USA > Illinois > Montgomery County > History of Bond and Montgomery Counties, Illinois > Part 31
USA > Illinois > Bond County > History of Bond and Montgomery Counties, Illinois > Part 31
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About the earliest physician was Dr. Hillis, of Hillsboro, lately deceased. The people did not " allow " to become ill, and midwives at- tended to women in labor.
The scenes of Indian warfare are quite all outside the county, but the early settlers had seen their portion of these horrors. Robert Briggs' maternal grandfather, living in the Fort at Edwardsville, rescued a daughter from the savages, and, while bearing her home to the fort, began bleeding at the nose and died from loss of blood. Samuel Briggs, the eldest son, born in 1809, was a soldier in the Black Hawk war, and Stephen R., the second son, born in 1812, was for eleven months a ranger.
As late as 1830, only a few families had set- tled in the township. Mathews had removed ; Wilkinson and Lockerman remained, and Will- iams and the Woods and Ash had located along the Three- Mile Branch.
The polls for the earlier elections were held at "Tennis' School-house " in Zanesville Town- ship, and when the west side of the county was divided into three election precinets the polls of Long Branch Precinct, which included North Litchfield, were opened at . John A. Crabtree's house in South Litchfield. The poll lists con- tain few names ; from a dozen to twenty votes would be received. As the population of North Litchfield by the last census was, outside of the city of Litchfield, only 951 on thirty-four square miles, and contains neither mill nor shop save at Litchfield and Honey Bend, it is credible that the township attracted population slowly. Nearly all the people are of Southern birth or origin.
The elder ones still relate many homely in- eidents of the early days. When a family ar- rived and it was understood that they wanted a house, the settlers assembled, and some cut logs and built the walls, while others split shooks for
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the roof, and others hewed puncheons for a floor and another portion erected the chimney. They did not cease until the house was ready. If the supply of meal gave out, and high water or the state of the trails prevented a journey to Old Ripley, corn was bruised in a hollow block of wood with an iron wedge or a wooden pestle. The finer portions were used for bread, and the coarser part was converted into hominy. Scant time had the settlers for social visits, but when one was paid the party came on horseback, the wife en croupe behind her husband.
An annual visit to Mr. Briggs by Mr. White- side, the partisan ranger, well known for his prowess in Indian warfare, was the signal for renewed confabs on the incidents of border life. Whiteside, Robert Briggs, Sr., and his son Samuel were the center of the group, and the children would hnddle into the corner terrified by their tales. Bits of description in their stories were of high merit for their graphic literalness. What the good wives talked of is beyond con- jecture. He is a bold man who will venture an opinion as to the topics in a woman's palaver.
The inquisitorial list of questions in the as- sessor's blanks, prepared in the early history of the State is inferential evidence as to the con- dition of the Illinois homes. But we have seen tax receipts of those relatively far-off days, in which the taxes on six hundred acres of land were $2.10, and on eighty acres, 12} cents, and these receipts were given to early settlers of North Litchfield and its sister township, South Litchfield. The wages of a stout, willing boy were a " bit " a day during the summer, and a good harvest hand was paid as high as half a dollar, or the exact price of a pound of coffee. "Hired girls " had not become a class ; in case of illness some young woman would leave home for a few days to care for the afflicted household, but her services were not rendered for the pay she received. The discharge of the sacred duty to care for the sick was the motive, and it was never neglected. The accepted life
of a woman was to marry, bear and rear chil- dren, prepare the household food, spin, weave and make the garments for the family. Her whole life was the grand simple poem of rug- ged, toilsome duty bravely and nncomplaining- ly done. She lived history, and her descend- ants write and read it with a proud thrill, such as visits the pilgrim when at Arlington he stands at the base of the monument which cov- ers the bones of 4,000 nameless men who gave their blood to preserve their country. Her work lives, but her name is whispered only in a few homes. Holy in death, it is too sacred for open speech.
Some of these cheerful dames still live, and seem to regret the times which will never come again. One of them says the floor of her cabin was so uneven that she placed rude wedges un- der her table legs to keep it steady, and when a heavy rain fell the water which came down the chimney formed a pool in the depression called a hearth, and she baled out the water with her skillet. Gourds were used for drink- ing cups, milk pails, dippers and receptacles for lard, some of them held half a bushel. When she became the owner of a stone pitcher, she felt rich, and at the table no person could have a knife and fork ; if he had the former, the lat- ter fell to another, and often the same knife answered the table needs of two or three.
