Elisha T. Gardner

Gardner was born April 22, 1811 in Kittery, Maine, son of Silas E. Gardner and Huidah Temple Gardner. They moved soon thereafter to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1816 the family headed west. They spent the winter of 1816–1817 in the Holland Purchase in the State of New York, and in the early spring of 1817 moved on to Olean Port on the Allegheny River, where they built a flatboat, and set off with the whole family and all their worldly good on board, going down the river into the Ohio River, and thence to Lawrenceburg, Indiana where his father died, leaving the family moneyless. After Silas' death, Huldah managed to get the family and their goods to Cincinnati where she was aided by the Freemasons, of which Silas had been a member. After remaining in Cincinnati till the summer of 1818, the family moved on to Madison County, Illinois.

In Illinois the young Elijah attended a frontier school for seven or eight months, the only formal schooling he was to receive for many years. He remained fond of books, and seized what opportunities he was afforded for reading and study. At the age of sixteen friends wanted to send him to college to prepare for ministry in the Methodist Episcopal Church, but this was impractical, since his older brother had left home and he was the sole support of his mother.

In the spring of 1827, the 16-year-old Gardner rented and planted eighteen acres of land, and worked on side jobs between planting and harvest. He went into St. Louis, Missouri on an unsuccessful quest for more work; so he hired on to a keelboat bound for Galena, Illinois, whose captain abandoned him there without pay after he was taken sick with fever. Weak with fever (so weak that he was obliged to lie down several times on his route to gain a little rest), he followed an Indian trail that led to a cabin owned by a half brother and a cousin in the mining regions near Galena, stumbling upon their place at midnight. The fever and subsequent shaking ague lasted nearly a year.

The next year Gardner and his cousin went to the Platteville Diggings in the Wisconsin Territory to work in the lead mines there (this being the height of the region's "lead rush"), and built a cabin about a mile north of the village of Platteville, in which they spent the winter of 1827–1828. Gardner spent his nights reading by an improvised lamp. When a local "debating society" was formed, Gardner became one of the leaders, and gained quite a reputation as a disputant. In later years he often said that he "graduated by the side of a mineral hole." In the fall of 1828, he returned to Illinois across the country, traveling 250 miles or more of wilderness, he would later say, "without seeing a human habitation."

On his return home he found his little cabin and clearing gone, and so began again, building a new cabin. In 1829, the Gardners moved to St. Clair County, Illinois. In the fall of 1831, having married the woman who would be his wife for the rest of his life, Gardner, despite working long hard hours as a teamster driving his own ox team, was deeply in debt. He disposed of the oxen and traded a two-year-old colt he owned for some carpenter's tools, and went to Alton, Illinois where he worked as a carpenter and joiner, returning home to visit with his wife and mother. By 1835, he had not only paid the debt (with interest), but was able to move his family to Alton, building up a profitable house-building business.

In 1839, he was once more taken ill, unable to work for nearly a year, and came near dying. On two occasions he visited Wisconsin to improve his health. He benefitted in particular by his second journey, but upon returning to Illinois suffered a relapse. He decided to move permanently to Wisconsin in the spring of 1840, and arrived in Green County, Wisconsin Territory on June 10, 1840. He built a cabin and a sawmill on Skinner's Creek, eight miles west of the spot where Monroe would later be built. Upon the advice of a friend, Gardner took up the study and practice of law. He opened an office in Monroe on December 23, 1842[1] was admitted to the bar in 1843, and practiced law in Green County for the rest of his life. From 1850 to 1852, he supplemented this income with the operation of a general store in Farmer's Grove.[2]

Although the law became his primary profession, he never lost his connections to agriculture. When in 1853 a Green County Agricultural Society was organized, he was elected its first president,[3] a title which he resumed in 1862, and again in 1869.[4] In 1861, at the 11th annual Wisconsin State Fair, he served as a judge for "Machinery for the manufacture of sorghum syrup and sugar"; and repeated the duty in 1864.[5][6]

In 1841 Gardner was elected an assessor for the county, and in 1842 was elected as "county commissioner" (equivalent to a county supervisor).[7] He was appointed justice of the peace in 1843, by Henry Dodge, Territorial Governor of Wisconsin. In 1844 he was elected county tax collector; in 1845 and 1846, county clerk.

He served as a Democratic[8] Representative in the last two sessions of the Fifth and last Legislative Assembly of the Wisconsin Territory,[9] and as a member of the first two Wisconsin State Senates from the 8th District, at that time consisting of Green County.[10] He refused re-nomination in 1849.

In 1850 and 1852 he was elected district attorney for the county. As chairman of the Town of York, Gardner was in 1851 ex officio a member of the Green County Board of Supervisors, and was elected its chairman. This happened again in 1856.

Gardner was strongly anti-slavery, but had always been a Democrat, until James Buchanan was nominated for President; after which he became and remained an enthusiastic Republican. During the American Civil War, he was appointed draft commissioner for his district; his own son, Silas Gardner, served as a lieutenant during the war, and was later elected sheriff of the county.

In 1862, he was again elected district attorney. He seems to have moved into Monroe at about this time, as he was elected as a Village "trustee" (city council member), serving from 1862 to 1864. In 1866, he was elected to the first school board for the village. In 1869, Gardner was an unsuccessful candidate for county judge. In 1873 he was again elected a village trustee, as well as chairman of the board of trustees.[11] In 1876, he served as Sergeant-at-Arms for the State Senate.[9][12]

By the time of the second annual meeting of the Old Settlers' Club of Green County in 1870, Gardner was by two years the earliest-arriving member of the club. Gardner died near Monroe on February 3, 1879.[9] The ceremony was presided over by the Masons, of which body Gardner, like his father, had been a member for some years.[13]