USA > Indiana > A History of Indiana from its exploration to 1922 > Part 2
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Hugh McGary was a lay judge from 1814 to 1818 with Daniel Grass in Warrick County, at the time Warrick County extended from Harrison County to Wabash River a portion of the time, and to the line of Posey County the remainder of the time. He was inspector of foods appointed by the commissioners of Warrick County during that period.
He kept a store in his hewed log house, which is known in the local
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HISTORY OF VANDERBURGH COUNTY
histories as Hugh McGary's double log warehouse, long before Evans- ville was incorporated as a town in 1819. It was during the period of several years before 1819 as store keeper, that McGary had grown gradually in debt to the Bowen brothers of Henderson, neglecting his duties, or doing business in a very unprofitable manner, according to his son-in-law, Dobyns. Evans, in a deposition, says that the Bowens were his chief creditors when he failed in 1820, and the records of judgments and claims against him still on file in the papers in the suit of Mollen, Stewart & Company, elsewhere mentioned, show that Evans was correct.
McGary operated the ferry from 1812 some seven or eight years, when he sold it to William McNitt, who was also the sexton and grave digger in the old cemetery (the southeast corner of Fifth and Canal Streets) now wholly abandoned. McNitt was the father of the late Carrie McNitt, and her sister, Mrs. James Steale, who will be remem- bered by the older inhabitants as prominent citizens ; Mrs. Steale left descendants in Indiana and elsewhere.
McGary was the first clerk of the court of Vanderburgh County, he furnished the room in his double log warehouse in which the first court in the county was held for some time, for which he was paid rent by the county commissioners. His brothers, Jesse and William R., became bondsmen for the first county treasurer and the first county agent respectively, so that the practical organization of Vanderburgh County seemed to be much under Hugh McGary's direction. In this warehouse was held the first public religious service in the town of Evansville of which there is any record. On December 19, 1919, the centennial of the first public religious services in Evansville of which there is any record, held in Hugh McGary's double log warehouse, was celebrated by the Methodists in the Coliseum in Evansville, and the historical address delivered on that occasion was published in the Indi- ana Magazine of History, volume 17, page 2, in which the event and its importance in the beginning of religious institutions in this section are fully described, and much information regarding the leading actors of that period is given.
Up to this time Hugh McGary had been a man of a good deal of importance, but about this time disasters, which had been foreseen by others, came upon him. He labored under many disadvantages which will appear in this history and explain his failure to carry out the plan of his life in the future city. These circumstances are a part of the history of Evansville, so much in fact was Hugh McGary its real founder.
Attention is called to the language of General Joseph Lane above quoted in which he says that the name of the new proprietor was per- petuated in the now famous city of Evansville. While Hugh McGary was the founder of Evansville in the sense pointed out, he was wholly unable to carry his plans to a successful termination. He was com- pelled on account of financial necessities in part, and the necessity to obtain the influence of Robert M. Evans in the legislation required to establish the new county of Vanderburgh, as will more fully appear, to
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HISTORY OF VANDERBURGH COUNTY
sell 113 acres, all of his land remaining unsold, above Main Street, which at that time was the cream of his land speculations, for which he received the nominal price of $10.00 per acre. This was done in 1817, but Lane says it was understood some time before that date, which is true. These facts will explain statements such as that contained in "Evansville and Its Men of Mark," the first biographical work of the people of Evansville, by Edward White, who says, Robert M. Evans "founded the city which bears his name."
Not only were the direct influences of the ideals, life and work of the first settlers seen in the beginning of Evansville and Vanderburgh County, but the individuals themselves are traced to Indiana territory and appear in the lives of themselves and their children as the first organizers of Evansville and Vanderburgh County.
The gap in point of time from the beginning of the permanent set- tlement wests of the mountains in pioneer Kentucky, then a part of Virginia, about 1775, until in 1818, when Vanderburgh County was created by the legislature of Indiana, covered the period of not quite fifty years.
During that period came the Revolutionary war and with it the con- tinuation of the wars with the savages, who saw in the log cabins and cultivated fields of the white man in that wilderness, the destruction of their hunting grounds and the doom of their race.
