USA > Indiana > Boone County > History of Boone County, Indiana : With biographical sketches of representative citizens and genealogical records of old families, Volume I > Part 24
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The places that should be reforested are the sections of land not adapted to agriculture. Hilly country is not suitable for farming, it can not be easily tilled, and the soil has generally been washed off the rocks. There are many acres of such land in Boone county. If the lands that have always been poor or have been made so by improper usage should be properly reforested, the leaf mold caused by the fallen leaves would enrich them and make them valuable. A great many tracts of land are located so as to be unprofitable for agriculture. They may be too far from town or from the owner's home.
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Some plots are too small, being cut off from large fields by railroads, creeks or roads. Many streams wash banks and make them irregular. If the right kind of trees were set out, they would have a tendency to hold the' banks in.
Public property and lands not used for anything else should be utilized for trees. If trees were neatly and tastefully arranged around churches, school houses, jails, libraries, halls and court houses, they would be a protec- tion, would beautify the surroundings and around the school houses, would serve as a shade for the pupils during play time. Trees should be set out on roadsides and public highways, to serve as windbreaks for the protection of the traveler and to beautify the roads. Of course the old question would arise concerning the drying of the roads. It should be a supervisor's duty to keep the roads well graded, the trees well trimmed and it would not be necessary for the roads to be muddy. There are large government reservations not being used at present which should be reforested.
Trees should be set out along the streets of our towns and cities, between the sidewalk and the curbing. The street indeed looks beautiful that is shaded by tastefully arranged trees. Every town or city should have a park to beautify it or to be a place of pleasure. What is a park without some trees ?
Where or who is the farmer that does not like a beautiful country home, which cannot be made so unless some trees are used? How pretty is the small wood lot near the home of the farmer? Every farmer should have a wood lot. Ten acres would be the required amount on a farm of one hundred and sixty acres in Boone county. The wood lot serves as a protection to the buildings and orchard, also a convenient place to put young animals in, if it is placed near the home. The trees should be planted in straight rows and a certain number to the acre. The number depends on the kind of trees. The dead trees and the trimmings from the others would furnish enough wood for domestic science.
There are many things which lead us to believe Indiana should be re- forested. The high price of lumber and fire wood is due to the scarcity of trees. Some day there will not be any coal, for it takes decayed leaves and other plants to form it. The people then will have to depend entirely on wood for fuel. Trees retain moisture by their leaves and roots. The leaves form a thick carpet over the ground and prevent such rapid evaporation. Thus by reforesting the natural resources would be increased, the home would
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be more beautiful and would serve as a check to floods. Hence under all these conditions why should not Indiana be reforested ?
MABEL ADAIR, Sophomore A, Lebanon (Indiana) High School.
THE TREE AS AN ENGINEER.
The better we are acquainted with a tree the more we appreciate it, and we are at times astonished by an intelligence which seems to be almost on the border of reason, says C. S. Harrison in Nebraska Horticulturist.
Take a tree standing in the open. It is seventy-five feet high and the limbs have a spread of fifty feet and it is filled with leaves, the whole present- ing an immense frontage to the winds which are blowing at the rate of sixty ıniles an hour.
Just hand that problem over to a civil engineer, the best educated one you can find. Tell him of the immense leverage the tree gives to the wind and that the base where it touches the earth is only four feet through and he must strengthen it that it will not blow over. What would he say if you told him he must erect a house seventy-five feet high and fifty feet broad, all on a base of only three or four feet. He would tell you it could not be done. That to be safe you want a foundation as broad as the house itself, and that it was not in the power of human skill to meet a problem like that.
And yet, that tree without having been to school, without studying en- gineering and without a knowledge of the higher mathematics, quietly goes to work and solves the problem without a mistake and a most difficult problem too.
A PLEA FOR TREES.
