Sussex-Lisbon pioneers started first businesses

by Fred H. Keller, Retrospect, Living Sussex Sun, Posted: April 24, 2012

The "1880 History of Waukesha County" lays out cryptically the embryonic businesses of historic Sussex and Lisbon.

Lisbon was started in 1836 and Sussex had its start around 1842. Lisbon did not get to be an official political town until April 5, 1842, when they used what was then the official center of Lisbon, the Lisbon Plank stone school. Abandoned in 1950, this school still stands (it was reconstructed in 1868). After 1950, it became a home for a period of time for John Halquist, found of the adjacent Halquist Quarry which started in 1929. It later became a storage building and currently is used by Halquist as a museum of rocks from the quarries. But in its time from 1842 to 1867, it was the center of the world for Lisbon.

One might ask what does having a school used for government purposes have to do with business? Well the school was built by mason and business man, George Elliot from a quarry James Weaver opened on his land claim which is today Halquist Quarry. Meanwhile, the school turned out scholars that in the future were business leaders in Sussex and Lisbon.

Sussex is not the very first "village" in the area. About 1840, Levi Russell started a little store and shoe shop at his house near the intersection of present day Duplainville Road and the Wisconsin Central Railroad crossing. A small nucleus of businesses sprang up and even later a McDonald General Store, but it never amounted to much and faded away.

The settlers started the primary businesses. Farming meant they needed blacksmiths to sharpen their plows and shod their horses and oxen. Black smiths also repaired and even built wagons which were essential to taking the main crops to Milwaukee and bringing supplies back.

In Sussex in 1842, George Elliott was the first settler, but soon Richard Cooling started a black smith shop and general store, and became post master. St. Alban's and its cemetery started in the village in 1843.

William Brown also started a general store on the southwest corner of Maple and Main streets in 1849.

Meanwhile, the ever-enlarging Cooling store on the south ran until after the Civil War and then was turned over to the up-and-coming James Templeton who had it until 1886.

In 1854, a "union store" was started in the four corners of Sussex. The farmers were behind it, but they were not businessmen and soon Cooling had it.

The first Sussex school was behind where Paul Cain has his service station today which was built in 1849. Then in 1867, this old wood schoolhouse was too small and a two-room cream brick school was built east of the four corners of Sussex by Sussex Creek which was then considered the edge of the village. The building of the school there changed Sussex, and the school and the businesses that sprang up would be the central focus of Sussex from then on.

Meanwhile Lisbon built for less than $1,000, including the land purchase of an acre, the Lisbon Town Hall where today sits the waiting room of the Wheaton Franciscan Medical Group. This building was used for political and community events.

In 1886 the Wisconsin Central Railroad came through Lisbon on Christmas day. The depot had the first telephone in the Town of Lisbon plus a telegraph. Nearby James Templeton built an elevator and feed mill shipping lots of barley. In short order, Templeton had moved his Sussex General Store to Templeton. There was a major lumber yard team track, cattle yards and even dedicated street going back to the elevator which lasted until 1932.

Several taverns went up, two in Sussex. The first and second being Boots taverns while in Templeton the Mammoth Spring Hotel and future Olde Templeton Inn got started in the late 1880s.

Many black smiths plied their trade including Fred Stier, Don Campbell, John Magnusson and Roman Kanawik.

With the coming of the Bug Line Railroad in 1890, the big downtown Templeton-Holman quarry employed 50 men with nine lime kilns got starting in 1890. The kilns shipped carloads of burned lime each week. They were abandoned in 1916 because of lessening of lime use for mortar as Portland cement was invented. Meanwhile there were three lime kilns down off Lisbon Road just east of today's Swan Road.

The Halquist quarry, then run by the McReady Stone Quarry, was turning out curb stones and sidewalk flag stones as its main products. The Davidson quarry was located on Waukesha Avenue north of Main Street in Templeton. Most of this stone was used for masonry construction. Today it is Madeline Park.

A list of businesses in 1872 included W.B. Medhurst-Agricultural Implements and farming utensils. Henry Phillips dealt horses. T.S. Redford bred Durham and short horn cattle and the Weaver family raised and sold hops.

Trade card lithographs from an 1884 to 1906

by Fred H. Keller,

Retrospect, Living Sussex Sun, Posted: Feb. 9, 2010 12:06 p.m.

The Sussex-Lisbon Area Historical Society is remounting a feature on trade card lithographs from an 1884 to 1906 Ada Weaver scrapbook. The impressive 46-page scrapbook contains 169 items.

The state-of-the-art lithographic trade cards were given out by merchants and manufacturers to promote their products. The glitzy colors became a collectable after the Civil War until around World War I.

Ada Weaver was the daughter of Civil War Union Soldier and Lisbon pioneer, Alfred Weaver, (1839-1924), and his pioneer wife, Sarah Ann Howard.

Today, in Sussex there is a Weaver Street and a Melinda Weaver Park (great aunt of Ada).

In Ada's book are five examples of trade cards that were issued by manufacturing companies that sold products at the Cooling-Templeton General Store in old four corners Sussex - Maple and Main.

Richard Cooling, one of the original Sussex residents, started a black smith shop where Paul Cain's Service Station is today. Cooling later additionally developed a General Store on the adjacent double lot to the east. On these two lots, on the southeast corner of Maple and Main, an 1873 property map shows no less than six buildings.

Richard had a daughter, Esther, and in September of 1886, she married James Templeton and he took over the Cooling General Store and became post master of Sussex in 1867 under his new father-in-law until he fully took over the reins of the postmastership of Sussex in 1878.

It was probably while he was proprietor of the old Cooling General Store and Sussex Post Master that he carried lithographed trade cards and that Ada Weaver had inherited these five Templeton trade cards that had added inscriptions of "James Templeton, Sussex, Waukesha Co Wisconsin." Three of the five are numbered from a series, #12, #14 and #16. One trade card advertises Dr. Jayne's Expectorant cough syrup while another is for a medicine for croup or whooping cough.

One specific cough syrup, "Dr. J.C. Ayer's Cherry Pectorial," has a catch phrase that it cures, "sore throat, colds, coughs, hoarseness, loss of voice and influenza."

Templeton maintained the Cooling General Store until 1887, when he saw took the opportunity to build an elevator/feed mill in close proximity to the Wisconsin Central Railroad.

The elevator/feed mill was next to the tracks and nearby a General Store where Siego's Japanese Restaurant is today. However, because he has Sussex on the back side of these five trading cards, Ada Weaver, probably got them in the period of 1884-86 back in the four corners ex-Cooling General Store and thus they are roughly 124 years old. He would have had "Templeton" on his General Store trade cards if it was his new store in 1887 in the eastern part of modern Sussex.

Templeton died in September of 1924 just when Sussex was annexing old Templeton in a consolidation and incorporation of Sussex into one village.

Today, James Templeton a powerful political being in old Lisbon/Sussex/Templeton has Templeton Middle School named after him.

He is buried at Prairie Home Cemetery in the City of Waukesha.