![Item #44616 [ALS] The Beauties of Frontier Fond du Lac Wisconsin described by Byron Murray Hanks, Newly Minted Lawyer & Settler. Wisconsin. Westward Expansion Fond Du Lac.](https://kaaterskillbooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/44616.jpg?width=768&height=1000&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1699972096)
[ALS] The Beauties of Frontier Fond du Lac Wisconsin described by Byron Murray Hanks, Newly Minted Lawyer & Settler.
Fond du Lac, [WI]: 1852. [4] pp. Bifolium. 7.75 x 10 inches. Very good, worn along folds. Item #44616
Wonderful letter describing the scene at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin just as the railroad arrived, by a recently married settler from New York, Byron Murray Hanks, 26 years old, Dartmouth College graduate, newly minted lawyer, and former engineer on the Genesee Valley canal and Erie canal who arrived with his wife, the former Mandana Ann Sherman of Henrietta , N.Y., to open a law practice between February 1852 and the time of this letter, May 30th, 1852, to his brother and sister, signed B.M. Hanks.
His description is of a bustling, expanding frontier community, "There are 6 or 7 meeting houses in the place of various denominations. The Baptists raised a frame last Thursday on the street where I have bought me a lot." His own congregation house "was not plastered, but the Masons will go at it tomorrow, and it will be completed in a short time." Of the lot he purchased "the ground was all ploughed and ready for the gardens. Now my corn, peas, brans, beets, melons, squashes, etc, are all up, looking as nice & as smart as anything green possibly can. The city has a quantity of good fountain water, soft and sweet. The inhabitants enjoy the best of health. It costs nothing for the pasturing of cows, as they now on the prairie. You might count 2 or 3 hundred of
them in a drove, in the prairie, east of the city"
He notes that the general expectation is that the city's population would increase from 3,000 inhabitants to 10,000 within the decade, and further describes the good fortune of "Old Doctor Darling", who arrived in Fond du Lac seven years earlier, and whose property was now worth $100,000.
Hanks left the practice of law a year later for railroad work, and finally returned to Rochester New York and took up the law again in 1855. See Chapman: Sketches of the Alumni of Dartmouth College, (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1869) p. 379.
Price: $150.00