"Any fool can destroy trees. They can not run away ; and, if they could, they could still be destroyed,-chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark, hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much toward getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees-tens of
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centuries old-that have been destroyed. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods,-trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time,-and long before that-God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanche, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests, and floods ; but he can not save them from fools-only Uncle Sam can do that." --- John Muir.
It took cycles of centuries to shape this country where Boone county is located for the habitation of man. There are no indications that the mound builders or any prehistoric race of men ever lived here. There are no land marks like in other sections of our state that he ever inhabited these woods. The American or Indian is the first race of which record is made. All the centuries of preparation were for his benefit and to prepare the land for his comfort. Just how many great growths of timber and vegetation were pro- duced and pressed away by the resistless drifts of ice there are none to report. It took all this to level up the country and make it habitable for man. After the Indian came the white man. We cannot enter into a minute account of the white man's struggle to obtain possession of this country. The Colony of Virginia was the first to lay claim to this territory. They claimed that their territory extended westward indefinitely, hence included all of what is now Indiana, which was carved out of the Northwest territory ceded to the United States by Virginia in 1884, which included all the lands now in the states between the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers. This was the foundation of the English title to the land. The French came in as adventurers, traders and missionaries before the English and laid claim to the lands by settlements. It is stated that as early as 1705 there were traders at the head of the Maumee river and that a trading-post was established at that point and called Ke-Ke- on-ga, now the site of Fort Wayne. Sieur de Vincennes found these traders as early as the above date and strengthened the post. Eleven years after- ward the post was established at Vincennes, 1816, which is considered the oldest military post within the bounds of Indiana. The French missionary, Allouez, as early as 1676, states that Kekeonga, at the source of the Maumee river, was the capital of the powerful Miami Confederacy. Since that date we have some reliable historic facts concerning this early nation of red-men. Four years later Baron La Salle came to Kekeonga with Bible and crosses and
SCENE ON SUGAR CREEK, NEAR THORNTOWN.
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was welcomed by the natives. For the next score of years or more the French were busy in their efforts to establish military and mission points in this new land in order to gain a foothold for their mother country. The next point to the west was at Ouiatenon, on the Wea prairie near the Wabash, and also at a point farther down the river, Fort Knox. It is claimed by some that the military post at Vincennes was established as early as 1716. During this period the French were very enthusiastic and active in their operations and projects to obtain possession and military control of the country occupied by the Miami Confederacy and other Indian tribes in the west. It was during this period of French activity that the Indian village Ka-we-ah-ke-un-gi, on the banks of Sa-na-min-dji, known to us as Thorntown, on the banks of Sugar creek, were visited and a permanent trading and missionary point established. The best authority that we can gather fixes this date in what is now known as Boone county about 1717 or 1720. This is 100 years before the Indian reserve of one hundred square miles was made to the Eel river tribe of the Miamis October, 1818. (The history of this reserve is given elsewhere in this work.) It was bought back by the United States in 1828. While the Indians were yet here the irresistible pressure of the white man was driving his stakes in this territory before the county was organized and in this section boldly driving their stakes while the Indian was yet in possession. It is stated that some of our most venturesome went into partnership with the Indians in real estate.
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CHAPTER XI.
EDUCATION.
SCHOOLS.
Just as surely as the night follows the day, schools followed the estab- lishment of a settlement in any part of the county.
The early settlers of Boone county were from Ohio and eastern Indiana, with a sprinkle from Virginia, Kentucky and the Carolinas, and a few from the woods of Pennsylvania. They came here almost any way to get here, with no provisions to get back to their homes. Some floated down the Ohio river to Cincinnati, or Madison, others made their way on horseback or on foot. Some in wagons drawn by horses or oxen. If they were on horseback or afoot, they could penetrate the dense forests of Boone, when they reached it by the Indian trail. The first that came by wagon had to cut a path for the wagon, and it was a tedious and tiresome journey. They had been ac- customed to schools in their former homes, and they were considered a ne- cessity of life, and they could not think of living without schools, any more than they could without homes and mills. Education was deemed a necessity and even before schools of the crudest kinds were established the children were taught in the cabin home by the father or mother or some traveler. If the home itself did not have any one capable of teaching the children, some mother or daughter of the neighborhood more intelligent than the others would gather about them the few children of the community and teach them the simple arts of spelling, reading and arithmetic. Education did not wait for the school houses any more than did religion wait for the church, but its influences were established just the the same.
