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Here Comes The Bride: Weddings In Early Wisconsin

Vintage Wisconsin: Tradition Of June Brides Goes Back Centuries

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Wisconsin Historical Images

In the above image, Eunice Lamers, of Theresa, Wisconsin, leaves for her wedding to Don Dehn in 1949.

June has historically been the most popular month for weddings. It’s a tradition that goes back centuries and is tied to the name of the month itself. June comes from Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage. Couples who married in June were thought to be blessed with happiness as a result.

Popular culture helped to promote June as wedding month, too, with movies like “June Bride” and the musical “Seven Brides For Seven Brothers,” which includes a song with the name “June Bride.”

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Wisconsin’s early weddings among its white settlers tended to take place whenever was convenient. That was often in the winter or late fall when the harvest was finished, not June when rural families were very busy.

Most weddings took place at the homes of the bride. Clergy officiated if they could be found but if not, “then the ceremony would be gone through with the usual formalities and then O.K.’d when one vested with the authority of marriage appeared in the country,” stated the Crawford County Press.

Madison’s first wedding took place on April 1, 1838, in the public house owned by the city’s first white settlers, Eben and Rosaline Peck. Rosaline Peck herself officiated the wedding of Jarius S. Potter to Elizabeth Allen and then provided the entertainment with her violin.

The tradition of wearing white is a newer one, attributed to Queen Victoria who married in an ivory gown. In the Middle Ages, blue symbolized purity so brides, if they could afford it, wore a blue dress. If not, they wore something blue, giving us the “something blue” line we still know today. Most women simply wore their best dress, whatever color it was.

Mary Dittberner, of Clintonville, made herself a brown dress for her 1887 wedding. The daughter of a tailor, Dittberner became a milliner and made her dress to reflect the latest style. She did, however, wear a white veil.

George W. Bird, a “rising young lawyer” from Jefferson, made plans to marry his sweetheart, a schoolteacher known as Miss Sawin, as soon as he was discharged from military duty in the Civil War. They were married on Sunday morning, October 2, 1864, at the Baptist church after the usual service. They were married, according to the newspaper, in a “very kindly and original ceremony in which the word ‘obey’ was absent” from the vows. They followed it up with a feast of roasted pig, vegetables, “the frosted wedding cake, bright jellies, preserves, pickles, and pies.”

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