Oak Creek Patch has published a well-done series of articles on Oak Creek Township’s impact on the Civil War. And it was significant.
The township — which included what is now South Milwaukee, once upon a time — sent dozens of people to the war, including some from prominent families, and they fought in some major battles.
Check out the series here. It’s worth the read. From it:
Oak Creek Township consisted of modern-day Oak Creek and South Milwaukee. White pioneers had arrived in the late 1830s and 1840s, at a time when Native Americans hunted and fished in the area. Wisconsin became a state in 1848, South Milwaukee incorporated as a village in 1892 and a city a few years later, and Oak Creek did not become a city until 1955.
A total of 38 men from the township served in Company K of the 24th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, according to “Wisconsin Volunteers, War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865,” an invaluable research book that has been put online by the Wisconsin Historical Society. One of them joined in 1864, so the number from Oak Creek when the company went into the war in 1862 was 37.
The dead included two cousins – Frederick Fowle of Company K, in 1863 of wounds received in the Tennessee battle, and Royal Fowle, an artilleryman in another unit who died of disease in 1864 in Louisville, Ky. Disease was an equal-opportunity killer of Union soldiers and Confederates in the war; many units lost more men to illness than in battles.
Frederick was the son of Frederick Fowle Sr. and Electra Rawson, while Royal was the son of John Fowle Jr. and Lavina Fowle, according to Judy Balestrieri, a descendant of the Fowle clan and a mainstay of the South Milwaukee Historical Society.
They were grandsons of John Fowle Sr., who was one of the first pioneers of the area and built two sawmills on the waterway that was named Oak Creek. The soldiers’ uncle, Horace Fowle (son of John Sr. and Sarah Dibley Fowle), built a Queen Anne Victorian home in 1892 that everyone today knows as the clubhouse in Grant Park.
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