History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 9

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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The first grand jury of the county returned twenty- two indictments by Joseph C. Reed, the first recorder and school-teacher, of which six were non prossed. They were pretty much all, except one assault and battery, for selling liquor without a license, a-class of offenses which has always been a strong one in In- dianapolis and is yet. The first sufferer of thousands of lawless liquor dealers through a course of two gener- ations was John Wyant. So many indictments at the first term of court in so small a settlement, with no roads and no navigable streams, and no neighbors but Indians, would indicate the presence of a considerable portion of the lawless element that always mixes itself up with the real pioncer and improving element, though there was much less of it and of a less dan- gerous quality than that appearing on the present fron- tiers of civilization. The first felony appears, from Mr. Nowland's recollection, to have been a burglary committed by an old man named Redman, and Warner his son-in-law, on the grocery-store of the late Jacob Landis in 1824. Col. Russell was the sheriff, and a search-warrant cnabled him to find the missing goods

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

or most of them. Warner's wife attempted to con- ceal them under her clothing, but was detected. The offenders were sent to the penitentiary for several -years. The first murder was committed long after- wards in 1833, and will be noticed particularly in its place.

The Court-House Square, like all the rest of the town, was a dense wood when the first jail was put there, and a little later when the first steps for a court-house were taken, on the representations of James Blake, the county commissioners made an order that in clearing the square two hundred trees (sugars or maples it was understood) should be spared for a grove. No special direction having been given the contractors they left the largest trees, which, when the surrounding protection of forest had been cut away, had to bear the brunt of every wind that blew, and were soon so greatly damaged that they were cut down and cleared away entirely. The con- tractors for clearing were Earl Pierce and Samuel Hyde, for fifty-nine dollars. Many years after an at- tempt was made to reproduce a little shade by a grove of suitable trees, but the saplings were killed by drought or carelessness, mischievous boys or breachy cattle. There has never been any shade worth speak- ing of in the Court-House Square since the primeval forest was cut away in 1822. With the progress of the present court-house the square has been filled from a shallow depression to a very handsome eleva- tion, and some fine trees would become both.

On Thursday, the 15th of August, 1822, as ap- pears from the " Commissioners' Record" (page 45), the County Board ordered the clerk to advertise in the Indianapolis Gazette for bids for a court-house, to be built upon plans furnished by John E. Baker and James Paxton. The specifications in brief were :

The building was to front on Washington Street, to be forty-five by sixty feet, and ninety-four feet high from the ground. It was to be of brick, and two stories high. The foundation was to be of stone, eighteen inches in the ground and three feet and a half out of the ground, and three feet thick. The walls of the lower story were to be twenty-seven inches thick, and of the second story twenty-two inches. There was to be a cupola in the centre

twenty-two and a half feet high, on top of it a dome five feet high, then a shaft twelve feet, and finally an iron spire with a gilt ball and vane. On the first floor were a court-room forty and a half feet square, and another small room and a hall, each thirteen feet three inches square. In the second story there were to be a court-room forty-one feet three inches by twenty-five feet, two rooms sixteen feet square, the hall and a room thirteen feet six inches square, and an entry eight and a half feet wide. The first story was fifteen and a half feet, the second fifteen feet. There was a " Doric cornice gutter on the roof, and four tin conductors with capitals." The roof was to be of poplar shingles, jointed, five inches to the weather.

At a special meeting held on the 3d of September, 1822, the commissioners examined bids for building the house, and awarded the contract to John E. Baker and James Paxton for thirteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-six dollars. Operations were to commence before the 1st day of April, 1823, and the building to be completed in three years. The build- ing was inspected by the commissioners, who were still in office, and this was their last official act. It was on the 7th day of January, 1825. Only a little painting and other work remained uncompleted. (Commissioners' Record, pages 45, 46, 47, and 54.)

