History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 10

Author: Sulgrove, Berry R. (Berry Robinson), 1828-1890
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 942

USA > Indiana > Marion County > Indianapolis > History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana > Part 10

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

An incident of the fall of 1822, still well remem- bered by the survivors of the early settlers, was an 4

invasion of gray squirrels that came from the east going westward. They were liberally killed, but the massacre made no impression on their countless num- bers. They destroyed a large portion of the corn they found in the line they followed as undeviatingly as a bullet, in spite of fences and 'streams and swamps. In 1845 another such emigration occurred, but of less extent and destructiveness. After this last there came a gradual change upon the character of the squirrel population of the county. Previously the " gray" was the only variety known, except a very rare red or " fox" squirrel. Afterwards the latter became the larger, and displaced the other almost as largely as it had itself been displaced. But this sort of game disappeared rapidly after the completion of the first lines of railroad, and now it is rarely seen nearer the city than a half-dozen miles.

The fall of 1822 was signalized by the first at- tempts to open roads under the act of the Legislature of the preceding session. These roads must be dis- tInguished from the county roads, ordered by the County Board on petition, and examined by " view- ers," which constituted so large a part of the care of the county government in early days, and ever since in fact. They were surveyed and some work done upon them under direction of commissioners ap- pointed by the act authorizing them, but little seems to have been accomplished, except to clear away the trecs, leaving the stumps nearly as serious an ob- struction. The White Water region was that with which the settlement naturally desired the earliest intercourse, and the roads in that direction were first opened, with one southward toward Madison, over which early in the winter a public meeting at Carter's tavern demanded a weekly mail to Vernon, Jennings Co., during the sessions of the Legislature at Cory- don. The roads of this period and for many a year afterwards were about as bad as any civilized com- munity ever had to put up with. They were pass- able for wagons and loads only when dried up in summer or frozen up in winter, and even in these favorable conditions there were long stretches that had to be " cross-layed" with rails or logs, filled in with chunks, to be passable even to a traveler on I horseback. Since the advent of railroads, and the

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

diminished reliance of the community on wagon- roads for any but neighborhood communication, these latter have been improved greatly everywhere, and now there are none entering the city that are not well graded and graveled, and as passable at one season as another. .

The first change from the primitive condition of the roads was the "macadamizing" of the National road by the government. An effort was made early in the settlement to get Congress to run the line of this then great national work through Indianapolis, but nothing was accomplished till Oliver H. Smith, afterwards founder of the " Bec Line" Railroad, be- came a member of Congress from the eastern district of the State in 1827. The line would have passed ncar Columbus, in this State, Mr. Smith says in his " Early Indiana Sketches," but he succeeded in car- rying an amendment that brought it here, and along our principal street, then and for a whole generation better known as " Main Street" than Washington. The " metaling" of this road extended through the town and beyond the river to a point a few hundred fect west of Eagle Creek, but it stopped in the town at the eastern end, near East Street, leaving a con- siderable distance uncovered to a point where a short stretch east of Pogue's Creck was " metaled." The survey of this road was made by the late Lazarus B. Wilson, engineer of the "Louisville, New Albany and Chicago" Railroad. He also planned the wooden arch bridges on the line, which have been in constant use with little repair, except replacing the soft slate of the first stone-work of the river bridge with durable limestone, since 1833. William Wernweg and Walter Blake were contractors for these bridges.

" Cross-laying," as often as otherwise called " cross- waying," was the universal substitute for better road- making during the first thirty years of the existence of the city. All the " bottoms" of streams were thus made roughly passable, with frequent repair and re- placing of rotten rails and logs. The old Madison road, through Franklin and Columbus, was especially improved or infested with cross-way work. Not long before the Union Depot was built the whole breadth of Poguc's Creek bottom, the head of this road, from Louisiana Street, at the foot of the rise on which the

residence of Morris Morris stood on South Meridian Street, to the rise on the other side at the " White Point," built by Dr. John E. McClurc, and long oc- cupied hy Nicholas McCarty, was a mass of rails and saplings and chunks and swamp-slush, bordered by a willow-fringed cow-pasture on the west side and a corn-field on the east, where the Eagle Machine-Works stand. In making the later substantial improvements of this street some indications of the old condition were discovered. The town streets were little better than the country roads for many years. Even after the trees were cut out,-and trecs were standing in some streets that are now built solidly for squares as late as 1842 or 1843,-the stumps were left for the wagon-way to wander around as crookedly as a " bottom" bayou, reinforced by frequent mud-holes, turned by large bodies of unrestrained hogs into hog- wallows. The fences along each side were " worm- fences," and sidewalks were pig-tracks hugging closely the corners of the fences when a big mud-hole had to be circumvented. But a few of the more central were better.

