USA > Indiana > Boone County > Early life and times in Boone County, Indiana, giving an account of the early settlement of each locality, church histories, county and township officers from the first down to 1886 Biographical sketches of some of the prominent men and women. > Part 10
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If a man had a good axe, an auger, draw-knife and hand- saw he could make anything he wanted. The tools above
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named he had to buy, but when he got them he then had a complete outfit. The next thing was to knock the brush away, fence in your yard and clear up a garden patch. Then came the heavier work ; then all our clearing had to be done in the green; the grubbing was no small item, but when it came to taking the green timber down, trimming and peeling the brush, chopping the logs so they could be rolled, and roll- ing and burning them, was something that the present gener- ation knows nothing about. And then the next thing is to get your little patch broke. The roots and stumps are so thick that you can hardly get your plow into the ground until it would strike a root or stump. The fact is, it took a mighty good Christian man to plow in those days. We raised a little corn, but we had to watch it mighty close, both spring and fall. The squirrels would dig it up in the spring if you did not keep them out or feed them ; we have caught hundreds of them. Then they were ready for the corn just as soon as it was in roasting ear, and then there were black birds by the thousand ; so you see we had a great many things to contend with. I have even seen the gnats and mosquitos so bad that you would have to build up a fire, to make a smoke, to milk the cows. They would almost blind a person ; and, as I said, we raised but little corn and no wheat for a few years, so our biscuits were all corn dodger or Johnny cake.
It will not do to narrate or detail hardly anything that comes up in my mind ; but to return to the subject. In those days we had no roads except paths blazed or hacked out from house to house ; and when you started to go to your neigh- bors living some distance away, you would take the path that would lead to one neighbor's house, and then take the path from his honse to the next, and so on until you would reach the desired point ; and you would hardly ever see a man going from place to place without his gun on his shoulder. It was no uncommon thing for a man to take in a deer or a turkey ; as to squirrels and pheasants, they would not waste their am- munition for. I might say something more about our roads,
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if there had been any to speak of. The next thing I shall notice is the schools and school houses. It was some time after we came to Boone County before I heard anything said about a school district. The citizens generally lived in set- tlements, so they would select some central point to erect a school house ; then they would set a day to meet, clear off the ground, cut the logs, haul them in, and probably the next day they would rear the structure. Now it would just do you good to see one of those model colleges. I will give you a description of the first school house that was erected in this section of country. It was about eighteen by twenty or twenty-two feet, of round logs and very rough at that, and each log about from eight to sixteen inches too long, leaving very rough and ragged corners; cabined off and covered with clapboards, which were held on the house with poles. The door was cut out in one corner ; the shutter was made out of long boards and hung on wooden hinges, the fireplace was cut out in the end, and it came very near taking the whole end of the house out, some six or seven feet at least. The fire- place was made of dirt, the chimney of sticks and clay, with a good bunch of mud on the top piece on each corner of the chimney to hold them from blowing off. The floor was puncheons split and hewed and laid down green, and when they seasoned there were some fearful cracks. The seats, or benches, were made by splitting slabs twelve or fourteen feet long, then boring four holes in them and driving legs in. The writing tables were made by boring holes in the logs, driving pins in and plank or slabs on them. The windows were constructed in this wise : by cutting and taking out the half of two logs, one above the other, then pasting paper over the space and greasing it so as to let the light shine through. There was not a pane of glass nor a pound of nails about the whole house.
