USA > Indiana > Lake County > A standard history of Lake County, Indiana, and the Calumet region, Volume I > Part 18
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JOSEPH HESS AND GIBSON
During this short boom at West Point one of its most popular features was the little eating house conducted by a French baker, Joseph Hess. From all accounts the bakery goods were first-class and Mr. Hess doubt- less brought from his native land those talents of neat and tasteful serv- ice which have made his people famous. But the road passed on, and so did Mr. Hess.
West Point soon afterward became the station of Gibson, and in 1853 the settlement was such that a postoffice was established there. In faet, the people living at Hammond received their mail there until Mr. Marcus M. Towle was appointed postmaster of the growing settlement further to the east, which in 1873 became a village under that name. For some time it had been generally known as the State Line Slaughter House. It received its present name in honor of George HI. Hammond, the Detroit capitalist, in partnership with whom Mr. Towle had founded the great beef-dressing business which brought the first industrial fame to the city and the Calumet Region.
HESSVILLE AND HAMMOND
But we are ahead of our story, and return to Joseph Hess. After leaving West Point, or Gibson, he took up land in section 9, engaging in the cattle and stock business, as well as in general merchandise. The village which developed around his interests was named Hessville, and in 1852 he was appointed its first postmaster, holding the office for nearly forty years. Through an assistant he also served Gibson in the
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same capacity. In 1853 he opened a general store, which he conducted until his death in August, 1895, in his seventy-second year. Mr. Hess held the office of trustee of North Township for twenty-two years, and in many ways was one of the leading citizens of the earlier times. He left seven sons and two daughters, among the former being Frank Hess, a well known banker and former treasurer of the City of Hammond.
Hessville is now within the city limits of Hammond, and Gibson, also within the corporation, is the site of the great railroad yards of the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad and the New York Central, as well as the immense office building of the latter corporation. An immense leap from the Gibson and the Hessville of the early '50s.
MUNSTER, AMERICAN-DUTCH SETTLEMENT
In the southwestern part of North Township is a street or road four miles in length along which reside sixty or seventy families, descended from a colony of Dutch settlers who located in 1855. It passes along the low, fertile and at times partly-submerged lands of the Little Calu- met bottom and the Cady marsh. The highway and the houses and truck gardens on either side of it, with the workers among the growing potatoes, cabbages, onions, parsnips and flowers, seem to make a picture lifted bodily out of old Holland itself. At the center of this new-world Dutch settlement are a schoolhouse, postoffice and a store, all included in the name Munster. Near that point the Grand Trunk and the Pennsyl- vania lines come together, and it is the shipping, business and social center of one of the most industrious, prosperous and unique communities in Lake County.
DUTCH SETTLERS OF 1855
The founders of this section of the Netherlands in Northwestern Indiana were Dingernon Jabaay, with his family, including three sons; Antonie Bonevman and his son-in-law, Eldert Munster, with his two sons, Jacob and Antonie Munster. The Munster family came from Stryen, nine miles from Rotterdam, and the entire colony boarded the ship "Mississippi" in the summer of 1855, reaching Lake County in August. A little later Cornelius Klootwyk joined the three families mentioned and together they may be called the pioneers of the Munster settlement. Peter Kooy came in 1857, and other countrymen arrived from year to .year until by the late '70s there was an almost continuous Dutch settle- ment stretching for more than five miles along the Little Calumet in both Lake and Cook counties. In 1876 a church building was erected
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By Courtesy of Frank F. Heighway, County Superintendent of Schools.
MUNSTER SCHOOL
---
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By Courtesy of Frank F. Heighway, County Superintendent of Schools.
HESSVILLE CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL, NORTH TOWNSHIP
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near the Illinois state line for the benefit of the Munsterites, virtually all of whom are members of the Dutch Reformed Church.
As stated by a visitor: "It is a beautiful walk from Lansing, just over the state line, eastward to the schoolhouse, with the broad sand- ridge on the south and the rich Calumet Valley on the north. This land the villagers cultivate, raising large crops of vegetables for the city markets. The passing stranger might well call it a Happy Valley."