One of the last incidents of the year was the elec- tion by the Legislature, early in December, of Bethuel F. Morris, grandfather of the distinguished young naturalist and Amazonian explorer, Ernest Morris, State agent in place of James Milroy, a non-resident, appointed by the Governor to succeed Gen. Carr, who had resigned. Mr. Morris was subsequently president judge of the Circuit Court, and cashier of the Indian- apolis Branch of the State Bank. He died some twenty years ago, after a long period of retired life, at his home ncar the crossing of Morris Street and Madison Avenue. About the time of his appointment to the agency on the 7th of December, the first sale of lots for delinquent taxes took place. It was a long one, and the fact that the greatest delinquency was but two dollars eighty-seven and one-half cents, and the range ran all the way down to twenty-five cents, showed that money was hard to come by when such small amounts could not be commanded for so important a purpose as the redemption of town lots. Fortunes were going begging then if anybody had known it. Some few may have neither known nor guessed it, but were lucky enough to take " the tide

NOTABLE EVENTS AND INCIDENTS.

at the flood." With most, however, it was the story of the man who could have got the half of the site of Chicago for a pair of boots, but had not the boots. Some of the largest fortunes in the city date from this tax sale and the condition of general finances it in- dicated. A proposition to incorporate the town this year was beaten.

The winter of 1822-23 was made a pleasant sea- son, like that of the year before, by social enjoyments and free commingling of all the settlers in pursuing them, though it followed, like the other, a summer of much sickness, and fell in a time of great financial trouble. The county was settling up pretty rapidly. Two hundred and five entries of land had been made in Centre township outside of the donation during the years 1821-22, and many of the purchasers had be- come residents. In Decatur township forty-five eo- tries were made in those two years; in Wayne, one hundred and sixty-eight; in Pike, twenty-nine; in Washington, one hundred and forty-six; in Law- rence, ten; in Warren, nineteen ; in Franklin, fif- teen ; in Perry, eighty-one. It is noticeable that the townships more remote from the older settled por-

tions of the State, from which immigrants might be expected, received more land-buyers than those on the east side and nearer. Wayne had a hundred and sixty-eight to nineteen in Warren, Decatur forty-five to ten in Lawrence, Pike twenty-nine to fifteen in Franklin. Land-buyers thought the western part of the county, with portions of the central tier of town- ships, contained the most desirable land.

The first act of the Legislature in the new year of 1823 was the assignment of a legislative representa- tion to the two-year-old county, January 7th. Can- didates began to show up with characteristic Ameri- can promptness at once, and the canvass'of merits was kept up briskly till the election the next August. Early in the spring, as already related in the account of the first religions movements in the settlement, the Presbyterians took steps to build the first church in the town, on North Pennsylvania Strect, pretty nearly opposite the Grand Opera-House site, and on the completion of the church organization the follow- ing July, Rev. David C. Proctor, of Connecticut, who had been retained as a missionary in 1822-23,

was the first pastor, succeeded in September, 1824, by the celebrated oriental scholar and religious " free-lance," Professor George Bush, who was much such another as the more noted Orestes A. Brownson, except that he did not turn Catholic as the latter did. The religious vagaries of no two men in the country, backed by rare abilities and profound scholarship as they were, have attracted so much attention. Pro- fessor Bush continued in chargé to March 20, 1829.

