#8 -- The Hartwell House
Location: W1914 Eagle Road
Angelina Ellis, the first-born child (1837) of Henrietta (Jones) Ellis Peirce Hall, spent her childhood years in Massachusetts. Her father, Joseph Ellis, who was a preacher in Harvard, MA, died when Angelina was 5 years old. When her mother then married Abraham Peirce, Angelina accompanied them when they moved to Wisconsin (living first in Kenosha and then in Germania), where Abraham died in 1853. Henrietta returned to Massachusetts and eventually married Benjamin Hall, who led his new family, along with a contingent of Congregationalists-turned-Millerites, back to Germania in 1860, establishing the Colony to await the imminent “end of days.” In 1868, Angelina married Samuel Hartwell, a member of the original group that came from Massachusetts to Germania. The couple built and ran a 24-room hotel and a livery barn until about 1880, when business waned. Using the lumber from the dismantled hotel, Samuel and Angelina built this house near the former hotel site. In 1896 the couple journeyed back to the Lunenburg, MA area to revisit her childhood home. Angelina wrote her diary of the trip in the unused pages of a diary she had received from her uncle. Samuel kept several diaries of the waning years of the Germania Colony, spanning the period from1895 to the early years of the 20th century.
Hartwell hotel and livery barn
Pictures: Hotel, Angie, and Samuel -- pg. 26 of State Historical Society of WI magazine
Pictures: Hotel, Angie, and Samuel -- pg. 26 of State Historical Society of WI magazine