USA > Indiana > Vigo County > History of Vigo county, Indiana, with biographical selections > Part 47
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In June, 1885, the department was made metropolitan, or non- partisan, as to its membership, and placed in charge of Chief Joseph Schell, who displayed to a remarkable degree a faculty for perfectly managing the entire system.
This was the disappearance of the last vestige of the old volun- teer fire department, a great institution in its day, that grew up from the old drays and hogsheads and the bucket brigade. The city had built a system of cisterns all over the city. These are still here, but are used only in the suburbs, where the water mains do not reach, except in emergencies, and then the water-works are aided by the use of the cisterns. In the old volunteer days there was a standing premium of $5 to the company that turned on the first stream of water. This little premium was the bone of con- tention. To hurry and hustle and run for it was the waking and. sleeping dream of the fire laddies, and then to cut the hose of a rival company and turn the whole wild frolic into a fight and break a dozen heads was the fun of a lifetime. It was anything before being beaten in getting the first stream on the fire. No men could be more active and vigilant than these old volunteer companies, and their effectiveness could not have been excelled except for the dis- position to play tricks on each other and cease fighting the fire to fight one another.
1886 .- Joseph Schell, chief; George Reglein, assistant, and Lawrence Kretz, superintendent fire alarm; companies, four men each; steamers Nos. 2 and 3 and hook and ladder company, with four men; two extra men.
1887 .-- Martin Hunter, chief; George Reglein, assistant; Law- rence Kretz, superintendent of fire alarm; all same as 1886.
1888 .-- John Kenedy, chief; George Reglein, assistant; Joseph H. Schell, superintendent fire alarm; same as 1887.
1889 .- Same as year before, except John T. Tully is first as- sistant.
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HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.
1890 .- John D. Jones, chief; Walter J. Bell, assistant; Rich- ard McDonald, superintendent of fire alarm; companies the same.
There are two steamers, six hose companies, one hook and lad- der company, forty-one members, and twenty-two horses. An aerial truck was purchased in 1890, and that takes the place of one of the old ladder companies.
The most disastrous fires that have occurred in the city were the distillery of the Terre Haute Distilling Company, January 21, 1886; loss, $60,000. The Terre Haute Car Works, July 17, 1887; loss, $240,012. The Normal Institute, April 9, 1888; loss, $100,000.
We have now passed over the leading events in the social life and civil affairs of the city from the time of its founding to the present. From the two log cabins-Dr. Modesitt's and William Mars'-all there was of the town, we are assured by Chauncey Rose when his eyes first beheld it, or the first beginnings that Lucius Scott says he saw here when he came in 1817, June 27, three or four cabins and Henry Redford's large hewed-log house that he was hurrying to finish, which afterward was famed as the "Eagle and Lion." The roof was on and the floors laid and great efforts were being made to prepare it for the reception of the large company ex- pected there to participate in the festivities of the Fourth of July approaching. That was the first national day .celebration in the county. It was a notable one. Maj. Chunn and his officers Levit Sturgus and Drs. Clark and Mccullough, with several other gen- tlemen and their ladies were of the happy crowd of celebrants. They came down from the fort where they resided. There were people here all the way from Shaker Prairie, Knox county. The fort band was on hand, the Declaration read, and from the "medicine chests " the men drank glowing and patriotic toasts (if such things can "glow") ; a great dinner and a ball at night was the crowning of the patriotic day. In your dreams can you see those heavy old fellows in phantom shadows dancing the stately minuet ?
As remarked in this beginning we have traced the story along down the three-score and ten years, and here is now the splendid city. From three or four log houses in 1816 there has sprung up, as if by magic, in the short space of time a beautiful and flourish- ing city with a population of 31,000. And a very large part of this increase has been in the last twenty years. In the first years of the history of the town, the best houses were built on the bank of the river, and on First street. In about ten or fifteen years, Second street began to vie with First street for the supremacy. And in a few years afterward, Third, then called Market street, became the Broadway of the village. At this time all east of Sixth street was out on the prairie on the hill. "Sibley town" was then a thicket of
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oak saplings and hazel bushes. "The Indian Orchard," one of the oldest landmarks of early days, was way up the river, where the boys went on Saturdays for green apples. "Strawberry hill," an- other of the time-honored landmarks, which has not to this day altogether lost its identity, was way down in the country. And " Pucket's lane," a celebrated locality of the olden times, but now almost unknown, was way down south of the village. Even so late as the year 1840, Seventh street was a county road, and all east of it fields of clover and corn-Seventh which to-day claims the honor of being the central avenue of the city, though the honor rightly belongs to Sixth street. Consequently to the pioneer of 1816 and 1824, or even to the old resident of 1840, without a change. The old landmarks have disappeared or are forgotten. From a few scat- tered white houses on the river bank, we have become a beautiful city on the prairie.
