USA > Indiana > Henry County > Hazzard's history of Henry county, Indiana, 1822-1906, Volume II > Part 78
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Charles Weimert Mouch was born at Wapakoneta, Ohio, on July 6, 1863. He was the son of Matthias and Mary (Weimert) Mouch, and was, as is amply testified by the names of his parents, as well as his own, of that sturdy Teutonic origin which has contributed so much of its best blood to the development of America's soils and indus- tries and to the rapid growth of its commercial character and spirit.
The opportunities of Mr. Mouch's childhood were limited to such as an humble home in a struggling new town might afford to a little boy whose parents were econo- mizing and toiling to earn a living and get a start in the world. As already stated a few months of schooling at the town school, during the earlier years of his life, consti- tuted his entire educational outfit so far as it was obtained from the schools. He must, however, have made good use of such limited opportunities as were given him and improved upon them afterwards, for he seems to be a ready and accurate accountant, amply able to look after the financial side of an extensive and complicated business, and also seems to be well informed in commercial affairs of many kinds, which neces- sarily involve the possession of an extensive fund of general information.
He was placed in charge of a team of horses and a wagon at the age of twelve years and from that time until he was seventeen years of age he was a teamster, doing general hauling about his native town and supporting his father, who was then disabled from earning his own living. At the age of seventeen years he entered the office of the master mechanic of the Scioto Valley Railroad to learn telegraphy. He says that the conditions were such as to inspire him to the utmost industry in his quest for practical knowledge, and so closely did he apply himself that in five months he had so mastered his instrument and had become so proficient in its details that he was made telegraph operator for the Scioto Valley Railroad at Portsmouth, Ohio, one of the road's most important stations. He served in that position so satisfactorily to all parties in inter- est that he soon attained to the maximum salary of sixty dollars per month.
Then an event occurred which illustrates his foresight. He was offered the posi- tion of operator and agent of the newly constructed Indianapolis and Springfield, Ohio, branch of the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Western Railroad, now the Peoria and Eastern division of the Big Four, at the village of Mooreland, Henry County, Indiana, at the princely salary of thirty-five dollars per month, and promptly accepted it, giving up his sixty-dollar job in a good town, amid good social and business surroundings, to do so. Not many young men would have made such a choice. But Mr. Mouch, though
Charles. W. Mouch
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but a boy then, had been so educated in the hard school of adversity and cherished such an ambition to reach pecuniary independence that he thought he saw in the humbler position in a village which then contained less than a dozen houses, far better oppor- tunities to save money than he could hope for in the environments at Portsmouth, and far better reasons to hope for advancement with the new railroad and the new town than were to be found in the better paid position at Portsmouth. He had discovered in time to save himself from it what every poor boy finds out, but often when it is too late, that the character of one's associates and the habits acquired from them have far more to do with his ability to save money and get on in the world than the size of his salary. In Portsmouth he associated with the first young people of the town. The young men were the sons of well-to-do parents, and having plenty of means, were not under an ever present necessity to economize. He could not maintain a respectable standing with such associates, desirable as they were in other respects, 'and lay up money with which to establish himself in business. For these reasons he accepted the Mooreland agency and by so doing laid the foundation for the remarkable business prosperity that he has enjoyed up to the present time.
Mr. Mouch became the second agent at Mooreland in 1883, when he was but twenty years old, the first agent having served for a few months only. The new village was probably eight miles from any railroad town of local importance and the country sur- rounding it was and is exceedingly fertile, conditions which more than justified the young man's hope that it might prove a good place in which to advance with the growth of the town. The surroundings were certainly crude enough to give room for develop- ment, for the preceding agent, who had filled the position in a sort of desultory way, had kept his office in the box of an old freight car. The original plat of Mooreland was acknowledged August 9, 1882, by the late Miles M. Moore, it having been carved out of a portion of his fine farm. Thus it will be seen that Mr. Mouch practically began his business career in the town with the beginning of the town itself.
