History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 24

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

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tinged with an acid taste that seriously impaired it. Still, a good many used it while they could get it because it was eheap. The manufactory was near Mr. Blake's barn, on North Street, between Mis- sissippi and the canal, or in that vieinity. The Indiana Horticultural Society was organized Aug. 22, 1840, Henry Ward Beecher being one of its leading promoters. It gave several fine exhibitions of fruits and flowers during the half-dozen years of its existence. On the 10th of April, 1841, a publie meeting was held to make arrangements for appropriate services on the occasion of President Harrison's death, and on the 17th business was suspended, an imposing funeral procession formed, and addresses delivered by Governor Bigger and Mr. Beeeher. The 4th of May was observed as a fast-day all over the country for the President's death. On the 25th of April, 1842, at two o'clock in the morning, a loud explosion was heard in the gro- cery of Frederick Smith, a little one-story frame on the south side of Washington Street, near Delaware. Those who heard it and hurried in found him lying in a heap of laths and lime, and shattered plank, and fragments of grocery-goods, terribly burned and bruised and unconscious, but not dead. He was left so for some hours till the coroner came. He after- wards recovered and left the place. On a fragment of plank or the lid of a goods-box he had scrawled in German with chalk an unintelligible account of his reasons for his suicidal attempt, but the only decipherable words were "envy of bread." He was thought to have been partially insane, and to have tried to go out of the world in the blaze of an exploding keg of powder. Why he didn't was a mystery. This was said at the time to be the first suicidal attempt in the town. Not far from the same time a man by the name of Ellis committed suicide by hanging himself in his barn in Wash- ington township. The Smith explosion, however, was not the first ease of suicidal mania. Some years before it a boy by the name of Alexander Wiley, a brother of William Y. Wiley, long a prominent and respected eitizen, drowned himself in the river some- where below the bridge, for some difference with his father, Capt. Wylie, then a popular tailor on Wash- 9

ington Street ; at least that was the universal belief at the time. The body was found a week afterwards in a drift a few miles down the river, terribly muti- lated by fish or earrion-birds. The annual Methodist Conference met here Oct. 21, 1840, with Bishop Soule as presiding officer. During the fall of 1842 lecturers on mesmerism excited a good deal of inter- est and had a good many believers.

In February, 1843, " Washington Hall" took fire, about two o'clock in the afternoon, and was fought zealously all day, and barely extinguished and safe at dusk. The engines had to be supplied with water by lines of buckets from pumps at the corner of Meridian Street, and in front of Mothershead's drug- store on Washington Street, and from several private wells. Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most daring and effective of the workers, and got his .clothes frozen on him and his hair full of ice, as did hundreds of others. The Old Seminary boys were dismissed by Mr. Kemper to go down aud help in the bucket line. The loss was but three thousand dollars, but that was the biggest fire that had ever happened here at that time. Miss Lesner opened the Indianapolis Female Collegiate Institute in the " Franklin Institute" house, on Circle Street, Sep- tember, 1843. In June, 1843, Robert Parmelee began the manufacture of pianos here on the south side of Washington Street, a little west of Meridian. It did not last long or amount to much. The fall before 1842, E. J. Peck and Edwin Hedderly began the manufacture of lard-oil on Washington Street. In April, 1844, was laid out the " Union Cemetery," east of and adjoining the " Old Graveyard." In 1833 Dr. Coe had added a considerable section, and in 1852 Messrs. Blake, Ray, and Peck made a much more considerable addition on the east and north, long known as the "New Graveyard." With the addition made in 1844 the cemetery extended from the river to Kentucky Avenue, and northward to the Vandalia Railroad. In 1860 a large plat between the last addition and the river was platted as an addition, and used chiefly for the burial of Con- federate prisoners who died in the camp hospitals here. But little else of it was ever used as a ceme- tery, and after Crown Hill was ready for use the

