USA > Indiana > Vigo County > History of Vigo county, Indiana, with biographical selections > Part 16
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The blessing over: "Now help yourself," is all the ceremony, and all that you feel you need. The broiled venison steaks, the well- browned spare ribs, the " cracklin " corn bread, the luscious honey piled in layers, and the cold sweet milk and the hot roasted sweet potatoes, with appetites all around the board to match this feast fit for the gods. You eventually quit eating for two good reasons: Your storing capacity is about exhausted, and then you notice such a hun- gry, eager expression in the faces of the children who are standing around and furtively watching the food on the table, and no doubt wondering if you will ever get through. Each one, when he finishes his meal, without ceremony gets up, and as no change of dishes is thought of, the particular youngster who is to eat after that partic-
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ular person is quickly in the place, and proceeds to stay his appe- tite. This arrangement is one of the children's, and no doubt often saves serious scrambling for places. The supper over, the pipes are filled, and the women have so quietly whisked things away and cleared the table, how they did it and where they put them you can not for your life tell, yet they are gone, and the day's working and eating are over, and in a few minutes the trundle-beds will be pulled out, and the children at the head and at the foot will fill them something after the fashion of a sardine box, let us bid these good people good-bye.
The Improved Log Cabin .- Nothing more distinctly marked the advance of the settlement of the country than the change in the architecture of the log cabins. Ihave tried to describe the open-faced brush and the round-log cabins that were so distinctly the first era. In a few years if you go back to see your friend, as you are very apt to do, as you will remember that supper a long time, you will find a two-story hewed-log house. the cracks between the logs "cliinked and pointed " with clean white lime mortar, and it may be the walls inside and out are heavily whitewashed. It may be covered with shingles even, and glass windows with 6x8 glass put in with putty. Hard oak planks, cut mayhap with the whip-saw, are on the floors above and below. An outside rock chimney towers above either end of the building. A shed-roofed kitchen, which is also the dining-room, is along the whole length of the main building. A leaning ladder of easy ascent takes you "up stairs " which is one big room, while the lower part of the main building is divided by a partition. The upper floor is the sleeping room of the boys and the " hands," while the room partitioned off is the girls' room, and which they consider the " parlor" as well as the bed-room. The old folks have their very tall feather bed in the main or living room, but under it is the trundle bed, as there is probably another under every bed in the house, and although the number of beds has greatly increased, if there is company to stay all night, this will ne- cessitate " pallets " on the floor. There is still the great wide fire- place and the cheerful open fire, and if it is winter, every evening just before dark a new back-log is rolled in with handspikes and into its place, and a "fire-stick " quite as large as one man can handle is placed on the short heavy dog-irons. But a second and smaller back-log is on top of the main one, and then the great yawning fireplace is soon full of the bright blazing fire. A hang- ing crane is here as well as in the kitchen fireplace. In the same yard is still the old round-log cabin where the family lived before the new house was built. This is now the loom-house. It is also lumbered up with barrels and boxes and piles of lumber and hoes, tools, and probably there is still a bed in it. The people are now wearing
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home-made clothing, and here the girls deftly weave those bright linseys with their bright red, white and black stripes.
On the outer walls of the loom-house were now stretched the coon and possum skins, and the roof was used to dry apples and peaches in the fall of the year, and in this lumber house, tied in sacks and hanging from the cross beams were the garden seeds, the bunches of sage, boneset, onion tops, and the dried pumpkin on poles on which were placed the rings as thickly as they could be placed. The barrel of kraut stood with its heavy weights on it in one corner of the kitchen, and by the side of the fireplace was the huge dye-pot and on this a wooden cover, and this was often worn smooth being a handy seat by the fire. Even stories were told, that seated on this there had been much "sparking " done before the older girls were all married off. When a young man visited a girl, or for that matter a widower or bachelor paid any marked attention it was universally called " sparkin'."