It requires much real pluck and nerve and a determined spirit of enterprise to enable a boy of twenty to turn his back upon the comforts and pleasures of a long es- tahlished community and leave all the friends, acquaintances and familiar scenes of his early life to locate in a town that exists mostly on the blue paper of the engineer's plat, to lead the lonesome yet responsible life of a railroad agent and operator, with all its dull monotony of care and weary rounds of watchfulness; for twenty is an age at which most boys are in the heyday of fun, when the exuberances of irrepressible youth overrun and dominate their lives. Perhaps we may consider that Mr. Mouch's childhood practically ended when he became a teamster at the age of twelve, and that by the time he had reached his twentieth year he had attaind to a maturity of judg- ment and devotion to business that other men do not reach until ten years later in life. Be that as it may, it seems to be certain that he exercised unusual business foresight and clearness of vision during his entire stay in Mooreland, in all some fourteen years, extending from 1883 to 1897. The first five years spent by him there seem to have been years of quiet devotion to the business of the railroad, except that he served as the vil- lage postmaster from February 6, 1886, until after the inauguration of President Benja- min Harrison in 1889, keeping the office most of the time at the railroad station, which is centrally located in the town.
It was in 1887 that he entered the grain and timber trade in Mooreland, using a house of Jacob H. Swearingen, in which to store his grain. He made good profits both in grain and lumber and soon began to loan money on good mortgage and other securi- ties. He always kept close watch of his investments, which though comparatively small at first, grew in proportion to the care bestowed upon them. In the year 1889 the. failure of Wisehart and Kent, grain dealers at Mooreland, who had up to that time owned and operated the only elevator in the place, threw it upon the market at as- signee's sale. Mr. Mouch improved the opportunity to multiply his facilities for han- dling grain by purchasing it and thus becoming master of the local trade in cereals. He bought the elevator at Losantville, Randolph County, on the same line of railroad, in 1892, thus preparing himself to handle the grain for a large territory lying in the three counties of Henry, Randolph and Wayne. Each of these movements added greatly to
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the volume of his trade and his advance was rapid. Another important purchase was made by him in 1890, which added much to his prestige as a far-seeing business man as well as to his substantial possessions. It was the purchase of the Jacob H. Swearingen farm of four hundred and thirty acres, located three and one-half miles northwest from Mooreland, which is recognized as one of the best and most profitable farms in Henry County, and which has doubled in value since his purchase of it.
On October 1, 1893, Charles Weimert Mouch was married to Hattie Estella, born April 18, 1867, daughter of James H. and Emily Louisa Moore, at their home in White County, Indiana, the latter being a daughter of Thomas and Elmira Lamb, formerly of near Dalton, in Wayne County, Indiana. Mrs. Mouch is a most excellent lady and well suited to be the partner of a man of such earnest purpose and active industry as Mr. Mouch. They live happily together and at present occupy their own commodious and elegant home in New Castle, which is reckoned among the best in a city noted for its pretty and well appointed family residences. They are the parents of four children, two of whom died in infancy and two of whom, Lois Hortense, born April 6, 1898, and a son, James Edward, born July 7, 1901, are bright, pretty and promising children. With so much to make them happy, Mr. and Mrs. Mouch are still in the bloom and vigor of youth and their friends are, apparently, warranted in hoping for them many long years of useful and contented life.
To continue the history of Mr. Mouch's life at Mooreland, the elevator at that place burned down in 1894 and was at once rebuilt and equipped as an up-to-date ele- vator of ample capacity to handle the grain for the Mooreland territory, and the trade continued as before. During the years 1889 to 1897 Mr. Mouch handled an immense amount of grain and logs besides managing the business of the railroad at that point and doing other incidental business. With it all he had amassed a comfortable fortune, such as many men would have been satisfied with. However, it may have been with him, his business activity was only confirmed and strengthened by his past experiences. He turned his Mooreland business over to his brother, Joseph Mouch, and removed to New Castle, which was then just emerging from its old-time, county-seat quietude into the stir and bustle of a manufacturing center, where skilled laborers or successful managers count for as much as the ancient lawyers did, except in the matter of awe- inspiring dignity.