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HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

dead were removed there, and the ground occupied by the Vandalia Railway Company for freight-yard tracks, wood-sheds, blacksmith-shop, round-house, and engine-house, and Ferguson's pork-house was put on a part of it. Washington Street was graded and graveled in July, 1845. In the same year the old Methodist Church, erected in 1827-29, began to eraek and grow unsafe, and was torn down and re- placed next year by Wesley Chapel. In 1843 the Methodist Church, growing unwieldy, divided, and one part retained the old church on the corner of Circle and Meridian Streets, the other used the court- house while they were building a new house, known as Roberts' Chapel, on the corner of Pennsylvania and Market, the present site of the Journal office. It was completed in 1844, under the pastorate of Rev. J. S. Bayliss. In 1868 this church was sold and converted into the Martindale Block, and a new church was soon begun on the corner of Delaware and Vermont Streets. It is of stone, and not yet fully finished, but it is one of the finest church edifices in the State. The first city clock, built by John Moffatt in 1853-54, was set in the steeple of Roberts' Chapel in 1854, and remained until 1868, when it was removed by the fire engineers. In the summer Seton W. Norris built, on the southwest corner of Washington and Meridian Streets, the bloek torn away a few years ago to make way for the present Hubbard Block. It was the finest build- ing in the place in its day. The Locomotive, for several years a popular literary weekly paper, was started by the apprentices in the Journal office. In the summer of 1846 the audacity of the gamblers provoked the citizens to harsh measures, and a public meeting appointed Hiram Brown, the oldest member of the bar, and one of the ablest, to the special duty of prosecuting them. His work, with a repetition of the public meeting the following year, drove off the worst of the dark-legged fraternity. The depot of the Madison Railroad was built in 1846, and was a substantial intimation that the long isolation of the town would soon be broken. Property had already taken an upward turn, and values were improving in the hopeless section of East South Street, then a country lane, and Pogue's Run Valley. Complaint

was made of the selection of so remote a site as South Street cast of Pennsylvania, but being fixed the Council began improving the streets leading down there across the swampy bottom, and the property- holders straightened the creek from Virginia Avenue to Meridian Street.

Governor Whitcomb issued his proclamation calling for volunteers for the Mexican war May 23, 1846, and Capt. James 'T. Drake speedily raised a company, with John McDougal, afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of California, as first lieutenant, and Low Wallace, now general and minister to Turkey, as second licu- tenant. It was made part of the First Indiana Regi- ment, of which Capt. Drake was made colonel. It spent the whole year of its enlistment guarding the mouth of the Rio Grande, where Lutber Peek, son of the first Lutheran clergyman here, was drowned. Two other companies were raised in May and Sep- tember, 1847, by Edward Lander, elder brother of Gen. Frederick Lander, and Capt. John MeDougal. They were put in the Fourthi and Fifth Regiments. It may be noted here that in numbering the regiments raised by the State in the civil war, the five Mexican regiments were counted first, and the first Indiana regiment in the late war was the sixth.

4th. During the fall and winter of 1842 and the early spring of 1843 a strong religious excitement prevailed throughout the West, and nowhere more ab- sorbingly than in Indianapolis. The preaching of the "Second Advent" by Samuel Miller had attracted the attention even of those who had not the slightest faith in his calculations or his interpretations of Daniel's "time, times, and an half." The spirit of religious revival was abroad, and in spite of the in- evitable extravagancies of religious enthusiasm it wrought as much permanent good probably as any that ever disturbed the self-seeking of any community. The "second coming" gave especial force to the ex- hortations of the time, and when the great comet blazed out all along the western horizon it gave a special force to the predictions of the " second coming." One of the portents was there before the eyes of all the world, and it gave encouragement to the invention of many more; meteors went flashing down the sky, leaving fiery trails that broke up into little patches

