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 70
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It is difficult to reconcile the present environment of Mrs. Martha E. Goldthait of North Washington street and the story she tells of her carly housekeeping days in Marion-the wife of Cimon Goldthait, a pioneer Marion business man and founder of the present Holdtbait Department Store. It was in 1850 that her husband one day told her not to use eggs for the table, as they were tive ernis a dozen and entirely too expensive for family diet. When they were two and three cents a dozen she used all she wanted of them. When Mes. Goldthait leaves home today she rides in a Pullman car, but she has pleasure in recalling the fact that as a girl of fourteen, when her father was removing his family from Ohio to Indiana, she walked a great part of the distance consideration for the horses drawing the wagon in which the household all was stored-and while surrounded by modern conveniences and comforts, she delights in reminiscenses of that character. It is another instance of Truth Stranger than Fiction," when one listens to stories of that nature. While the woman who walked part of the way to Indiana does not ride out in an automobile-does not want it-her carriage has long been a familiar vehicle about Marion streets.
The late JJehu Andrew explained the high cost of living so much discussed recently by saying there are now more middlemen to be paid for their service than when in the early history of Grant county all the families did everything for themselves. When the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker were the whole proposition, the profits were not. divided among so many and the cost of production was correspondingly less, and it was a bit of sensible philosophy coming from one who knew the meaning of the word economy. Almost a nonogenarian. Mr. Andrew was in Marion at the time of the visit of President William Howard Taft, July 3, 1911, and went home late in the afternoon without any dinner --
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Id no money to buy it. Mr. Andrew was a well to do citizen, but the light fingered gentry "touched him." He did not know when or how his purse containing several dollars was taken. What he regretted most was the loss of his pocket pieve, a $5 gold coin wrapped in a serap of calico, and he would recognize the coin again if it were wrapped in the same bit of calico-a serap from a dress worn by Mrs. Andrew several years earlier, he thought the thief had little consideration for "hoary locks-rob an old man in broad day light," and that was why he prac- tieed economy that day-knew the "high cost" of carrying unnecessary funds with him in a crowd.
Mrs. Aun Jay related her experience in securing fruit when her children were little and she could not go into the woods for it. She had a pair of old fashioned ear pendants that were admired by a neigh- bor girl, and notwithstanding the fact that they wonkl sometime be price- less heirlooms for her own children, she bargained with the girl to let her have them for a bushel of wild berries and made the mistake of pay- ing her in advance for the berries. She "counted the chickens before they were batched." When she heard of the girl selling berries else. where she inquired about it. Inconsistency was not then regarded as jewelry. The girl had lost one of the pendants and Mrs. Jay never did get the raspberries. When that same family afterward wanted to trade a lol in the cemetery for a cow she advised against any such transaction.
It seemed an unusual story when "Father" G. P. Ripley and his wife had a visit from their daughter, Mrs. Fanny Stratton, in 1910, at their last housekeeping stand adjoining the Riley Boys' Brigade church on West First street. It had been thirty years since they had given her up to the Northwest, and although along the Mississinewa " No news is always good news, " they had never expected to see her again. One evening the two old people were sitting on their little porch when a cab stopped in front, and as their long lost daughter paid the fare the old people wondered who was coming to visit them. It had been a long time since a letter had reached them, although as they sat in the shadow they would see her before them, and somtimes they would resolve to cross the continent in search of her. Since man changes once in seven years the woman who greeted them had changed more than four times since they had seen her last, but " Mother" Riley was not "eanght nap- ping," and her intuition served her well as she looked the visitor over carefully, divining that it was the real "flesh and blood daughter" she had never expected to see again, while the father had no such presenti- ment. Whatever may have happened to the museles and bones. the spirit was unchanged and the daughter said her parents had not needed her as much as she had needed them-just to sit again with them in the twilight.
