell Zimmerman, and Johnson, Johnson and Roy, all architectural historians, agree. It is the only remaining example of the French Second Empire Style in Racine, with its concave mansard roof and dormers. In its early, more elegant years the house was on a much larger lot extending to the lake, and its outbuild ings were as interesting as the house itself. There was a scroll-cut ginger bread summerhouse and an octagonal, board-and-batten barn with a louvered Among the boarders, briefly, were Mr. cupola. and Mrs. Joseph Hecht and their twelve In addition to its architectural value, year old son Ben who became a well-known the house has historic interest because playwright. The Hechts later moved to a of its early occupants, who included house now demolished in the 900 block of several industrialists; Dan Castello, a Lake Avenue. Ben Hecht and Dan's son nationally known circus man; and Ben Harry practiced circus stunts in the old Hecht, noted playwright. The house was barn, and one report says that they built in 1867 for William Dingee who spent at least one summer with a small established the Geiger Threshing Machine traveling circus in Wisconsin. Ben Company in competition with the J. I. dropped out of the University of Wiscon Case Threshing Machine Company. After sin at Madison shortly after entering the Case Company bought him out, he and went to Chicago as a newspaper worked for a number of years for his reporter where "he became in a few years former competitor. the youngest participant in the cele brated Chicago renaissance of literature The next resident and owner was the rubbing shoulders and swapping stories colorful circus celebrity, Dan Castello, with such luminaries as Sherwood Ander who practiced his tumbling and acrobatic son, Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken" (and stunts in the octagonal barn. His others), according to a brochure pub circus career included a partnership lished by the Newberry Library of with P. T. Barnum, performances before Chicago. Hecht's best known work was Queen Victoria, and a tour on the Great The Front Page. His later works Lakes on a 160 foot wooden boat. His included fiction, plays, autobiography, show featured his wife as an equestri and essays, and he won six nominations enne and his son as an acrobat. Racine and two Oscars for his screen plays. might have become the circus winter quarters if Mrs. Castello had not been After Mrs. Castello left the house, the so fond of this home on the lake that next resident was Wakely Bull, a Case she refused to move to another site in Company executive and a brother of Racine which had been selected for that Stephen Bull. He was followed by Harry purpose. The circus then found winter McLaren, president of Mitchell Motors quarters in Baraboo. Dan Castello died and the Racine Rubber Company. The in 1906 after losing all his money when house was turned into apartments after a New York opera house in which he had several periods of vacancy, and in 1950 invested burned down before it could be Konstant Gosieski and his wife, owners opened.

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