This hewed-log house was sometimes neatly weatherboarded, painted and had a neat brick chimney, and you could not very readily tell it from a frame house. Here children were born, grew to ma- turity, married and commenced life nearly in their one-room log cabin, which more rapidly gave way to the nice frame or even the great brick mansion, with the ornaments and luxuries of modern life. Where now may be seen buildings of granite, marble and iron that gleam in the morning sun in blinding splendor that have cost hundreds of thousands, nay, even millions of dollars, once probably stood the round-log cabin that had been built from the standing trees about the spot by the husband, aided only by the young wife, with no other tools than the ax and the auger. These honest, patient, simple-minded folk never bothered their heads to anticipate the regal edifices of which their humble cabin was the beginning. Their earn- est and widest aspiration was merely " be it ever so humble there is no place like home." Around these wide but humble hearths they saw their children grow up to strong men and women, honest, un- sophisticated, rough and blunt in manner, but ignorant of the knowledge of the vices that so often lurks beneath the polish and splendors of older societies and superfluous wealth. Their wants few and simple, within the easy reach of every one, their ambition brought them no heartburnings, no twinges of conscience and none of that pitiable despair, where what we may call that higher sphere in the circles so often brings-where there are no medicines to min- ister to a mind diseased.
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CHAPTER XIII.
1816.
PEACE had been declared between Great Britain and America.
Peace had also been permanently established between the whites and Indians in the Wabash valley, and the restless spirit of American pioneers had found another outlet.
This year may be fixed as that of the real commencement of the grand movement of pioneers to Vigo county. The war with En- gland was over-the second war for American independence; the dispute with the Canadians as to the title to the lands in this region was also settled; the Indian problem was practically solved and their last claim to the soil adjusted permanently, and then, too, the soldiers of the war of 1812 had returned to the older settlements and fully informed their friends all about the new and beautiful country of the Wabash valley. From the Carolinas, passing up through Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, on to Pennsylvania, New York to Maine the restless and adventurous were disturbed like the fields in the early spring's sprouting, in the advance to the upper Mississippi valley, so soon to be the garden and granary of the world. It had started all along the line, and in the few years we see the transcendant wonder of 25,000,000 people with all those elements of the highest civilization and wealth, take the place of waste, the wild beasts and savagery. There is nothing parallel to this in the entire annals of mankind. In the life-time of people who came here nearly grown and before their eyes has passed this tremendous drama. A very little band of those living witnesses to all this are still with us, and I, for one, confess that I look upon these venerable few with an interest, almost an awe, that to my mind attaches to no other person or persons in the world.
The old or medieval ages when a boundless fete day and wild joy and adoration attended the return of the nation's warriors from their expeditions of victory and conquest, the honored and glorified guests of all the nation, are now read of by our youths with all the intense interests and imagery of a healthy and active boy's soul. Their excited imagination can recall the scenes in the parks and groves about Rome and Athens that were consecrated to the honor and entertainment of the nation's returned heroes. And the ac- counts of the triumphal processions engage deeply even the older
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and more sober heads. These great occasions were well calculated to expand the bud of young patriotism to fullest bloom, and there is nothing that the people can bestow upon their sun-bronzed war- riors but that is freely given.
They had conquered a city and brought home their beautiful captives chained to their chariots as the triumphal procession passed along the streets, and the great lords killed thousands of cattle and fed their dependants, and rolled out tierce after tierce of strong drink that the people might rejoice to their full. In their expedi- tion and war they had added perhaps territory to the empire, but as often had besieged the city and starved them and then assaulted and put the people to death and burned the town as a penalty for their long and stubborn resistance.
The civilization of that age recognized only as great victors those of the sharp and bloody sword. At that time transplanting peoples that new nations and new civilizations might be budded and might grow and spread their benign influences over the world, the one instrument of culture was the flaming sword of the plumed knights of battle-the mailed warrior was the husbandman, and the fruits he garnered were the captives and slain-slavery and death.
Place this wonderful movement of the northwest by the side of the great historical war eras of the past, and the full import of the saying that " Peace hath her victories as renowned as war," will come to you with tremendous force. "As renowned," indeed! There really is nothing to compare between them. One is simply waste and death, the other is the better and higher life and all its joys and boundless blessings. One converts happy homes into waste places and mourning, the other reverses this in all things and makes the waste places ring with joy and creates the millions of happy homes, and lifts up the poor, wretched and ignorant and develops the earth's greatest and best.