It was A. J. Hays who said the way to have a short winter was to borrow money from a bank in the fall that would come due in the spring, and other pioneers agreed with him. When he was in active life Mr. Ilays bought cattle all over Grant county, riding on horseback every- where. Sometimes he had need of borrowed capital in carrying on his business, and the above bit of philosophy escaped his lips one thne when making settlement in the Marion State Bank for money he had used through the winter. The telephone revolutionized the stock buying business in Grant county, dealers engaging stock without quitting their own firesides while they used to buy from long horseback tours of the whole country. With the daily papers everybody knows the markets, and the buyer relies somewhat npon the honesty of the man who offers stock upon the market as to condition, but notes in the bank are said to
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mature just as rapidly as under the old methods of doing business. While a note due in the spring may cause the winter to seem short. it never has lessened the fuel bills in Grant county.
When the fathers and mothers of today were children one of the best known childhood rhymes was:
"Baby bye, here's a fly.
* * ** * *
Here he goes, on his toes, Tickling baby's nose."
but nowadays the microscopist and bacteriologist have taught them that the fly is not at all a suitable playmate for the baby. "Swat the fly," became a watchword about the time the war of extermination on the housefly began, and society no longer muses in that fashion. Indeed, wise families have long objected to association with the fy at table, and peach tree limbs were always in demand until long about the Conten- nial year, when the screen door first made its appearance in Grant county hardware stores. The national Christian Endeavor watchword is, the whole United States of America dry in 1920-a moral economie- and this sanitary economie-the war on the house fly-is being waged quite as industriously. Where domestic animals are kept it requires eternal vigilance to control the fly nuisance, but people not yet old remember when the family was more annoyed by this pest than at pres- ent. Concerted action is the method of exterminating flies. Filthy stables are the best fly incubators, and people are able to combat the evil nowadays by cleanliness, and sanitation is revolutionizing condi- tions. While some careful housewives feel that " Mister Fly" has made his last stand. A. D. 1913, he is apt to be like the poor-always with you.
When Adam Wolfe of Muncie, who was among the leading capitalists of Indiana, was casting about for a bank location, he was indneed to locate his son-in-law, Jason Willson, in Marion because of the strong Quaker population in Grant county. Before his death, A. D. 1913, Mr. Willson had long been recognized as the oldest Indiana banker, and it required a "long look ahead" to see the future m a county so offen under water as Grant, and a county town thirty miles from a railroad as was Marion at the time-only the stage coach to Anderson connecting it with steam traffic. When the Willsons located in Marion Mr. Wolle assured them that all the advantage of civilization would come later, and it was from the cold blooded standpoint of a simple business proposition that he was influenced, reasoning that the Quakers were merring in their judgment of the character of land, and the family never regretted its decision-its future home in the metropolis of Grant county. Other county towns were then without banks, but Mr. Wolfe sought invest- ment among an honest, prosperous people, and thus the reputation of the Quakers of the sixties was collateral in a way that perhaps none of them knew about at the time. Thus the first bank was located in Marion because the Quakers were known to have money, and to discharge both their moral and financial obligations.
Everybody in business sought Quaker patronage, and a Quaker could always open an account in a store. Byron II. Jones, clerk of the circuit court and father of O. S. and S. F. Jones, was the first depositor in the Willson bank, opening his account with an $800 deposit, and Mr. Jones had been a Quaker until he took the oath of office, which disqualified him, and "they read him out of the meeting." Butif this bank was opened, there was no public depository and citizens used to leave their surplus Funds with business men of the town. Eli Thomas, who is one
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of the most venerable Friends now living relates that once when he had sold his hogs he did not care to have the money on his person - suspicious characters had seen him receive it-and he rolle In up in paper and left the package with Sammuel MeClure- not a. cred as to its contents - and three weeks later, when he asked for it. Mr. MeClure returned it intact, although Mr. Thomas did not have "the scratch of a pen" to show for it. While Mr. MeClure was not a Quaker himself, he always said that would be his church were he to join any, and he would not tolerate disparaging remarks about them. Yet he welcomed the Will- son bank into the community because it relieved him of a great deal of responsibility incident to the times in business affairs.