Well, the next thing was to get some one to teach a school, as the house was built and furnished and ready for business. They would go at it in this wise: They found some one that
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could spell, read, write a pretty good hand, and if he was good in arithmetic and would lick the scholars if they did not . keep order, were all the qualifications necessary for a teacher. They would draw up an article of agreement something like this: I, George B. Richardson, propose to teach --- naming the branches, generally spelling, reading, writing, and arithmetic. That was as far as they would go. We had no use for gram- mar in those days; and they would teach so many days for so much per scholar, to be paid at the expiration of said school. So this was the way we got our education in those days, and this was the way it generally turned out : when you started to school if you was large enough to do much work in the clear- ing would go to school all the bad days and stay at home and work all the nice weather. I have given you a description of our school house ; it was not only a school house, but a church also. I have seen as great revivals carried on in that old log house as I have ever seen since, and I have always be- lieved that those old men and women knew just what they were talking about, and I don't think the preachers then preached for the money alone, for there was not much money in it fifty years ago. It would do some of the folks good to hear some of the old-time preachers; but the most of our up- starts would call them old fogies and likely make sport of them. Well, I might say something of the markets: In the first place, we had very little to sell, but what little we had, must be hauled to the river-Madison, Lawrenceburg or Cin- cinnati. I have known my father to haul wheat from here to Lawrenceburg, and be gone nine or ten days, and then could get only forty cents cash or forty-five cents in goods per bushel ; not only him, but all the neighbors. Sometimes four or five would go together, take their provisions and horse feed, and camp out every night, and would have a happy, good time of it. Some years thereafter a wheat market opened up at Lafay- ette. Then they thought that we had a market right at home and could go there and back in four or five days. My mind has been somewhat drawn out in thinking of the past, and to
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the youths of the present day I have no doubt that what I have written will seem incredible, but those of my age can testify whether the things I have written are correct or not. I will now compare the present with the past, or speak of a few of the changes that have taken place within my recollec- tion, which will carry me through a period of about fifty-six years, as I am now near sixty.
Fifty years ago this was a wilderness or a dense forest with scarcely any inhabitants. I doubt whether there were over three or four towns in the county, and I do not suppose there were a dozen houses in the city of Lebanon, and it was well enough, for it was hard to get there and a harder matter to find the place when you got there. And if it should be at a wet and gloomy season of the year, you would conelude of all the places on earth Lebanon was the most disagreeable, espe- cially in the spring of the year, for about six weeks you could hear nothing day or night but about ten thousand frogs all yelping at once. This was music to the sinner's ear, but not much joy or peace about it. There were no roads, either to the city or away from it. Now Lebanon is a desirable place to live in, with her hundreds of nice, comfortable dwellings, and it is nicely sitnated. If it could have been so that a person could have foreseen fifty years ago and pictured out what it is to-day, he would have been thought to be a fit subject for the insane asylum, if there had been any such place. Then gravel roads were not thought of in this country, let alone the idea or thought of railroads running all through the country, bring- ing our markets right to our doors. The former we needed fifty years ago ; but you could not have broken a man or com- pany up quicker than to have given him a railroad and com- pelled him to run it with what money he would have gotten out of it. In the first place there was no travel to amount to anything ; the pioneers had neither time nor money to spend in that way; and as to freight, there would not have been more than six or eight carloads in the whole county outside of what few hogs that could be gathered up, and they were
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generally in good shape for traveling. As to our improve- ments, we just simply had none to amount to anything ; true, what little we did have was highly prized. Our mills were very unhandy, and such mills as they were at that, all water mills, and too much water would wash out the dam, and of a dry time you could not grind, or perchance it might be frozen up in the winter season. Our nearest mill, about four miles distant, belonged to a man by the name of John Koontz, and if the mill was in good running order it would grind from two to four bushels per hour, and as there were but few wagons in the country milling was done on horseback. A wagon-load would almost have been a week's work. When the water be- gan to fail they would grind an hour or two in morning and shut down and gather a head, and so on.
