The other day we went to, about a week and a half ago, went to a dedication to Camp Utley.
Now, I know you're not going to say what's Camp Utley.
We're going to describe what that is in just a moment, but it's very historic.
And Racine is one of the places that played an important part in the Civil War.
You wouldn't think so because it's so up north and wasn't where there was no fighting up here, but it played an important part.
Steve Rockstad is here, he's an historian, and they gave a really nice talk at the dedication.
of Camp Utley, which, by the way, is right at the right where Wisconsin Avenue meets Main Street right north of the Coven Center, right at that little point.
And there's a nice marker there, beautiful marker.
And thanks for joining us, Steve, to appreciate it.
Thank you.
I'm honored to be here.
Now, who is Utley?
William Utley was a rather eclectic character.
He had a lot of different roles in Racine.
And he was
assistant june general of the state of wisconsin and abolitionist certainly was against slavery and he had among other people pursued the idea of having a camp to train civil war soldiers in the state of wisconsin but he wanted it in racine and he was able to get it why do they want racine well i think it was just strict patriotism like it is with everything else you know we had camp randall which is the most well known civil war camp in madison
but the second largest and most influential was Camp Utley.
And it was simply named in his honor and he had one of the regiments that was named after him.
We had also the Eagle Regiment named after Old Abe, the Eagle, part of that regiment trained at Camp Utley.
His, the Abolition Regiment trained at Camp Utley.
We had part of the Iron Brigade at Camp Utley.
There were a lot of notable regiments and infantry
groups that trained there ended up going into battle and became fairly well known during their tenure in the Civil War.
Now, a lot of people who came to Wisconsin back in the 1800s came from New England and he came from Massachusetts.
And what brought him here, do you know?
Everybody moved west.
Everybody was moving west.
There was more opportunity.
He saw promise.
where other people did not see promise.
He saw movement where other people didn't see movement and he loved or seed.
Absolutely loved or seed.
Just like another senator we had James Doolittle who's buried in Mount Cemetery.
Loved or seen.
Ended up dying in Rhode Island but he was a very close personal friend of Lincoln.
Utley was not but a lot of the stops were in Wisconsin and that's how we have a lot of these towns in the state.
I heard Colonel Utley
But then I saw something online.
It was General Utley.
Well, he was an agent in general of the state of Wisconsin at one point in his career.
Yeah.
So he went by different titles, depending on who knew him and in what context.
Now, there's a beautiful marker there.
Whose idea was it to come up and say, we've got to put a marker for Camp Utley?
Well,
That's preservation we're seeing who's responsible for the entire.
And you, you remember them, the group?
I was a, I've been a president of them twice before back in the early 2000s.
And I've been on the board.
I was on the board with them for, oh, I'm going to save roughly about 15 years, but I'm not in any leadership role right now.
But I remember back probably in the.
late 90s, early 2000s, we had conversations about putting a marker there collectively as an organization.
So the idea of putting a marker there has been talked about for probably a good 20 years.
And I'm just thrilled that preservation was seen.
You know, finally, the timing was right.
I was really
Happy that it came out in America to 50 because I thought what an appropriate year for us to put up a marker commemorating a Civil War training camp
Now we'll mention the president Scott Leonard's the president the preservation we're seeing right now How do you how do you get that land to put now it's it there's nothing on that little Strip of land where it is, but who owns that you
can even
sing also you're able to deal with them and get the marker there
Because
I know the
mayor, the mayor was at the dedication.
Right.
The city was very generous in donating the land and they are also going, they took responsibility for his perpetual care.
Yeah.
So it's on city property.
Thank you very much to the city of Racine for allowing the marker to be put there.
I hear perpetual care.
I think of a funeral plot.
Well, that's true.
We'll call it ongoing maintenance.
How's that ongoing
maintenance?
Well, you have perpetual care.
Excuse me.
I'm not going anywhere.
Yeah.
Now.
Camp Utley was at 74 or 5 acres.
75 acres, I think.
75.
Okay.
Now, for people that can't put 75 acres in their head, like I couldn't, because I live on a half acre plot of land, a quarter, a quarter acre plot, and like most typical houses around Mercedes, a quarter acre plot.
And I'm trying to figure, multiply that time.
I couldn't do it.
So, luckily, we were able to find out if you drive under Coven Avenue,
Starting from that point where the marker is and you go all the way down to Center Street, make a right, go all the way up to 16th Street, make a right, go back down to the lake.
That's 75 acres.
It's a
lot
of land.
And it was donated by a farmer, Thomas Wright, and he was also the gentleman who donated the 10 acres for Racine College.
So, if you add all the land that DeCoven is on, well, I call it the DeCoven Center, but then it was a DeCoven Foundation back in the 80s and before that it was received college.
But if you take all of the DeCoven property, those 10 acres, and you add it on to the Camp Butler land, you're right, that's an enormous track of property.
