USA > Indiana > Lake County > Encyclopedia of genealogy and biography of Lake County, Indiana, with a compendium of history 1834-1904 > Part 2
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
appointed him also agent of the Three Per Cent. Fund, fixing his bond as agent at three thousand dollars. They instructed the sheriff to prevent any person from taking pine timber from the public land or school lands of the county, and to bring such offenders to justice. It was found on trial much easier for the commissioners to give these instructions than for the sheriff to carry them out. It is an old saying, catch before hanging, and the catch- ing part was what the sheriff found to be difficult.
An amusing instance of an attempt to capture some timber thieves is on record. When the young Chicago was beginning to grow and pine timber was needed, a report reached the county officers that men were stealing valu- able trees from off our northern sand hills. A posse was summoned and an independent military company was taken into the service. The party took dinner at Liverpool, and proceeded, it is said, with drum and fife sound- ing,-how could military men march without martial music ?- to the place where men had been cutting down the grand pines. But the men had dis- appeared. Knowing that they were trespassers they did not propose to face, not only the civil but the military authorities of Lake county. It was cer- tainly a novel way to secure the capture of thieves. The county commis- sioners finally paid the amount of the different bills, and perhaps they and the sheriff learned wisdom from experience. The pine timber went to Chicago.
Solon Robinson, who is good authority for those times, wrote in 1847 about Lake county, that the sand ridges along Lake Michigan were "orig- inally covered with a valuable growth of pine and cedar, which has been all stript off to build up Chicago." So, according to this statement, the instruc- tions given by the county commissioners in 1837 amounted to very little.
CIRCUIT COURT.
In October of 1837 was held at Lake Court House, in the Robinson log building. the first term of the Lake Circuit Court, Judge Sample presiding and Judge Clark associate. The other associate. Judge Crooks, does not seem to have been present. There were nine lawyers, and thirty cases for
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
this first term were on the docket. It is reported to have been a very quiet session. The majesty, as sometimes manifested. of human law, coming for the first time into the wild magnificence of nature ought to have quieted human passion.
In this year of the organization of the county, mail facilities were poor while letters were costly. John Russell was sent from Lake Court House to Indianapolis to obtain the sheriff's appointment and he went and returned on foot before a letter could go and return. The postoffice eastward, from which the mail was brought. was then Michigan City, distant about forty miles, and the next ones west, in Illinois, were Chicago and Joliet, each also distant about forty miles.
There was in the county at this time one regular physician, Dr. Palmer. A quite large log building was put up in the summer by the two brothers. Solon and Milo Robinson : it was made later in the year or in 1838 a two- story building, and a few frame buildings were in this summer erected. Many new settlers came in. and log cabins were becoming quite abundant, with their stick and clay chimneys, their puncheon floors, clay plastered walls, and roofs made without nails. Of the eighty-one whose names are on record as "Settlers in 1837," the Claim Register for that year not being entire, the following names are quoted as having been at one time grouped together : "Bartlett Woods and Charles Woods. natives of Winchelsea, England ; Hervey Ball and Lewis Warriner of Agawam, Massachusetts; George Flint, Benjamin Farley, Henry Torrey, Joseph Jackson ; Henry Sanger, Ephraim Cleveland, William Sherman, A. D. Foster, and, first of the German settlers on Prairie West, John Hack." These were prominent settlers in different parts of the county and their names, with many others of that year, must continue to live in Lake county history.
Religious services were held several times this year at Solon Robinson's house and in the log building at Lake Court House, and at Pleasant Grove, where probably the Methodists commenced a formal organization, the first on record in the county.
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
These early years, so important in laying foundations for the future, passed rapidly along with their excitements. their adventures, and, to some extent. with their privations, and the date soon came of 1838.
As early as 1833 had been opened along the beach of Lake Michigan a route for travel, and another road opened not long after a few miles inland, and four-horse coaches had been put upon the road by Hart, Steel and Sprague. for conveying passengers and mail from Detroit to Fort Dearborn which became Chicago. But this, except furnishing a tavern-stand or two on the lake shore and a ferry across the Calumet. had little to do with the settlement or growth of Lake county. But in the winter before the summer of 1838 Congress established some mail routes through the county, two of which were of considerable benefit. One was from LaPorte to Joliet, pass- ing through Lake Court House, which was taken by HI. S. Pelton. and the other was from Michigan City to Peoria, this also passing through Lake Court House. now Crown Point, and then southwest, passing near the present town of Creston.