To my mind these venerable few of the early pioneers now left to us are the nation's guests; being its foundation builders they are the great and all-conquering heroes, a part and partakers of the greatest victories won since the dawn of creation. It matters not how humble the part they played in the wonderful drama, yet here they are, all that is left to us of the men and women whose old eyes when bright and young helped work out the supreme prob- lem, partook of it, and saw it all come step by step. Seat them then in honor in the great triumphal car at the head of this proces- sion of 25,000,000 of happy and joyful people, whose captives are their children in the golden chains of love. This is the fruits of their victories. This is the triumph that we see. Could you bor- row their vision and their memories, you would look back and see
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their comrades and companions whose bones have moldered in their unmarked graves many years. The rough sandstones at the head of others' graves placed there by loving hands that have long since ceased to pulse with life-that are tumbled and broken and the rains and the winds have nearly erased the crude lettering that so briefly told their short history upon earth. Living or dead, their supreme work sanctifies their immortal names. Their resources at the hour of commencing their great work were their bare hands and stout hearts. No martial blare of trumpets, no applauding world looking on, no bugle blasts or fluttering flags to fire their souls to frenzy, but in the solitudes, the storms, the pathless, un- known lands, where lurked dangers and death to rise up in unseen waves to confront and destroy them, they moved on to the supreme victory.
In a very little while it will be only the printed page that will be left to tell posterity anything at all of these men, women and children, who came and saw and conquered. Everything in this world perishes, passes away forever, except the impressions of the types upon the virgin paper. Wars and their effects, empires and principalities, civilizations and religions, nations and their works may come and go, but these live on forever, bearing the seeds of their ever-renewing life of their own immortality without the loss of a syllable or letter, " they are," as Lord Bacon has well said, "as ships that sail between the vast seas of time, making one nation a partaker of the knowledge of other nations."
The arrivals of the year 1816 and something about them-such as can now be collected from the records and from the few left of those who came that year and commenced to make their homes in what is now Vigo county- is the immediate purpose of this chapter. In this list we can now enumerate the following:
Abraham Tourttlot.
John M. Coleman.
Eliakim Crosby.
Caleb Crawford.
Carey Marcellus.
Robert Graham.
Thomas H. Clarke.
James Cunningham.
Charles Bullitt.
William S. McCorter.
Thomas Bullitt.
William White.
Hyacinth Lasalle.
Joseph Kitchell.
John Owens.
Alexander Chamberlin.
Phineas M. Cooper.
Jacob Lane.
The above names are taken from the oldest official record that refers to the people of Vigo county. These are the land records, not only the entries, but the deeds and any other recorded docu- ments or papers. It is not certain that some of these did not come sooner than this, but it is certain that they were here at that time,
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because the record says so. But after the most diligent search there can be no evidence found that is proof that any of these came earlier than the year given. The tombstones, obituaries and recol- lections of those who knew them while living have all been con- sulted to the utmost, and they have therefore been put among the arrivals of 1816.
Among the others known to have come in that year has already been mentioned the colony from Geneseo, N. Y.
Joseph Richardson, wife and seven children-four sons and three daughters. Richardson brought far more wealth than the average pioneer. He entered as much as twelve sections of land. Govern- ment land then sold on credit at $4 per acre, and afterward, when the price was reduced to $1.25 per acre in cash, this caused a great temporary loss to Mr. Richardson, so much so, indeed, that it was much the work of a life time to regain it. This is but another instance of the wrongs coming of the ignorance and folly of states- men in trying to dabble forever in the private affairs of the people. If those men who then made the laws could have anticipated or realized a little of the present, they would have given these people homes simply for occupying them, and then have limited the amount that each person could possess the fee simple title to, say, 160 acres, and probably each head of the family 320 acres. The truth was, this land was the people's. They had to earn and get it before the government could have any claim to it. All the right a good gov- ernment can have to the soil is that of a few simple regulations tending to prevent the monopolizing of it by the strong and greedy -simply, in some measure, to see that the weak are not crushed by the powerful. The men who "want the earth " always have the most plausible arguments about " developing," etc.
