City of Edgerton

Charles Rollin Head was twenty years old when he followed his parents to Wisconsin territory in 1840. They, along with Joseph Goodrich, H.B. Crandall, James Pierce, Ebenezer Phelps and other families from Allegany County, New York, came to Wisconsin the previous year and homesteaded near Milton in Rock County. Young Head, however, stayed just a little over two years and returned to western New York state in 1843 to complete his studies at Alfred Academy in Allegany county where he had been born.

 

Discovering an interest in medicine, he enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1844, graduating in 1848.  The new doctor, with degree in hand, then returned to Wisconsin, which had been admitted into the union of states on May 29th of that year, and settled at Albion in Dane County.  He soon had acquired large land holdings sout of Albion village, nearly three quarter sections, about three hundred acres, more or less, in section 4, Fulton Township.

 

Underlying much of his Fulton Township land, especially those lands in the southern part of the town, were large deposits of bright-red clay just below the surface. In 1852, Doctor Head began a brick making operation, forming brick of

bright-red clay, which, when fired turned buttery-yellow.

Much of the cream colored brick went into Albion Academy

. The academy would be one of his life-long treasures,

where he would serve more than twenty-seven years as a

director and President of the Board of Trustees.

 

In the following year, 1853, perhaps because of this activity

and opportunity for work at Doctor Head's brickyard, the

village of Edgerton was laid out, probably by Lucius H.

Page. Page had left his family home in Vermont a decade

earlier to homestead on a one-hundred-sixty acre piece of

unbroken, unfenced, untilled land in Fulton Township. A

large Edgerton cream brick Italianate farmhouse, which

he built in 1858, still stands west of Indianford village on

Hurd Road, County Highway M. Page's Edgerton village,

however, platted and surveyed by Adin Burdick for the

owners, Charles R. Head, Adin, Julius and Edward Austin

Burdick, and Henry Swift acting as agent for Mary Holden,

was recorded August 31st, 1854. Doctor Head's brickyard

is noted in Block 15 of the play, bounded by Albion and

Mechanic streets, on the east and west respectively, and

Fulton and Rollin streets, respectively south and north.

The brickyard was sold in 1854 to Lillibridge Barber.