SAW MILLS AND BRIDGES.
Lumber is a necessary article for any improvement in building beyond the primitive log cabins, and enterprising pioneers soon commenced erecting saw mills. They seem to have found considerable difficulty in making their mill-danis sufficiently strong to give them water in a dry season and then to resist the pressure of a freshet. Four of these earliest mills are accredited to the year 1838. called from the names of their builders, Walton's, Wood's, Dustin's, and Taylor's. The Wood mill, where is now, at Woodvale, a large flouring mill, furnished the most lumber.
One mill had been put into successful operation before this year, built by Wilson S. Harrison, which in the spring of 1837 furnished oak lumber for fifteen dollars for a thousand feet. The great market place was Michigan City. afterwards Chicago, from which places pine lumber could be obtained. Pine trees grew in the northern part of Lake county, but this was mostly stolen and taken to the market in Chicago.
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
Bridge-building commeneed in this year of 1838, for which work lumber was a necessity. One who looks over the county now. especially in the sum- mer time, seeing here and there a ditch. but very little flowing water. can have no correct idea of our streams in the early days, when free and bridge- less, in the spring and often in mid-summer, the Calumet and Turkey Creek, Deep River and Deer Creek, Eagle Creek, Cedar Creek, and West Creek, were sending off their full flow of water to the distant Atlantic, some through Lake Michigan, and some southward through the Kankakee to the Missis- sippi and the Gulf. The stream called West Creek, with its wide marsh. its springs, its quicksands, formed, until bridges were built, an impassable bar- rier for any thing like travel. The horseman was in danger in many places if he tried to urge his horse across. Two bridges were built. in this year of lumber, across Deep River, a short distance northeast of Lake Court House, costing five hundred dollars. These were built by Daniel May and Hiram Nordyke. That bridges were needed across this river then was evi- dent, for in the mid-summer of 1837 a very large horse drawing a buggy, in an attempt to ford the marshy stream, went down, probably into quick- sand, leaving only his head out of water, and only by rapid exertion of his driver who plunged at once into the water, was separated from the buggy and helped upon his feet, regaining the dry prairie on the further side.
Over West Creek, near the Wilkinson home, a bridge eosting four hundred dollars was built by N. Hayden. Across Cedar Creek, called some- times the Outlet, near the home of Lewis Warriner, now the Esty place, the bridge cost only two hundred dollars, erected by S. P. Stringham and R. Wilkinson. The one across Deep River at B. Wilkinson's crossing near the Porter county line, built by Amsi L. Ball, cost four hundred dollars.
Thus, in the first year of bridge-building it appears that for five very needful bridges the amount of fifteen hundred dollars was laid out. The money eame from what was known then as "the three per cent. fund."
FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH.
June 17. 1838. was constituted, according to their denominational usage,
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
with nine Baptist members from the two states of Massachusetts and New York, Elder French of Porter county present and acting as Moderator, what was called the Cedar Lake Baptist Church. The meeting for organization was held in the large log schoolhouse which was not then quite completed. Besides this center two other places were selected for holding Sabbath meet- ings, Prairie West and Center Prairie, but these two other places were soon given up. It may be added that at the schoolhouse of this first Baptist center, public, formal recognition services, according to usage, were held May 19. 1839.
METHODIST ORGANIZATION.
Says an old manuscript, referring to the summer of 1838, "The Meth- odist Episcopal Church may be considered as regularly organized in the county from this time, forming with Porter county a circuit, and supplied with preaching at stated times." According, however, to Conference Min- utes the circuit which comprised Porter and Lake was not formed till 1840, but there was a Kankakee Mission formed in 1839, and a Deep River Mission formed in 1835. so that it is probable, as was stated in regard to Pleasant Grove, that there was a beginning of Methodist organization in the county earlier, but not much earlier, than the Baptist organization.