HIGHLAND
Following the grand sand ridge which extends from Lansing, Illinois, almost directly east to a point near Hobart, also on the line of the early stage road which ran from Liverpool to Joliet and Chicago, one discovers at a distance of about three miles from Munster a postoffice, a schoolhouse, two churches and a small cluster of houses which are known collectively as Highland. There were a few squatters along the ridge and the road in pioneer times, but nothing like a settlement until the Chicago & At- lantic (Erie) established a station there. Two miles north is what was Hessville, and in high water the Little Calumet covers much of the ground between.
WHITING AND THE "STANDARD"
The territory between Wolf Lake and Lake George and Lake Michigan, which is now covered by the City of Whiting and the vast storage plant of the Standard Oil Company, was known in pioneer times as Calumet. The place was afterward called Whiting's Crossing. In 1870 the first store was opened at that locality by Henry Schrage, and when a post- office was established there in the following year he was appointed post- master. Although Whiting was made a regular station on the Michigan Southern in 1874, it did not get beyond the status of a little by-station until 1889, when the Standard Oil Company founded the immense refinery and storage system at that place. When the company selected its location, there were only about half a dozen small houses and the Schrage store at Whiting. It is now a city of about 7,000 people, growing and well managed.
EAST CHICAGO AND INDIANA HARBOR
East Chicago covers substantially nine sections north and east of Hammond, and includes within its corporate limits the large north- eastern territory abutting on Lake Michigan and extending nearly to the Vol. 1-12
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Grand Calumet, popularly known as Indiana IIarbor. Indiana Harbor has become the great outlet of the Calumet Region, and East Chicago as a whole has therefore realized the dreams of the early promoters of Calumet City. Including the two popular divisions, but which have no legal justification, East Chicago has a population of about 20,000; not far from that of Hammond, which, however, is a more compact city and is able to present its good points to better advantage than East Chicago.
In 1888 the site of East Chicago comprised marshes, scrubby pines, underbrush and sand ridges; there was nothing to distinguish it from other wild and rather dreary stretches in North Township. Fully thirty years before, George W. Clarke, a Chicago capitalist and specu- lator, had purchased several thousand acres of land in that region, cast- ing himself into the future which we now know as the present. He did not live to practically realize from his vision of great industries, great railroads and great waterways, which should crowd the Calumet Region of North Township; but his heirs did, in solid millions of dollars.
On a map prepared by Mr. Clarke in 1860, while he was still making these investments and banking confidently on the future, what is now known as the actual Indiana Harbor on Lake Michigan is designated as Poplar Point. At that time there were no settlers at that point, but some- what later a sawmill was erected in the locality by Jacob Forsyth, and the place named Cassella, in honor of the wife of President Cass of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had been running through that region since 1854. The station was known as Cassella until 1901, although the Clarke map of 1860 showed a proposed "Indiana Harbor of Wolf River." But since 1901, when the Inland Steel Company located its extensive plant at old Poplar Point and the system of waterways was inaugurated which has joined Lake Michigan to the Grand Calumet and those fine inland basins, Wolf Lake and Lake George, the gateway of the Great Lake and most of the territory south to the river has continued to be known as Indiana Harbor.
Within the corporate limits of East Chicago, west of the main canal or waterway which connects the Grand Calumet with the channel joining Lake Michigan to Lake George, the first permanent settlement was made by the Penman family in 1888. All the great trunk lines of railroad had already been completed through the Calumet Region and not long after the coming of the Penman family a considerable settlement quickly arose. Hammond had grown to be a city of over 4,000 people and East Chicago, although organized as a town in 1889, was considered for sev- eral years as one of its suburbs, to be absorbed if desirable. But as stated, the coming of the Inland Steel Company, the construction of the waterways, the solid banking of numerous industrial plants on either side
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of these channels, and the establishment of great railway yards and locomotive works immediately south and west, soon made East Chicago an independent city of rapid and substantial growth. With the excep- tion of Gary, there is no city in the Calumet Region which showed a greater growth than East Chicago for the decade from 1900 to 1910. In the former year its population was 3,411; in the latter, 19,098.
As previously stated, the details of the growth of Hammond, East Chicago and Whiting as cities, and the development of their many fine institutions, have been reserved for separate chapters.
CHAPTER XIV
ROSS TOWNSHIP
UNJUST TRICK OF FATE-WOODVALE (DEEP RIVER )-THE WOOD SETTLE- MENT AND DESCENDANTS-LONE JERE WIGGINS-SAXTON ABSORBS THE WIGGINS CLAIM-MERRILLVILLE SUCCEEDS CENTERVILLE-AINSWORTH AND LOTTAVILLE-MORE RURAL THAN URBAN.