He came to New Castle in 1897 and became a partner with Thomas J. Burk and Eugene Runyan in The New Castle Bridge Works, which were then located on a Big Four track in the western part of the town, and were doing a large business. At the end of eleven months he sold his interest in the bridge works at a fair advance. In 1899, he, with others, organized The Indiana Shovel Works and soon after erected the extensive factory buildings near the Big Four and the Pennsylvania railroads, in the northern part of the town, he being from the start the head and general manager of the company. In the large and well appointed brick factory building the business of making and finishing shovels from the rolled sheets was carried on with good success for three years; but by and through those three years of experience Mr. Mouch learned that the security and profits of the business might be materially increased if the shovel blades could be rolled as well as cut and finished by his company.
A favorable opportunity for carrying this idea into effect occurred in 1902, when the failure of the bottle works, located on the Rogers farm, west of New Castle, threw the buildings and plant upon the market at trustee's sale. Mr. Mouch purchased the grounds and buildings and installed machinery for rolling the sheets from which the blades of the many varieties of shovels turned out by the factory are made. After the new rolling mills were ready for business, early in 1903, some of the heavier machinery and certain portions of the work which had been done before at the shovel factory, north of town, were transferred to the plant west of town, leaving the original buildings to be occupied by the finishing departments. The materials from which the shovel blades have thus far been rolled are broken steel rails and locomotive tires.
In 1904 The Chicago Steel Manufacturing Company, having lost its plant at Ham- mond, Indiana, by fire, removed to New Castle and built a mill and installed machinery for the manufacture of nails and steel disks for harrows and plows, in close proximity
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to the shovel company's rolling mills, in order to secure its rolled material from that mill. It began operations early in 1904 and consumed about fifteen tons of rolled steel per day, until November 8th of that year, when it burned down, with so little insurance upon it that the Chicago Steel Company decided not to rebuild it. Mr. Mouch then purchased all the machinery belonging to the plant except that used for the manufac- turing of nails, such as presses, shears, rolls, etc., suitable for making harrow and plow disks and added the manufacture of steel disks to the already large business of the shovel factory.
The average annual output of the factory is now placed at sixty thousand dozens of spades and shovels of all kinds and two hundred thousand harrow, plow and grain disks, and the average annual value of the output is placed at five hundred thousand dollars. An average of about two hundred and twenty-five men and boys find employment in the various branches of the business carried on by the combined disk and shovel fac- tories, at the rolling mills and in the original shovel factory buildings, and the wages paid average one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars per annum. The products of the mills find a ready market in all parts of the United States and in Canada, Mexico, Australia and Cuba, shovels short and long handled, spades, etc., being made in many varied styles and patterns to suit the preferences of purchasers and the various uses to which they are put in the several countries in which they find a market.
Another important feature of Mr. Mouch's large business is that he manufactures his own handles, his factories for this purpose being at present located in western Ohio, the thrifty young or second growth gray ash used for the purpose having been ex-, hausted in the country about New Castle. He regards it as very important to the in- terests of the business that the factory should control its own sources of supply as far as practicable, so that it may not be subjected to suspensions by failure to obtain some part or parts of the material necessary to its continuons operation.
From the foregoing it will be seen that Charles W. Mouch has probably been a greater factor in promoting the more recent industrial growth of New Castle and the prosperity of the surrounding country than any other man of similar age in the county. When a young man of forty-two years of age, beginning with nothing but industry and perseverance, has struggled upward until he controls an establishment that turns out a halt million dollars' worth of finished products annually, and pays out one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in wages yearly, it is evident that he is a person of great business capacity and that he is of real service to the community in the dispensation of the means for comfortable livelihood to others, consequently bringing a large in- crease of business to local merchants and producers of the town and surrounding county.
