USA > Indiana > Grant County > Centennial history of Grant County, Indiana, 1812 to 1912 : compiled from records of the Grant county historical society, archives of the county, data of personal interviews, and other authentic sources of local information > Part 68
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The twentieth century child will never understand how it was ever possible for any one to be lost in the woods all night anywhere in Grant county. When he was eight years past the four score mark Eli Thomas related that his mother, Mrs. Hannah Thomas, wife of Jesse Thomas. who was a pioneer settler living north of the Mississinewa river along what is now North Washington street, spent an entire night in the woods, although not far from the settler's cabin where five children were ery- ing for their mother. As a pioneer setting to the "lost in the woods picture," Jesse Thomas was the man who sold an ox team for $40 and gave the proceeds as a bois toward locating the county seat on the Boots and Branson traet, showing that the night his wife was lost in the woods in 1829 was two years before the county was organized, and as Mr. Thomas related the experience of his mother it required a stretch of imagination to understand all about it.
It was a late summer night and his father was late. braving her five children at the cabin door, Mrs. Thomas went into the woods for the cows. The few Grant county settlers then put bells on all outside stock, and thinking she heard her own cow bell Mrs. Thomas started out at night fall only to find that she was mistaken-that she had been at- tracted by the bells on some horses, their own among them, and thinking she would mount one and it would bring her home, for she then real- ized that she was lost and there was no light in the cabin where she had left her children, she tried in vain to catch the family "nag." finally getting hold of "Uncle John Pearson's bell horse." With her hand on the bell collar. she spent the night with the horses in the woods. The fear was not so dreadful as the thought of her five children, and her imagination run wild that night. When the belated husband arrived he found the children excited, and with the few settlers he could muster a searching party was organized. While Mrs. Thomas could hear their
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lond halloos reverberating through the woods, she was unable to make herself heard, and when they found her next morning she was along Massey ereck only about half a mile from home, and it had been a terrible night with her. She had elung to the horse for protection from wild animals, and her thoughts had been sufficient company. Neither the cows nor the mother came home at eventide, and children then were much like the timid children of the twentieth century- afraid in the dark, and children of today want their mothers in the evening.
While the settlers' sense of sight and sound were alert, the woman in the clearing now a part of North Marion, had been mistaken in the tinkle of the bell, and one who remembers when there were outside woods pastures can understand something of the solitude of that night with the horses in the woods. While there were farm boundaries none could definitely locate them. There were no line fences-no "devil's lanes" in the county then, and the sound of the bell and instinet were the only guides to the footsteps of a midnight wanderer in the woods. While Mr. Thomas, whose memory was undimmed, told of his mother, Mrs. Thomas recalled the time when Rachel and Eva Wyant, who lived along Deer creek, on what is now the Sand pike, went after the cows one summer evening many years later and were lost in the woods, wandering several miles and coming out at the river north of Jonesboro. Her sister, Mrs. Sidney Harvey, who happened to be at the home of Jesse lliatt, heard their ery and knew their voices, and made up a party to go with them and met their father in the woods with a dinner horn trying to locate them. There were heroes and heroines in the early history of Grant county, and a lost child always stirred the hearts of the settlers. It was a common cause and many a searching party has spent the night in the woods in quest of one that had missed his way. The sound of the sheep bell is still sometimes heard in the pasture, but no other domestic animals are thus kept together, but "before the war" all stock gained a livelihood browsing outside, and there was horsebalm as well as catnip growing wild. Wild peas and horsebalm were as com- mon in the woods pastures as catnip is in the twentieth century door yards, and with the nuts and moss in the woods time was when stock could survive the winter in the Grant county forest.