On the 7th of March the second newspaper of the New Purchase made its first appearance under the name of Western Censor and Emigrant's Guide, with the customary ambition of papers in new settlements taking a name better proportioned to its hope than its importance. It was published and printed in a building on Washington Street, opposite the site of the New York Store, by Harvey Gregg and Douglass Maguire. Not much is known of the former now more than that he was a lawyer of good abilities from Kentucky, and appeared in the bar at the first ses- sion of the court. Mr. Nowland relates an incident of his first visit here at the time of the lot sales in 1821 which illustrates his characteristic absent- mindedness and the solid honesty of the people and the times. He had brought a considerable sum with him to buy land, and had about two hundred dollars in gold left after making his first payments. He missed this one morning, and supposed. he had dropped it from his pocket somewhere where he had been examining land. He gave it up for gone and went home. The following spring Mrs. Now- land found it under the rag-carpet of the room he had slept in with sixteen other men, all of whom might have seen him stick it under the carpet, and probably did, but had no more thought of meddling with it than they would if it had been locked in a dynamite safe. Travelers and moralists have boasted that the Finns have no word for steal, and know no use for locks. The primitive settlers of Indianapolis might have contested the Monthyon prize of virtue with them. It may be enough to suggest that the condition of society has changed in sixty-two years, and it would not be safe to put two hundred dollars under a carpet with sixteen other men in the room, with any expectation of seeing it again. He was the

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

second lawyer to settle in the new town. He died early.

Douglass Maguire, his partner, long survived him, and was far better known. He came to the place in the spring of 1823 from Kentucky, was the last State auditor elected by the Legislature but one before the Constitution of 1850 went into operation, and was one of the four delegates from this county to the convention that framed that instrument, Gover- nor Wallace being the other Whig, and Alexander F. Morrison and Jacob Page Chapman the two Demo- crats. Mr. Maguire bore a strong resemblance to Henry Clay both in form and feature, and was to the full as generous and warm-hearted. The Western Censor and Emigrant's Guide was the precursor of the Journal, as the Gazette was of the Sentinel. Like its rival, its first issues were irregular. The second number appeared on the 19th of March, the third on the 26th of March, the fourth on the 2d of April, the fifth on the 19th, the sixth on the 23d, after which its issue was regular. On the removal of the capital to Indianapolis in the fall of 1824, the State printer, John Douglass, bought the paper and changed the name to the Journal. The Journal it has been ever since, nearly sixty years now. The old editor, Mr. Maguire, retained an interest for some years with Mr. Douglass, and the firm was Douglass & Maguire, -very nearly a repetition of Mr. Maguire's name.

About a month after the appearance of the second paper the first Sunday-school was organized in the cabinet-shop of Caleb Scudder, on the south side of the State-Honse Square, April 6, 1823. It proved a very popular as well as wholesome enterprise, mus- tering no less than seventy pupils the third Sunday. When the weather became bad in the fall it was sus- pended till the next spring, and was revived a year after its formation in April, 1824. The first Presby- terian Church was completed that spring and summer, and the school taken there. It was never suspended again. In 1829 it celebrated the Fourth of July in the fashion above described, and theneeforward the Sunday-schools monopolized the national holiday till its general celebration was abandoned except as a mere day of idling and making pleasant parties. The average attendance the first year was reported to be

about forty, the second year fifty, the third year seventy-five, the fourth one hundred and six, the fifth one hundred and fifty. In 1827 a library of one hundred and fifty volumes had been procured. Up to 1829, when the Methodists completed their first chureb, all denominations united in this school, and it was thence called the " Union School," superio- tended and mainly promoted by Dr. Isaac Coe. It may be noted here that in all the Sunday-school pro- cessions on the Fourth of July from 1829 for thirty years nearly James Blake was the marshal, if he was at home. In 1829 the Methodist scholars colonized in their own church, and the Baptists followed in three years, as soon as they had a suitable place in their church. But the co-operation of all the schools was seeured by a Sunday-school Union, in which all were represented.