These two bodies of Christians, the Methodist and Baptist, were the strong religious forces in the early years until the Presbyterians made a beginning in 1840, and many more Methodist than Baptist pioneers came into the county. They were successful also in establishing themselves in a few centers which did not change as did the Baptist center, until it became only a pleasure resort. Before, however, that first Baptist church was com- pelled to disband by the changes which were taking place, it had on its record book the names of nearly one hundred members, forty-two of whom had been baptized in accordance with their usage in the crystal water of their beautiful lake.
Of the earliest Methodist centers, four at least, at one of which a bishop once preached, would not now be recognized as places where people ever met for worship.
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
This summer of 1838. at the religious organizations of which a glance has been taken. was one of "continued distressing sickness." It is quite sure that, in proportion to the number of inhabitants, more deaths took place than in any other summer of the county's history. It was a very dry sum- mer. called a summer "of excessive drouth."
Yet many improvements were made this year, and other settlers came in. One party came from the state of New York in four wagons drawn by horses, making the journey in four weeks. Among these were the families of Solomon Burns and George Willey, also Harry Burns. They settled on the west side of West Creek, where a little neighborhood was formed com- prising the families bearing the names of Rankin, Hitchcock, Gordinier, Mar- vin, Burns. Fuller. Farwell, Willey, and later of Graves, Irish, also Blayney. which was an almost inaccessible neighborhood from the eastward until the construction of the Hanover bridge.
THE LAND SALE.
March 19. 1839. came that event for which the settlers had been looking and waiting, and yet for which many of them were not ready. The sale of United States lands, including the public lands in Lake county. commenced on that day in the town of LaPorte. The, so called, squatters of Lake were there in large numbers, some of them hardy pioneers, accustomed to frontier life, some of them but recently from New England and New York, who had been taking their first lessons in frontier life, and some of them sturdy Germans, lately removed from the thronging life of Europe into the new freedom and abundant room of this western world, all determined to stand by each other in seeing that no speculator should bid upon a claimant's land. The event in view of which they had organized the Squatter's Union. July 4, 1836. had now come, and they were prepared to fulfil its agreements and its pledges. The impression was strongly made that no speculator should overbid a squatter, and the moral force of the fact that five hundred deter- mined men had decided upon that question, was sufficient. Men were chosen, according to their agreement. to do the bidding. Solon Robinson for one
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
township. William Kinnison for another, and A. McDonald, whose name appears here for the first time in these records, who was afterwards a promi- nent lawyer, the first one at Crown Point, whose date of settlement is 1839, was the bidder for the third township. No speculators interfered. The record is : "The sale passed off quietly, and the sons of Lake returned peace- fully to their homes."
COUNTY SEAT LOCATION.
Another prominent event took place this year, in May, the location of the county seat. The Indiana Legislature appointed the commissioners. They, it is to be supposed, looked over the county. Three places sought the location. These were. the town of Liverpool where so many town lots were sold in 1836, the village of Lake Court House, where already a log court house was built and where Commissioners' Court and Circuit Court had been held, and where the county officers were residing, and Dr. Calvin Lilley's place at the now well known lake.
By some means or by some influence the Commissioners selected Liver- pool. Great dissatisfaction resulted from their decision, and the citizens determined to ask for a re-location. Their request was granted. The Legis- lature again appointed commissioners, These were, "Jesse Tomlinson and Edward Moore of Marion county, Henry Barclay of Pulaski, Joshua Lind- sey of White, and Daniel Doale of Carroll county." The same localities were in competition as before, George Earle for one, Solon Robinson for one. and. instead of Dr. Lilley, Judge Benjamin McCarty for the third, having bought the Lilley place, laid out town lots and named it West Point. The Commissioners came in June. 1840. Donations, large for those days, were offered by the friends of each locality. Finally, Lake Court House was selected as the proper place for the county seat of Lake county, those five men who have been named located it there, and there for sixty-four years it has remained. Solon Robinson and Judge Clark, the former setting apart forty acres and the latter sixty in section 8 for the town that was soon to be. laid out seventy-five town lots, donated a large publie square, and gave an
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
acre of ground besides the square for a court house and other public build- ings, also an acre for school purposes. The two men named were considered the proprietors of the town. They donated one-half of the lots and gave additional land. Russel Eddy, who became a prominent resident in 1838, clonated ten acres of land and J. W. Holton fifteen. Other donations, some in money. some in work, were also made. George Earle of Liverpool was appointed County Agent. He and the two proprietors re-named the place and called it CROWN POINT. The County Agent and the proprietors sold lots at auction November 19. 1840. The prices varied from eleven dollars up to one hundred and twenty-seven and a half for a lot.