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which finally took the form of letters and read, " The Lord is coming." Strange intimations of the great catastrophe were found in marks on leaves, sometimes on prophetic eggs of strangely inspired pullets, some- times on the bark of trees, or the accidental lines of rain-drops. They were all paraded with gloomy ex- ultation in the Midnight Cry, a paper of the Second Advent, published in Cincinnati by Joshua V. Himes. The " unrespective" secular press laughed at these fantastic phenomena. They called the "Second Ad- vent" organ the Midnight Howl and the Evening Yell, and insisted that the mysterious letters made of a meteor's tail spelled " Pay the printer." But the re- vival went on, not exactly separated from the advent excitement but independently of it ; all the churches felt it. About the time the comet appeared a young preacher of considerable ability, who had given the " advent" prophecies close study, came to the town and preached a series of connected sermons on the subject in several of the churches, principally in the Christian Church on Kentucky Avenue, and the First Lutheran Church on Ohio Street ncar Meridian. One gloomy, rainy night, when he was preaching at this latter place, there was a strange lurid glare all over the western sky, reaching up to the zenith, and looking as if the world were really on fire in the back yard, as the congregation was dismissed and got out of doors into the drizzling rain. The sermon had described with considerable graphic power the portents that would precede Christ's second coming, and the impres- sion was still vivid on the minds of many. That awful red light spreading over the thick clouds all around both poles and up to the zenith seemed a reali- zation of the most terrible anticipation of the sermon. Nobody fainted or screamed, but a good many women and not a few men looked at it as they never before had looked at an earthly conflagration. It proved to be the burning of a few large ricks of hemp cut and stacked on a farm on the river bank at the ford of the Crawfordsville road.

Several of the most confident of the Adventists made themselves ascension robes, and some sold or gave away their property. One of the leading men sold out and joined the Shakers in Ohio. One woman became per- manently insane and was afterwards put in the asylum.

The failure of the world to " come to time," or rather eternity, on the 1st of April, 1843, or thereabouts, which was the date that Miller's calculations had de- termined to be the limit, did not undeceive any of the devout adherents. The prophet or interpreter of prophets recast his calculation and concluded that June was a safer limit than April. The failure then began to tell on the delusion of pretty much all who had not undeceived themselves before, and the " Second Advent" fancy disappeared entirely.

It will not be beneath the dignity of a local history to notice in this connection that there were three places chiefly used for the baptism of converts, where the rite was applied by immersion,-the river at the old ferry, as often on the west as the east side, because the water shoaled very gradually on that side, and on the east there was a " stepping off" place that would take a man in a swimming depth in a few steps; another was in the canal at Washington Street, but less used than the canal at the Kentucky Avenue bridge. It was here that Mr. Beccher first practiced immersion, after a declaration that he had no more faith in the efficacy of the rite in that form than any other, but would administer it in the way that best pleased the subject of it. A very common feature of Sunday was a procession or crowd going from some up-town church to the river or canal to administer baptism at the close of the morning's services. When pork- houses spoiled the river and sewage befouled the canal the churches betook themselves to baptisteries. The colored brethren, whose church was on Georgia Street west of Mississippi and very near the canal, went to the Georgia Street foot-bridge. The creek was never used for this service, or, if at all, very early in the set- tlement's religious development.

The beginning of the year 1847 was marked by the highest flood ever known in the river before or since, though that of last February could have been but little below it. On the first Sunday of the new year the water was at its highest. It covered the whole of the river bottom, Fall Creek and Eagle Creek bottoms, and in many places came up level with the surface of the bluffs. It ran over the top of the middle pier of the National road bridge, and several times the big trees and masses of drift borne down on

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the furious current looked as if they must strike the sills and girders and sweep the structure away. The National road west of the river was covered " hub deep" from the bridge to the bluff. In two places the current was so strong as to cut great gaps across the heavily macadamized roadway, and pour down the south slope of the grade into the low ground of the bottom in a violent cataract that churned the soft allu- vial soil into thin mud and carried it off. In this way two deep pits were dug, the largest of which was prob- ably one hundred feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. A frame house on the south side of the road was washed off by the flood and lodged in this hole, where it stuck, leaning dangerously over for several months, but was finally removed, and is still standing near its former site in Indianola. These two huge scars left by the flood remained more or less conspic- uous for twenty years. The mischief done by it was so general and serious that the Legislature extended the time of paying taxes by land-owners in the river bottoms, and probably remitted them altogether in cases of especial hardship. The canal bank along the river near the Michigan road was washed away, the feeder-dam injured, the Fall Creek aqueduct washed out, and the Pogue's Run culvert on Merrill Street torn away. The old "ravines" in the town made their last serious disturbance in that flood.