Time has worked wonders since my recollection, in the milling business as well as in every thing that you can think of. There were no sawmills in the country to amount to any- thing, and to undertake to put up a frame building was an awful undertaking in this section of country. When the first frame house was built in this community the logs were hauled about nine miles to get them sawed ; the studding and rafters were all hewn and the shingles were split and dressed down with the draw-knife, and good carpenters were hard to find ; all other material was scarce and hard to get, and money was very scarce, so the improvements of this kind progressed very slowly for fifteen or twenty years. I might say something about our tools and farm implements. Well, the ax, the maul and wedge and the grubbing-hoe are pretty much as they were fifty years ago, though considerable improvement has been made on our ax. Our plows were the old Cary, or bull plow, as they were called, with iron shares and wooden mouldboard, and, by the way, I have seen some mighty good results brought about by the use of this old pioneer, and then there were three or four two-horse harrows to my knowledge. We generally sowed our wheat and plowed it in with the shovel-plow. The next thing I might mention is our implements to take care of
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our harvest. To cut our wheat we used the side or reap- hook, as they were called, and if a farmer had six or eight acres of wheat he had his hands full during harvest time.
After they would get their wheat cut they would stack it, and at some leisure time clean off a tramping floor and lay their wheat down, and then get all the horses and boys they had to ride them around over the straw till the wheat was all shelled out, then take off the straw and put down another floor full, and so on. This I thought was fun when I was a boy. Then they would get a fanmill and clean it up. Some- times you would have a load to haul off, and sometimes you would not have more than enough for seed and bread. As to grass, we eut that down with a mowing scythe, then scattered it to cure, then raked it with forks, shocked it, and then hanled it in and stacked it out. We had no barns to mow our hay away-nothing but log stables, and the mow would not hold more than two or three loads. Our pitchforks were all wood, and a good one was thought to be worth taking care of. I have not said anything about the way we generally spent our time from the time winter broke till crop time. The first was to go into the sugar business, which was no little business if properly carried on. We used to open from three to five hundred trees and make from three to six hundred pounds of sugar and a lot of molasses, which did not go bad with pan- cakes. Then the next thing was to take the dead timber down and get our logs burned down and the trash piled so that the logs could be rolled. It was no uncommon thing for a man to put in from ten to twenty days rolling logs, and go as far as three or four miles to a log rolling or house raising. In short, there have been no changes in this county for forty-nine years but have been under my observation, but it has been so slow and gradual that it is hard to tell when or how it was all accomplished. It has been like planting a small tree; you will not perceive the one year's growth, but let it stand and cultivate it for fifty years and you have a large tree, and it don't seem possible that it was the same tree you planted fifty
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years ago. So has been the growth of our county since I first came into it. There was not a hay rake, hay fork to unload hay in the barn, threshing machine of any kind, reaper, binder, mower, wheat drill, corn planter, double shovel plow, riding break plow, spring tooth harrow, hay loader nor anything of the kind in the county, I don't suppose, nor for a good many years after, let alone what is carried on by steam power, and I do not think that there were but few steam engines in the state fifty years ago, let alone Boone County, and now there is scarcely anything done but what is done by horse or steam power. Now we can thresh from six hundred to one thousand bushels per day, although I can recollect when my father beat it out with a flail and cleaned it up with a sheet. This may seem strange to the young people of the present day, but what I have written is not overdrawn. I don't know but that I ought to say something concerning the manner that parents trained their children in those days. There were but few drones and loafers lounging around and doing nothing.
The training of children was very strict. They were not allowed to swear or make use of any profane or unbecoming language, and one decisive answer would settle any question that might be asked. The boys were generally in the clearing from Monday morning until Saturday night, week in and week out, grubbing, chopping, splitting, hauling and laying up rails. This was their daily business ; and the girls' tuition was in the kitchen. The girl that did not know how to cook, wash, iron, spin, weave, dress flax, cut and make any, garment that the family had to wear, was not the girl that the young men were looking after. You would hear them talk that this or that girl could spin so many cuts a day, or weave so many vards of cloth, or dress so many pounds of flax per day, after doing up their morning's work. Such girls were said to be worth their weight in gold to any man that wanted a wife. It was the grit and get-up that was looked at, and not the old man's pocket-book, which I fear is the cause of so many unhappy marriages at the present day. You must not infer
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from the above that the old folks were idle. The old women would sit at their spinning wheels from morning till bed-time, spinning flax or tow to weave into cloth for our every-day and Sunday wear; and the old men would have to break out and dress the flax and get it ready for the hackel. I doubt whether there is one young man in twenty that would know a flax break if they were to meet one of them in the road, let alone knowing how to use one, and but few that would have any desire to do so if they could, and but few girls that would know how to rig up a spinning wheel, or could spin one skein of sewing thread in six months. I would like some one of them to try their hand and bring it to the county fair and make a public exhibit of it. Probably I had better say no more, for fear you may get tired of my scribbling, though I have only hinted at a few things.