The census taken this year by Lewis Warriner gave for the population of the county, when Crown Point as a town commenced its existence, 1463 inhabitants.
EVENTS FROM 1840 TO 1850.
Without minute details such as an annalist might give, the more im- portant events in these ten years of rather slow growth may be briefly noticed.
Politically, the county was now largely Democratic and in favor of re- electing Martin Van Buren ; but there were some, then called Whigs, among these were especially Solon Robinson and Leonard Cutler, who went to the great political gathering at the Tippecanoe Battle Ground, joining in the log cabin and hard cider campaign of 1840, and helping to elect General Harri- son. The two men named were decidedly in favor of temperance and took no part, their friends were very sure, in the hard cider part of the celebrations of that year.
Health had prevailed at Crown Point from 1834 to 1843. but in the spring of this latter year scarlet fever came in a very malignant form. A spot was now chosen for a cemetery and soon there were eight burials.
Many sheep were brought in from Ohio this same year, and for a time Lake county was quite a wool-growing region. A few sheep had been among the domestic animals of the early pioneers. Their great enemy was the prairie wolf. After the large flocks came disease spread among them. A few good flocks are still in the county.
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
In 1844 the wheat crop was injured by rust. The wheat crop of 1845 was considered very good. But for several years in this decade the average price was not more than sixty cents a bushel. It was a trying time for farmers. Many became discouraged. There is evidence from different sources that in these years of depression as many as one-half of the earliest settlers passed out of the county seeking homes in the then distant West.
But some improvements in this trying time were made. Gospel min- isters came, churches were organized, buildings erected. Almost as soon as the county seat question was settled and Crown Point was named. so that Solon Robinson felt sure of the growth of his town, he secured the residence of Rev. N. Warriner, a Baptist minister who had been recently ordained at Cedar Lake, built a house for him near his own home, and helped to provide for his support.
In 1843 Rev. M. Allman, a Methodist minister, settled in Crown Point. Two church buildings were erected : one for the Methodist congregation at the crossing of West Creek, the other a Roman Catholic chapel on Prairie West. And, this same year or the next, was built a Methodist church at Hickory Point, on the county line, but in Lake county.
April 27. 1844, was organized, by Rev. J. C. Brown of Valparaiso, the Presbyterian church at Crown Point with eighteen members. The two prom- inent women of this church at this time were, Mrs. Harriet Warner Holton and Mrs. Richard Fancher. Elias Bryant and Cyrus M. Mason were the first elders. In 1846 Rev. William Townley became the first resident pastor of this church. A church building was soon erected at a cost of three thou- sand dollars. About the same time, between 1845 and 1847, the Methodists also erected a church building. Cost not now known.
In 1846 sickness again came, and other calamities befell the struggling inhabitants of the new county. The summer was very dry, the weather was very hot. This is part of a record: "Sickness was almost universal. There were few to relieve the wants of the sick or to administer medicine." There were no trained nurses to be obtained in those days, and no money
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
to pay for trained nursing if it could have been obtained. So the members of each family did for themselves the best that was possible. Physicians were few. This is another record: "The summers of 1838 and 1846 are the two most noted for sickness in the annals of Lake. Both were very dry seasons." Besides the sickness of 1846 fields of grain went to waste, for there were no men to do the harvesting. The men and the boys who were able to work were taking care of their sick and performing the needful house- hold work. . Only those who passed through that trying year can know how great the trials were. In the present conditions of the county such a time can not come again, even if extensive sickness should again prevail. Increas- ing the privations of that memorable year, much of the wheat that some did succeed in harvesting was hardly fit for market or for bread, and half the potato crop raised was destroyed by disease. In those years spring wheat was quite extensively raised in the county, and potato bugs were destroyers unknown.
