John Edwards, Sr. left England for the United States in 1832, bringing his year-old son John. Whether he came immediately to Wisconsin is uncertain, but 1846 finds him established at Hazel Green, mining lead, speculating in land, and apparently running a general store. It would seem that a rather large family moved together for there is record of a James Edwards moving from England and appearing in Hazel Green at about the same time.
The papers of John Edwards, Sr. show that he was a man of considerable substance for Wisconsin in that period. A document of August 1857 has “money due me” set at $16,131.00. In general these early papers, from 1846 to about 1858, include accounts, receipts, invoices, and statements together with a large number of deeds and land contracts. These pertain mostly to the lead business and the general store, as well as to land sales. Most of his dealings were with merchants in Galena, Illinois, to whom he sold lead, and from whom he bought goods for personal use and resale.
By far the most interesting portion of the papers is that dealing with the lumber business which Edwards entered toward the end of the decade of the 1850s. He sent his son John, Jr., who had gone to California in 1851 to look for gold, to Wood County, Wisconsin where he and a Henry Clinton enraged in logging and sawing. With the year 1858 begins a regular series of letters from John, Jr. to John, Sr., which runs until 1868. This correspondence between Frenchtown, later Port Edwards, and Hazel Green gives a comprehensive and detailed picture of the logging business of the period. Most of the letters are from John, Jr. but a considerable number are from Clinton.
The firm of Edwards and Clinton lasted until June of 1864 when Clinton, on a drinking spree, received a number of shot-gun pellets to the stomach. He thereafter disappears from the correspondence although the letter reporting the incident does not tell what finally happened to him.
John, Jr. seems to have been a man of considerable force and character. It should be remembered that he was not yet thirty when he undertook to direct his father's lumber business in a still very much untamed part of northern Wisconsin. His writing is simple and clear and usually grammatical, which is rather surprising since his mother could not write her name, and he himself must have had little formal education.
There is little in the letters beside matters concerned with the lumber business. There is almost no mention of the Civil War except when John, Jr. bought himself out of the draft and when the conflict affected supply of men or the price of lumber. The lumbering enterprise along the Wisconsin River in Wood County developed, after the period covered by these letters, into the Nekoosa-Edwards Paper Company. However because John Edwards, Jr. was survived by only one daughter, the firm passed to the Alexander family, and later was headed by John Edwards Alexander, John, Jr.'s grandson.
Of John, Sr. little is known. The Wisconsin Biography incorrectly reports him to to have died in 1864, although there are letters to him in this collection until 1868. Nevertheless he was by this time, without doubt, at a rather advanced age.