Ross Township comprises forty-nine sections of land northeast of the central part of Lake County, well drained and fertilized by the water courses of Deep River which take a broad circular sweep through its eastern and southern portions, and Turkey Creek which flows through its northwestern sections to join the parent stream about a mile above the line in Hobart Township. The territory within the present bounds of the township was mainly wooded land, when the whites first saw the land-to make a record of their observations-in the early '30s. Deep River was alive with fish and the dense woods harbored all kinds of game, both birds and beasts: so that Ross Township, before there was any dream of civil government or white man's politics, was an ideal home for the Red Man, and its soil was relinquished by him with more than the usual regret and delay.
UNJUST TRICK OF FATE
But the wooded lands and the strong currents of Deep River had a practical attraction to pioneer builders and mill-men, who early com- meneed to locate their claims and crowd out Poor Lo. In connection with the history of Ross Township, it seems to be rather a trick of fate, and also an unjust one, that neither the location of its first settler, nor the settlement to which he gave his name, should be left within the boundaries of the township.
Both Ross and St. John townships were set off from the north part of the original Center Township, at a meeting held by the county com- missioners on June 8, 1848. The former took its name from William Ross. the settler who took up his claim in section 6, on the eastern side of Deep River. That tract was included in the Ross Township of 1849,
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181
By Courtesy of Frank F. Heighway, County Superintendent of Schools.
MERRILLVILLE SCHOOL
By Courtesy of Frank F. Heighway, County Superintendent of Schools.
Ross TOWNSHIP CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL (No. 10)
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but when Calumet Township was created in 1883 three northern sections were taken from the original Ross Township, leaving the village by that name in Calumet; at the same time Hobart Township was created and took away a strip which included the Ross claim, which historically be- longed to the township by that name.
WOODVALE (DEEP RIVER)
Woodvale, the mill village on the eastern edge of Ross Township near the Porter County line, was founded by John Wood, a Massachu- setts man, who, in 1835, located a mill claim on the western banks of Deep River, at that sharp bend in section 21 which deflects that stream abruptly toward the southwest. At that time he found Jesse Pierce located on Turkey Creek and, with Dr. Ames and several others compos- ing an exploring party, stopped at his cabin to "get his bearings." Mr. Wood returned with his family in the following year and, as we have already stated in the general pioneer history of the county, found that an Indian had filed a claim upon his land during his absence. In order to make his title clear beyond question, Mr. Wood paid the Indian $1,000 for the quarter section which he had selected for his mill-site and home- stead. The Wood family thus located comprised the parents and five children. The youngest son was then about a year and a half old, their three-year old boy dying a few weeks after they had located at Wood- vale. Two sons and a daughter were born in Lake County.
A Christian church was dedicated at Deep River in 1904. Rev. C. E. Hill has been its pastor for some years.
THE WOOD SETTLEMENT AND DESCENDANTS
From 1837 to 1839 Mr. Wood improved his water-power and erected a saw-mill and a grist mill, the latter developing into a large and com- plete flour mill widely known among the early settlers of both Lake and Porter counties. Around the mills arose quite a settlement, which, as the years passed, received steady accessions from succeeding generations and off-shoots of the Wood family, many of whom spent their lives in the old neighborhood. Members of the second and third generations continued to carry on the mill after the death of John Wood in 1883, who left twenty-four grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Both he and his good wife, who was a cousin of the noted missionary, Mrs. Boardman (Sarah Hall), were buried in the family cemetery on the east side of Deep River.
Within recent years Woodvale became the postoffice of Deep River.
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LONE JERE WIGGINS
What is now the Village of Merrillville was first the old Indian town known as MeGwin's, then Wiggins' Point and Centerville, before the prominence of the Merrill families fixed the present name upon the postoffice and the settlement. Jeremiah Wiggins appears to have been one of those mysterious men who are ever wandering into new commu- nities, who come from out of the shadow of Somewhere and merge into the shade of Nowhere. The Claim Register does not record him, although most of the pioneers agree that he appeared at the site of the Indian village some time in 1836.