No doubt there are many other heart rending stories of people who were lost in the woods, but they have not been told the county his- torian. In the 1877 Atlas the story is told of Mrs. Penina Winslow, wife of Joseph Winslow, who settled in the Back Creek neighborhood, being lost in the woods, and it serves to show the density of the virgin Torest in what is now blue grass country without intimation of timber at all. They were North Carolina immigrants living at Nature-Lea, now the home of Aneil Winslow, and that pionver had anticipated Mrs. Means in The Hoosier Schoolmaster by "getting plenty," having pre- empted land for himself and for four sons and three daughters along Back creek. Their farms are still pointed out as having belonged to one family. Mrs. Winslow could hear the sound of the ax and hammer where a cabin was being built for her daughter, Mrs. Exum Newby, on what has long been known as the h. L. Fankboner farm half a mile farther up the ereek, but returning home there were no sounds to guide her footsteps and she lost her way in the woods. Although not far from her own cabin, and every effort was put forth to find her, she spent the night in the woods in the neighborhood of the old Back Creek cemetery, although it was not yet a burying ground. The depths of the solitude were broken by the dismal howling of the wolves, and she was found next morning completely exhausted From fear and her lonely wandering through the night. While the environment of the pioneer was different
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from that surrounding his posterity, present day conditions would be just as mystifying to him. The people who were at home in the forest would be lost in the modern city and the changed rural district.
The late Dr. Lewis Williams one time related the following snake story to the "snake reporter," who is now county historian, and white he was sitting in the darkness of total blindness as he related it, he seemed to see the reptiles crawling before him. He said that when he was a boy he and a brother contracted with Tense F. Massey, who was then opening a farm in the Indian land on the Mississinewa near the Meshingomesia Indian village. At that time the Indians in the Reserve Were more numerous than white people. Pleasant township women still tell of the squaws coming to their doors with papooses strapped on their backs, and Indians were frequently encountered along the trail from one trading post to another, when the doctor declared they had traversed the banks of the Mississinewa, coming to Marion so frequently that they had worn great paths into the ground. When Mr. Massey settled in the Reserve the Williams boys cleared his first tich for him. They cleared the land at $3.50 an acre, cutting out all timber that measured under eighteen inches in diameter at a point knee high to them on the stump-the height stumps were left if the tree was cut-and while it seems like protligate waste it was necessary in order that the wilderness might be reclaimed. The timber was mostly black walnut, and the undergrowth indicated the rich quality of the soil.
The Indians had hitherto inhabited the Reserve exclusively, and as they had a deepseated superstition about human spirits being reincar- nated in snakes they never killed them. Every crack and crevice in the rocks were alive with them. One day, when the boys were hard at work in the clearing, Mrs. Massey was returning from some neighbor's house over the hills by a foot path through the woods when a spectacle met her eyes that greatly frightened her. It exceeded anything that had happened in her wilderness experience. The time was March, when the sun and showers presaged April weather, and the settler was always seized with that feeling of lassitude known as spring fever. The nearest Indian settlement was Waupacit Village, and as Mrs. Massey reached the river the sun shone brightly upon the biggest pile of rattlesnakes she had ever seen together. Her circulation was quickened at the sight more than if she had been attacked by the swamp ague of that period, and she came in breathless haste to where the boys were chop- ping in the clearing and told them of her discovery. A small army was mustered and the forces made an attack upon the strong fortress of the rattlesnakes still in semitorpid condition and entirely too slog- gish and inactive for self defense. Their period of hibernation was past and they had crawled over the Jedges of the rocks to sun themselves and return to normal condition.
Armed with clubs the Williams boys made the attack, and it was a day never forgotten by the doctor, although many events had been crowded into his later life, and he told it without thought of its being a "snake story" at all. Some of the snakes were six feet long and as big around as a stove pipe, and they counted three hundred victims when they quit the slaughter. Some were large and some were small. When a man wished to procure the rattles from a snake he had killed it was customary to place one foot on the tail and pull on the body, thus dislodging them. A man named Oakley, who had joined the snake killing party, thought to provide himself with a trophy-the rattles off of one of the biggest reptiles-but his snakeship reached for his tormentor, although his head had been battered until they thought him dead-and the tormentor thought he was in snake heaven. No
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snake dies till sundown was the old saying when shakes were numerous along all the streams, and while his head was mangled, the reptile had not "said die, " and he was simply acting in his own interests as an American citizen when he attempted to sting the man who was robbing him of his erowning attraction-his rattles.