Until the completion of the court-house court was held, as the law required, at the residence of Gen. John Carr, a double log cabin on Delaware Street, abont opposite the entrance to the court-house. The first session was held here on the 26th of September, 1822, with Judge William W. Wick presiding, the newly-qualified associates, McIlvaine and Harding, assisting, James M. Ray as clerk, and Hervey Bates as sheriff. After the court was organized it ad- journed to Crumbaugh's house, west of the line of the future canal. Calvin Fletcher was made the first prosecutor, continning for three terms, and fol- lowed by Harvey Gregg, Hiram Brown, William Quarles, Philip Sweetser, James Morrison, Hugh O'Neal, Governor Wallace, Governor Hammond, and others more or less eminent in the profession. There were thirteen civil causes on the docket, and twenty-two indictments found, of which, as already

ERECTION OF PUBLIC BUILDINGS.

related, six were non prossed. Eleven lawyers were present, five of them being residents. The session lasted three days, naturalized an Irishman, Richard Good, licensed John Hawkins to sell liquor, indicted a dozen or more for selling without a license, and established "prison bounds" for the unfortunates arrested and confined for debt, that relic of barbarism being still in mischievously vigorous condition here. The first civil case was Daniel Bowman vs. Meridy Edwards; the first criminal case, State vs. John Wyant, for violation of license laws. The second session was opened May 5, 1823, at Carr's, and ad- journed to Henderson's tavern, on the site of the " New York Store." Here appeared the first divorce case, Elias Stalleup vs. Ruth Stallcup. The third session was opened at Carr's, as usual, Nov. 3, 1823, but adjourned to Harvey Gregg's house. The fourth, April 12, 1824, adjourned from Carr's to John John- son's, and the fifth met at Carr's, Oct. 11, 1824, and adjourned to the partially completed court-house, and never afterwards left it till it was torn down in 1870 to make room for the present one.

This old court-house was practically the only pub- lic building in the town from 1825 to 1835. The Legislature made a State-House of it for three months every winter. The Federal Court, the Su- preme Court, the County Court, and the County Board all met and did business there. More than this, after the completion of the State-House, and the removal of that portion of public business to its own quarters, the old court-house became the City Hall, the place of conventions, the ready resort of every gathering that could not go anywhere else and could pay for lights there. The county's fuel usually warmed all that got in, whether publie charity or private show. Joseph G. Marshall and James Whit- comb, two of the ablest meu in the United States in the days of the giants, held their debate there when opposing candidates for Governor in 1843. The eccentric wandering preacher, Lorenzo Dow, preached there in 1827. Professor Bronson gave his first lec- tures on " Elocution" there. Col. Lehmanowski lee- tured there on "Napoleon's Wars." Preachers " out- side of any healthy organization," as the Southern senators said of Seward apd Sumner, who could not

get the " Old Seminary," could always get the court- house. "Nigger minstrels" gave the first of their performances there. A ventriloquist gave a show there. John Kelly played the fiddle there. Wil- liam S. Unthaok lectured there on electro-magnetism as a motive-power more than thirty years ago. County conventions and city meetings assembled there. But a year or two before it was torn down the citizens held a meeting there to take measures to get the Agricultural College, for which Congress had made provision in all the States, located here, against the competition of Lafayette and John Purdue. A Mr. Keeley in 1844 made experiments in mesmerism there, and set half the fools in town mesmerizing the other half. Few buildings in a new country, or any country, have had a greater variety of experiences in as short a life. It was State-House, court-house, oc- casional church, convention hall, lecture-room, con- cert-room, show-room, ball-room in forty-five years.

During the time the present court-house was in course of erection, from May, 1870, to July, 1876, the courts were held in a large, cheap two-story brick building at the west gate, near where the west entrances from the street now are. In front, and to the east a few feet, were the old offices of the county, the clerk and treasurer, recorder and auditor, the last two in the second story, the others on the ground- floor. In 1827 the Legislature appropriated five hundred dollars to build a little double-room, one- story brick house at the west entrance of the Court- House Square, for the clerk of the Supreme Court, then and for many years afterwards Henry P. Coburn, one of the foremost of the old citizens in all good work. He was one of the first trustees of the town government, one of the first trustees of the Old Seminary, and one of the first three trustees of the city schools, a position in which he contributed as largely as any man to their wise and beneficent estab- lishment. He was always put in for gratuitous pub- lie services, and never made any difference in the faithfulness and efficiency of his discharge of them. He was a graduate of Harvard and a college-mate with Edward Everett, came to this place with the State . government in 1824, was the father of Gen. John Coburn and Henry, of the firm of Coburn & Jones,