As one of those rugged "old-timers" put the Wiggins matter, "he seems to have been a lone man, without much connection with anyone." He made some stir in the neighborhood by plowing up the old Indian cemetery and creating bad feeling among the few Red Men left in the immediate country. For a time, even after Wiggins melted into nothing- ness, the locality was called Wiggins' Point. Southwest from it, across the prairie, was Brown's Point, and about five miles south, on the edge of the woodland, was Solon Robinson's little place called Crown Point.
SAXTON ABSORBS THE WIGGINS CLAIM
Early in the summer of 1837 Ebenezer Saxton, the Vermonter, came with his family from Canada and found the strange lone Wiggins in his little cabin. Before the year was over the energetic Saxton was the owner of the Wiggins claim, and in the following year Jeremiah dropped out of sight. Our good friend and historian, Mr. Ball, says in one of his publications that "this lone man died in the summer of that very sickly season, the year 1838, and his name has not been perpetuated." In a sketch of Wiggins written at a later date, he seems not so certain of his end, as he remarks: "He (Wiggins) was with Mr. Saxton in 1838 and soon disappears from any of the county records; but that he was living in 1838 is abundantly certain."
MERRILLVILLE SUCCEEDS CENTERVILLE
It was the combination of the interests of the Saxton and the Merrill families that resulted in the founding of Centerville and, when the latter became the stronger of the two, of Merrillville. In 1837, when, according to the Claim Register, eighty-one men became settlers in the newly organized county, Dudley Merrill bought a claim which had been made by Amsi L. Ball, or by his son, John Ball, settlers of 1836,
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and located on Deep River south of Miller's Mill. But he soon obtained land at Wiggins' Point and made there a permanent home. William Merrill, his brother, came with him in 1837 as a settler. He also obtained land at Wiggins' Point and at length erected quite a large frame dwell- ing house on the north side of the old Indian trail, opposite the Indian dancing floor where the Saxton family had located, that trail becoming the mail route to Joliet from Laporte and a great thoroughfare for western travel.
Soon village life commenced. A hotel was opened and a store, and then a blacksmith shop, and the name of Wiggins' Point was changed to Centerville. Both the brothers had sons, and around the Saxton and Merrill families quite a community arose. Dudley Merrill commenced to operate a cheese factory, besides being proprietor of the hotel for a time and always a farmer. One of the sons of William Merrill was a physician and one of his daughters a well known teacher, and repre- sentatives of later generations have continued to reside in the county and become useful men and women.
Merrillville grew slowly, but in time the frame schoolhouse gave place to a two-story brick, a brick church was also erected, a feed-mill followed the cheese factory, the houses increased in number and im- proved in appearance, and it secured an outlet both north and south by the construction of a substantial macadam road from Crown Point, through Ainsworth, Hobart and Lake Station to Lake Michigan. That thoroughfare is still of great benefit to Merrillville, although since 1903 it has enjoyed railroad connection over the Chicago, Cincinnati & Louis- ville Railroad.
AINSWORTH AND LOTTAVILLE
Ainsworth, which became a station on the Grand Trunk Railroad in 1880, is quite a shipping point for milk. It has a schoolhouse and is the center of quite a rural settlement.
Lottaville, a station five miles to the west on the same road, is also a station which may sometime become a village.
MORE RURAL THAN URBAN
But Ross as a township is far more rural than urban, and more agri- cultural than industrial. It presents many advantages both for the rais- ing of cattle and milch cows, and these industries will grow with the acquirement of better transportation facilities.
CHAPTER XV
ST. JOHN TOWNSHIP
IN THE ROUTE OF A GREAT WESTERN ROAD-JOHN HACK, PIONEER GER- MAN-OTHER PIONEER CATHOLICS-DEATH AS A LEVELER OF CREEDS- CHURCH OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST-DESCENDANTS OF THE PIONEER GERMAN CATHOLICS-ST. JOHN, THE VILLAGE-FRANCIS P. KEILMANN -DYER AND A. N. HART-MR. HART'S DEATH-GEORGE F. DAVIS, RAISER OF FINE LIVE STOCK -- DYER OF TODAY -- HARTSDALE-NICHOLS . SCHERER AND SCHERERVILLE.
The present St. John Township comprises forty sections in the west- ern and northwest-central portion of Lake County. It was formed at a meeting of the county commissioners held June 8, 1848, and was taken, with Ross Township, from the northern part of old Center. It was orig- inally seven miles from east to west and six miles from north to south, but about 1890, when Griffith was platted, two of its northeastern sections were incorporated into that town, which was attached to Calumet Town- ship. This reduced the township to forty sections.