I have not said anything as to myself. I stayed at home with my father till I was twenty-one years old, and helped him clear a large farm where the village of Big Spring is situ- ated. Then I began to think it was not best to start out in the world alone, so I concluded I would get some one to make the trip with me, and my affections had been set on one Margaret .L. Parr, daughter of William Parr, who was then living in the neighborhood and one of the early settlers. She was born in Tennessee, in 1831, and moved to this county in 1833. So we agreed to cast our lots together through life, and were married on March 7, 1850, and have been living together thirty-seven years, raising a family of twelve children. There are eleven living; our oldest son died when twenty- eight years old. We have seventeen grandchildren living and six are dead. My political and religious views might not suit everybody, but they are the best that I know anything about, according to the way I have looked at things for the last forty- five years. I suppose I was a Democrat when I was born, as my father and mother were. The first presidential canvass that I can recollect was between Jackson and Clay, in 1832, and I was a Jackson man when I was but four years old, and
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I have not yet seen any good reasons for changing my opinion. My religious views are those of the old Regular Baptists. This, I know, don't suit everybody, but I can not help that. And it is of no use to add any more to this, as everybody can not see alike. I served four years as justice of the peace, have lived in Marion Township for forty years. I shall add no more.
COMMUNICATION FROM EMMA. . ELIZABETH MARVIN.
The subject of this sketch was born in Wayne County, Ind., February 5, 1826; born and raised on a farm, only having the advantages of pioneer life, from which I wish to contrast the past with the present and let the present generation of children see the change. In the first place we had no school system, therefore the consequences was three months of school for summer and three months for winter, all subscrip- tion. The school buildings were made of round logs schutched off and daubed with elay mortar. One end of the building was about one-third cut into to make way for the chimney, which was made of sticks and clay ; lighted by a window on each side; a slab, into which legs were put, for their seats; a broad board fastened to the wall for writing desks; the books were no two alike, so there was as many classes as books, ex- cepting the spelling elasses, the big and little spelling as it was called. As time passed there was some improvement in the books, which made way for classing. The girls when ar- riving at the age of fifteen or sixteen concluded that their school days were about over, and their minds were directed in another direction, not to music or teaching school ; it was the big and little wheel, of which they spun their two hundred pounds of wool during the summer season ; and I must say that those days were the happiest days of my life. But since time has passed and the improvements that have taken place reminds me of that old adage, " When ignorance is bliss it is
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folly to be wise." As we had nothing better we were perfect- ly happy, so our days glided along until we were grown up. In the year 1844, on the 1st day of December, I was married to Henry M. Marvin, and on the morning of my nineteeth birthday we bade adieu to the parental roof and started out in the world to try the realities of life. We came to this place, where I have lived ever since, with the exception of two years. I have lived in the same door-yard for forty-two years, protected and guarded by our Heavenly Father, who knoweth all things and what is for our good, and finding we have realized the trials of our ups and downs. Up to the present time our family consists of nine children, only four living, the other five having gone to try the realities of an- other world. -
SOME EARLY REMINISCENCES TOLD BY A PIONEER IN LEBANON.