Veterans of those wars were residents of Indiana territory, notably Gen. Thomas Posey, a Revolutionary soldier, with a great and bril- liant record as such, and Lieutenant-Colonel, better known as Major Hugh McGary, an Indiana fighter of great renown. This man was the father of Hugh McGary, founder of Evansville, and will be known as Hugh McGary, the elder. His son will in this history be mentioned as Hugh McGary. The relation of Hugh McGary the elder to Evans- ville history has already come into prominence in the research work of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society.
Woodrow Wilson says that local history is only a part of a greater whole and should be read with up-lifted eye, and so it is with the be- ginning of the history of the counties of southern Indiana in the be- ginnings of the state. Hugh McGary the elder has been mentioned as the Achilles of the Indiana Wars from 1775 to 1783, side by side with Daniel Boone, the Ulysses of those wars. He died in old Knox County and was buried in the edge of what is now the present city of Prince- ton long before Gibson County was organized. He brought his family to Indiana, including his son, Hugh McGary, previous to 1806, a cir- cumstance which has not been mentioned in any previous history. These facts with others furnish a setting for the picture of the begin- nings of the city of Evansville .*
*Proceedings of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society pub- lished by the Indiana Historical Commission, Bulletin 16, pp. 14, 16. Boone and McGary had explored Kentucky together in 1773. Draper Mss., 36J3. Collins ii, 32.
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In 1775 there appeared in western North Carolina and passed through Cumberland Gap two men who led the first permanent set- tlements of white people in Kentucky. In 1773 Daniel Boone at- tempted this final settlement of Kentucky as the sole leader with a party, but it was not strong enough. Part of it, including Boone's old- est son, was ambushed and killed by the Indians on the eastern border of Kentucky, and Boone returned to North Carolina and waited until a safer and surer effort could be made.
When that time came in 1775 Hugh McGary the elder as leader, before the birth of his son, Hugh McGary, with forty horses and a flock of sheep and cattle with one Hogan and one Denton with their wives and children and a party of men, by previous appointment and after long waiting on the ground, met Daniel Boone as leader of another party east of Cumberland Gap in North Carolina and the two forces joined and came into Kentucky under the joint and equal lead- ership of Daniel Boone and Hugh McGary, the elder, whose wives were the first white women to settle in Kentucky, Boone at Boones- borough and McGary at Harrodsburgh .*
Excessive praise has been given Daniel Boone by the early histori- ans. The highest authority exists for the statement that Marshall, the father of Kentucky early history, championed Boone and Boones- borough to the exclusion of any fair record of Harrodsburgh and the people in its environments, much of which for that reason perished.
Equal justice has not been given to Hugh McGary the elder. Both McGary and Boone had faults. They were much alike in the essential characteristics of pioneers, backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies, sentinels on the borders of civilization.
The history of Indiana territory and old Knox County of which Vanderburgh County was a part, begins about the first of the last century. In 1805 Robert M. Evans, a Virginia cavalier of the eigh- teenth, moved from Kentucky to Knox County and settled about two miles from the point where Princeton was afterwards located. Hugh McGary, the elder, was married at least three times and had three sets of children. After 1803, the exact date is not fixed within a period of two years, he moved from Henderson County, Kentucky, where he was there living, a tavern keeper and owner of a tannery, to old Knox County where he died in May, 1806, leaving a number of grown sons, one or more had already settled in Kentucky, and a widow and family of younger children on a farm in the wilderness.
The only evidence obtainable tends to show, which I believe to be the fact, that he lived at about the point shown in an angle in Free- man's survey, which angle was caused by a diversion south of easts
*Bulletin 16, Indiana Historical Commission, p. 19. McGary's Station at the earliest period was a mile from the Harrodsburgh Sta- tion where a visitor records that she heard the sheriff call witnesses from the court house window in Harrodsburgh. Draper Mss. 12 C. C. 45.
