USA > Indiana > Johnson County > History of Johnston County, Indiana. From the earliest time to the present, with biographical sketches, notes, etc., together with a short history of the Northwest, the Indiana territory, and the state of Indiana > Part 27
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Abraham Sells may justly be accounted as the first English- speaking white man to make a permanent home in White River Township. Close upon his heels, came Thomas Lowe, a North Carolinian, with his family and his two sons-in-law, Permenter Mullenix and William Sanders, and their families. Sells entered the township. as we have seen, on the third day of of March, 1821, and Lowe came "between the 3d and Io," a very few days after. The latter settled on a choice tract of land in Section 8, about two miles northeast of the Bluffs. and at once made preparation for raising a corn crop, the ensuing season. About the middle of the same month of March, David Scott moved from near Bloomington, Ind., to White River Township, and camped just below the mouth of Pleasant Run,+ near Abraham Sells, and cleared and planted a field of corn. His family he left behind, proposing to move them out the coming fall. Late in the Summer, however, his horses es- caped, and he became so much discouraged, that he sold out to Sells, and abandoned the county.
On Wednesday, the 10th day of May, following, John Doty and his family, from Hamilton County, Ohio, entered the township. He had set out with his large family and all of his worldly possess- ions in search of a home "in the West," and entering the Whetzel trace at its eastern terminus, had traveled upon it till within three
* Judge Franklin Harden. John Tipton mentions a similar circumstance as being seen near the capital location.
t So named, it is said, because it was a pleasant running stream.
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miles of its western end at the Bluffs. Coming to a shapely, well- wooded hill, then, as now, a landmark, along the northern side of which the trace ran, he was so well pleased with the outlook that he unyoked his cattle and made a camp, and "went to living." The next morning after their arrival, he and his three sons, Peter, Samuel, and George, began a clearing, and by hard work they managed to plant three or four acres in corn, which, when earing time came, fell a prey to the raccoons. It is said these ro- dents came in droves, and stripped it of the last nubbin.
During the time the father and sons were making their clear- ing, the family occupied an open camp and were greatly annoyed by rattle snakes. One morning while at breakfast, they were hor- rified at the sight of a monster which came crawling in at the open door of their camp. It had been attracted, it is supposed, by the odor of frying venison. More than thirty of these venemous reptiles were killed in and about the hill the first season. The next per- sons to move in, were Daniel Boaz and John Ritchey. These men with their families moved in one vehicle. Boaz was a Virginian, by birth, and Ritchey a Kentuckian. They came to White River in the fall of 1821, and were the last of the arrivals for that year. The close of the year saw eight families living in the White River settlement. Twelve more, it is certainly known, came the year following, 1822. These were Archibald Glenn, and John Murphy, from Kentucky; Nathan and Benjamin Culver, from East Tennes- see; Nathanial St. John, from Ohio; Daniel Etter, Michael Brown, Andrew Brown, and one or two others, who long since left the county, from Virginia; and William and Samuel Blean, who were born in Ireland. By the close of the second year, after the first settlement was made, not less than 100 people were living in the White River settlement.
Two settlement centers, the Blue River and the White River, have been under review; let us pass to a third. In the spring of IS21, Amos Durbin settled on the outskirts of the Blue River settle- ment, so far from its center that when the civil townships came to be organized, he was found to be in Nineveh Township, and he is therefore entitled to the destinction of being named as the first settler of Nineveh. The township derived its name from its prin- cipal creek, and it in turn from the following circumstance: Rich- ard Berry had a son, Nineveh, who, while hunting one winter's day, crossed the creek, which was orginally known as the Leatherwood, and killed a deer. With it on his back he undertook to recross the stream on a log, but loosing his footing he fell in, and came near being drowned. His father ever after spoke of the stream as "Nineveh's
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Defeat," but the early settlers dropped the latter half of the name, calling it NINEVEH, and it is so known to this day.
But another man must be accredited with the honor of founding the first distinctive Nineveh neighborhood. That man was Robert Worl, of whom but little is now known. He was an Ohioan, who set out for the New Purchase the latter part of the summer of IS21. With his family and a few personal effects he floated down the Ohio in a boat to some point on the Indiana shore, whence he made his way over the Indian trails to the Blue River Settle- ment, and thence through a pathless forest to Leatherwood Creek, or as it is now known, the Nineveh, where he arrived sometime in the month of September, and at once erected a pole cabin on the bank of the creek, a mile east of the present site of Williamsburg. Worl and his family lived alone through the fall and winter, de- pending for food mainly on the rifle. The region round about was filled with- game. Wild turkeys, deer and bears were as plentiful as domestic stock in the same neighborhood is to-day.