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

and died July 20, 1854, at the age of sixty-four. This little building was torn down in 1855, and the clerk's office was removed to the State-House. The present court-house was completed in six years from the removal of the old one, at a cost of one million four hundred and twenty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-one dollars and seventy-nine cents, a lit- tle more than one hundred times as much as the old house of 1823-25 cost. Costly as it was, and re- cently as it has been completed, it is said to show signs of dilapidation. The State is once more making a capitol of the county's house while wait- ing for its own building, as it did from 1825 to 1835, but it had a right to the first one, for it paid for it and used it as an owner. It has no right to this one, and must pay as a tenant. The city has found quarters for its offices in the same building, after moving about from the old Marion Engine house on the Circle to any convenient rooms it could get till it found something like a permanent location in the Glenn Block, and another later where the Mænner- chor Hall is. It will stay now where it is till it gets a hall of its own. The only other building ever erected on the Court-House Square was a large tem- porary frame, built by the political parties for cam- paign meetings in 1864 on the southeast corner of the square. It remained for some time after its special use was completed, and was made a sort of public hall.

Following the incidents of the organization of the first court and the occupancy of the Court-House Square has carried this narrative beyond the order of time, and it may now return to the further action of the first session of the County Board. On the 16th of April the commissioners, under an act of the Legislature, appointed Daniel Yandes county treas- urer, to serve for one year, or till the next February session, which was the regular time of appointment. On the 13th of November, 1822, he made his first report, and it will be found interesting at this day, when the revenues and expenses of the county are equal to those of the State at that time :

" DANIEL YANDES, COUNTY TREASURER, DR.

To amount of receipts up to this date, for store licenses, tavern licenses, and taxes on certificates and sales and writs .. $169.93₴

To certified amount of county revenue assessed for 1822

726.79

To the balance in your favor on settlement this day .... 79.11₺

$975.84

TREASURER,

CR.

By payment to grand jurors to this date. $2.25

" to county commissioners 36.00

to listing, appraisers, etc ....

70.50

to prosecuting attorney.

15.25

to expenses of the courts and juries. 40.50

to returning judges of elections .. 9,50

to building county jail account. 140.50

to work on Court-House Square. 59.00

to viewers and surveyors of roads. 8.124

on poor account.

5.00

on school section account .. 1.50

for printing. 32.874

$421.00

To treasurer's per cent. on $421.00 at 5 per cent ...... 21.00

By amount of county revenue yet due from Harris Tyner, collector, for tho year 1822. 490.84}

By amount deducted from revenue by delinquents ... 42.87₺

$975.84"

Mr. Yandes was reappointed Feb. 10, 1823, to serve for one year, and was reappointed annually till 1829. The following are the dates of his later ap- pointments : Feb. 11, 1824, Jan. 3, 1825, Jan. 6, 1826, Jan. 1, 1827, Jan. 8, 1828. James John- son was appointed in 1829. Hervey Bates was elected sheriff at the regular State election in August, and served till 1824, when Alexander W. Russell succeeded him, and was succeeded in 1828 by Jacob Landis. Harris Tyner appears from the report of Mr. Yandes to have been the first tax collector. James Paxton was the first assessor, by appointment of the County Board, April 17, 1822. George Smith, of the Gazette, was elected coroner at the regular elec- tion in August, but seems not to have served, and the first in service was Harris Tyner, commissioned Sept. 1, 1823. A complete list of county officers will be found in a more appropriate connection. The purpose here is only to notice the first occupants and duties of the officers.

On the 29th of May two keel-boats came up the river, the " Eagle" from the Kanawha, and the " Boxer" from Zanesville, the former loaded with fif- teen tons of salt, whiskey, tobacco, and dried fruit, the latter with thirty-three tons of dry-goods and print- ing material for Luke Walpole, one of the earliest of the merchants, who then had a store on the Court-

NOTABLE EVENTS AND INCIDENTS.

House Squarc. Stores then and for years after kept dry-goods, groceries, hardware, queensware, liquor, everything, as old back woodsmen used to say, " from scythe-snathes to salt fish, hymn-books, calico, and tobacco," and a strip of red flannel hung over the door was the usual sign.