While the Quaker had credit in all business circles, was it to his personal advantage? Some argue that with debt hanging over them they exert themselves to pay it -- that debt is a stimulus, and through some hook or erook the Quakers have acemulated property. The pres- ent generation of Graut county Quakers studies economies the same, and some of them may still be spurred on by debt, yet others have lived on " Easy Street" and its rural ramifications so long they have ahuost for- gotten the goading influence, although economy is a disease hard to eradicate from the Quaker system. There were looms in the pioneer Quaker homes, and the women wove flannel, jeans, and they covered their floors with home made carpets, but quality was always a consid. eration. While in the past they did not spend all of their money on clothes, today no one would point out a Quaker because of the ent of his garments. The twentieth century Quaker still has his bank account, and his money is good anywhere -- but other people now have the same recognition.
While Grant county Friends are law-abiding, some of them have been sport loving-given to innocent amusements. The "Hickory" Quakers have not necessarily been "undesirable citizens, " and the following story illustrates a characteristic. It was along in the seventies that a party of coon hunters in the Oak Ridge and Bethel neighborhoods in Liberty were rambling about and treed a coon on the farm owned by the Rev. John Carey in the Back Creek neighborhood, and when R. A. Whitson and Albert Brandenburg -- two of the younger members in the party- - mustered courage to visit the Carey homestead in the middle of the night and ask the privilege of entting the "coon tree." that pioneer Friend questioned them as if he had been a "Philadelphia lawyer," rather than a Friends minister. The following colloquy ousned : "Yes, " Mr. Whitson admitted, "I am a member of Bethel Friends meet ing," and by adroit questioning that shrewd Quaker minister and farmer learned the names of the entire hunting party then holding midnight vigil in his woods. When he found that several official members of Oak Ridge Monthly meeting were in the party, his mind was made up and he answered : "Tell 'em not to eut my tree, " and as much of those Oak Ridge Friends enjoyed sport the timber was umolested that night, but a year later some of them were again in the woods and located a coon in the same tree, but they pursued a different course-they enlisted the sympathy of one of the sons.
It was a red oak tree and in the meantime lightning had struck it. The son, Isaac Carey, said his father was gone to Yearly Meeting at Richmond, but that he would "fix it" with his mother. He told her "Father" wanted some timber ent for rails, and it would save him the trouble of chopping the tree, and he it said to his credit he did work up the timber into fence rails in order to ease his conscience from hav- ing had part in the sport himself. Because the official board of Oak Ridge Monthly Meeting of Friends was paying a midnight visit to the
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Carey woods did not cause this pioneer Friend to look with favor upon such pastime, although his family was later accessory to it, and the inti dout did not interfere with any existing friendships - perhaps the hunt ers themselves under reversed conditions, would not have granted such privilege put yourself in his place. There was no rural telephones then, but courageous youths visited the home and called the husband man, rather than take advantage of his absence and destroy his prop- erty. Riley Garner, Addison Scott and Rigdon Scott -well, that is telling names along with the tale, but these young Quakers standing guard in the woods were true to their early training had definite con viction, and there was no wanton destruction of property. While there would have been little intrinsic loss-there was a little market or timber then- their own self respect would have been destroyed and Dak Ridge Quakers came through with their garments unsullied, and Mr. Carey was the sovereign of his own domain. Other Quakers had guns and dogs, and hunting was part of the every day life of the pioneers. The coons and coon trees are saered memories-pastime of men and boys-and the older ones delight in recalling such incidents.