IN THE ROUTE OF A GREAT WESTERN ROAD
St. John Township, or St. John's Township (the former preferred by most of the old settlers), was probably named in honor of John Hack, the first to settle permanently within its limits. The northern sections of the township were along the route of the old Sac trail, or the curved ridge of sand that afterward determined the popular wagon road that passed through Laporte and Valparaiso, crossed the Deep River at Wood- vale, touched Merrillville, included the locality of the future Scherer- ville, took its exit from Indiana at the State Line House (now Dyer), and continued on to Joliet and Chicago. For many years this route shared with the more northern road along the shore of Lake Michigan the bulk of the great western travel surging toward the prairie states and the Mississippi Valley.
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JOHN HACK, PIONEER GERMAN
John Hack, a Prussian, was caught in this tide of western travel in the year 1837. He was fifty years of age at the time, was the father of eleven children, and brought a large family with him. So far as known, his was the first German family to settle in Lake County. Mr. Hack
By Courtesy of Frank F. Heighway, County Superintendent of Schools. DYER CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL, ST. JOHN TOWNSHIP
established his homestead on the western limit of Western Prairie, or Prairie West, near the present village or settlement of St. John.
OTHER PIONEER CATHOLICS
In 1838 the four families of Joseph Schmal, Peter Orte, Michael Adler and Matthias Reeder came from Germany and settled near the Hack homestead. They were all earnest Catholics and, within a few years, a number of other adherents to the faith joined them.
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DEATH AS A LEVELER OF CREEDS
During that year also, Henry Sasse, Sr., Henry Von Hollen and Lewis Herlitz, good German Lutherans, settled on the western shores of Red Cedar Lake. Mr. Sasse, who was the pioneer of that colony, lost his wife by death on the 10th of June, 1840. In those times, even more than in these, the tears shed over the departed blotted out all distinctions of church or creed. An illustration of that truth is given by George Gerlach, a pioneer Catholie of St. John, who writes as follows: "A beautiful incident occurred, in which he (John Haek) was an actor, in connection with the burial, on that little mound at the head of Cedar Lake, of the remains of the first wife of Henry Sasse, Sr. At the time of the death of Mrs. Sasse, Lutheran, or Catholic priest, or church even, there was none near, and the pioneer American neighbors assembled, as usual, to bear the remains from the house to the little neighborhood burial spot. The grave had been dug, the body was deposited, and there seemed to be need for some religious service. Then the tall, dignified form of John Hack, the Catholic, stood by the grave, and he read, in the German language, for his Lutheran neighbor and friend, a burial service. It mattered little in that wild and to that gathered group, either to the living or the dead, whether that service was Catholie or Lutheran in its form; it was enough, then and there, that it was Christian-that it recognized mortality and immortality, human need and a Saviour. So far as may now be learned this was the first burial of a Lutheran in the county, and that such religious services as these should have been eon- dueted by a Catholic layman was ereditable surely to the religious prin- ciples of both."
CHURCH OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST
The Catholic families had formed such a colony in the southern part of the township by 1843 that John Haek built a chapel on his land and near his home, after which the prescribed services of his church were regularly held. The organization is still known as the Church of St. John the Evangelist, and it is probable that when the township was named and organized, five years later, the pioneer religious body of a large distriet which was strongly Catholie had a bearing on the naming of the township itself. John Hack's little ehapel was used until 1856, when a larger briek church was erected, a school being conducted in connection with it.
DESCENDANTS OF THE PIONEER GERMAN CATHOLICS
The pioneer of the German Catholics of St. John Township left numerous worthy descendants in the county, not a few of whom became
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residents of Crown Point. Of the descendants of Joseph Schmal, who settled on Western Prairie in June, 1838, and who had seven children, five reached advanced years in Lake County-Mrs. Rhein, whose home after her marriage was in Hanover Township, near Cedar Lake; John Schmal, of St. John; Joseph Schmal, of Brunswick; Mrs. A. Hack, of Crown Point, and Adam Schmal, formerly county treasurer and a resi- dent of that city. Mrs. Angeline Hack married Matthias J. Hack, one of the sons of the pioneer, and after the death of her husband in 1867 con- ducted the Hack Exchange in Crown Point for a number of years.
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