Until 1828, the whole county voted at IIills- boro, aud there was the post office, store and physician. In 1830, twelve years after its set- tlement, but seven families had located in the township-Robert Briggs, Thomas Briggs, Aaron Roberts, Mathews, Wilkinson and Lock- erman, and possibly T. C. Hughes. A war trail from the timber at the head of the Cahokia to the timber on Shoal Creek ran along the south- eastern sections, and the Indian-fighter, White- side, and his rangers, pursued a band of war- riors along this, and brought on an action near the southeast corner of the southwest quarter of Section 26. Whiteside, years after the bat-
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tle, pointed out the site. Flint arrow-heads and tomahawks have been found there. Tradition has preserved no details of the fight, save that the savages suffered from the shotguns. White- sides was a laborious slayer of Indians, but wrote no detailed history of his exploits on the trail. The early settlers lived in fear of Indians, though no incidents are preserved of any out- rage here later than 1815.
Bennett Woods settled in the township east of Shoal Creek, and found that in addition to those previously mentioned, Aaron Roberts had preceded him. Of this Mr. Roberts, we can learn only that he was a man of great humor, and was not of kin to John C. or James S. Roberts, long well-known residents of " Roberts' Settle- ment," the earlier name of Honey Bend. Thom- as C. Hughes settled in 1829, on the farm now owned by Martin Ritchie. Thomas Briggs, a brother of Robert Briggs, lived about a mile south of Hughes. The farm afterward passed into the hands of Samuel Kirkpatrick, brother of the famous Sheriff.
When 1830 dawned, the settlers lived at the edge of the timber-Bennett Woods east of the Creek, Aaron Roberts, the third set- ler, on the creek, and Mr. Hughes and the two Briggs west of it. Mathews had vanished and there is no mention of Lockerman or Wilkin- son. There were certainly five families, and possibly seven in the township. Mrs. Bennett Woods died in 1829, and was the first death. The first marriage was Joshua Martin to Sarah Briggs, eldest daughter of Robert Briggs. The first sermon was preached at the house of Ben- nett Woods, by James Street or Larkin Craig -probably the fromer. They belonged to the Missionary Baptists, and their earliest house of worship was a log chapel, a few rods over the line, on Section 35, in Zanesville-the venera- ble John Woods is able to fix its location. This decaying in 1865, Little Flock Church was built at Honey Bend. The Cherry Grove Chapel, in Butler Grove, was the primitive church for the
Methodists of several townships. Being near the line, the Methodists had no place of wor- ship in this township until 1855, when the Hard- insburgh Chapel was drawn to Litchifield. Some of the early Methodists attended at Asbury Chapel, Raymond ; some at Cherry Grove, in Butler Grove, and some at the Hardinsburgh Chapel.
The Baptists first attended the log church near J. Woods,' but by the subdivisions in which that denomination rejoices, there are now four houses for their occupation.
The first burial place was the Bennett Wood's Graveyard. There were laid away Robert Briggs in May, 1857, and his wife in 1850, Mrs. Bennett Woods and other pioneers. The Crabtree Grave- yard was perhaps the second one, though it is in South Litchfield. We were not curious enough about mortuary matters to seek to know these things in their grim minuteness. The fact that a cemetery was found near each church or regular preaching place, points with great clearness to the fact that no funeral was thought to be properly conducted without a sermon, and the exposure of the face of the dead for a last look by the spectators, though the Baptists- almost the sole religious denomination-dis- countenanced funeral sermons or mortuary serv- ices at a church. The dead were lovingly borne from the house to the place of burial and there left to the awful care of the grave.
The coffin was the handiwork of a home workman ; the dead was arrayed in the chill simplicity of a shroud. It was unknown that a dead person was buried in the dress worn in life, or in such a dress as living people wear.
The defense of any custom is its ntility, and the records of the pulpit contain little evidence of abiding religious impressions from the fu- neral sermons. Perhaps they are the Protest- ant form of praying for the dead.
The diseases were chiefly fever and chills ; at times nearly every home contained more or less sick members. We have visited neighbor-
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hoods in which every house had its sick in- mates. The first physician was Dr. Moore, of Woodboro, and North Litchfield was the home of no physician until 1854.