Doubtless, the first fall and winter spent by the Worls in the Nineveh woods, they found exceedingly long and dismally lone- some; but the season of leaf and flower came at last, and with it three neighbors. On Friday, the 15th of March, Joah Woodruff and William Strain, came directly from Ohio, and Benjamin Crews, who two years before moved to the Blue River neighborhood, and settled over the line in Bartholomew County. All three had families, and had been Worl's neighbors in Ohio. That was a busy spring on the Nineveh. Crews camped by the side of a log for eight weeks, from the middle of March to the middle of May, by which time he had nine acres cleared after the fashion of the times, which he planted in corn, and then he built a cabin.
During the year of 1822, eleven men, with their families, are known to have moved into the Township. In addition to those already mentioned, were Adam Sash, Daniel and Henry Mussul- man, and James Dunn from Kentucky, David Trout from Vir- ginia, and John S. Miller from North Carolina.
The next year, James and William Gillaspy, William Spears, Curtis Pritchard, Louis Pritchard and Richard Perry, Kentuckians; and Jeremiah Dunham, an Ohioan, and Elijah DeHart, from North Carolina, moved in. In 1824, Robert Moore and George Baily Aaron Dunham, of Ohio, arrived, and Isaac Walker, Perry Baily, Joseph Thompson and Robert Forsyth, all from Kentucky. In 1825, Daniel Pritchard, John Parkhurst, William Irving and Amos Mitchel, from Kentucky, and Jesse Young, from Ohio, moved in, and, in the year following, came Thomas Elliott, Prettyman Bur-
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ton, William Keaton, Clark Tucker, Daniel Hutto, John Hall, John Elliot, all Kentuckians, and Thomas Griffith, Samuel Griffith, Richard Wheeler, James McKane, James and John Wylie, Ohioans. In 1827, of those who came, John Kindle, Aaron Bur- gett and the Calvins - James, Luke, Thomas and Iliram - Milton McQuade, John Dodd, Robert Works and, as is supposed, George Henger and Jeremiah Hibbs, are all believed to have been from Ohio, and James Mullikin, David Forsyth and James Hughes, from Kentucky. The next year Joseph Featherngill, Gabriel Givens, Mrs. Sarah Mathes and James White came, followed by Ilume Sturgeon, in IS29, and by Walter Black, David Dunham, - John Wilks and Aaron Burgett, in 1830. Sturgeon was from Kentucky, Mrs. Mathes from Virginia, and the others from Ohio, save Black, whose native place is uncertain.
In the year 1822, the Burkhart brothers, David, Lewis, George, Ilenry and William came to this county from Greene County, Ky., by the way of the ancient river trail. Henry and George settled on the north side, while David built his cabin within the borders of Franklin Township on the land on which the late Michael Canary so long lived, and ultimately died. All three built cabins on the trail, and they have left their family name in Buckhart's Creek, in their old neighborhood. About the time of the arrival of the Burk- harts, came Levi Moore along the trail, from the south as far as the Big Spring (now Hopewell), whence he turned to the east and built a cabin on the high ground, a few hundred yards west of the place where the Bluff road crosses Young's Creek. This cabin site has never ceased to be a place of residence. It is now occu- pied by John McCashin. Of Moore, but little is known. In the summer of 1825, he built a cabin and log stable on the east side of, and close to the line dividing the east and west halves of the south- west quarter of Section 9, in Township 12, afterward owned and occupied by Aaron LeGrange. Moore had entered the west half of that quarter, and publicly gave out that he owned the east half, but Adam Sash learning otherwise, entered that half, and the owner- ship of Moore's cabin and stable thus fell to him.
On Young's Creek, which flowed through the west eighty, he built a mill, but the site was inauspicious. At that point the creek run between low banks through a wide valley, and he found it im- possible to construct a dam that would withstand the freshets. Ilis log mill-house was built over the creek bed on piles driven into the earth with a maul, and he put in machinery with which he could grind " from ten to fifteen bushels of corn per day." Driven to desperation by repeated washouts, he at last felled a large sycamore tree top on his dam, hoping in this way to hold it down: but find-
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ing it a vain effort, after a year or two he abandoned the enterprise, and soon after left the country and went, no one knew where. The foundation logs of his mill, after sixty-three years, are still to be seen, embedded in the Young's Creek mud, apparently as sound as the day they were placed there.