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HISTORY OF VANDERBURGII COUNTY
when the line was surveyed in 1803 so as to include in an Indian Treaty, a settlement of white people then existing at a point which be- came more than a decade later, approximately the site of Princeton, and as late as 1818 the grave of Hugh McGary the elder was identified, as appears in the Draper Mss., as located about half a mile west of the public square in Princeton by a pile of logs where he rests in a grave now unmarked and unknown. The reason the writer thinks his farm was located here is that he was buried there and the witnesses to his deathbed will all resided in that immediate neighborhood. With Hugh McGary, the elder, came from Red Banks, (Henderson) Kentucky, his wife and family of young children as he describes them in his will, also his son, Hugh McGary, then grown. The latter settled in Indiana permanently and probably occupied a farm before land was offered for sale in 1807, as did his father, or entered it later, but the deed rec- ords of Knox County were burned in 1814 and it does not appear when he took the title to his farm. Later Hugh McGary, as the records show, sold his farm after Gibson County was established.
Perhaps the exact date of his acquiring this land might be traced in the old Government Land Office records.
Previous to 1807 settlers such as McGary the elder and Robert M. Evans were squatters, with a tenure to land full of uncertainty which became a matter of public and legislative interest, as well as the foun- dation or explanation of the term "Squatter Sovereignty" appearing in the literature of that time. Robert M. Evans succeeded in buying the land he lived on when sold at the first public sale in 1807. McGary the elder died in 1806, but carefully provided in his will how the ground upon which he was living should, if possible, be purchased by his executor for his three younger sons. This the executor or admin- istrator did not accomplish, for what reason does not appear, but pur- chased land in the quantity directed by the will about two miles north of Owensville. This fact appears in recitals of deeds when the land many years later was sold. The original deed record was burned.
The life and times of Hugh McGary the elder are of such his- torical importance as to require treatment beyond the scope of this history. Like Boone the period of his active life closed when settle- ments beyond the mountains became safe against the barbarities of In- dian wars. The wave of immigration with which McGary and his family came north of the Ohio River brought a type of men which soon disappeared as a controlling factor in whole or in part with the new civilization which came with statehood in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
Rather it would be more definite to say that the new population, the leaders of which organized the town of Evansville and Vander- burgh County represented a broader circle of men and influences than the Indian fighter, the backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies, the type originating largely in the up-country of the Alleghanies beyond the in- fluences of the Atlantic coast and European civilization. It seems clear to the writer from the mass of records in Vanderburgh County, which cannot be enumerated in this history, that here is the true explanation
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HISTORY OF VANDERBURGH COUNTY
why Hugh McGary was eliminated from early Evansville in 1825 and left the county about 1826 or 1827.
The cosmopolitan character of the population of early Evansville and Vanderburgh County may be traced in the union of a number of types represented by leaders which will be evident in the events of the early period including the sketch of the leading actors in the first decade in the history of the city and county, an interesting but neglected period in our histories, which it is the purpose of the writer here to present.
1
SELECTION OF THE SITE OF EVANSVILLE
The location of Evansville on its present site did not occur directly or indirectly as indicated in the Elm Tree fiction, copied in most of the histories of Evansville. Elliott's history has Hugh McGary passing from the Battle of Tippecanoe to Bardstown, Kentucky, where he is alleged to have lived in 1811, of which there is not the slightest evi- dence, and where he was passing over the location of Evansville's site for the first time, where upon camping on this location at night he was the next morning fascinated by the commanding view, and soon after- wards returned and entered the land in the Government Land Office.
He was not present at the Battle of Tippecanoe. Two of his broth- ers were there in the militia from Knox County before Gibson and Warrick County were formed. He had been long before that time a resident of Indiana territory, he was in 1812, when he entered frac- tional section 30, a resident of Knox County, Indiana territory, as the United States Land Office records show. When the patent for the land was issued to Hugh McGary in 1816 (he took the four years' credit allowed by law in which to pay for it) he is incorrectly de- scribed in the patent in 1816 as "of Knox County," though at the time he was and had been for nearly four years living on this land which was in 1816 in Warrick County, of which he was then lay judge. He then kept a store at McGary's Landing near the present junction of Main Street with Water Street or Riverside Avenue.
The location of Evansville was on the high ground on the river suitable to a city nearest to the Red Bank's trail which had from time immemorial been used by the Indians and was well defined, connect- ing the Indian villages on the Wabash River above Terre Haute through Vincennes through Red Banks (Henderson) crossing the Ohio River by a ford for travelers on foot and for animals in low water and thence across Kentucky to the Indian villages in the south.