Returning now and taking up the thread of the material or busi- ness trade and commercial life of the place we may hope to find quite as interesting and instructive a study as was presented in the preceding chapters. From the little stump hominy-mills, where they pounded their corn for the family bread to the horse, the water, and finally the great steam mills; from the whip-saw and its slow and painful cutting the log into rough, uneven planks to the great gang-saws moving through the timber with such perfect accu- racy, and counting its products by the millions, where once it was by hundreds; from the bark canoe to the pirogue, the flatboat, the keel, to the canal, and then to the rude first steamboat on to the floating, swift palace, walking the waters with its hundreds of tons burden like a thing of life, and still on to the steel-tracked railroad taking the place of the dim trails of the buffaloes, and the couriers des bois, and bringing the world to one common focus, enabling each people to participate of the advantages of all other people, and a part of all these is the land filled with great factories, mills, foundries and farm machinery, where the puffing and whistling of the steam engines girdle the earth in their eternal whir and hum. Then the telegraph, telephone, electric lights and electric motors, and busy men boring into the granite bowels of the earth more persistent than the borers in the stone columns for gold, silver, precious stones, and far more important yet, for fuel, gas and oil, and for granite and marble. With his puny hand striking the wheeling earth to its depths, and transforming beyond the magi- cian's dream the rough, the dark and the noisome into the good and the beautiful. These materialists, in the sense of progressive man, have toiled, invented and created that we might have and enjoy. They are the unpoetic, practical side of life, giving us, however, as bounteous God's largesses, the mere contemplation of which may numb the brain and stagger the mind.
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HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.
A Cincinnati directory of 1831 makes elaborate mention of the " Wabash trade." The writer says: "It has been suggested to us by a mercantile friend that some notice of this trade would be inter- esting to a large class of our citizens. A commerce of great and increasing importance is carried on between this city and the towns on that river. Some idea of the value of this trade may be formed from the fact that from the 5th of March last to the 10th of April fifty-four steamboats arrived and departed at Vincennes alone. It is also estimated that at least 1,000 flatboats entered the Ohio from the Wabash at the same time." There may be exaggeration in this flatboat estimate, but the lesson is there nevertheless. Then follows a list of the important trading points on the Wabash that Cincinnati should carefully cultivate, prominent of which is Terre Haute. The directory adds: "Merchandise for Greencastle and Blakesburg should be shipped to Terre Haute." This was then a natural dis- tributing point, because not only was it shipped here for the places named, but for points (nearly all points) west in Illinois for fifty and seventy-five miles. At one time mention is made of "a fleet of steamboats, laden with salt, wending their way up the Wabash." This would seem strange to a shipping clerk nowadays, but at that time it was the only way that that section of country could be sup- plied with salt except at enormous prices. In the thirties Capt. Wolfe came up the river with a salt fleet, and for many miles the farmers would come and exchange their wheat for salt, bushel for bushel, both the wheat and the salt being hauled by the farmer both ways. An old Cincinnati merchant said that he remembered when in the spring boats were laden at that place asregularly for the Wa- bash as for any other river points. Capt. R. Tarleton, once a sea captain, attempted to establish a packet line between Logansport and Cincinnati. Capt. John J. Roe, afterward one of the noted steamboat men of St. Louis, got his "start in life" in the Wabash trade with his steamboat Concord, which craft is well remembered by the few old citizens remaining of those early times. Some of the largest of Western steamboats would ascend the river to La Fay- ette. A boat that could pass the canal at the Ohio falls, it was con- sidered, could ascend the Wabash to the head of navigation. They would come laden from New Orleans with sugar, molasses, salt and other merchandise, and get a return load of pork, corn, wheat and flour. This was in the old three-boiler-boat days, when the river landing was the busy place where men gathered, where trade was carried on.