On the 17th of June a meeting was held at Hawkins' tavern, on Washington Street, to prepare for the first celebration of the Fourth of July. It took place on the "Military Ground," which then covered pretty much all the area north of Washington Street and west of West Street, then a country lane, to the road along the edge of the bluff of White River and Fall Creek bottoms, now called Blake Street, and north to Michigan Street. It was heavily wooded, largely with hackberries, whose little black beads of fruit with a mere scale of covering, as sweet as any bee ever made, were a favorite indulgence of the school-boys of a later day. A few of these old hack- berries are still standing in what is left of the " Military Ground" in Military Park. The opening ceremony of the occasion was a sermon by Rev. John McClung, the "New Light" pioneer preacher, on the text, from Proverbs, " Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." Rev. Robert Brenton " closed with a prayer and benediction." Be- tween the two religious extremes there came a brief address from Judge Wick on the events and charac- ters of the Revolution, closing with the Declaration. Squire Obed Foote read Washington's Inaugural Address, with remarks appropriate to the subject, and John Hawkins read the Farewell Address, with suitable reflections. The audience certainly got a better quality of literature and sentiment than they would have been likely to get from a larger infusion of original matter. The more material enjoyment of the day was a deer killed the day before by Robert Harding on the northwest corner of the donation, and " barbecued" in a sufficient hole dug near a big elm. A long table was set under the trees, and a better feast made than could be got for less vigorous appetites at ten dollars a mouth at a Delmonico's. During the dinner the inevitable speeches were made by Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell and Maj. John W. Red- ding. The festivities were completed by a ball at. the

house of J. R. Crumbaugh, just west of the site of the canal near Washington Street.

The observance of the Fourth of July was kept up faithfully for about the third of a century. Then it began to fail in interest, and the war put an end to it. For much the greater part of this long period the celebration was confined to the Sunday-schools almost wholly, only a rare parade of mechanics or firemen breaking the current. Early in the morning the children of each school would meet at the church, form a procession with banners, the least in front, and march, under the superintendent, to some point near the Circle, where all would fall in and make a pro- cession of several thousands in the latter days, always under the marshalship of James Blake, and go to the State-House Square or to some convenient grove, where a platform and seats had been provided, and there hear a prayer, a reading of the Declaration by some young fellow of promising qualities, and an oration of the stereotyped kind from a lawyer or preacher or some one of a pursuit inclining to oratory. Governor Porter achieved his first local distinction by a Fourth of July address in the grove on West Street, afterwards the site of the Soldiers' Home. It was not of the stereotyped, eagle-screaming, sun- soaring style, however. He had a Revolutionary soldier on the platform, and made as effective a use of him, in a less degree, as Webster did of his old soldiers in his speech on Bunker Hill. Another striking address on a like occasion was that of ex- Governor Wallace in the State-House Square the year before, not far from the middle of the decade of 1840 to 1850. The conclusion of the celebration was a liberal distribution of "rusks" and water, and a benediction that sent all home before the unpleasant hour of noon. Since the war the Fourth has been a sort of general picnic holiday, or occasion for a fes- tive celebration by some one of the many associations in the city. For about thirty years it was steadily maintained by the Sunday-schools, from 1828 to 1858.

On the 20th of June, three days after settling upon the mode and means of celebrating the Fourth, the citizens held another meeting at the school- house, near the present intersection of Illinois

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

Street and Kentucky Avenue, to settle the ar- rangements for a permanent school. Trustees were appointed, and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence selected as teachers. The school was maintained for some years. Mr. Reed, the first teacher in the settlement, did not keep his place more than one quarter,-all schooling was counted by the quarter (of twelve weeks) in those days,-but others succeeded him till this permanent arrangement was made in June, 1822. Who the first trustees were there is no record to tell, and no reminiscence recalls them, but it would not be a wild guess to say that James Blake or James M. Ray or Calvin Fletcher was among them.

The first State election in the New Purchase oc- curred on the 5th of August, 1822. William Hendricks, uncle of ex-Governor and cx-United States Senator Thomas A. Hendricks, received three hundred and fifteen out of the three hundred and seventeen votes cast for Governor. He served two terms in the National Senate after leaving the Ex- ecutive chair. This vote would indicate a popula- tion of fifteen hundred to sixteen hundred in the county with the enlargement then appended to it. As above noted, Mr. Bates was elected sheriff at this election, and served a full term of two years. George Smith, elected coroner, was succeeded in 1824 by Harris Tyner. . In the militia election of the 6th of the next month, James Paxton was elected colonel of the Fortieth Regiment, Samuel Morrow lieutenant-colonel, and Alexander W. Rus- sell major.