The mother found sufficient time from her numerous cares and duties to spend a short time in the enlightenment of her family. True, she was limited, perhaps, to the Bible or some rare book, but this served sufficiently to accom- plish the end in view.
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As the settlements became more populated schools were established in buildings prepared for them or in some private home.
Before the organization of the county all education was conducted from private resources, and, indeed, many years after the county had been organ- ized and a school fund amply provided for, the receipts were so little that the "subscription schools" were practically the only means of an education.
The school law of Indiana as early as 1824 provided for the building of school houses.
"Sec. 6. Each able-bodied male person of the age of twenty-one or up- wards, being a freeholder or householder residing in the school district, shall be liable equally to work one day in each week, until such building may be completed, or pay the sum of thirty-seven and one-half cents for every day he may so fail to work and provided, moreover, that the said trustee shall always be bound to receive at cash price, in lieu of any such labor or money as aforesaid, any plank, nails, glass, or other materials, which may be needed about said building.
"Sec. 7. That in all cases such school house shall be eight feet between the floors, and at least one foot from the surface of the ground to the first floor, and finished in a manner calculated to render comfortable the teacher and pupils, with a suitable number of seats, tables, lights and everything necessary for the convenience of such school, which shall be forever open for the education of all the children within the district without distinction."
Before the days these splendid colleges of the woods were erected, ac- cording to the specifications of Sec. 7, the pupils and teachers had to put up with any sort of a shack or an excuse of a house for school purposes. It was of round logs, with split logs or dirt for a floor, a spacious chimney of sticks and mud; greased paper instead of glass for windows; backless seats for the comfort of the pupils, and a slab to stand up and write on. There is a vast difference between what a trustee would call comfortable for teacher and pupils in 1914 and what they would consider comfortable in 1830.
Sec. 10 provided that when the house was finished the trustee should examine it, number and name it and make all needful subsequent repairs.
The next step was to organize a school. The trustee would call the in- habitants together at such school house to determine whether they would have any tax raised, either by money or produce, to support a school, and what time the school should begin and continue. The trustee would make
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record and proceed to select teacher and to contract with the same as provided by the meeting of the citizens. So many days, so much money, so much pro- duce, and especially whether the teacher should "board 'round" or not.
The trustee examined the applicants for teachers in those days, whether they were qualified to teach "Readin, Ritin and Rithmetic," hence the three R's course was established in Indiana as a fixture. The early history of the establishment of schools in Boone county is full of interesting stories of the pioneer teachers and trustees which would make interesting reading. Boone county was full of these episodes and they are not unlike the stories of the beginning of schools all over this land of ours. The old blue-back spelling book, Pike's Arithmetic and the goose quill urged by the sight of the long, limber rods that reposed above the faithful teacher's desk, which developed the boys and girls of that day into honorable men and women, that laid the foundations of our county and state. They were men and women who were able to discharge well their duties to their day and generation. It is a ques- tion whether we are producing any better quality today, with all our boasted improvements in schools, churches and roads. In 1837, seven years after the organization of Boone county, there was an important change in the school law, that created an examining board of three members. This change re- lieved the trustee of this responsibility, and made a dignified court, before which the would-be teacher trembled with fear. We reniember well the first time we ever appeared before this august body and trembled before its wis- dom. Just think of a chip of a boy having thrown at him the problem : "Will you, sir, tell us what will be the product of 25 cents multiplied by 25 cents?"
