Later we went to Walworth for the mail, taking the road running south. The town of Walworth was founded in 1836 by James Van Slyke who made his residence at the head of the lake. The only residents there about 1840 were Christopher Douglass and sons, Marcus Russell, James Van Slyke, Matthias Mohr, and William Reid. Matthias Mohr purchased 50 acres in the town of Walworth in 1840, and in 1843 he purchased 38 acres more. In 1840 William Reid purchased 960¼ acres, in 1840 Marcus Russell purchased 80 acres, and in 1841, Christopher Douglass purchased 480 acres, all in the town of Walworth.
The village of Walworth had a store, a blacksmith shop, the Red Lion Hotel, and the Brick Church. In the Brick Church cemetery are buried today the remains of my grandfather and my grandmother and a number of their children. The Red Lion Hotel was used by many people passing on the main road from town to town in Wisconsin.
A short distance to the north of grandfather’s house was the sugar bush. This was at the bottom of the high hills going north up to Russell’s. Near the place stood the old Potawatomi village and cornfields which Mrs. Kinzie in her book _Wau Bun_ speaks of visiting in 1831.[90] I well remember seeing the Indian trail back of the house leading up to the higher land in the sugar bush.
The country at the head of the lake was filled with large butternut, walnut, hickory, basswood, ash, sugar maple, white-, black-, and burr-oak trees. The sugar bush, through which a clear, cold brook ran murmuring to its outlet in the lake, was notable for its many butternut trees and was one of the most beautiful spots that could be seen anywhere about the lake. I remember well the large oak tree near my grandfather’s house in which a canoe had been placed holding the remains of a relative[91] of Big Foot,[92] an Indian chief after whom Big Foot Prairie was named. The wood of the softer trees near the farm was used by the Reid family for the rails from which snake fences were made. I remember my father and driver taking stakes from a snake fence and putting them in the mud for my mother to stand on.
In the early days my father and mother in going to Lake Geneva had to go by wagon. When the railroads were built, they took a train to Turner Junction (now West Chicago) located thirty miles west of Chicago, and from there took a wagon to Lake Geneva. Later they went by the same railroad (the Northwestern) to Harvard Junction and from there by wagon to the head of the lake.