Andrew Brooks was a gunsmith, and it is not known what year he came, but it was among the very first. He repaired guns in the fort for both whites and Indians. He married one of the May girls, and for a long time repaired all the guns in this portion of the country. He was a good workman and could make a gun complete; a quiet and respectable citizen. Joseph Richardson had married Mary Burnett. He died in York at the age of seventy-five years. She died there in 1851.
His daughter, Matilda, married Dr. McCulloch. He practiced medicine in Terre Haute many years.
Maj. Abraham Markle brought his second wife wlien he came to Vigo. His sons were William, Abraham, Henry, George, Fredrick, Joseph and Buonaparte. The Markle family, John Dickson and family, Isaac Lambert and family settled on Otter creek. These two men were brothers-in-law, and they built the first water-mill in the county on Honey creek, south of Terre Haute. Before they
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put up their mill the people had to go to Vincennes or pound their corn meal in a mortar, sometimes in the fall of the year grating it on a tin grater. This grater was a simple enough affair. It was made of a piece of tin punched with many holes and bowed and tacked to a board, the rough side out. After the corn became too hard for roasting ears, and before becoming flinty dry, it grated very well, and if you were very careful to keep your knuckles off the tin you could soon prepare enough for the family meal.
Joshua A. Olds came with the Markles in 1816. They came down the Alleghany and Ohio and disembarked at Evansville, and came by land to Vincennes. His family was wife, son George, Elizabeth, Sarah, Electa and Emily. Isaac was born after they came to the west. He is the only surviving son, and Mrs. Lester Tillotson is the only surviving daughter of the Olds family. Isaac lives in Kansas. Mrs. Tillotson lives in Terre Haute in the house where she and her husband lived, at the corner of Second and Swan streets, over fifty years ago.
Joshua A. Olds was a valuable acquisition to the pioneers. He was a skilled millwright, and could do much and very clever cabi- net work. He made most of the first chairs ever seen in Vigo and the surrounding country, as well as built the first mills in this and Parker counties. He was a native of Salem, Mass. His wife was Mary Lanburner, a native of Canada. Mrs. Olds died in 1819. He died in Montezuma in 1848.
Sarah Olds (Mrs. Lester Tillotson) was thirteen years old when they came to the old fort. She distinctly remembers that there was one house in Evansville, the point where they disem- barked to go across the country to Vincennes. This one house seemed to be the whole of the town, and was residence, store, town hall and general rendezvous for Indians and whites who had any- thing to trade. The mental inventory left upon her young mind is that the entire store consisted of three barrels of hickory nuts. With such a fair start in the world-all these nuts in stock, surely the young and ambitious city might say with Tam O'Shanter:
The storm without might roar and rustle. The Evansvillians did nae care a whustle.
Mr. Olds built his round-log cabin, and the first year only attempted to put a puncheon floor under that part occupied by the beds. The other part of the room was a clean and well-swept dirt floor.
Of all the people who came to Vigo county in 1816, as old or older than Mrs. Tillotson at the time, she is the only one surviving. She was born in February, 1803, and is now well along in her eighty-eighth year, tall, straight, and as active, mentally and phys-
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ically, as the average woman of fifty. Seated on one of the chairs made by her father sixty odd years ago, she told the writer her recol- lections of the past seventy-five years, when she was a good big girl thirteen years old on her way with her father's family to the Wa- bash country. Her mind seemed to be no more at fault in going back over that three-quarters of a century than if it were all the happenings of a few weeks or days ago.
She remembers that the mill of Lambert & Dickson on Honey creek was built on a sandy foundation, and the raging waters came and it was partially wrecked, was repaired, but again it was de- stroyed totally.