The leading events of the three years of the first settlement of the city may be summed up thus: in 1820 the selection of the capital site, birth of first child, cultivation of the " caterpillar deadening ;" in 1821 the first appointment of justices, laying out the town, the epidemic and the famine, the first sermon, the first marriage, the first death, the first store, the first sale of lots, the first seliool- house and school,-a year of first things; in 1822 the organization of the county, designation of town- ships, measures for county buildings, first tax levy and report, and generally the incidents of the tran- sition of a community from an accidental collection

into an organized body prepared to support and take care of itself.

During the remainder of the year 1822 the chief incidents of which any record or recollection remains was a camp-meeting, beginning September 12th, east of the town, presided over by Rev. James Scott, sent here by the St. Louis Confer- ence in 1821, the first of a long series of this class of assemblages held in or about the donation, and still kept up, in an improved form with perma- nent arrangements, at a convenient point southeast of the city, near the little town of Acton, on the Cincinnati Railroad. The " Military Ground" was a favorite location for some years. Then they were held in the northwest corner of the donation, in a sugar-grove east of the canal, known as the " Tur- key Roost," and the general resort of the sehool- boys for little sugar saplings for "shinny clubs." The camp-ground was in the western edge of it. For some years a grove near the present site of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum was used, then for a considerable time they were abandoned about here altogether. Their revival and establishment permanently at Acton is an affair of the last decade mainly. For a whole generation the most prominent and effec- tive preacher at camp-meetings was Rev. James Havens, irreverently called by the ungodly " Old Sorrel," a man of rugged and powerful structure, both physically and intellectually, as fearless as the famous Peter Cartwright, and as well able to pro- tect himself from the violence that he sometimes had to encounter or expect from the "roughs" who sought diversion in disturbing the meetings. The most notable incident in all that is remem- bered of these gatherings about here is his en- counter with a man named Burkhart, commonly called " Buckhart," the leader of a lawless crowd brought here by the work on the National road and the Central Canal, and left here idle when those works were abandoned. They lived by dig- ging wells and moving houses, when they did any- thing but steal, and when they could not do better lived on the corn and potatoes, pigs and chickens of the farms that then covered the greater part of what is now the city. They were called the " chain-

NOTABLE EVENTS AND INCIDENTS.

gang." Two or three met violent deaths in affrays a few years later, but Burkhart left the town, went down about the " Bluffs," and died in his bed at a ripe old age, in better moral condition than he had lived for most of his life. The camp-mecting which was the scene of the incident was held on the " Military Ground." " Old Dave Buckhart" appeared there on the skirts of the assembly pretty drunk, and wandering barefooted in the simple costume of a dirty shirt and pair of pantaloons, his usual style of dress, from one point to another, singing a ribald song, or couplet rather, of his own making. Gen. Thomas A. Morris, the hero of the West Virginia campaign, the credit of which Mc- Clellan absorbed, and Hugh O'Neal, one of the fore- most criminal lawyers of the State, had learned some- thing of the purpose of the chain-gang to disturb the camp-mnecting, and went there expressly to pre- vent it and punish the rowdies. As soon as Burk- hart's singing was scen to attract attention they went to him, and at almost the same instant Mr. Havens came up. A peremptory order of silence was met by a drunken defiance, which the legendary account says was followed by a blow "from the shoulder" by the preacher that knocked the rowdy senseless. But Gen. Morris says he is not sure that Mr. Havens struck Burkhart, and that there was no knock-down. This phase of the story took form from an occurrence the next day, when Burk- hart was before Squire Scudder for disturbing the quecting. He was " gostrating" to the crowd at- tending the trial, and the late Samuel . Merrill, thinking that the most effectual way to "squelch" the Icader of the "chain-gang" and hold it in more wholesome dread of the law-abiding commu- nity would be to beat him at his own game, and show him that rowdies were not as formidable an- tagonists as better men, challenged him to wrestle with him. The rowdy was heavily and easily thrown by the sober and muscular lawyer, greatly to his chagrin and the discomfiture of the gang. It was not long after this that he left the town, and never returned except for a brief visit.

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History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 9

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