Moore left a bad reputation behind him. He was charged with over-tolling the grists that went to his mill, and, not content with that. he caught a portion of the descending meal in his wide sleeves which he transferred to his own barrel, a trick not uncommon with rascally millers of his day. It was laid to his charge also that he stole his neighbors hogs, and scrupled not to rob the Indians, who camped now and then in his vicinity. Certain, it is, that he and his family were phenomenally untidy about their home. Under the high porch of his cabin, his little flock of sheep were penned every night, winter and summer, to keep them from the wolves, a pre- caution that his pioneer neighbors could have excused perhaps, but the ducks and geese that slept upon the porch and in the cabin it- self, to keep them from their prowling enemies, the foxes, and minks, the neighbors could not excuse. Moore could not build cabins and mill houses and roll logs without calling upon his neigh- bors for assistance. nor could they assist without dining at his table. But the memory of the combined odors of the sheep-pen, of the goose and duck sleeping apartment, and of the Moore cookery, re- mains to this day. It is said that a boiled egg was the only article of food a man could eat at the Moore table without a qualm. Nevertheless, Levi Moore left his name in a certain sense indelibly impressed upon the county. Upon the little creek, that, taking its rise a mile north of Franklin and flowing thence southwesterly till it discharges into Young's Creek, not far from the site of his first cabin, he gave the name of " Indian Creek," from the circumstance that the Indians frequently encamped upon it in the early days, and by that name it is still known. In another stream, Moore's Creek, which unites with Young's Creek, near Hopewell. his name will be held in perpetual remembrance, for it carries his name.
In the month of February, 1821, Elisha Adams, a Pennsylvanian by birth, but moving from Kentucky, and Joseph Young, a North Carolinan, and Robert Gilchrist, from Washington County, Ind., came to the county. Young settled in the delta formed by the union of Sugar and Lick Creeks, while Adams moved farther north, and built a cabin near the present site of Amity. Lick Creek was so named by the United States surveyors, because of the great number of most excellent deer licks found near its source. But Young's cabin soon came to be known better than the licks, and the first settlers caring little for the name bestowed
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by the surveyors, changed Lick Creek into Young's Creek, and time has sanctioned their act.
In the autumn succeeding Adams' arrival William Rutherford moved on Sugar Creek in Section 33, less than two miles northeast of Adams', and became the first settler in what is now known as Needham Township.
About the time Rutherford was building his cabin, Adams' horses strayed off, and while hunting for them in Bartholomew County, he met with John Smiley of Washington County, who said he was looking for a mill site. While hunting game, Adams had more than once noticed a place on Sugar Creek in Section 34, where he thought a mill could be advantageously built, and he not only acquainted Smiley with the fact, but gave him such a glowing account of the country adjacent to the site, that Smiley came to see for himself, the following summer. The place suiting him, he made a purchase, and in the ensuing fall moved his family to the county, and after erecting a cabin in which to live, began at once building a mill, which was finished the same fall, and which was the first mill in the county.
In October, 1820, George King, Simon Covert, Samuel and Cornelius Demarer, Peter A. Banta, William Porter, James and Wallace Shannon and Prettyman Burton, all of whom were resi- dents of Henry and Shelby counties in Kentucky, made a tour of parts of Indiana, to "look at the country." Crossing the Ohio, a few miles below Madison, they traveled eastwardly through Jefferson and Switzerland counties, thence to Versailles, in Ripley, and through Napoleon and on to the "Forks of Flat Rock." Shortly after crossing the Ohio, William Hendricks joined them, but at the "Forks" he turned aside to become the proprietor of the county seat of Decatur County. King and his company kept on till they reached Connor's Prairie, where they took the back track on the Indian trail till they came to the location of the seat of government, where "four little cabins" were all there was of the future city. Crossing the White River at that place, they visited Eagle Creek and then White Creek, after which they re-crossed the river at Whetzel's. Riding up to the Bluffs, they followed Whetzel's trace out to the Indian trail, where they saw Loper's unfinished cabin, and thence they traveled south ward past the Big Spring and Berry's ford, and so on to their homes, having been absent seventeen days.