There was and still is a ford in the Ohio River in low water about five miles below Evansville and another one near Henderson. The Red Bank's trail as a reference in deeds, as a land mark or boundary does not appear in the deeds of Vanderburgh County to lands south of this upper ford. If the trail extended to the lower ford the survey and record of this trail must have been made in high water when the land opposite Henderson for long distances was covered with water. The late Sebastian Henrich, the veteran abstracter, unusually well informed on such matters, had an old Government book with maps of the Ohio River dated 1825 for use of river pilots which showed double sand bars on opposite sides of the river at the upper ford (causing the shal- lows) which are still there. He was inclined to think that the Red Bank's trail crossed the river there. Hugh McGary lived in Hender- son, Kentucky, in 1803, and earlier married there Polly, daughter of
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HISTORY OF VANDERBURGH COUNTY
Jonathan Anthony, and though living later in Indiana from 1806 until 1825 and perhaps a little later, and with several other grown sons of Hugh McGary the elder he spent much of this time going backward and forward between Indiana and Kentucky .* From a very early period, therefore, Hugh McGary knew this location perfectly, a fact which stamps the Elm Tree story, as it is told, as a fiction and for which nothing but unsupported rumor exists. Had his route to Ken- tucky to visit his wife's family in Henderson from old Knox County been on a trail over the present location of Mt. Vernon or Rockport, both well located on the river for a city, not unlikely the future me- tropolis of this section would have been selected by McGary there.
*Letter of Robert Stockwell, 1863, Draper Mss,
CONFUSION OF IDENTITY OF HUGH McGARY, THE ELDER, AND HUGH McGARY, THE YOUNGER
The personality of Hugh McGary prominently appears in all pub- lished histories of the City of Evansville and Vanderburgh County, but his coming and passing, whence he came and where he went, are shrouded in mystery on account of the absence of any facts based upon any accurate original research on the subject shown in any of them.
Where attempts have been made in the absence of knowledge of facts to deal with Hugh McGary, mistakes and fictions once stated have been repeated, some of them in all the subsequent histories and in one particular, in most of our histories the very identity of Hugh McGary and that of his father have been confused and one historian has distorted the facts of history in order to make his account con- sistent on its face. Any correction of these extraordinary errors could only be made by a reference to facts properly verified.
When the Evansville Centennial Commission of 1917 began its work, with a greatly neglected original investigation into the history of Hugh McGary, the founder of Evansville, it appears that a single Hugh McGary had been in several historical works of high standing made to do service through two generations of pioneers, and that a confusion of identity as one person had been made of individuals, whom an intelligent inquiry developed to be Hugh McGary the elder and his son Hugh McGary, Jr.
As a result of this confusion of identity. no less a person than Theodore Roosevelt, misled by a mistake in Thwaites Early Western Travels reflected upon Hugh McGary, the town builder, as the rash and insubordinate person charged by him (as I expect to show else- where unsupported by the facts of history) to have been responsible for the disaster at Blue Licks in 1782 and a historian of Evansville and Vanderburgh County carried out the mistake to an absurd extent. Among Dr. Draper's manuscripts in the Madison, Wisconsin, library the statement appears of an old woman in Henderson County, Ken- tucky, who was a relation of the wife of Hugh McGary, the town builder, that the last heard of Hugh McGary, the elder, was that he had moved to Indiana territory with his family and had settled some- where near White River. The same statement appears to the effect that his son. Hugh McGary, had settled somewhere in what was later known as Gibson County, Indiana. Except this scrap of testimony, there is no writing in existence which I have ever found to indicate the fact that Hugh McGary the elder lived in Indiana, except the record of his will probated in the territorial records of old Knox County, to- gether with the administration of his estate beginning in 1806 and closed in 1812. But this evidence was so conclusive as to admit of no doubt on that subject. The age of McGary, the elder, when he died
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HISTORY OF VANDERBURGH COUNTY
cannot be definitely stated. He appears in the records of Augusta County, Virginia, in 1758. The records of North Carolina to which he moved soon after that date, contain no reference to him after care- ful inquiry on the subject, other than Draper's statement that he was sheriff of Wilkes County, then a very large county. His name next appears cut in a tree in Kentucky with the name of Daniel Boone, date 1773, referred to in Collins History of Kentucky, upon the faith of which Draper says he explored Kentucky with Daniel Boone in 1773. Draper says McGary was a native of Ireland, and sheriff of Wilkes County, North Carolina. This was probably about 1770 and history records that the social conditions in North Carolina were then border- ing on revolution, and describes the uprising of the oppressed and downtrodden against colonial oppressions. There were at that time riots and defiance of organized law administered under a colonial gov- ernor and it took a man of iron to perform the duties of sheriff in Wilkes County at that time.