The automobile has come to stay ! That seems to be the consensus of opinion about it. When the Marion Civie Assembly planned its antomo- bile parade for April 18. 1913. in connection with the formal opening of the new market house and civie hall, two hundred invitations were mailed to Grant county farmers by Marion dealers who had lists of their customers, saying nothing about the machines owned by farmers who bought them elsewhere, and of those who owned machines of older patterns than had been made a matter of record. Ten years ago l'art- ers were arrayed solidly against the advent of the automobile --- were opposed to allowing it highway privileges-and in all their institutes resolutions were passed legislating it out of existence. Why, progressive farmers even visited other counties to get resolutions through the insti- tutes, curtailing automobile privileges along the high ways, and one Vear at Swayzee, when the matter was before the institute. Alfred Comer suggested that if they must use the highways that conriers be sent through the country on horseback one day in advance to notify the people along the way that they might look out-and now the farmers are the best automobile customers. In ten years their viewpoint has changed "right about face," and the automobile is the necessary ina- chinery in up-to-date farming. Public opinion is a creature of educa- tion. Farmers and their Twentieth century transportation are the envy of all their city "cousins, " and friends. They go out in style -seven passenger cars and all the family along. In fact, no one now questions the fact that the automobile enthusiasts have brought around the "good roads" conditions.
Friends have always done personal religious work through the medini of visiting families, and along when night meetings first came into favor there were neighborhood cottage prayer meetings. Visiting missionary Friends usually took one or more companions along -more effective service the result-and Eli Thomas relates that along in the 60s. when evangelism began to spread-the religious leaven began to operate in the hearts of men-Mrs. Hannah Yearson. a minister from New Eng- land Yearly Meeting, was visiting Friends in the limits of Mississinewa and Northern Quarterly meetings, calling on families and making per- sonal appeals, about the first traveling Friend to conduct such a religi- ous campaign in the county. Local Friends always stood ready to advance the Kingdom on Earth, and Isaac day took the missionary in his carriage while Jacob Davis went ahead ou horseback, warning the people of ber approach and calling the men from the fields in order to
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economize on time, as the women went through the entire Mississinewa Friends community. When they reached the home of Mr. Thomas, who then lived in the country, Mr. Davis had the family in waiting and Mr Jay remained in the carriage while Mr. Davis again played the part of forerunner at the next house. As the much heralded visitor entered the Thomas dooryard amid the curious glances from the family -a novel experience to them-she exclaimed : "The law was given by Moses, but Grace and Truth by Jesus Christ," and she delivered her sermon with- out the formality of being seated, and half a century later it is being "handed down" again. Mrs. Pearson was accompanied by men of influence, who gave her prestige in the community, and the value of the story lies in the fact that it illustrates the changed evangelism in Grant county.
There is nothing that will better serve the purpose of showing old time economic conditions before the railways opened up communication between Grant county and the rest of the world than the following let- ter so carefully treasured by J. Walter Buchanan, the handwriting of his grandfather, Alexander Buchanan, and sent to " Mr. Davis Norton, Marion, Grant county, Indiana," from Louisville, Kentucky, May 10. 1811, and carried into Marion by stage from Andersontown. Mr. Buchanan says: "I take my pen in hand to inform you of my health. It. is not very good at present, but it is better than it has been, I have been sick, but am getting along very well. I have got to work again. I write to let you know that I wont be there till some time in chung, as I have a job commenced that will take me till the first of June to finish. and then I will go to Marion as soon as possible. I am as strong in the notion of going into business as ever. (He was a cabinet maker. ) I will have some money, but not as much as I had expected. I have got a good many tools gathered up. Write to me as soon as you get this letter and direct it to Cincinnati, and let me know when there will be a team from Marion. If there will be a team there soon after the first of June, I will stay there to start my chest home, and if there wont he a team, tell me where they stop when they do come so that I can leave my chest where it will be sent the first opportunity, as I have a large chest and can't take it any other way. Nothing more at present, " and with Twentieth century freight facilities between Marion and Cinein- nati this letter of "three score and ten" years ago seems an impossibility.