He has further given tangible expression to his interest in the industrial growth of the town and county by direct money aid to new enterprises, both as a stockholder in them and through The New Castle Industrial Company, of which he is one of the founders; and its vice-president, a company which has been of much service to the local public in the help and encouragement it has given to the location of new manu- facturing establishments and by making known to the general business world the fine, healthy location, worthy citizenship and excellent railroad facilities of New Castle.
He was also one of the founders of The Pan-American Bridge Company of New Castle and its first president, and was one of the early stockholders of the Maxim Building Company and is one of its directors.
Charles Weimert Mouch is greatly attached to his wife and children, of whom he is justly proud, and for whose sake he most prizes the early success which has come to him in his business undertakings.
The parents of Mrs. Charles W. Mouch reside in White County, Indiana, nine miles south of Monticello. Her father is a native of Henry County and is a son of the well known pioneer, Philip Moore, upon whose home farm the town of Mooreland was located and named in honor of that family. In 1865 James H. Moore and his brother, Miles M., both of whom were then married, moved from the home farm in Blue River Township to White County, Indiana. After a few years Miles M. returned to Henry County and bought a part of the old home farm, but James H. has continued to reside
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in White County. 'Elsewhere in this volume in connection with a brief history of Moore- land will be found biographical reference to Miles M. Moore in particular and to the Moore family in general, and to this sketch the reader is referred. Mrs. Nancy Moore, of Mooreland, is a sister of Mrs. Mouch's mother and her husband was a brother of Mrs. Mouch's father. When Mr. Mouch lived at Mooreland before bis marriage he made his home with Mrs. Nancy Moore, and there became acquainted with Mrs. Mouch, who was visiting her aunt. Mr. and Mrs. Mouch were married at the home of the bride's parents in White County.
L. P. Jruby
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF LEONIDAS PERRY NEWBY,
LAWYER, POLITICIAN, PUBLIC OFFICIAL AND SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MAN AND FINANCIER.
The Newby family, of which Leonidas Perry Newby is a member, came to Indiana from North Carolina early in the nineteenth century. The early settlements of the an- cestral branch of the family in North Carolina were in the counties bordering upon Al- bemarle Sound, such as Perquimans, Paspitank and Chowan. They were members of the Society of Friends, and certain Friends of the name in those counties are known to have been the owners of large tracts of land and many slaves, whom they treated with kindness and leniency. But when the Society of Friends or Quakers arrived at the con- clusion that slavery was sinful and the holding of slaves an offense against the law of God, and late in the eighteenth century the yearly meetings determined that all Friends must liberate their slaves, they obeyed the behest and in carrying it out impoverished themselves, so that the family became widely scattered over the State. Early in the following century many families of the Newby relationship, which was and is a large one, sought the new country north of the Ohio River, and taking up the new lands in Ohio and Indiana, became sturdy pioneers of the two sister States.
The immediate family to which Mr. Newby belongs located in Henry County, Indi- ana, coming here from Randolph County, North Carolina, in 1837. Mr. Newby's father first engaged in the business of merchant tailoring at Greensboro. In those days the country merchants all sold goods upon long credits, and in fact could sell them in no other way. The system broke up most of the earlier merchants. Mr. Newby's father, whose name was Jacob Newby, and who was a most worthy man, being no exception to the rule. The head of the family, after the loss of his property, went back for a time to the cultivation of the soil for a livelihood, and the subject of this sketch was horn upon a farm near Lewisville, Indiana, on April 9, 1855. Mr. Newby's mother was be- fore her marriage Lavina Leonard, and both she and her husband were enthusiastic Methodists of the old-time, earnest and devoted kind, notwithstanding the fact that Jacob Newby's ancestors had been primitive Quakers.
Although Mr. Newby's father and mother were exemplary and industrious people, his father was never a robust man, and though he toiled often beyond his strength, both when farming or when working at his trade, he could accumulate but little, and found that it required all the strength he could muster to support his six children and keep the wolf from the door. Hence it was that Leonidas Perry, who was the youngest of the sons, was thrown upon his own resources early in life, a fact which largely accounts for his business success.