Maj. Markle's mill was built on Otter creek, and this was a bet- ter mill and for some years was the dependence for bread for the people for many miles around. That then her father went to Rose- ville to build the mill at that place for Chauncey Rose. Thus when still a young girl she came to see much of Mr. Rose, and tells of that gentleman offering to sell to her father a tract of land now almost in the very heart of the city of Terre Haute-sell it for a very small sum and all on credit, with the assurance that he could take his own time and convenience to pay for it. That her father feared debt that he could not meet, and of course never dreamed that it would be of much more money value than at that time.
She told about her husband buying the lot where she now lives, paying $100 for it; then in the very center of fashionable residence property, that for the same money he could have bought probably any forty acres now in the fashionable residence part of the city.
As she talked on, these things in their realization seemed to come to her much like a dream. Where the post-office now stands was then "away out to the cemetery"-how could the city go there? Thus the graveyards of to-day are the heart of the throbbing city to- morrow, and the splendid city of to-day is the ancient and buried ruins to-morrow.
In this New York colony was the Redford family. The father died on the way, and was buried, and the widow, four sons and a daughter came on, and made Vigo county their home. The sons were Henry, Richard, Moses and James. The daughter, Sarah, married John F. King. The Redfords settled on Fort Harrison prairie.
There was also the family of Capt. Daniel Stringham, with his houseful of boys. It was a son of Daniel Stringham who had run away to sea when a lad before the family came west, and became the eminent Rear Admiral Silas Horton Stringham. The String- hams settled in the lower end of Fort Harrison prairie. One of the daughters of Daniel Stringham became Mrs. Jane Wedding-mar- ried Judge Randolph H. Wedding. They lived near where is now
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the Orphans' Home. Jane Stringham was Judge Wedding's sec- ond wife. Of this union there was no issue. Admiral Stringham, who died in Brooklyn, was the last of the Stringham family. He was born in Orange county, N. Y., in November, 1797, and entered the navy at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Jane Wedding had preceded her only brother to the grave some years.
Mrs. Tillotson remembers there was the Fitch family also in the New York colony of 1816. They stopped a short time at Fort Har- rison and then went to York, Ill., and made their home. They came in Markle's boat.
A paper of 1866 gives the following: On Tuesday, June 12, there was a gathering of the remnant of the old settlers that came from York State to Vigo county in Capt. Daniel Stringham's flat- boat at the residence of Judge Wedding, two miles east of Terre Haute, on the National road. It was in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the boat-load of emigrants to locate in Vigo county. It was a family boat (flatboat) under command of Daniel Stringham. Maj. John Bond and Col. Webb's family were on the boat. Webb settled in Gill's prairie, Sullivan county. The boat landed at Fort Harrison June 12, 1816.
Of these three families on Stringham's boat there survived at that time (1866) the following: Zebina C. Hovey's wife of Bloom- ington, Iowa; Mrs. Judge Wedding, of Vigo county, and Mrs. Gil- key, of Crawfordsville. These were all the children of Capt. Dan- iel Stringham. Of Maj. John Bond's family were Mrs. Jones, of Fayette township, and her neighbor, Mrs. Johnson. Of the Webb family there were none living.
These five persons were then the only survivors of the three fam- ilies that came here in Stringham's boat. [Particulars of Judge Wedding are given in the next chapter. Settlers, 1817-Ed. ]
Ezekiel Buxton, John Earle, Lewis Hodge, Dr. Charles B. Mod- esitt, Robert Carr, Abner Scott and Henry Redford were of the com- ers of 1816 who settled in Terre Haute. Redford has already been mentioned as one of the Redford sons whose father died when on the way with his family.
Dr. Modesitt had come alone to look at the country, particularly the new town of Terre Haute, and at the sale of lots he made sev- eral purchases and then returned to Virginia, and on horseback brought his wife and child to their new home. This child, then four years old, afterward became Mrs. Chauncey Warren, who is still spared to her family and wide circle of friends.
Dr. Charles B. Modesitt had been educated for a physician. In the language of Capt. William Earle, who wrote so cleverly of his boyhood recollections of Terre Haute and its people: "He was one of those rare old gentlemen that we meet but once in a lifetime-
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