In 1832, Israel Fogleman occupied his life-long homestead, though he brought no wife to his cabin for six years. Peter Black- welder had settled half a mile west, and Aaron Kean a couple of miles north. The Striplings were in the north part of the town, and in 1840 the township contained ten or twelve families. Alfred Blackwelder settled south of S. A. Paden's. Some chil- dren of the first settlers married and settled near the ancestral home.
The Bandys and Pete Thompson, Jesse and Israel Ash, John C. and James Roberts, Isaac Weaver, Ahart Pierce, C. W. Sapp and Ralph and Jacob Scherer and Elihu Boan came, and, in 1850, there was one school- house, near the site of the brick one, just west of Mr. Austin's. In 1852, the Terre Haute & Alton railroad was located on the south line of the township, and, with the lay- ing out of Litchfield and the opening of a market for grain, and the consequent appre- ciation of land, a new era dawned. The vacant prairie began to be fenced and brought into tillage. The salient feature of this de- cade was the creation of the village of Litch- field, with a population of 1,500, many of them of different nationality, and widely dif- fering in manners and customs. The orig- inal settlers were conservative in habits and modes of thought. Litchfield was a good place to buy and sell in ; it was a conven- ience ; but socially and politically it was looked upon with coldness. If a Litchfield man wanted a county or town office, he failed to secure it.
When the war was in its earlier stages, various parties proposed to resist what they erroneously supposed was in contemplation.
Their fears were soon dissipated, and gather- ings of armed men at private houses, and armed sentinels around, were omitted. But men did meet at night for instruction in the military art, but they soon became ashamed of their untoward zeal, which had been stim- ulated by the presence of disloyal refugees from the States in rebellion. The result was an immediate feeling of unquietness, but no one imagined that this spasmodic moment of feeling would glut itself in action. It evaporated in fast riding and loud, boastful talk.
On an evening in February, 1864, three men called at the house of William G. Por- ter. five miles north of the city, and knocked for admittance. They said they were neigh bors on their way home, and had broken their wagon, and desired a hammer and nails to repair the injury. Mr. Porter and his wife were alone and had retired for the night. He went to the door with the nails, when he was seized, and a demand made for his money. Mr. Porter showed fight in his nightdress. One person stood guard and two dealt with Mr. Porter and his wife. He re- ceived a slashing blow from a pistol, which laid open a long wound, and was shot in the head, the bullet plowing into the skull, where it remains. Porter made a lively fight, and foiled the robbers. But help was coming, and the robbers fled. No arrest was made, as the assailants were masked. Their pur- pose was simple robbery, and no political meaning was attached to the affair. But in October of the same year, three persons, about 7:40 P. M., visited the house of John C. Rob- erts, of Honey Bend, on an errand of plnn- der. Each had two revolvers, and the fam- ily were wholly defenseless. They obtained a gold watch, $150 in money and the family silver. One of the robbers, being lame, walked on the side of his foot, and was
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tracked to Litchfield. Arrests were made, but as they were refugees from Missouri, a presumptive alibi was made out, and they were released. There was, in the selection of the family and the undoubted character of the robbers, a political element in this crime. Thompson Williams, a half-mile west of Mr. Roberts, was robbed of a gun the same night, but it was afterward found in a field where the robbers had cast it away.
These three events comprise the criminal his- tory of North Litchfield for sixty-four years, for the plundering of chicken roosts and the occasional relief of a smoke-house, were inci- dents not unknown in all frontier settlements, and were accepted at their real significance.
In 1870, the St. Louis Division of the Wa- bash road was built, and a station was located at Honey Bend. A town was laid out, and a post office established, J. E. Hickman, Postmas- ter, who also opened a store there. The place has neither passenger nor freight depot, but the shipments of cattle and grain have been noticed in the decrease of shipments from Litchfield. The village contains a church, schoolhouse and several shops, and about twenty neat dwellings.
The adoption of township organization in 1872, and a judicious road law, have wrought marvelous changes in the condition of the high- ways. The chief roads have been ditched and graded. Safe bridges and culverts were placed at the water courses. Of course taxation in- creased, and whether the consumption of iron be the test of civilization or not, no one will deny that increase in taxation marks the his- tory of our settlements. With the growth of wants comes a more rapid inerease of taxation : and organized and regulated benevolence and administration of law, have superseded the ac- tion of individuals who took care that no de- serving persons suffered for food or shelter, or set at defiance the laws of mine and thine.