And he donated 10 acres
to Racine College so they could actually put a college there because that was the contest between Racine and Kenosha.
The first town that could get 10 acres of land got the college.
So, Thomas Wright was responsible really for Racine College and he's also responsible for donating the land to be used for Camp Utley.
Steve Ronch,
that is here.
And he's here today because we're talking about Camp Utley, which had the dedication about, what, two weeks ago now?
Are we going to have a go?
Yeah, the 18th, June.
Yeah, okay.
We're talking about the dedication and Camp Otley, because a lot of people don't know what Camp Otley was.
And we decided it's about a 75-acre plot of land.
It was during the Civil War, and this was the training camp for Union soldiers, taught them artillery, and they had the cannons.
And to the best of your knowledge, because there's nothing for sure.
You can only go by journals and what people wrote down.
They shot those cannons off toward the lake.
Yes.
To practice.
So...
There should be cannonballs laying in that lake somewhere,
right?
Oh, I'm sure there are numerous hundreds of cannonballs sitting below the silt at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Absolutely.
Nice to get some of them, huh?
It would be wonderful if maybe the State Historical Society as a nautical project would say, let's go look for cannonballs off.
They were getting
scuba suits.
Let's go.
Yeah.
And that's where they shot them off.
Now, you've got to picture the times.
It was the 1860s.
And you got a picture what it looked like.
There were no homes there.
They're, you know, I looked at the trees around there.
I didn't figure what these trees here then
was all prairie.
Yeah.
Cause it could those trees don't look that old.
Yeah.
The bluff going westward back to center street.
Um, the indications are in the record that it was all prairie.
So what, who, where do these soldiers come from all over the north?
They are obviously not primarily Wisconsin.
Oh, these were
Wisconsin.
These were Wisconsin
troops.
Every state, when Lincoln called out for troops after the firing of Fort Sumter, every state had a quota and they were to produce a certain number of soldiers.
Ironically, as Camp Utley grew and grew and grew, at first the state of Wisconsin did not meet its quota.
They had a little problem getting their quota, but as they came, they populated that camp.
very well to the point where the kitchen on the camp in an actually manufactured building, how it could service about 100 soldiers at a meal.
How many soldiers were there altogether?
Well, they think there was probably in the neighborhood of 2200 over the course of the four years that came through there.
And that's a lot.
That's a lot of people to train, especially when you're getting ones just from Wisconsin.
young people too.
These are young men.
These weren't.
In addition to whatever was going to Camp Randall, there was also a camp in Fond du Lac very briefly and there was a camp in Milwaukee very briefly.
We don't think of those today.
They don't have any notoriety and I don't think they had any longevity, but the Camp Utley one has, I don't want to say conveniently forgotten.
It's just been forgotten up until recently, especially now with the dedication.
But unless you're in historical circles and you study Racine history, it's very easy to not even realize that we had a civil war camp here.
No different than you probably don't realize a lot of the inventions that have come out of Racine, a lot of the businesses that started in Racine, a lot of popular entertainers and movie stars that were born in Racine.
It's very easy to forget your history if you're not in historical circles or you just are not of a historical bent.
That's what makes this so significant is that now we have a marker, now we are telling the story and the marker I am hoping will be served as a catalyst for preservation we're seeing in the museum and other organizations to go out and say let's do some programs on campus.
Let's go out and educate the general public on what went on here and the significance of why this camp was here, how many people went through, how big it was.
It's a fascinating part of Racine history.
So my brother is a huge civil war fanatic.
He just is.
I don't know how it came about, but he is.
And I took a picture of the marker.
Now, when I took a picture of his right after the dedication ended, there were a lot of people milling around.
So I took it from a distance and I said, I'll read it when I get home.
I just took the picture.
I'll zoom in on it.
I forgot there were two sides to it.
So I said it to my brother and then I'm looking at the bottom, you know, see other side.
So if you go to see it, you got to read both sides.
read the side facing south first and then read the side facing north second and you'll you'll see the sign.
It's a beautiful sign.
It's a beautiful marker.
And let me just tell people where it is again in case you missed it.
If you go down Main Street, go down as far as you can go just before you hit the Coven.
Coven is at Avenue to Coven Avenue.
And you'll see there's a point right there where Main Street meets Wisconsin Avenue.
You'll see the marker there in that little plot of land, triangle plot of land.
Pull over park and read the, read the marker.
And then try to figure out 75 acres by going down to DeCoven, making a ride on center, making a ride on 16th, right to the lake.
And you'll see how big that encampment was.
Now, while the break there, you were telling me, they just lived in tents, you know, flimsy tents.
These weren't structures made of wood.
And we think, oh, that's a beautiful day today.
Nice day to camp out.
But when it's 10 below zero, it's not a beautiful
day to
camp out.
And they didn't have heaters in these tents.
So how did they stop from freezing to death?
creatively.
There are letters that have survived from some of the soldiers at Camp Utley.
I've read a few of them.