Along in the last quarter of the nineteenth century Grant county citizens used to argue the Scriptures, and there were many good "Seript- orians," in "those days." Indeed, it was so popular to discuss "Serip- ture," that one pioneer Grant county woman declared they had made sorghum molasses "so klare she could read the Scriptures through it." T. D. Tharp relates that while visiting country schools in an official capacity he was once an invited "over night" guest at the home of Abram Goodykoontz, now called Heimat in Liberty, and that the RA Joseph Allen, who was the Jonesboro Presbyterian minister and . fr il of the family, was there. Rev. Allen was a minister who cather oother "livelihood" with saw mills years ago, and he knew the Bible in a way few others knew it. Mr. Goodykoonts and Mr. Allen talked far into the night. Mr. Goodykoontz being a Spiritualist in belief, and Mr. Allen feeling under obligations to convert him to Christianity. Later, Mr. Tharp listened to an argument in the Spencer House between Mr. Allen and a hotel guest, and when he had wound up the traveling sales- man completely, the late Jacob Spencer, who was then landlord, com- mended the local minister with a vice like grip on his knee, exclaiming: "The Bible is true, gentlemen, the Bible is true." That long ago there
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were no metropolitan newspapers to consume leisure hours, and people threshed out everything by way of argument. The Rev. Joseph Allen was one of the best informed men who ever lived in the county. He was a strict Sabbatarian, and his children dare not "slide down a straw stack" on Sunday. If his boys had not prepared the Monday morning kindling on Saturday night, they did it carly Monday morning- never on Sunday. Some of Mr. Allen's daughters are still well known resi dents, although the sons have left the community.
The old eagle cage in the courthouse yard in the days of the second Grant county courthouse was built by Lewellyn J. Starrett, who was much given to artistic arrangement, and who used to decorate many halls and churches for festive occasions. The eagle eage was movable. In the old days of the brick courthouse, surrounded by a board fence and hitch rack, the town boys used to catch rats and carry them to the eagles, and for many years this cage and its occupants were an attraction to all visitors. When this old courthouse was standing the circuit court room was the social center for the entire county, and cirenit riders often preached the gospel there, and theatrical troupes used it until White's hall supplanted it.
At the funeral of Mrs. Mary Gardner in 1912 the obituary recalled an incident in her life that was unusual to Grant county citizens. Alfred Gardner and family lived in North Carolina "at the breaking out of the war," and he was drafted into the Confederate army, although a Northern sympathizer- opposed to the institution of slavery. When he became a "prisoner of war" in the North Mrs. Gardner, with six small children, set out to make a home among relatives in Indiana, where he later joined her. He had assured her before leaving home that if he should be captured and brought North he would not return to North Carolina. Mrs. Gardner was one year en route, remaining six months at Newbern, North Carolina, where she baked biscuits for northern soldiers, and she was one week on the Atlantic going to New York city. where she secured passage to Andersontown, the nearest railroad point to Marion. One of her children died while making the journey. She came in 1863, and when the war was over Mr. Gardner came, and they lived neighbors to Rolinda's parents. As a little boy he was once placed on a horse behind Mrs. Gardner to take her home, and she said: "Now don't slide off over the horse's 'circumstance,' " " " and since that time "fail" and "circumstance" have been synonyms. Mrs. Ialla Modlin and Mrs. Flora Cox are the daughters surviving Mrs. Gardner in her ninetieth year.
It was not because they were Quakers and would later perch them- selves on the political "water wagon" that the carly settlers located along the Mississinewa and its contributing streams, but because of the advantages to the pioneer of running water, the peach tree limb wizards not yet having discerned water veins in well digging, and that explains the Branson monument at the old Branson family homestead. David Branson, who donated thirty acres of land to the original Marion town plat, was a Hicksite Quaker, and the Branson homestead .was a Hick- site center in the early history. The man was a moral and physical giant, stood six feet and six inches in his stockings, had six toes and red hair, and when Iieksite emigrants came to Indiana they always stopped at Branson's, and covered wagons were a familiar sight along the river. There was never a Hicksite church in Grant county, although there are still a number of Hicksite Families. When the Washington township Bond family, headed by Benjamin Bond, arrived, they camped three weeks at Branson's, until they could preempt land at $1.25 an aere, and
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locate in Washington, where they afterward affiliated with the Wesleyan Methodists, other Ilieksite families going from Branson's to Wabash and Huntington counties, and south to Madison county, where they or ganized lieksite meetings. Eli Kimbrough, who died in 1904, had a "tip and a-bit." pocket piece that had been given him by Mias Hicks when he was a child.
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