The killing process was occasionally resumed for three or four weeks, as more reptiles would erawl out in the sun, and there was a stench that reached up to heaven, but heroic measures were necessary in ridding the hills of such terrors. The turkey buzzards eireled about until all were finally consumed, and in time the rendezvous was broken up where for time out of mind the snakes had taken up their winter quarters. It was the mouth of a cavern, and when the sun shone the settlers paid frequent visits there until all the reptiles were dispatched, although on cool days snakes seldom made their appearance at the mouth of the cave. Although blind when he told the story, the doctor ex claimed graphically, swinging his cane and imitating the peristaltie action of a snake gliding along: "Think of a monster more than six fret long in the path and erawling toward you -- you hear his rattles," notwithstanding snakes were naturally timid unless driven by hunger or forced to defend themselves. While they were as much afraid as the boys in the clearing, they would tight when necessary in defending themselves. It was along about 1880, when the Indians were placed on the Grant county tax duplicate, a story was told of a snake crossing the road that was so long that when its head was through the fence ou one side its tail was not yet through on the other side, but a searching party was unable to locate it, and perhaps that was a "snake story."
It was soon after Matter Park was opened that some boys playing there captured a black water moccasin suake, and dragged it with a string about its head to their home at Tenth and Washington streets, the site now occupied by a brick building. When their mother, who was a washerwoman, saw it she was distressed abont it and had the boys bury it in the door yard. Next morning she awakened them early, npbraiding them because they had not obeyed her. When she looked out there was a snake in the door yard as large as the one they had dragged there and the boys soon killed it and buried it with its mate, for which it was seeking, having followed the trail alnost three miles and stopped where its mate was buried, the haunts of men having no terror for it in its desolation, The mother was only convinced when the boys dug up the one buried the previous day, and when she saw the two snakes buried together she knew there was eonstaney in reptiles whatever the human shortcomings, and it seemed almost sin to break up such an association : "What God has joined together let no man put asunder." The truth of the foregoing may be verified in some of the Washington street house- holds today.
One Old Folks' day in Matter Park Mrs. Lydia Strange of Monroe told of a snake she killed on election day in 1842, while her husband, the late George Strange, was gone to the polls to vote. She was making soap in the yard when the pup stirred up a snake in the weeds near where her two children, Joshua and Margaret, were playing on the other side of the cabin from her, and she distinctly heard the rattle --- a sound the settler knew when he heard it. When the pup frightened the snake, she saw it glide under the puncheons and she could not take her children inside with such danger lurking under the rabin floor. With a handspike in her hand Mrs. Strange lifted a puncheon in the corner, and although the snake was coiled and ready to dart at her, she saved the day with a well directed blow. When her husband anal other men came along from the election they saw a four-foot snake lying
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across a log not far from the cabin, and many enjoyed hearing such a story in a public gathering from one who had lived under different conditions in Grant county.
When Miss Rachel James, of the Octogenarian Club, bachelor maid and last of a prominent Grant county family, beard the Strange snake story, she said that when she was a girl on Lugar creck the wolves were as numerous as dogs were later, but she was not afraid of them and wandered about the hills in search of berries at pleasure, although she always shuddered at sight of a snake. There was once a rattlesnake den over on Walnut creek near the site of the county infirmary, and with the approach of warm weather each year all the stakes would leave the den and return to it when winter came on. The rendezvous was only broken up when settlers began watching the place with guns and picked off the reptiles as they were basking in the sunshine in the early spring and regaining their usual activities. There were monster rattlers among them, and time was when the farm boy knew the difference between a rattlesnake, water snake or blue racer, but drainage and the presence of humanity has changed the conditions under which reptiles thrived and only an occasional garter snake has its head jerked off in the hands of an intrepid youth who would flee at sight of a rattler.