That summer of 1846 passed: a number had died, some, perhaps all, sadly missed in what had been bright homes; but the living prepared again to hope on and live on. A very favorable fall and a mild winter followed.
In 1847 there were in the county seven postoffices, five saw mills in oper- ation furnishing oak lumber, two grist-mills, "Wood's mill," which did grind- ing for the farmers of both Lake and Porter counties, and Wilson and Saun- der's. George Earle of Liverpool was also erecting a third at what became Hobart. There were then in the county about fifty frame houses, five church buildings, two brick dwelling houses, and five stores. Two of these were at Crown Point, one kept by H. S. Pelton and one by William Alton. One was at Pleasant Grove, one at Wood's mill, one at St. John. There were in the county two lawyers, six, perhaps seven, physicians, fifteen justices of the peace. There were five local Methodist ministers. one circuit preacher, and one Presbyterian pastor. The Baptist pastor, the first minister of the Gospel residing in Crown Point. had removed to Illinois.
The county officers for 1847, when were completed ten years of organ-
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
ized county life, were the following named men: "Henry Wells, Sheriff ; H. D. Palmer. Associate Judge : Hervey Ball. Probate Judge; D. K. Petti- bone, Clerk; Joseph Jackson, Auditor; Major Allman, Recorder; William C. Farrington. Treasurer: Alexander McDonald, Assessor; S. T. Green, H. S. Pelton, Robert Wilkinson, Commissioners."
OUR MEXICAN WAR COMPANY.
Lake county having made so grand a record in that fearful conflict for the life of the nation between 1861 and 1865, it would not be just to omit some mention of the deeds of her earlier sons in a very different contest.
May 1, 1846, there was declared by our Government war, stern, and ever fearful war, upon the country called Mexico. Fifty thousand volunteers were called for by the President. Many young men were ready to offer their services, and to join the forces that were expected to reach-there was an air of romance in the expression-the "Halls of the Montezumas."
Joseph P. Smith, a business man of Crown Point, who had been a mili- tary inan in New York city, was at this time captain of an independent mili- tary company at Crown Point, and he with twenty-five or thirty of these men, and others from outside of the county, started for the war. This com- pany joined the army in Mexico in 1847. They saw little of what some call the glory of war, little of the glitter of Montezuma halls. They were in no battle. They did that needful but wearing work, guard duty. They were six months at Monterey. Forty-seven of the company died amid the burning heats or on the trying march, and in the fall of 1848 they returned, as Tennyson said of the Light Brigade, "all there were left of them." One of them who had lived through the sickness and death of so many comrades, afterward lived through the sufferings of the Libby prison, and returned a second time, safe from the perils of war. to his home in Crown Point. In that later war record his name will appear.
The year 18449. ten years after the Land Sale, and with it the year 1850. closed up in Lake county the true pioneer mode of life, a life that had its enjoyments and its privations, a life which has been many times described 2
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HISTORY OF LAKE COUNTY.
on written and printed pages, but which by the younger people of this gener- ation can be but slightly understood or appreciated; yet which made possible for them and those coming after them the great advantages which are now enjoyed.
Lord Bacon assigned the highest meed of earthly fame to the founders of States, called in the Latin tongue conditores imperiorum. The Pilgrims and the Puritans, the Quakers and Covenanters, the Cavaliers and Hugue- nots, with many others from the kingdoms of Europe, helped to found the first thirteen states of this Union. Our pioneers founded a county, not a large division of country, but twice as large as that noted region, the ancient Attica, a division of the old Greece, which contained once a large population. seven times as many as we yet have. And these men and women who laid the foundations here are justly entitled to a fair meed of fame, and their pioneer life, up to 1850. is worthy of consideration and of due appreciation. Some of its peculiarities are in detail yet accessible to the present inhabitants of the county. Memorial sketches of many of these pioneers will be found in this work. According to the United States census there were in the county in 1850 seven hundred and fifteen families.
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