There are now five school districts in the township, all with good houses in which schools .
are maintained for at least eight months in the year. For the convenience of those who had worshiped at Cherry Grove, or Asbury Chapel or Litchfield, Phillips Chapel, about two miles south of Honey Bend, was erected in 1872, and this house and the one in the Bend, are the only religious houses in the township, outside of the city.
A brick-yard is in operation a mile east of State street, and the margin of Shoal Creek af- fords an abundance of compact, crystalized limestone. Burned into lime it yields a superior article, which has been found especially useful in building the abutments of bridges and culverts.
The pioneers of sixty years ago are repre- sented by gray-haired men and faded-tressed women. The ox cart has utterly perished ; the wooden plow, the winning shot, the sheep folds, exist only in imagination. The log cabin has gone, the flax and cotton fields are no longer tilled, the musie of the spinning wheel and the beat of the loom are silent ; sidesaddles are out of date. And we have written of things which were the familiar sights and sounds of our youth, that those in the morning of life may learn what was only sixty years since.
Our rural friends are incredulous as to the wonders of the telephone, and to the child on our streets to-day, the history we have written will be incredible : but that it is of modern times we have been speaking, he would class us among the weather prophets. Evidence wins assent, but experience commands belief, and we chide not the lad for believing. only what is confined to his own experience, when eminent men contemptuously reject whatever their poor reason cannot compress or fathom.
We have tried to bring back to the reader the time which is now purely historical in North .
Litchfield. The prevailing peace and quiet of the people have been due to their own strong, simple, sturdy, high hearted characters, and to the auspicious faet that the law and the customs of their age were on a level with the average strong working moral quality of the people.
SOUTHI LITCHFIELD TOWNSHIP.
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CHAPTER XII .*
SOUTH LITCHFIELD TOWNSHIP-ITS DESCRIPTION, BOUNDARIES AND GENERAL TOPOGRAPHY- SETTLEMENT OF WHITE PEOPLE -THEIR EARLY HABITS AND INDUSTRIES-FACTS AND
INCIDENTS-EDUCATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS-MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS, ETC., ETC
T MIIE northeast third of this township was originally well timbered, and forest is found on one or two sections on its south bor- der. The surface is generally well-drained by Long Branch, Shoal Creek, Lake Fork and its three northern affluents. The northwestern sections discharge their surplus waters into the Cahokia. The center and west portions of the township are not as fairly drained as the other divisions, and may be called flat. The soil obeys the general law of change and decrease in depth, as one travels south. The black, clinging soil, peculiar to the prairie, loses its northern depth. White soil is more frequently met. But there is as much in the cultivator as in the soil, and farmers in South Litchfield are among the solid men of the county. Brick clay is found near the town and down by Shoal Creek. Stone is quarried along the Creek and down Rocky Branch.
The township is exclusively agricultural. There is no shop or store or mill now nearer than Walshville and the city of Litchfield; and but two churches-a German Lutheran in the south, and a union house in the east. The people are all farmers. Three railroads, the original Terre Haute & Alton, the St. Louis Division of the Wabash, and the Jacksonville & Southeastern-the last one just opened-con- nect the township with the wide, wide world.
It was originally settled in 1816, by Nicholas Lockerman, who occupied the east half of the southeast quarter of Section 15, now the prop-
erty of John A. Briggs. The first settlement in the county was at the Clear Spring Church, in Hillsboro Township, about two miles east of South Litchfield, and the early settlers located in the neighborhood, along the West Fork of Shoal Creek. Lockerman was not a desirable neighbor. IIis life was a scandal. Ile had a natural, but no legal wife, and Rev. James Street, finding him and the mother of his three children one day in the corn-field, lectured him so sharply and effectively that he coerced him to marry the woman, and the ceremony was performed in the field. It was the first mar- riage in the county. One of his sons settled on the Davenport place, in the city of Litchfield, and another one on or near the Martin Ritchie farm in North Litchfield. He was killed, many years since, at Zanesville, by Andy Nash. The family long ago became extinct in this region. Probably Mr. Street settled at Clear Spring in 1814, as we have seen a tax receipt given him, in this county, dated that year. If this be con- clusive as to the date, the settlement of the county must be set back a year or two.