Years ago the story was told that a vatamount had been seen in Monroe. Hiram Brownlee, who has lived all his life on the same town lot in Marion, was among others who went out with dogs and guns to dispatch it, and next day they were telling about it in Sweetser's store. While Mr. Brownlee knew the Sweetsers he did not know all who were in the sound of his voice as he related the experience, and George Sweetser Mr. Brownlee called him " Bug"-had great pleasure in draw- ing ont the details of the chase, how they went through farms and pushed down several panels of fences at a time keeping on from the Strange-Thompson Farms to the Grant-Blackford line. While Mr. Brownlee knew George Strange he did not then know Samuel R. Thomp- son, who was in the company gathered to hear the story in Sweetser's store, Mr. Sweetser remarked casually: "You ought not to have de- stroyed Mr. Thompson's fence." Mr. Brownlee answered : "Old Sammy Thompson has nothing to do but build it up again," and, although he had noticed a man whose eyes were so black they sparkled, Mr. Brownlee was unprepared for a formal introduction to Mr. Thomp- son and he "almost fainted," although the destruction of property had been in the narrative and not in reality. When Mr. Thompson grasped his hand, he remarked: "Your mistake, Mr. Brownlee, was in not coming to the house for your dinner," and as he related the incident Mr. Brownlee regretted the passing of that brand of old-fashioned hos- pitality from the annals of the county. While wild animals only exist in story now, a generation ago Grant county farmers were disturbed by the ravages of foxes and some were seen in Monroe. In the spring of 1891 the historian joined a township fox drive which centered in a field on the Thompson farm, now owned by Mrs. Mary Thompson Buchanan, and when the lines advanced there was just one terrified little fox, which was soon captured, although others had escaped before the lines had converged, and it was great sport -- perhaps the last fox drive in Grant county. Foxes have been since that time in the vicinity of the Rock Dam, and farmers suffered loss of poultry and young pigs from them. There is a story in the Atlas about a wolf pen in Franklin in which Henry Shugart canght seven wolves, always removing the captive as soon as discovered in order not to arouse sus- pieion and frighten away other wolves. There was a bounty on skins and Mr. Shugart would shoot them before opening the trap. Occasionally
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a wolf would come to life again, when he would be lifting it through the trap, that had feigned dead when he shot it. The wild life of the forest disappeared before the advance of the settler, and domesticated animals are all the Twentieth century child has ever seen in the wood lands of Grant county.
While most citizens understand that the third temple of justice has graced the public square in Marion since the laying of its cornerstone in 1881, not all understand that the prehistorie race of Moundbuilders bad visited the site in an early day, but there was a mound of some con- sequence in the court house square- saying nothing of its origin. There were several smaller oues near it, but today there is no trace of any of them. The first courthouse, a wooden structure spoken of by pioneers as the "ramshackle," was built on this mound, and the second ednice remembered by many . men and women not yet old-was built with brick made from the mound that graced the spot. When the third courthouse was built the lawn was only slightly elevated above the sur- rounding street, and now that the civic spirit has taken hold on the community many regret that the "fathers" saw fit to consume the natural elevation in making the brick later used in a house on Boots street between First and Second streets. This mound was historie. The story goes that at its highest point it was abont sixty feet in diameter and ten Feet high, and the settlers said it was building material placed on the ground by nature when they utilized it in making brick, but to their surprise skeletons of human beings were removed that seemed to have been buried in a sitting posture. When exposed to light and air the bones of these seven foot giants erumbled and soon disintegrated, and there was nothing left to be given modern burial -- and it will never be known until the Resurrection morn who was buried there.
Many years ago it is related that mastodon bones were unearthed on the Bloom farm now owned by Philip Matter in Pleasant, and seien- titie research demonstrated the fact that the animal from which they had been taken had weighed at least nine tons. It was in 1904 that the Smith Brothers, who were tenants on the Gift farm, known as the Lake Galatia or Beck farm earlier, were cleaning out Barren creek when they discovered mammoth bones and succeeded in exhiunning so many of them that they were able to dispose of them For $1,000 to the Smith- sonian Institute in Washington City. The discovery created so much excitement that the farm was visited by many enrious people, but the bones were not there long enough for a public exhibit, a representative of the Smithsonian Institute closing a bargain with C. D. and S. R. Smith immediately, and the transaction resulted in a law suit, the owner of the land claiming the bones because of the fact they were dug up on the land. The jury gave half the money to JJesse Gift, who owned the Barren creek farm where the bones were exhumed. Grant county citi- zens who view the Barren creek mastodon will have to visit the Smith- sonian Institute.