The Wabash flatboats were small, generally not more than sixty feet long by sixteen wide; often not more than twenty or twenty- five feet long. There was quite an industry in Terre Haute build- ing these flatboats, loading them and going down the river.
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The first boat, as related, came in 1822 to Terre Haute. The old Terre Haute cannon was rolled out to greet her. The people were out on a great holiday. A premium of a town lot was given the bold captain, and feasting and dining and dancing celebrated the trip from Vincennes all the way up. This was soon followed by the arrival of the " Plow Boy," when again the old cannon belched forth a royal welcome, to be answered in her salutes by the little brass cannon on the boat, and everybody was down to the wharf to shake hands with the boatmen and welcome them to Terre Haute. One venerable old pioneer tells me that he heard a conversation on the occasion of the arrival of the first boat, when one bold man pre- dicted that the day would come when a boat carrying 300 tons would at some time in our history come as often as once a week, fully laden both ways. One of the men doubted this, pronounced it impossible, and finally figured out 300 tons each way for a whole year, and the man's prediction was looked upon as incipient lunacy. The crowd decided that such a rate of transportation would compel them to come laden with water to pour into the stream on arrival, and then dig sand from the bank for the return load, to be floated out on the water they had brought. For a quarter of a century all commerce in this section was borne on the waters of the Wabash. The rapid increase of boats always found it difficult to keep pace with the rapid increase in the demands upon them.
In 1826 the agitating question among the people was the improve- ment of the Wabash river. A man writing on the subject June 18, 1821, said: "From the best information within our reach we believe that about 1,700 flatboats have descended the Wabash this spring. The boats without cargoes, valued at $100 each, would amount to $17,000. Estimating cargoes at $500 each, the total amount of value that descends this stream will be $1,200,000, taking no account of the downward freight on steamboats."
March, 1828, the river reached 28 feet and 7 inches; May and June, 1858, 28 feet 7 inches; the wagon grade then broke, and this lowered it; August, 1867, 27 feet 6 inches; August, 1875, 27 feet 6 inches.
Old Boat Advertisements .- Regular Terre Haute and Evansville packet. Daniel Boone will hereafter run as a regular weekly packet, leaving Terre Haute every Tuesday, at 3 o'clock P. M. Burton & Tilly, agents. N. B .- The public can rely on the boat making her trips in time, being the fastest boat ever in this trade.
Regular Evansville, Terre Haute and Lafayette packet. The new fast running boat Visitor, N. F. Webb, master, will run as a regular weekly packet between the above ports throughout the season. Draws only seventeen inches.
February 31, 1849, steamer Hibernia, T. H. & L. packet.
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February 10, 1849, regular packet Western, S. S. Paxton, master. February 20, 1849, fine steamer Vermont, Capt. William Haslett.
March 30, 1849. Following steamers at the wharf: Lowell, Richland, Sante Fe, Visitor, Hibernia, Magnet and Columbia.
The Western sunk March, 1849, near Horseshoe Bend, heavily laden with pork, flour and lard, valued at $3,500, owned by Capt. S. S. Paxon and Clerk Bauce.
March, 1849, steamer Boone lost at York, Ill., a party of pleasure seekers on board from Lafayette. She left the main river and was carried out on shore. Owned by Capt. Jordan. They dug a canal to get her back to the river.
In 1831, between March 5 and April 15, fifty-four steamboats arrived and departed from Vincennes. In February, March and April of the same year there were sixty arrivals and departures from Lafayette, then a village of about 300 inhabitants. Many of these boats were large side-wheelers, built for the Ohio and Mississippi, and known as New Orleans boats.
February 16, 1854, the first boat passed through the I. & St. L. bridge at Terre Haute. In 1855 a 400-ton boat, built wholly of cedar, from the Tennessee river, while descending struck the bridge pier and stripped her port side from bow to stern.
March, 1870, a fish boat passed through the draw of the Van bridge.