The following fall, King and Covert, who were brothers-in-law, and William Shannon, a neighbor, returning to the state, made another journey to examine the country. This time they went direct to Indianapolis, passing through Johnson County, and at- tended the first sale of lots in that new city. Crossing White River
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the same day, they rode to the neighborhood of Eagle Creek where they camped. The next morning they set out in earnest for the Wabash country and saw but one cabin from Tuesday morning till the following Sunday evening. The journey was a disappoint- ment to them. The country was not apparently as good as they had been led to expect. "Good land was like the milk sick, still ahead." They returned to their homes by the way of the Vermil- ion River country.
After another year, King and Covert made a third trip to the state. This time they were accompanied by Garrett C. Bergen, and the purpose of their journey seems to have been to enter lands in Johnson County. King, who was the leader in all these expe- ditions, was of the age of forty years. His native place was Wythe County, in Virginia, whence he had moved with a widowed mother to Kentucky while a lad, where he had been apprenticed to a wheelwright with whom he had learned the trade. He had the knack of money getting, and having accumulated a small sum, he was desirous of settling himself in a new country at such a place as he would be enabled to control the location of a county town, on Jands he might himself own. On this third visit he saw his op- portunity. On the 8th of January, 1821, an act had been passed organizing Bartholomew County, and on the 3Ist of December following. bills to incorporate Morgan, Marion and Shelby counties had been approved by the Governor, leaving the territory lying between, to be incorporated thereafter. The situation was patent to every one, but King seems to have been the only one who was able to take advantage of it. On reaching the Blue River settle- ment he fell in with Samuel Herriott, whom he questioned concern- ing a suitable town site in the neighborhood of the center of the unorganized territory, and from him learned of what was supposed to be a suitable tract lying in the angle formed by the confluence of Lick and Camp creeks. The land lookers went at once to it, and after looking the land over and each selecting his tract, they rode off to Brookville to make their entries. But when there they learned that the unexpected thing had happened. Twenty-two days before, Daniel Pritchard had entered the very eighty that King had marked as his own. But George King was not the man, when once he had put his hand to the plough, to look back. He purchased the eighty adjoining the Pritchard tract on the west, while Bergen bought on the north and Covert on the east, as they had originally intended, after which they returned to the neighbor- hood of their purchases, and King finding the owner of the coveted eighty, paid him two hundred dollars for his bargain and took a conveyance in fee. Covert and Bergen returned to their homes,
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but King remained. Securing names to a petition to the Legisla- ture, praying for the organization of the territory lying between Morgan and Shelby into a county, he went by the way of Corydon, then the capital of the State, and procured the passage of an act organizing the new county, which receiving the signature of the Governor, became a law on the 3Ist of December, IS22, and the county was named Johnson, in memory of John Johnson, one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of the State.
John Smiley, the miller, was appointed by Governor Hendricks, sheriff of the county, and in accordance with the law, issued a writ of election to be holden on Saturday, the Sth day of March, 1823. Two voting places were named, one at the house of Hezekiah Davison, on Blue River, and the other at the home of Daniel Boaz, on White River. Israel Watts and Daniel Boaz, were elected associate judges; Samuel Herriott, clerk of the circuit court; William Shaffer, county recorder: and William Freeman, John S. Miller and James Ritchey, commissioners, and a county govern- ment was thereupon duly organized.
Here let us pause in our story and take a look backward. Up to the close of the year, 1822, there were three centers of settle- ment in the county, Blue River, Nineveh and White River, the first of which contained fifty-nine families, the second twenty and the third fourteen. There were a few cabins scattered here and there throughout the county, outside of these settlements as we have seen, enough by actual court to bring the whole number up to an even 100, which according to the usual method of computa- tion in such cases, gives a population of 500 .*
All these original settlers were poor men. It is hard for the people of this more favored age to form a clear conception of the depth of their poverty. The greater part were land owners, it is true, but unimproved land was selling at " Congress price," and a cabin and five or six acres of cleared land added from fifty to seventy-five dollars to that price. The number of acres of cleared land contiguous to the 100 cabins in the county did not exceed 500. Probably there were as many horses in the county as heads of families, and three times as many cattle. Hogs were becoming numerous, in a few localities, but were worth little more than so many wild deer. All the furniture in the 100 cabins did not cost as much as the furniture to be found in a single one of a good many houses in the county to-day. It is hard to estimate aggre- gate values in the absence of the assessor, but it is believed that
* In my History of Johnson County, published in 1881, by a printer's mistake the num- ber is put at 550. It was written 500. I inadvertently repeated the mistake in " Making a Neighborhood."