There were other indications of the solid growth of the town than the establishment of a second paper and the acquisition of a representation in the Legis- lature. The agent sold four acres of the donation, at sixty-five dollars and seventy-five cents an acre, for brick-yards. Better structures than the frames that were partially replacing logs were contemplated, though but one briek house, that of John Johnson, already referred to, was in progress. About the 1st of June two enterprising settlers, William Townsend, a pioneer of 1820, and Earl Pearce, later, put a set of woolen machinery in the mill of Isaac Wilson, on Fall Creek race, where Pattison's mill stood for many years in the later days of the town. Following close upon this came two new hotels of a more pretentious character than their log predecessors. The first was a large frame built by Maj. Thomas Carter opposite the court-house, opened on the 6th of October, and the scene of the first Baptist sermon on the 26th of the same month. Though a regular Baptist Church organization had existed from September of the year before, and a Mr. Barnes had been engaged as a preacher in June, third Saturday, 1823, yet the first regular sermon seems to have waited this chance in the house of one of the most devoted and deserving of the members. The hotel was burned Jan. 17, 1825, during the first session of the Legislature, and the proprietor, in the days long before insurance was

NOTABLE EVENTS AND INCIDENTS.

known in the New Purchase, lost all he had, with ne indemnificatien. Mr. Ignatius Brown, illustrating the folly that sensible men will commit during the excitement of a fire if they are unused te such calamities, says that a squad of the citizens thought te save the sign which swung in country fashion te a tall post in front of the house, and chopped it dewn as they would a tree, the fall smashing the sign all te splinters, as they would have known if they had net lest their heads. Some months afterwards Mr. Carter replaced the burned house with that of Mr. Crum- baugh near the site of West Street, and kept his tavern there prosperously for several years till his death. The ether hetel lived te become by itself and successor the mest noted in the town or the State for about thirty years. This was the " Washington Hall," a frame on the site of the New York Stere, built by James Blake and Samuel Henderson at the same time as Mr. Carter's house, but opened three months later, Jan. 12, 1824. Mr. Henderson had kept a smaller tavern there previously. The successor of the " Hall" in 1836 was a brick, and made the name famous under the management of the late Ed- mund Brewning. The old frame was moved to the next lot east, and there for a number of years was a shoe-shop in the lewer story, and the law-office ef Governor Wallace in the upper, where Lewis, his son, -now a distinguished general of the civil war and novelist and minister to Constantinople,-wrote sev- eral chapters ef a novel in the style of G. P. R. James century.

called the " Man at Arms," a tale of the thirteenth " Smith and wife, of the New York theatre," in the

Mr. Ignatius Brown notes that early in the spring of this year-1823-three young settlers, named Stephen Howard, Israel Mitchell, and Martin Smith, started for the Russian settlements on the Pacific by way of Pembina. Nething was ever heard of them, except that they reached Fort Armstrong early in May, and on the 15th of August, three months and eleven days after reaching the fert on the Mississippi, get to Fever River, having seen no white man for twenty-three days after leaving the Vermillion Salt- Werks, and having been robbed by the Indians and nearly starved. During the same spring the " In- diana Central Medical Society" was formed to license

physicians to practice under the law then in force, with Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell as president, and Dr. Livingston Dunlap as secretary, the fererunner of many a medical association and college since. The Fourth of July was celebrated at the cabin of Wilkes Reagin, near the crossing of Market Street and Pegue's Run. He fed the company with an- ether barbecue, and the company included a rifle company, commanded by Capt. Curry, of whom nething mere appears to be known. Mr. Reagin was a conspicuous man, being the first butcher, the first auctioncer, and one of the three first justices elected by the people. Rev. D. C. Proctor and Rev. Isaac Reed performed the religious services of the occasion, and Daniel B. Wick, brother of the judge, read the Declaratien, and Morris Morris delivered the address. The September succeeding showed a population, ac- cerding te the new Censor, of six or seven hundred, with a better state of health through the sunimer than had been generally believed. The Censor, true te its name, used the occasion to censure the jealousy with which other towns in the State regarded the still un- used capital.

The August election fer first members of the Legislature resulted in the choice of James Gregory, of Shelby, as senator, and James Paxton, of this county, as representative. There were the usual winter diversions to close the year, but varied, ac- cerding to Mr. Brown's citation of an announcement in the Gazette, by a theatrical performance of " Mr.

dining-room of Carter's tavern, on the last night of the year. Mr. Nowland puts this first dramatie exhibi- tion in the winter of 1825-26, and says the performer was a Mr. Crampten, a strolling acter. The differ- ence is of no consequence as long as there is entire concurrence en the main feature of the affair. Music was needed, of course, and there was nobedy to make it but Bill Bagwell, a jolly, vagabend sort of fellow, who made the first cigars in the place in a cabin on the southwest corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets, and played the fiddle at the pioneer dances and wed- dings. Maj. Carter was a rigid Baptist, of the kind called by " unrespective" unbelievers " forty-gallon" Baptists, who, though sober men, were not at all