May 30, 1862, the steamer D. B. Campbell, owned by Capt. N. Shewmaker, left the Wabash river.
May 30, 1862, the Mary Gray made her first trip up the river to Terre Haute.
December 17, 1862, the propeller Buffalo in descending struck the bridge pier and stove a hole. Sank at the foot of Chestnut street. The owner of the boat was knocked into the river; rescued by Chauncey Miller.
February 5, 1870, the steamer Vigo was burned at the wharf.
March 3, 1870, the Tyrus sank her barge above the Alton bridge, laden with lard belonging to F. F. Keith.
James Farrington established the first steam ferry in 1846.
March, 1856, the steamer American struck and carried away entire span of the bridge.
The Canal .-- In 1824 Col. Thomas H. Blake was a member of the Legislature from Vigo county. He introduced the first measure looking to the building of the Erie & Wabash canal. The capital was then at Corydon. Col. Blake made a lengthy and able report on the canal question, recommending State aid to the project. In this report lie assumed, correctly too, that Terre Haute was the head of navigation, and therefore the imperative demand of the age was for ample transportation facilities from this route to Lake Erie.
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HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.
This was the step that led to the complete work that went on for twenty-six years before the first canal boat from the north hove in sight of Terre Haute. One after another took up the project. First there was, of course, much discussion as to the main route, even if one were ever built. The canal act passed the legislature in January, 1830. In 1841 matters had progressed until there was every probability it would be built somewhere near where it was at last located. Col. R. W. Thompson was in the legislature of 1840-41, and advocated changing it, although work had been done to a railroad. The country was not ready for this advanced idea, and the common voice was for the canal. The people of Vigo county could see that farm products were selling at Lafayette for double what they brought here.
In 1848 the canal was completed from Toledo to Lafayette, and both packets and line boats were running to the latter place. Peter McKenna says he arrived from New York in 1848, and went to work for Samuel Dodson (afterward city marshal), contractor on the canal at the summit near Lockport, ten miles southeast of Terre Haute. The contracts were in half-mile sections, and when he arrived no work had yet been done through the limits of Terre Haute. The whole line was completed and the water turned in the latter part of May, 1850. K. B. Osborn was superintendent, and William J. Ball was resident engineer. Thomas Dowling was one of the canal trustees. It may be here noted that William J. Ball was the first practical and able civil engineer to locate in Terre Haute. He was brought here by the building of the canal. He came in 1840, and was chief engineer on several of the early rail- roads. He died in 1875. Two of his sons, William C. and Spencer Ball, are the proprietors and publishers of the Terre Haute Evening Gazette. The first line boat to arrive was the Iolus, Capt. Spear- ance, in June following, filled with officers of the canal and many prominent citizens-jolly sailors on the "raging "- afestive crowd painting a storm on the troubled waters. The canal was then com- pleted to the reservoir junction. Soon afterward the work was finished to Worthington, and from there on to Evansville, and was opened to that place in 1852, the terminus. The first regular Terre Haute packet was the " Eliza," Capt. David Dodson, and the next was a small boat of Samuel Dodson's. Her full name, no doubt, was " Eliza Jane," but the space was too small for the contractor to put it all on the queen of the waters. The canal era, as well as the Erie canal, in Terre Haute, lasted just ten years, commencing in 1850 and practically ending in 1860. The Rothschilds gave up the enterprise, abandoned it, in fact, in 1858, when it ceased to be a commercial highway. Then some of the leading men of Terre Haute, at the head of whom was Chauncey Rose, organized a com-
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pany to keep up the canal and operate it for the local trade from Terre Haute to Worthington. W. D. Griswold was vice-president and Gen. Charles Cruft, treasurer. After two years, or a little more, this finally stopped. The west bank of the canal within the limits of Terre Haute had been invaded by the wash of the river, and the career of the Wabash and Erie canal was at an end. No trace of it can now be found in the corporate limits. It came down from the lower line of the city cemetery, running close to the river bank, to the foot of Mulberry street, and then turned east on Eagle street, and then bending to the northi to Canal street, then east on Canal street to Tenth street, following that to Oak street, thence south- easterly, passing out of the city. The grounds at the Union depot and the road tracks occupy nearly the entire old canal, and steam engines fly along where was once the patient canal mule. The shrill railroad whistle was the knell of the canal, emptying its waters, shriveling its banks and giving back its well-trodden tow paths to the briars and brambles, and where once floated its boats are now great solid houses rooted in the firm earth, and young men smile at the palace-car dining table when told of the joy and bright anticipations that came to their fathers with the arrival of the first line boat on the canal. Yesterday is dead forever. To-day, with its ambitions, joys, hopes and laughter, will go to to-morrow's charnel house, and thus goes on forever the whirligig of time. We smile in pity for those who have gone before us, just as those who are to come after us will smile at our simplicity and our ambitions and hopes.