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excluding land values, an assessor on the first day of January, IS23, could not have found over $5,000 or $6,000 worth of property in the whole county.
Returning from this digression, we find that George King, hav- ing secured the county organization, early in the following spring (1823), moved to his purchase, that he might be on the ground when the time for locating the county seat came round. It was in the latter part of February or first of March, that accompanied by his two unmarried daughters and his married daughter and her husband, David McCaslin, and Simon Covert, whose wife staid be- hind until the ensuing fall, and Isaac Voorheis, a young and un- married man. King left his Kentucky home and came to Johnson County. The movers found a road cut out to Elisha Adams' place, and thence on, assisted by Robert Gilchrist,# they made their own road up the east bank of Young's Creek to the mouth of Camp Creek.
It was late in the day when the axemen followed by the teams and cattle reached the creek, where they found a dark and turbu- lent stream rolling between them and their destination. Not knowing the fords the teams were driven back to a high dry knoll where a camp fire was started and a camp made. Little did the campers on that knoll, as they watched by the light and warmth of their camp fire that night, dream that they would live to see the day when that knoll would become the site of a college devoted to " Christianity and Culture." +
Hardly were the teams unhitched that evening, when it was discovered that the meal and sieve had been left at Adam's, where- upon King and Gilchrist and McCaslin returned, leaving Covert and Voorheis to occupy the camp alone. Other things it seems had been left behind, also, for the campers milked into and drank milk out of the bells, which had been brought for use in the range. The next morning on the return of King and McCaslin the pilgrims sought for and found a place to safely cross the " swollen stream." A beautiful tract of high and dry land on the north bank of Young's Creek, which has since been graded down and is now occupied by the residence of Judge Woollen and of others, was their objective point, but such a network of down logs overgrown with spice wood and other bushes all woven together, with wild grape vines, not to mention a forest of beeches, maples, hackberries, sycamores and buckeyes, did they encounter that the whole day was consumed in reaching their destination. The writer has repeatedly talked with
* In the early records this name is spelled Gilcrees. The family have since changed the spelling as in the text.
t This is the motto placed on the seal of Franklin College.
P.
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three of the men who cut the first road through what is now known as the Old Bear Plat of the city of Franklin and also with others who saw the place before the town site was cleared off and all agreed in pronouncing it the most impenetrable thicket in all the country round about. A hurricane not many years before had passed down Young's Creek and up Camp (now Hurricane ), leav- ing a wide swath of fallen timber in its wake and it was through this the road was made that day.
In the evening, wearied and hungry, the emigrants reached the high ground King had selected for his cabin site. A tent was erected and a hasty camp made. The meal bag and the seive, having been brought up from Adams', a supper of corn cake and bacon was enjoyed. Tin cups took the place of cow bells for drinking vessels. At an early hour the men lay down on a browse bed before a glowing camp fire, under cover of a tent to sleep. They were too tired to talk and soon were in the land of dreams. During the night, however, a tempest of rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning and wind arose, and such commotion ensued in the forest around them that they felt their lives were in peril. At intervals the crashing of falling trees could be heard, and be- fore the blast had expended its force a large tree, close by, was wrenched from its roots and fell thundering to the earth, but hap- pily in a direction from them. More than fifty years afterwards Col. Simeon Covert, speaking of that falling tree, said: " It shocked us greatly," and sure it must, as it crashed to the earth amid the blackness of night, in a tempest-tossed forest. The next morning work was begun on King's cabin, a two-roomed structure with an entry between, which served as a house for all, till the little fields were cleared and the crops laid by. That cabin stood on the highest part of the knoll which has since been cut down, crosswise of the present line of Jefferson street. The next step taken was to make clearings for corn. Covert's patch was amid the fallen timber in the track of the old hurricane. Over three acres he grubbed, chopped and burned, clearing after a fashion, and planting on the 30th of May. At the end of seventeen days he laid his corn by, and the following fall gathered at the rate of fifty bushels to the acre, of good corn. The particulars of King's and McCashin's planting has not been remembered.
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