Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/59

 much whisky. They publicly destroyed all the liquor they had on hand and became crusaders in the temperance cause. In the spring of 1836 Colonel Samuel F. Phoenix selected in Wisconsin a "Temperance Colony claim," on which he settled that summer. Then he rode to Belmont and induced the first territorial legislature to set off from Milwaukee County a county to be known as Walworth, in honor of the chancellor of the state of New York, who was a noted temperance leader. He named the village begun by him Delavan, in honor of E. C. Delavan, pioneer temperance editor and at that time chairman of the executive committee of the New York State Temperance Society. Colonel Phoenix lectured on temperance, helped to organize early temperance societies, rebuked his neighbors—especially the New Yorkers—for employing whisky at raisings, and, before his death in 1840, had succeeded in giving a powerful impulse to the movement in southeastern Wisconsin.

Another dramatic figure in early temperance annals was Charles M. Goodsell, who in 1838 settled at Lake Geneva and built the first mill operated in Walworth County. He was of Connecticut birth, and his father owned and managed, among other properties, a whisky distillery. Goodsell, however, when he came west from New York State, was a most determined opponent of the traffic in intoxicants. Soon after opening his mill a local company erected in Lake Geneva a distillery for making corn whisky. Goodsell warned them, he says, not to expect him to grind their grain and they installed a grinding apparatus of their own. But, their machinery proving inadequate, they finally sent a grist of corn to Goodsell's mill, demanding, as under the law they had a right to do, that it be "ground in turn." Goodsell refused, thereby producing a tense situation, for the pioneer farmers looked to the distillery as a cash market for their grain. Finally,