The 22d of February, 1847, was celebrated by a procession of the mechanics of the city, who marched to the Christian Church on Kentucky Avenue, and were addressed by the late John D. Defrees, then re- cently become proprietor and editor of the Journal. On the 26th a general meeting of the citizens was held at the court-house to take measures for assisting in the relief of the distress in Ireland. A good deal of good work was done here by committees and by individual liberality.

CHAPTER VI.

CITY OF INDIANAPOLIS.

tive and great change produced by the close approach of the first railroad, so it may fitly indicate the be- ginning of the " third period" of the city's history, a period of vigorous growth and solid promise. The leading events are: 1st, The changes in the munici- pal government and its departments ; 2d, The intro- duction of the free-school system and the taxation to maintain it ; 3d, The development of the railroad sys- tem, and the improvement in business and material condition produced by it ; 4th, Associations for busi- ness or charity, churches, private schools, lectures, and means of intellectual culture or diversion. As the history of the municipal government will be treated separately and fully, nothing need be said here cxcept as to its general course. The public schools, churches, railroads, and manufactures are in the same category.

First .- On the 13th of February, 1847, the Legis- lature enacted a city charter for Indianapolis, and left it to be accepted or rejected by a popular vote on the 27th of March, the Governor being required to make proclamation of the operation of the charter if it were accepted. The city was divided into seven wards,- four north of Washington Street, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth ; and three south of it, the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh. The First contained all of the city (which covered the whole donation east of the river) cast of Alabama Street, north of Washington ; the Second, all westward to Meridian; the Third, all to Mississippi; the Fourth, all west to the river, south of Washington Street ; the Fifth .Ward took all west of Illinois Street ; the Sixth, all east to Dela- ware; the Seventh, all the donation east of Delaware. The first city election was to he held on the 24th of . April, the mayor to serve two years, with a veto on the Council and the jurisdiction of a justice, his pay to be his fees. The wards to elect one councilman each for one year, with a salary of twenty-four dollars, or two dollars for each regular meeting. They had all the usual powers of municipal bodies, and were re- quired to elect secretary, treasurer, assessor, marshal, with a constable's powers, street commissioners, city and such other officers as they deemed necessary. Taxation could not exceed fifteen cents on one hun- dred dollars, except by special authority from a popu-

THERE was not much change, except in name, when the "town" became the " city" of Indianap- olis, but it marked the beginning of a very posi- lar vote. The most important question to be settled

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CITY OF INDIANAPOLIS.

at the election of April 24th for city officers was that of which least was said, the levy of a special tax to establish and maintain a free-school system. The State school fund, at that time mainly derived from the sale of the " school section" reserved in each Con- gressional township for school purposes, and thence called the " Congressional Township Fund," was not sufficient to accomplish anything of consequence, and it was proposed to assist it, and make an efficient system with the addition of a local school tax. The people were to vote "yes" or " no" on that proposi- tion at the first city election. The president of the expiring Town Council, or Board of Trustees at first, Squire Joseph A. Levy, a very respectable black- smith on Washington Street, issued his proclamation for an election on the 27th of March to decide upon the acceptance of the charter. It was accepted by four hundred and forty-nine votes to nineteen. Gov- ernor Whitcomb proclaimed the charter in force on the 30th. Then President Levy issued his second proclamation for an election of city officers and the decision of the school-tax question. The election was held in the new seven wards, and resulted in the choice of Samuel Henderson, the first president of the old Council or Board, as mayor; Uriah Gates, councilman from the First Ward ; Henry Tatewiler, Second; Cornelius King, Third ; Samuel S. Rooker? Fourth ; Charles W. Cady, Fifth ; Abram W. Har- rison, Sixth ; William L. Wingate, Seventh. The new Council -organized the 1st of May, with Mr. Rooker as president; James G. Jordan as secretary, at a salary of one hundred dollars ; Nathan Lister, · treasurer, fifty dollars ; James Wood, engineer, three hundred dollars ; William Campbell, marshal and col- lector, with a per cent. pay for the latter and one hundred and fifty dollars and fees for the former ; Andrew M. Carnahan, city attorney, paid by fees ; Jacob B. Fitler, street commissioner, one hundred dollars ; David Cox, messenger of the Marion Fire Company, and Jacob B. Fitler of the Relief, each twenty-five dollars ; Sampson Barbee and Jacob Miller, market clerks or masters, at fifty dollars ; Joshua Black, assessor, paid by the day while en- gaged ; Benjamin F. Lobaugh, sexton. The total of the tax duplicate for 1846-47 was four thousand