The Indian trail, from the timber on the Cahokia to Shoal Creek, crossed the northwest corner of the county. So well was it used that the path, hard beaten, is still accurately re- membered, and flint arrow-heads were frequently found on the prairie, by the older settlers. The existence of " buffalo wallows" seems to indi- cate the fact, or at least the belief, that buffalo once roamed this region, and an occasional bear or panther was seen by frightened fam-
*By H. A Coolidge.
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HISTORY OF MONTGOMERY COUNTY.
ilies peering into their homes. The fear of Indians was not unknown, and the trampling of a man's horse around the house has sent the trembling inmates into the loft, to shiver in fright until a new day banished their terrors by disclosing the cause.
The political condition of a people depends on the tenure of land. If a settler could call land his, in the sense that a horse or a rifle was his, the region could not be retarded in its development, or such grave embarrassments arise as have been witnessed in older States. The land tenures of the Northwest were per- feet, and hence its peace was placed on a solid basis. The sole contingent blemish in the titles is the right of eminent domain. The land in this region was put in market for the benefit of the State by attracting settlements. There were no " land grants " in those days, when the price of land was put up to enrich the seller. The worth of a State is its people and their condition, and it is yet a question whether the people which feed the world or the one which clothes the world ; the people who produce or the people who traffic, will, in the long run, be the world's arbiters.
We have been moderately curious as to the motives which set journeying hither so many from the States south of the Ohio. Most of the emigrants had not reached life's meridian. They were young, hopeful, courageous, and poor in actual worth, but rich in possibilities. Illinois was a Territory, reposing under the noble provisions of the famous Dane Ordinance of 1787. Not a few of the pioneers have left their record that they sought homes here be- cause the land would not be blemished by negro slavery, and civil and social distinetions would be yielded only to those who owned " niggers." \ fat soil ready for the plow, cheap lands and a temperate climate, were not peculiar to Illinois or South Litchfield. For the grand simplicity, the sturdy virtue of their lives, they got recognition and fame as
Enoch Arden did-after death. And though few families in South Litchfield are descend- ants of the pioneers, yet these few retain their pre-eminence, and from them are selected with rare assent of unanimity, the guardians of the orphans, the administrators of estates and the servants of the public in township or county offices.
We cannot write history as a blind man goes about the streets, feeling his way with a stick. The facts are transparent, and through them we catch gleams of other facts, as the raindrop catches light, and the beholder sees the splen- dor of a rainbow. We are to speak of common men whose lot was to plant civilization here, and who, in doing it, displayed the virtues which render modern civilization a hoast and a blessing. These early times cannot be repro- duced by any prose of a historian. They had a thousand years behind them, and in their little space of time they made greater progress than ten centuries had witnessed. Theirs was a full life. The work thirty generations had not done, they did, and the abyss between us of to-day and the men of sixty years ago is wider and more profound than the chasm be- tween 1815 and the battle of Hastings. They did so much that it is hard to recognize the doers. They had a genius for doing great things. That olive leaf in the dove's beak per- ished as do other leaves, but the story it told is immortal. Of their constancy, one can judge by the fact that not one of them went back to the ancestral South.
The only history worth writing is the history of civilization, of the processes which make a State. For men are but as coral, feeble. insig- nificant, working out of sight, but they trans- mit some occult quality or power, upheave society, until from the moral and intellectual plateau rises, as Saul above his fellows, a Shakespeare, a Phidias or a Hamilton, the royal interpreters of the finest sense in poetry, in art and statesmanship. At the last, years
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color life more than centuries had, as the sun rises in an instant, though he had been honrs in hastening to this moment.
As the county, in 1830, contained but 2,953 inhabitants, in 1840, only 4,490, and ten years later 6,277, it will be understood that the bor- der townships, separated from Hillsboro, the po- litical and commercial capital, by the deep val- leys of Shoal Creek and its West Fork, must have gained slowly in population. Lockerman's cabin was the nucleus of the earliest settle- ment. Melchoir Fogleman located south of him just over the line in Walshville, and slowly pio- neers planted themselves between their homes.
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