All three of those supreme judges looking at us with their two eyes, by their glare scaring out of us what little wits we had. You may imagine our feelings, but we can not express them to you in words. There was no such sum as that in Pike's Arithmetic. Figure it as we would we could only get six and one-fourth cents out of it. It looked too small, and two of the exam- iners so expressed themselves. The other thought it rather small, but guessed it was right, and they all concluded that we were qualified to teach. The beauty of it was they did not know any more about it than we did. Had we known that at the time we might have felt more confident. We never forgot the lesson. and years afterward, as county superintendent, we always tried not to frighten the applicants for teacher's license. We never forgot the misery of that day, and never desired to inflict it upon another. Those good
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old starting-days are over, and we trust that they will never come again. They were in keeping with pioneer life. Nothing else would have done. The school house, the trustee and the teacher just fitted the demands of the day. A person that had stood up against the wall of some college and had a little of the stuck-up shine on him, would have cut a pretty figure in the early woods of Boone as a school teacher. The trustee would have turned him down as disqualified, and the big boys would have taken him down to the spring and ducked him under three times.
The teachers-where did they come from? There was the questioning Yankee, the sturdy Englishman, the firm Scotchman and the witty Irishman, and a few backwoodsmen or native born. We remember our first teacher. He was an Irishman, who wore a broad-brim and went to church every Wednesday, and gave us a long noon recess. On invitation (sometimes bad boys got invitation to cut off the recess), well, we went. The folks sat still and mute for one round hour, and then arose, shook hands and went home. We never forgot those days nor our teacher, nor how he taught us the multi- plication table, for our dear old teacher was faithful. Long ago he passed to rest, and is awaiting the glorious morning of an eternal day.
Often times the teacher knew little or nothing except to "keep school," but this at least served the purpose of an organization. "The first teachers in Indiana were mainly from Ireland or Scotland, with a few from New Eng- land, and occasionally one from Virginia or Tennessee. The first school houses were log cabins with puncheon floors and seats. Generally one end of the house was taken up by a fireplace, where huge logs furnished warmth and smoke. The windows were small, consisting generally of four or six panes of glass about eight by ten inches in size. In these uncomfortable houses school was taught usually three or four months in the year. Text-books were not to be had. and the scholars took to school such books as the family might have brought with them from the older states. The New Testament was the approved book used for teaching reading. The course consisted of read- ing, writing and arithmetic, with now and then a class in geography and grammar. The teacher was always provided with a good supply of switches, and a heavy ferule or two, with which he pounded learning into the scholars. The teacher was an autocrat, and his word was absolute law, both to parents and children.
All studying in schools was accompanied by loud vocal noises from the
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scholars, until a school with twenty-five scholars resembled a modern po- litical meeting, more than anything else. This method was deemed the only one by which students could be made to think for themselves. The idea was that studying and thinking amid such confusion and noise best fitted the student for business in after life. This custom prevailed in most of the schools until long after Indiana had become a State in the Union. The method of recitations followed very closely that of studying, and most of the lessons were recited in a monotonous, sing-song tone. One of the main re- quirements of a teacher was the ability to teach penmanship. In those days penmanship was a very laborious, tedious, and painful exercise. It was really pen-printing. The scholar was compelled to write very slowly and with the greatest precision. Spelling was another of the specialties in those days. Generally the classes stood around the room and 'spelled for head.' The last afternoon of each week was usually devoted to a spelling-bee. The school would divide and each try to spell the other down. When schools became more numerous, and within easy distance of each other, it was a common thing for one school to challenge another to a spelling match, which would be attended by as many of the adults as could find the leisure. These were great occasions for the adults as well as for the children of the whole countryside, and were generally followed by a country dance or some other amusement common in those days." The above is taken from Smith's His- tory of Indiana.
Nor indeed was spelling the only pleasure and lesson taught upon these occasions, as many a young man and maiden could testify, the spelling bee was the social part and the "longest way home was the nearest and best."