two hundred and twenty-six dollars; the aggregate of taxable property, about one million dollars. The vote of the wards is worth recording here. About five hundred votes were polled altogether. In the First Ward, 108; Second, 85; Third, 122; Fourth, 35; Fifth, 37; Sixth, 41; Seventh, 66. The vote on the school tax was four hundred and six for it, twenty-nine against it.

Second .- The authority given by the popular vote on the 24th of April for the school levy was promptly used. Each ward was made a district with a trustee, houses were rented and teachers engaged, but the fund would only maintain one-quarter of the four free. Donations were asked, lots purchased cheaply in 1848 and 1849, and substantial one-story brick houses built in 1851 and 1852, and so arranged as to allow enlargement by a second story when necessary. This was added in the First, Second, and Fifth Wards in two or three years. All have been greatly enlarged since, except the old house on Pennsylvania Street a little south of South Street. It is a machine- shop now. A two-story house was built in the first place in the Seventh Ward, on Virginia Avenue, in 1857, and made a three-story in 1865. Lots were bought in the Fourth Ward and what was afterwards the Ninth in 1857, and at the close of the war in 1865 and 1866 large, handsome, commodious three- story structures, with high basements and all im- provements for warmth and ventilation, were built at a cost of thirty-two thousand dollars each. In 1867 the first four-story house was built in what was then the south part of the Sixth Ward at a cost of forty- three thousand dollars. Three times as many school- houses as all these have been added to the system since, and will be noticed in the division of the work treating specially of schools and colleges. The first tax levy in 1847 yielded $1981; in 1848, $2385 ; in 1849, $2851. The aggregate of collections up to 1850 was $6160, of which $5938 were spent in the following year for lots and houses. In 1857 the annual proceeds were $20,329. The first expendi- tures were wholly for lots and buildings, the teachers getting their pay as the teachers of private schools did, from parents. After house-room had been secured, the revenue could go in part for tuition,

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HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

for longer terms and more teachers. In this half- formed condition the schools were forced hy lack of means to continue till the accumulations of the tax and State fund enabled them to make a fair start in a real free-school system. This was done in 1853, when the Council made Henry P. Coburn, Calvin Fletcher, and Henry F. West trustees for all the schools, instead of making each ward a district with a trustee as before. A system of regulations was drafted by Mr. Fletcher, and on the 25th of April, 1853, the schools were opened free for the first time, with two male and twelve female teachers. Up to that time the number of scholars had not exceeded three hundred and forty. In the first week of the new system it was seven hundred, and over one thousand of the two thousand six hundred children of school age-from six to twenty-one-were enrolled. The new arrangement soon provided for the use of uniform text-books and unity of method in teaching, and in August a system of grades was adopted, the divisions being the Primary, Secondary, Intermediate, Grammar, and High Schools. All the lower grades were kept together with the Grammar schools in the same building, the latter under the "principal" teacher. The old County Seminary was repaired and made the High School building under Mr. E. P. Cole, with an assistant.

Until 1855 the trustees themselves did all the work appertaining to the system outside of the school-houses, and did it without compensation. In February, 1855, they made Silas T. Bowen-now head of the oldest book house in the State, Bowen, Stewart & Co .- superintendent, with a salary of four hundred dollars a year. He improved the schools greatly, but could not spare the time that they needed, and gave place to George B. Stone, at one thousand dollars a year. He had previously had charge of the High School, succeeding Mr. Cole. His salary was one thousand dollars, and he gave his whole time and mind to the work. Under him the system was fully developed, and worked as well as it ever has since with costlier officers and greater pretensions. His success overcame all prejudices and objections, and no tax was paid so cheerfully as the school tax. The income increased as the city grew, and more

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History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 24

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