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

fanatical in their views as to the use of liquor, but he was immovably convinced of the sinfulness of playing or hearing a fiddle. To get his consent to allow Bagwell to play orchestra to the performance, the actor and musician both had to assure him that the instrument of the occasion was not a fiddle but a violin, and the performance of a hymn tune satisfied him of the difference. Mr. Nowland says the major interrupted the exhibition to stop the orchestra in playing the depraved jig called " Leather Breeches," and it required considerable diplomacy and the per- formance of church music to appease him. The pieces performed, the " Doctor's Courtship, or the Indulgent Father," and the " Jealous Lovers"; tickets, thirty- seven and a half cents. Several performances were given, and the couple returned the following June but failed, and left suddenly, probably helped to the determination by a criticism of the Censor, which rated the performance rather low.

It may have been a mere whim of a couple of over- sanguine new-comers, or it may have been a larger promise of prosperity than appears now to have been credible or possible at that time, but it is true, never- theless, that a Maj. Sullinger opened a " Military School" here on the 13th of January, 1824, for "the instruction of militia officers and soldiers." Nearly at the same time William C. MeDougal opened the first real estate agency, though the Gazette shows that its proprietor, George Smith, as before noted, opencd a similar establishment a year or two later. The month of January was signalized to the pioneer par- ticularly by an act of the Legislature of the 25th, ordering the permanent removal of the capital,that is, the State offices and records-by the 10th of the following January, 1825, the Legislature to mect that day in the court-house capitol of the new capital C for the first time. No doubt the promptness of the passage of this aet was duc in part to. the delegation from the New Purchase, and the power of two votes to help those who helped the owners. On the return of Mr. Senator Gregory and Representative Paxton on the 21st of February, a public banquet was given them by the grateful citizens, and the occasion illus- trated with highly-colored views of the prosperity that would follow the change. Their dreams have been

more than fulfilled, but not till all who were old enough to take part in the festivities were in their graves.

The next incident in the fifthi year of the settle- ment was the most startling and alarming that had yet occurred. This was the murder, on the 22d of March, 1824, of a company of nine Indians of the Shawanese tribc,-two men, three women, two boys, and two girls,-some eight miles above Pendleton, by a company of six whites, four men and two boys. An account of this cruel massacre was given in a sketch of the occupancy of the New Purchase by the Indians, but there may be added here, as illustrative of the early condition of the white settlements, the account both of the crime and the trial made by Hon. Oliver H. Smith, ex-United States senator, who wit- nessed the trials, and was at the time one of the lead- ing lawyers of the State.

" The Indians were cncamped on the east side of Fall Creek, about eight miles above the falls. The country around their camping-ground was a dense, unbroken forest filled with game. The principal In- dian was called Ludlow, and was said to be named for Stephen Ludlow, of Lawrenceburg. The other man I call Mingo. (His name appears from other accounts to have been Logan.) The Indians had commenced their season's hunting and trapping, the men with their guns, the squaws setting the traps, preparing and cooking the game, and caring for the children,-two boys some ten years old, and two girls of more tender years. A week had passed, and the success of the Indians had been only fair, with better prospects ahead, as spring was opening and raccoons were beginning to leave their holes in the trees in search of frogs that had begun to leave their muddy beds at the bottoms of the crecks. The trapping season was only just com- mencing. Ludlow and his band, wholly unsuspicious of harm and unconscious of any approaching enemies, were seated around their camp-fire, when there ap- proached through the woods five white men,-Harper, Hudson, Sawyer, Bridge, Sr., Bridge, Jr. Harper was the leader, and stepping up to Ludlow took him by the hand and told him his party had lost their horses, and wanted Ludlow and Mingo to help find them. The Indians agreed to go in search of the

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 10

Author: Sulgrove, Berry R. (Berry Robinson), 1828-1890 Publication date: 1884 Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co. Number of Pages: 942

Author: Sulgrove, Berry R. (Berry Robinson), 1828-1890
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 942