By Gene Kemmeter

Part II in a series

Mathias Mitchell was a mystery man when he came to Portage County and purchased two sites of approximately 80 acres in Stevens Point in January 1845 that would become the base of development in the downtown area of Stevens Point.

Within months of the purchase, Mitchell constructed a house and a hotel with a tavern along the riverfront at the west end of Main Street.

George W. Cate, one of Portage County’s first attorneys who was later a circuit judge and served in Congress, wrote a history of Stevens Point for the 1896 edition of the City Directory and said Mitchell had the “home and tavern” completed by early spring and development of the Stevens Point community was mainly within the sites Mitchell had purchased.

In a brief history of Stevens Point published in the Stevens Point Journal July 20, 1907, Wayne Bentley wrote that the first hotel Mitchell built in Stevens Point was called The Raftman’s Home.

In his book “Our County, Our Story,” a history of Portage County published in 1959, Malcolm Rosholt, said Mitchell built the first tavern house or hotel in the city along Main Street, approximately where Bank One is today, and received a license to operate on March 24, 1845, according to Portage County treasurer’s records.

So, who was this Mathias Mitchell?

The search to correctly identify pioneers can be tedious, and impossible to verify.

But there may be enough clues to tentatively identify him.

A pioneer was a person of the era, an explorer and entrepreneur, a man born in the age of little recognition and record-keeping.

It was an era where recording of events and individuals was regrettably non-existent.

Generally, the only records available were governmental records, mainly dealing with property, or stories passed on by word of mouth.

Because the countryside was undeveloped, there were no newspapers or cameras to record what was going on.

Portage County’s first newspaper, The Pinery, didn’t start until Jan. 14, 1853, when Gen. Albert E. Ellis brought a newspaper press from Green Bay and began publishing a weekly newspaper.

But the advent of newspapers in Stevens Point didn’t record what Mathias Mitchell was doing in Stevens Point and the surrounding area.

Volunteers in the Stevens Point area went through copies of The Pinery, the Stevens Point Journal, the Portage County and Stevens Point Gazette, The Plover Times and The Lumberman prior to 1886, indexing all the proper names to provide access to assist future researchers. The name of Mathias (or Matthias as it is sometimes spelled on land records) Mitchell isn’t among the 8,549 names listed.

Fortunately, for today’s readers and amateur historians, the internet has opened avenues to track individuals from the pioneer age, while also leaving a number of questions about the positive identity of individuals.

Mathias Mitchell wasn’t a recluse who stepped forward to make a donation to the public.

He was active in the community as it expanded into the Stevens Point area.

The development of Wisconsin along the Wisconsin River was determined through the Treaty of the Cedars in 1836, but the three-mile area on each side of the river was not surveyed until 1839-40 by Joshua Hathaway and the land was not offered for sale by the U.S. Government until 1844.

In anticipation of the potential development, hundreds of pioneers, who could be called squatters, moved into the area to stake out sites to purchase before they could legally buy and settle on the property.

The demand appeared to be so great that the U.S. Government got the Menomonee Nation to agree to the Treaty of Lake Poygan in 1848, which ceded all tribal land eastward between the Wisconsin River to the Fox River to the government, opening more land to pioneers for development.

As U.S. territory expanded, so did the country’s desire to know what it had.

The U.S. Census was started by the federal government in 1790 to count every resident in the nation.

The Census would list the location of the household and name the head of every household and then enumerate every free person in the household according to sex and age bracket.

The 1850 Census was the first to name every occupant of a household, with their gender, race, age, sex, birth year, birthplace, occupation, industry and value of real estate.

The 1850 Census also identifies a “Matthias” Mitchell, age 37, as a citizen of the town of Stevens Point, Wis. He is a lumberman owning real estate valued at $4,000 and was born in Pennsylvania.

In his household are his wife, Catherine, 35, who was also born in Pennsylvania; a daughter, Hester, 13, who was born in Indiana; a son, Eli, 9, who was born in Illinois; a daughter, Emeline, 6, who was born in Illinois; and a laborer, Henry Mosoon, 15, who was born in Michigan.

While Mitchell built the first hotel, there were at least two others in the downtown area. There were also a lot of boarding or rooming houses, buildings large enough to house more than five people.

Listed above and below “Matthias” on the Census are hotels. In the hotel above him, Peter Grover, 32 is the tavern keeper. Next is Celia Grover, 27, then Ann Brown, 50, then five children named Brown, ages 10-19, with the oldest listed as “laborer.” After that are 18 men, all of them listed as laborers except one musician and one with no occupation.

The hotel below the Mitchell family has Francis Lamere, 37, listed as tavern keeper, then his wife, 38, and four children, ages 1-17. Then there’s a male laborer, 45, and a female, 18, with no occupation.

There were also two other hotels listed in the Census in the town of Stevens Point, which extended all the way north beyond the Lake DuBay area toward Wausau (then known as Big Bull Falls).

One was on Main Street owned by Joseph B. Phelps and the other was owned by John DuBay at what is now the Lake DuBay area.

Today’s Portage County borders weren’t set until 1856.

Mitchell was active in the community.

He had school-age children, and he was among several residents in 1847 who petitioned for a school district in the town of Stevens Point known as Stevens Point School District Number Two. The school was built in 1850 on the north side of Clark Street, the site of a municipal parking lot behind the Portage County Public Library today.

School District Number One was in Grand Rapids (today’s Wisconsin Rapids) which was part of Portage County at that time. Wood County was formed in 1856.

Mitchell didn’t contain his development ideas only to Stevens Point.

As a lumberman, he was also involved in sawmills, including one on the Little Eau Pleine River in the town of Eau Pleine in the 1840s and 1850s.

After a new road was extended south along the route of old Highway 51 (County Trunk BB) from Plover to Buena Vista (near the former community of Keene) in 1855, Mitchell built a tavern-house, called Mitchell’s Tavern or Mitchell’s Farm Stand. The site was near today’s Moore Barn at BB at Highway 54 in the town of Stockton.

The Portage County Register of Deeds Office contains thousands of property records, and Mitchell is listed as an individual on 109 of those documents.

As an example of the discrepancies caused by spelling, 65 of those records list him as Mathias, with the remainder listing him as Matthias or both.

More about Mitchell and his family in part III