His first ambition seems to have been for knowledge-the attainment of a practical education-hence we find him as a small boy performing the duties of janitor for the Greensboro school to gain the means to supply himself with clothing and books and help the family along, while he was at the same time pursuing his studies in the school and keeping up with, and at times, leading his classes. During the summer months young Newby worked for the neighboring farmers and saved his earnings to aid him in his winter campaigns for knowledge. This course was persevered in until he arrived at the age of sixteen, when the family removed to Knightstown, Indiana, where he entered the high school. The Knightstown school was then under the very efficient superintendency of the late Professor Hewitt, with John I. Morrison as the leading member of the board of trustees, and was one of the foremost town schools in eastern Indiana.
Before he had reached the age of seventeen, Mr. Newby began to teach in the pub- llc schools of the neighborhood, thus gaining the means to enable him to pursue his studies in the high school, teaching and attending school alternately. While thus engaged he also began to read law, giving to it whatever time he could spare from his studies in the school or duties in the school room. He graduated from the Knightstown High School with honor in 1875, being its first graduate; but he continued certain lines of study with Professor Hewitt after his graduation and also continued his study of the law, and to keep up his expenses taught for three hours every day in the high school.
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The time that was left to him for his legal studies was spent first in the law office of Butler and Swaim, of Knightstown, and later in the office of J. Lee Furgason, of the same place. He was admitted to the practise by the Henry Circuit Court in 1878 and in the same year formed a partuership with the late Walter B. Swaim and opened an office in Knightstown. This partnership with Swaim was terminated at the end of the first year, when Mr. Newby established an office of his own and has continued the practise single-handed ever since.
"The Bench and Bar of Indiana," a valuable and entertaining volume of more than eight hundred pages devoted to the biographies of eminent Indiana lawyers, edited by Charles W. Taylor and published at Indianapolis in 1895, says of Leonidas P. Newby:
"In 1880 he was elected prosecuting attorney of the eighteenth judicial circuit, com- posed of the counties of Henry and Hancock. His office, however, did not begin until nearly two years had elapsed after his election; but within three months after that event the prosecuting attorney then in office resigned, and Governor Porter appointed Mr. Newby to the vacancy, thus enabling him to hold the office nearly four years. One of his first cases on opening an office was the famous Foxwell murder case at Rushville, Indiana, in which he appeared for the defendant. The ability shown by the young attorney in this case received much favorable comment and so placed him on his feet as to give him a good start. In 1886, he was the leading counsel in the celebrated Anderson murder case at Williamstown, Kentucky, and received the credit of making one of the most able speeches ever made at the bar, in closing the argument for the defense. In the prosecu- tion of this cause appeared Hon. M. D. Gray, the county attorney and now the common- wealth attorney for the judicial district; Captain Dejarnette, then commonwealth attor- ney and now considered one of the most brilliant lawyers in Kentucky; Col. J. J. Lander- man, a noted politician and lawyer of Warsaw, of that State, and Hon. W. P. Harden, of Lexington, then the attorney general of that State, and now (1895) a candidate for gover- nor. With Mr. Newby was associated Hon. O. D. McManama, afterwards judge of the criminal court of Frankfort, Kentucky; Hon. L. C. Norman, of Frankfort, now Auditor of State; Capt. John Combs, of Williamstown, Kentucky, and Hon. W. W. Dickerson, since a member of Congress and now a candidate for re-election. In the preliminary trial Hon. W. P. C. Breckinridge appeared for the defendant, but was unable to appear at the trial. "Mr. Newby has been employed in trial cases in all the Middle States as well as in some of the Southern, Western and Eastern ones and has held the greatest part of the practise in the southern part of Henry and the northern part of Rush County."
Since "The Bench and Bar" from which the foregoing is taken was published, Mr. Newby has succeeded the late Judge Joshua H. Mellett, of New Castle, as the Henry County attomey of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and in conjunction with John L. Rupe, of Richmond, has charge of its extensive and lucrative legal business in Eastern Indiana, which added to his already large practise makes his income from his profession one of the best of those enjoyed by Eastern Indiana lawyers.
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