The masters of these schools ruled them with an iron will. No teacher was considered as fit unless he could give promise of being able to thrash any boy in the school. Eggleston's picture of primitive school life in his "Hoosier School Master" is not very greatly overdrawn and many a patron of that time was a firm believer in the pedagogy-"no lickin', no larnin', says I". Pete Jones' were common throughout the country, but were soon put to flight by the Hannah Shockys and Bud Means'.
The school houses were crude affairs, built of poles with greased paper windows on one side, and mammoth fireplaces filling "rooms one end," punch- eon floors, split log seats, which were made by splitting logs and boring holes in them in such a way that wooden legs were put in them, the desk was a
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crude affair and the only ornament of the room was the bunch of hickories hung above the master's chair.
The main fireplace was fed by logs pulled into the house by the bigger boys. The wood to maintain the fire was cut in the nearby forest frequently by the boys themselves during the school period. It is easy to see how those near the fires would roast and the pupils farther away would freeze their toes, but woe unto the boy or girl who allowed such a thing as a frozen toe to in- terfere with his "books", for the schoolmaster was very willing and seem- ingly eager for the opportunity to display his ability to "lick".
But good came out of all this, simply being a step in the evolution ot the greatest system that has ever been devised.
School had made but little progress when the first constitution of the State was adopted in 1816 and to establish the great system that we now have that instrument contained the following article :
"Knowledge and learning generally diffused through a community, be- ing essential to the preservation of a free government, and spreading the op- portunities and advantages of education through the various parts of the country being highly conducive to this end, it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to provide by law, for the improvement of such lands as are, or hereafter may be granted by the United States, to this State for the use of schools, and to apply any funds which may be raised from such lands or from any other quarter, to the accomplishment of the grand object for which they are or may be intended; but no lands granted for the use of schools or semi- naries of learning shall be sold by the authority of the State prior to the year eighteen hundred and twenty; and the moneys which may be raised out of the sale of any such lands, or otherwise obtained for the purposes afore- said. shall be and remain a fund for the exclusive purposes of promoting the interest of literature and the sciences, and for the support of seminaries and public schools. It shall be the duty of the General Assembly, as soon as circumstances will permit, to provide by law for a general system of educa- tion, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a State University, wherein a tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all. And for the promotion of such salutary end, the money which shall be paid as an equivalent by persons exempt from military duty, except in times of war, shall be exclusively, and in equal proportion, applied to the support of county seminaries ; and all fines assessed for any breach of the penal laws
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shall be applied to said seminaries in the counties wherein they shall be assessed."
The following is taken from Smith's History of Indiana :
"Notwithstanding this ample provision in the constitution the cause of education advanced very slowly. There were many obstacles in the way. The settlements were small and widely scattered; there were no funds with which to erect school houses, and there was apathy on the part of some, and very decided hostility on the part of others. The cause of education, however, had many staunch friends, and they did not let the matter rest, but kept up the agitation from year to year. The General Assembly of 1816 made provision for the appointment of superintendents of school sections, with power to lease the school lands for any term not to exceed seven years. Each lessee of such lands was required to set out annually twenty-five ap- ple and twenty-five peach trees until one hundred of each had been planted. Between the years 1816 and 1820 several academies, seminaries, and literary societies were incorporated. In 1821 John Badollet, David Hart, William W. Martin, James Welsch, Daniel S. Caswell, Thomas C. Searle and John Todd were appointed by the General Assembly a commission, to draft and report to the next legislature a bill providing for a general system of edu- cation; and they were instructed to guard particularly against 'any distinc- tion between the rich and poor." The commission set about their work con- scientiously, and when it was completed submitted it to Benjamin Parke, who had been at one time a delegate to Congress, and was then the United States Judge for Indiana. The bill so reported was enacted into a law, and became the first general law on the subject of education passed by the Indiana General Assembly. It was passed in 1824, and bore the title: "An Act to in- corporate congressional townships and providing for public schools therein."
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