In the first Centennial year of American Independence, D. S. Hogin, who was a pioneer citizen of Grant county and is now an octogenarian and an active man, filled a wooden box and sealed it with the following instructions carved into it: "Not to be opened until July 4, 1976. De- posited by D. S. Hogin, July 4, 1876." Carved on the bottom is the following: "After opening, deliver to his posterity," and the carving is as enduring as the wood from which the box is made, evidently done with a pocket knife and by one skilled in making letters. When the vault in the county treasurer's office was ready for use about five years later, Mr. Hogin brought the box there For safekeeping, and each ste- ceeding treasurer guards it with zealous care, and for almost two score
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years it has been in perfect condition. Perhaps the story told in the Centennial History of Grant county will serve to keep alive its history. and the question arises: To whom will the custodian of the treasury deliver this box when American Independence celebrates its second centennial ? The daily papers and a resume of the local history to date were included in the contents, but when a century has drifted by the chances are there will be no login posterity living in Grant county. There are two sons and one granddaughter in the immediate login laut ily, and but few more distant relatives of the man who planned an event of the second centennial of American Independence. There was special dispensation when Abraham lived, but the present generation will not know much about the ceremony attending the opening of this box more than sixty years hence.
It is often said the water is never missed until the well is dry, and A. R. Smith, local civil engineer, relates that he did not kyow what a large place his father, the late Ephraim Smith, who made the first survey now on file in Grant county, had filled in his life until he had gone beyond and he could no longer ask questions of him. Ephraim Smith became county surveyor in 1846, but in 1843, when he was a road supervisor. he built the first corduroy road on Washington street. In 1893, when his son, A. R. Smith, was engineer for the Marion Street Railway Company and was laying double track along South Washington street, in making the necessary excavations he removed many pieces of timber. that were derayed Int little, that his father had placed there just half a century earlier. Just forty years from the time Ephraim Smith located a corner in Jefferson township, another son. (. D. Smith, who is also a civil en- gineer, removed the wooden stake driven by his father, and scraping the outer surface a little he was able to preserve the solid piece of timber after it had been forty years in the ground at the corner of a homestead. It is now an heirloom, and both sons felt that they were undoing the work of their father that had stood the test, although modern conditions required the use of different materials. Ephraim Smith lived to be a nonogenarian, and the day before he died be reminded A. R. Smith that in an early day he had shot a deer and hung it on a limb on the same town lot now ocenpied by the son as a home on Fifth street in Marion, and it was unusual that their lives should flow in so nearly the same channels, and under such changed environment.
When Mrs. Thurza Arnett Howell was a young woman school teacher at Oak Ridge in Liberty she was known as a sleep walker-a sommam- bulist-and her friends were always anxious about ber and kept close watch on her lest she injure herself in some of her midnight escapades. But one night she escaped their vigilance and walked two miles and crossed Deer creek on a foot log, returning in safety. It was before Deer creek had been spanned with a bridge, and there were Indians roaming about the country that long ago. It was Friday night and the young woman had forgotten a knife and Bible that she always carried home with her over Sunday and left them in the schoolhouse. Next morning they were in her home and she had not wakened while making the trip or she would have been badly frightened passing along a lonely trail in quest of them. The practical joker who used to saw the underside of a foot log half off and watch for pedestrians did not know she was walk- ing or perhaps the cold waters of Deer creek would have aroused her. Foot logs are as scarce today as somnambulists, and boys who used 10 play pranks on pedestrians by weakening the log from the under side are bending their energies toward other kinds of mischief. Time was when there were foot logs instead of bridges across the ditches as well
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