Oak Creek Historical Society

Jacob Goelzer Farm

 

Location:    aprox. 800 W. Oakwood Road,  Oak Creek, WI

Established: about 1870

 

Jacob H. Goelzer and his relatives had a 134-acre farm on what is now West Oakwood Road, on both sides of the railroad tracks and across the street from the Oakwood Depot, according to the 1876 plat map of the Town of Oak Creek.

 

A decade earlier, Goelzer had just returned from the Civil War. He had been living in Germantown when he enlisted on Aug. 21, 1862, in Company G of the 28th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment. He was a private, and spent most of the next two years in Arkansas. In early 1865, the 28th was moved to New Orleans and then to Alabama, where it was one of many Union units laying siege to Mobile and Fort Blakeley in the final weeks of the war.

 

Goelzer was mustered out on Aug. 23, 1865.

 

Goelzer was born in 1840 and died in 1882. He and many other relatives are buried in the Independent Cemetery behind St. John’s Lutheran Church at West Oakwood Road and South 27th Street.  It has a GAR marker, honoring his CIvil War service. The Grand Army of the Republic was the war veterans’ organization.

 

The Goelzer clan’s large house still stands, on Hummingbird Lane in the Oakwood Terrace subdivision that was built around it in the early 1990s.

 

Seymour Gilbert of New Berlin was a sergeant, first sergeant and then the first lieutenant of Goelzer’s Company G, and the officer’s substantial wartime diary is on a website devoted to the 28th Wisconsin. What he saw on a daily basis is what Goelzer also saw. See it at: