William Plocker
American businessman and politician

William Plocker (May 28, 1811 – December 20, 1878) was an English-born Dutch-American immigrant, farmer, politician, and Wisconsin pioneer. He served in the Wisconsin State Assembly, representing Fond du Lac County.
Biography
William Plocker was born in London, England, but raised and educated in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He emigrated at age 16, landing in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 1, 1827.
Two years after arriving in Boston, he moved to Orleans County, New York, where he worked as a farmhand, taught school courses, and clerked for local businesses. He prospered in New York, and was appointed collector of canal tolls at Brockport, New York, in 1839 and 1840, and was named cashier at Buffalo and Albany, New York, for the Western Transportation Company. From 1845 to 1847, he worked aboard the steam ship Wiskonsan, first as clerk and later as master, making a circuit between Buffalo and Chicago. Because of these years of nautical work, he was often referred to as "Captain".
In 1847, he chose to settle in the Wisconsin Territory, and purchased land in the town of Metomen, Wisconsin, near the village of Fairwater, in Fond du Lac County. Within a year of his arrival, he was appointed postmaster at Fairwater.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Plocker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.