McGary left in Indiana territory at least two sets of children by different marriages and a farm to some extent improved occupied by him as a squatter, upon which his will shows he left flocks of sheep, cattle and horses and at his homestead he left a widow and family of small children. His will was witnessed by Robert Evans, William Barker and James McClure and among other items names the son of the testator, Hugh McGary. This fact alone, of course, settles the question of identity concerning which, however, other conclusive facts are added. Starling's History of Henderson County, Kentucky, names both men and calls the younger Hugh McGary, Jr .*
All of the children of Hugh McGary of Evansville, except his old- est child, Clarissa, who married Thomas J. Dobyns, were under guar- dianship in Indiana as minors about 1830, although resident in fact in Tennessee at that time, their mother having died in 1822 and their father having left Indiana some years previously. The various records in Vanderburgh County with other strong circumstantial evidence, unnecessary to state here, corroborate these conclusive historical evi- dences that Hugh McGary, the founder of Evansville, was a generation younger than Hugh McGary, the Kentucky pioneer. The probate record of Vanderburgh County shows that after the death of their mother the children of Hugh McGary, whose mother was a daughter of Jonathan Anthony, a large land owner in Vanderburgh County, were upon the death of the latter decreed by court to be heirs of Jona- than Anthony as the record shows. The foregoing testimony is suffi- cient, in fact conclusive, that Hugh McGary, the elder, the Kentucky pioneer who came to Kentucky from North Carolina in 1775, and Hugh McGary, who entered fractional section thirty, T. 6 S., R. 10 W. in Knox, (now Vanderburgh) County, in Indiana territory in 1812, six years after his father's death, were separate persons.
Verifying the foregoing statements, which have made necessary
*Starling's History of Henderson County, Ky., p. 116-117.
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the introduction in this history of Hugh McGary, the elder, the two volumes of Thwaites Index to his thirty volumes of Early Western Travels are very exhaustive and complete, although doubtless it con- tains some errors. At Volume 2, page 43, of this index there is a con- fusion of the Kentucky pioneer and the town builder in Evansville, Indiana. This is a mistake most easily made. Except Starling's His- tory of Henderson County and the territorial will record of Knox County, Indiana territory, there was nothing of record from which any historian, however diligent, might obtain the truth. Thwaites index in one line reads "Hugh McGary, Kentucky Pioneer XIII, 70. In Evansville, (Ind.) X, 45.' This index confuses the two inen as one. Volume X, page 45, Thwaites "Early Western Travels" contains a short description of Evansville by Hulme in his journal (1818-1819). Note 16, page 45, Volume X, is as follows :
"The first log cabin on the site of Evansville was built in 1812 by Hugh McGary of Kentucky. Four years later, General Robert Evans, having purchased the land in the vicinity, surveyed and laid out a town which he named Evansville. It did not attract settlers until 1818, when Evans succeeded in having it made the seat of the newly erected Vanderburgh County.
"In 1819 it contained one hundred inhabitants ; but Hulme's expec- tation of its future importance was slow in being realized, for in 1830 the population was but five hundred. It was incorporated in 1847, and from that date its growth has been rapid .- ED.'
Vol. XIII (printed 1904) p. 70, note 4, to Nuttalls journal is as follows :
"Evansville the seat of Vanderburgh County, was named for Rob- ert M. Evans of Gibson County, Ind. It was founded in 1814 on ground donated by Hugh McGary, famous as a Kentucky pioneer who had for several years possessed land in this region. McGary was one of the leaders in the disastrous battle of Blue Licks .- See Cummings Tour, Vol. IV (Thwaites) Note 120."
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