A few years ago, while researching information about tornadoes and unseasonably cold winters that have visited Portage County, I found several references to black people living here.

Many old-timers may not be surprised by that information because they knew or learned about blacks who resided in the area, especially at Plover, in the first part of this century and even earlier.

Surprising to me and to people I have discussed the matter with is the fact that black people lived here in family units prior to the Civil War.

In its June/July 1982 edition of COLUMNS, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin reports: “After the Wisconsin supreme court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was unconstitutional, and again in 1862 when the Homestead Act opened land for settlement, these blacks were attracted to the state by a vision of freedom and land. One group of blacks settled the Cheyenne Valley community in Vernon County while another pioneered the Pleasant Ridge community in Grant County.”

The references to early black residents of Portage County are rare, but each one I have seen is about some unusual and tragic event.

For example, the PINERY reported that a black woman died of exhaustion while walking in a snowstorm early in 1857 between a farm occupied by a friend or relative east of the city to her home in Stevens Point.

The account of a tornado that hit the southern part of the county in September of 1863, also in the PINERY, stated that a home occupied by a black family in the Town of Buena Vista was destroyed.

Recently, Marjorie Warner of our Society, called my attention to another important reference to a local black person. Since her retirement from the directorship of the public library here, Marjorie has worked diligently for our organization and has done some important research by reading materials in our archival collection and early newspapers published here. In the notebooks of pioneer S. A. Sherman, she found the following:

I think the 1st to die in Plover was a Negro woman with the small pox and buried near the Morgan House where the others were buried but was never removed. Old man Tucker moved the dead in [to?] the new cemetery near the Yellow Banks. I drew the plat and assisted [sic] in laying it out [.] this was the 1st one laid out in [when?] the Pinery Plover included the whole county.

In the Sherman notebooks it is reported that Melissa Adelia Franklin Morris (sister of George W. Franklin who built the house now planned for restoration) came to Plover in 1845 and died there on Oct. 11 of that year. Sherman said she was the first white person to die in Plover. The circumstances surrounding Mrs. Morris’s illness (the result of childbirth), the preparation of her body for burial and her funeral were all described in the notebook. The reference to a black woman followed those entries.