There was one soldier in particular that I think there's five or six letters that he penned during the course of the war and many of them were from Camp Utley.
He doesn't talk about anything all that great except there's another letter in which they talk about the drilling.
You know, they get up at six in the morning and they drill for an hour.
Now I'm making this up.
I don't have the schedule in front of me, but they drill for an hour and then they go in for breakfast and they come back and they drill for two more hours and then they take a break for lunch and then they go out and they drill and then they take a break and they drill and they ended up drilling.
I think it was eight or nine hours out of an average day.
All they did was drill.
So that meant they were doing a lot of marching.
They were doing a lot of target practice.
They were doing a lot of how to march, how to, you know, put together everything that they needed for battle, practicing the cannon, shooting.
There's one letter that the soldier said, we were shooting into the lake.
Now, so they weren't just shooting the cannons.
They were shooting their guns.
And he says, I've gotten to be a pretty good shot.
I don't know what that means if you're shooting at an open body of water.
So, I don't know if they had targets out on the lake.
That's a fascinating concept to think that there were like floating targets out on the lake that they had to try to get.
No, World War II, they had
floating
targets.
And we don't have any evidence of that, but you know, they're not shooting into the land.
I've never seen anything that indicates they were shooting west from the camp.
There's no, I haven't seen any documentary evidence that said they were shooting south, but I have seen it where they're shooting into the lake.
So, you know, when you're doing nothing but being on your feet in those leather boots for nine, 10 hours a day, whatever it was, marching, marching, marching, marching and shooting.
I mean, that's a long day.
And especially if you're, like you say, if you're in the winter and it's 10 degrees or less,
That's a long day.
How did Camp Utley
come to an end?
The war came to an end.
No, but what happened to camp?
How did it become?
They just
disassembled it
and sold off the land to residents.
Well, it went back to Thomas Wright, who owned it.
He more or less just loaned it for camp use.
And there was also a racetrack there at one point on part of that land.
There was a racetrack for horse racing.
And so when they talk about the actual diagram of how the camp looked, there were the large canvas tents that housed, I think the number was eight people per tent.
At the end, they weren't on the ground, they were on cots and things like that.
But you have these canvas tents and they said they used, they put them on the old racetrack so that it looked as though every row of tents had a street in front of it.
And, um, but there was a lot of horse racing in Racine.
This was one of the tracks, these oval tracks that were in Racine that they utilized because I don't think that the horse racing was going on at the time that the camp formed.
So they just used the race track.
We could have been part of the triple crown.
Who knows?
There it is.
Now, if you want to see a Colonel Utley, his grave is in Mount Cemetery.
We spent 45 minutes looking for it.
And it's, it's tough at mound because it's all kind of winding roads going through there.
It's not straight roads.
And till you find the, uh, it was in, um, number six, I think, um, it was in blocks or section six, block 27.
So we, we get, we gave up, we get in the car, we're about to pull away and my wife says, there it is, Utley.
It was tall monument that said Utley and he has a small stone there.
And I took a picture of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, that's it there.
And we found Utley, but my wife, there it is.
We're just about the point because we were there.
We just, you know, there were so many grace.
She was looking for flags on grace and currently did not have an American flag on his grave.
And there were so, and it's hard to read some of them.
The weather is not being kind to some of these tombstones.
Steve, it's good having you here.
Thank you very much for
having me.
It's been great pleasure.
You're going to pick your brain and get this information out there.
And you're going to come back because next time you come back, we're going to talk about the million dollar quartet.
I love it.
Which should consist of four people Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins.
They got together for one session, strictly by accident, I think, at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee.
And we have some recordings of it and that was the only time they ever got together in the same room.
to record.
Absolutely.
And I just saw the million dollar quartet at the fireside theater.
Right.
And it was really good.
I was at Sun Studios in Memphis.
706 Union Avenue.
Got my t-shirt and everything, says Sun Studios.
And now I think I finally fit in it.
After watching it, somebody thought, thank you, Steve.
Steve Rockstaff, thanks, Steve, for coming in.
I mentioned the current president of Reservation Racine, Scott Leonard.
and the board of directors and everybody of Preservation Racine who ups Preserve Racine's history.
Well they did
a
phenomenal job.
Scott and his team did a phenomenal job with the monument of the dedication and kudos to all of them for the great job they did.
That's showing too.
A lot of people showed up and it was it was really neat.
The mayor was there, the county executive was there.
They had two women.
Dressed in Civil War dresses, which I thought was great while they're holding their cell phone was kind of ruined at all.
But they were holding their cell phones while they were dressed.
The color guard was dressed in the Civil War.
The Union soldiers were dressed like that.
It was really good.
I got tons of pictures of it.
And I loved
it.
I'm
glad you enjoyed it.
It was a beautiful day, too, which helps.
Thank you, Steve.
Steve Rocks that.
Thank you.
We'll be back talking about the million dollar quartet in a few weeks.