In the year 1834 my husband, William Zion, and I came to Lebanon and settled in the wilderness among wolves, squir- rels, snakes and many other pests. Mr. Zion entered what is now the William Stephenson farm, cleared the timber off and built a cabin and a blacksmith shop, he being a blacksmith and wagon amker. Soon after we had got our shop built, a land speculator came along on his way from Cincinnati to Chicago ; when near our place he broke his carriage wheel, and did not know where to go for repairs. Some one told him of Mr. Zion being a wagon maker, and he came to our shop to get a new wheel made. My husband took a large oak rail from the fence to make a hub, and a smaller one for the spokes, and with the . assistance of myself to turn the crank, on something similar to a grindstone, he fixed for the work and made him a new wheel, and the traveler went on his way, feeling relieved, as a breakdown in these swamps was a serious matter.
Mr. A. H. Longley built the first house in Lebanon on the site where Peters' dry goods store now is. He was the first
HON. HENRY M. MARVIN.
EMMA ELIZABETH MARVIN,
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postmaster, and carried the mail in his hat, consequently the office was not always in the same place. Abner H. Shepherd came to Lebanon in 1836, and the following year, at the age of fourteen years, carried the mail from Indianapolis to Lafay- ette, by the way of Piketown, Royalton, Lebanon, Thorntown, Frankfort, Jefferson, Prairieville, Huntsville and Dayton. Hc rode on horseback through the wilderness and mud, with noth- ing to guide him but the blazed road where the trees were chipped on one side to show the way to go. Mr. Zion was the contractor on this route. James Richey, the father of J. E Richey, was the first tailor in the town, and for several years cut and made the garments of our earlier inhabitants. John Peterson erected his cabin on the ground where Brown's opera house now stands and engaged in the tavern business. Wil- liam Smith, familiarly known as " Uncle Billy," had a cabin where the Rose House now is. He was a "tavern keeper," too, but carried his more extensively by selling liquor. It was no uncommon thing to see hunters, with their dogs and guns, come in on Sabbath day and go in and get a drink. But I am glad to say he afterwards joined the M. E. Church and lived a christian life. One of the miracles of his conversion was that he could neither read nor write until "wisdom from on high " taught him, and he soon learned to read the bible and had a good understanding of the same. David Hoover was the first clerk of the court, and was also recorder, holding both offices at the same time, and was not always kept employed. He was not troubled with parties running after him for depu- tyships. John Forsythe was selling dry goods on the lot known as " Zion's Corner," south of the square, and in 1855 William Zion bought him out, and continued in business until 1862. (The first court house stood north of the square, court being held twice a year, lasting three days. j Jacob Tipton, of Jamestown, was the first elected sheriff of the county, and was succeeded by William Zion, who held the office four years. I sometimes acted as turnkey, and one night at the late hour of
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12 o'clock, went to the jail and let a relative of one of the pris- oners out. Colonel Hocker was the first attorney and county surveyor. Dr. MeConneha was the first practicing physician who located here. Before his coming people had to go to Thorn- town for a doctor. Even before his arrival sometimes an un- dertaker was needed. Calomel was the cure for all things those times, and in one case it was a kill. A woman who had come here from Kentucky, did not feel well, but was able to do her house work; she went to a doctor and he prescribed calomel as being the thing to climate a person coming from another state, but the dose proved fatal.
The first church organized was the Methodist Episcopal, in: the winter of 1835-6, with a membership of seven, as follows : Josiah Lane and wife, Addison Lane and wife, Amelia Zion, Rebecca Bradshaw and Steven Sims. The organization took place in the log court house, Rev. Thompson, of Crawfords- ville, being the minister. But previous to this, a man by the name of Mills was sent out to this uneivilized country to preach to the heathens as a missionary. The New School Presbyterian was the second organization, with Rev. Bird as pastor. Soon after this, Rev. Ferguson, of Thorntown, organ- ized the Old School Presbyterian Church. The Christian Church was organized in 1838, at the house of James McCann. on Main street, with Gilbert F. Harney as pastor, James McCann and wife, John Shulse and wife, Zachariah Pauley and wife, Jane Forsythe and Susan Dale members. Elizabeth: Shulse is the only one of the charter members now living. This organization held meetings in the court house for awhile
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