The Age of Fire and Steam .- To the people of Terre Haute this is the great era in her history-the power lifting the strug- gling young town into the present splendid city. The dawn of this great age was the beginning of the town's life, and they have come and grown together. And now comes to the most thoughtful the interesting problem of whether we are not now fairly entering upon the new age of electricity, much in the same way as the founda- tion builders were upon their age of fire and steam, and that before us are the same unknown advances that lay before them. Civiliza- tion is not yet a finished work, and there is labor for us all who can think, invent or combine and utilize the wonderful powers and secrets of nature, and that passes on higher and ever higher to where nations shall cease to decay and perish, and when men shall no longer suffer the whips and scorpions of ignorance.
National Road .- We have already seen that the railroad trains now fly along the route where was once the canal, as on the old National road, in its day a great government project of building from the ocean to the Mississippi a wagon road, that would better enable people to go and come from the east to the west.
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The old National road, from Baltimore to the Mississippi river, was the government's vast undertaking in the early part of this century, when our Union itself was young, weak and poor. To enable the people to reach the national capital was one of the origi- nal objects of the stupendous undertaking, starting in the east and coming with its builders it was creeping slowly along, and as com- pleted, section by section, throwing up embankments and spanning streams with its great wooden covered bridges, the people mar- veled at the greatness and enterprise of their government.
Indianians were alive to the project. The legislature took the promptest action. Every State then had big ideas of "State policy," that is, of bending all public works to the building up of great cities within their own borders. This fascinating delusion cost some of the western States heavily. For instance, Illinois lost millions of dollars in the foolish attempt to build her great cities at Alton (this to rival St. Louis), and at Swaneetown and Cairo. The latter points were not rivals particularly of any other place, but the statesmen supposed it was their business to found and fos- ter great cities, and they went to work at it in dead earnest. They were ignorant of the simple fact that the laws of commerce are far more powerful than statesmen or statute laws.
The building of the National road through Indiana reached the,eastern line of the State, and during the thirties the work was pushed on to that point of completion, where the work was stopped never to be taken up again.
A large force of men as early as 1834 were at work through Vigo county. This was the county's first army of invaders as workers and builders. To supply the men and teams was the first home market for the small farmers. The work encouraged immi- gration, and the people realized that good effects were to come from it in every way. As contractors and employes it brought here some excellent people, who were pleased with the new country, and became permanent settlers. It was, too, the first uplift from the seas of impassable mud and mire, that at certain seasons fairly locked the whole country. Grades were thrown up across swampy and boggy places, culverts made, and substantial bridges thrown across streams by engineers who understood the science, and placed them safely out of the way of the raging spring freshets, that had mocked at the feeble attempts of the people to bridge the small streams of their neighborhood. The heaviest force of workmen about Terre Haute and immediately east of the town were here in 1838-39 and 1840. The long bridge east of the town, the "yellow bridge " across the swamp, and the road macadamized several miles through the swampy overflows to the south of Lost Creek. The stone was hauled and prepared to bridge the Wabash at this
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place, but the work was stopped and the bridge was not built. The great pile of stone was in time taken away and appropriated by the people.
The work and its partial completion was an important improve- ment, and with it came the halcyon days of the Concord stage coaches-stage stands, stage drivers, every one an old Samuel Weller, and a young Sam, too, and were experts in writing letters to the merry cooks along the route-splendid scribes if they could get a pen with a "hard nib " and fresh " pope-berry " juice-their love would never " fale." This was when people would rush to their front door to see the stage coach come with its high prancing horses. " Whoa ! Emma."
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