1990 fall - The Henry County Historical Society and Museum

Vol. 18 Number 2
Fall, 1990
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FOUNDED I8E7
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HENRY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM COMPLEX
"Bringing history to life
Tnn tsu¿Ì{lruÀL Pusure¿T[on
0r
. . .and life to
history,"
Tun Hulvnv 0oulvw Husronloau S00[üTy, nno.
THE HENRY COUNTY HISTORICALOG
Richard P. Ratcliff, Editor
(Spiceland)
is the
biannual publication
of the
HENRY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, INC
606 So. 14th St.
New Castle, Indiana
47362
Founded
April, 1887
Telephone:
3L71529-4028
-
Officers
Richa¡d E. McKnight, President
Trustees
Richard Scott Bouslog, Chairman
"lú
'(New Castle)
(New Castle)
Mrs. Nadine Kirkpatrick
Mrs. Dorotha (Hoover) White, Vice-pres.
Mrs.-Eleanor (Jessup) Painter, Secretary
(New Castle)
Stephen R. Smith
(ShirleY)
Miss JoAnn Edwa¡ds
Jack Gebha¡t
Membership Secretary
(New Castle)
Douglas W. Wilson, Treasurer
Dr. Donald Hamilton
(Ashland)
(New Castle)
(Sprinport)
(New Castle)
(Knightstown)
Curato¡
Mrs. Joan Paul
"I
"Unless you cherish the
mernory of your a.ncestors,
you deserue to be forgotten by your Posterity."
-
Edmund,Burke
TflSND
høue euer hød a pleasure
in obtøining any little
ønecdotes of my øncestors."
- Benjørnin Franklin
"I know of no way of jud.ging
the future but by the pøst."
-
Pa.trich.
Henry
INNUIL MIETING
Where Did Catherine Winters Go?
The 103rd Annual Meeting of the Henry County Historical Society will convene
at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, October 18, 1990, in the Victorian living room of the Gen.
William Grose home with President Richard E. McKnight, presiding. Reports of
the officers, trustees and society treasurer will be given during the business meeting. At 6:45 we'll adjourn for a light dinner, served from the North Annex of the
Museum Complex. The cost of the meal: $2.00 per person.
The program, slated to begin at 7:30, will feature a film about Catherine Winters, the New Castle girl who disappeared in 1913 and was never found. The film
was shot in New Castle in 1913 under the direction of her father Dr. W.A. Winters.
Mr. and Mrs. Winters ùoured the country with the film, showing it during vaudeville shows and in movie theaters in hopes someone could give
them a lead in their search for Catherine. The movie has not been
seen by the public for over 70 years. It captures on film some of
the earliest known street scenes of an Indiana town. Ttustee
Donald Hamilton and President McKnight \MiI narrate this exceptional piece of celluloid and tell the "Where Did Catherine
Winters Go" story. Also, original photographs of the young girl
and her family will be displayed. An added bonus! Two songs
written about her in 1913 will be performed. The evening prom(
ises to be exciting. Don't miss it!
Í
d
.¡
t0B00tîEt n0mE¡¡
'uiä8uTffii*
(Editor's note: The following account of the life of
Elisha Hammer wag writt¿n In May of 1990 by society member Thomas Ham¡ner of Grcenwood, Minnesota. Thomas Ha¡nner is a great-great-grandson
of this sturdy Henry County pioneer.)
Elisha Ha¡¡mer was born June lg, 1806, on his father's plan.
tation in Randolph County, North Carolina. He díed April 14,
1893, at hie home in Spiceland, Hen4¡ County, Indiana He was
the sixth issue and the second son of Abraham (Abram) Ham.
mer Jr., a Friends minigter, and Catherine (Trqdon) Hnmrner,
aleo of Randolph County.
Abraham owned and operatæd a 608 acre plantation near
Asheboro (Gabriel'e Creek), North Carolina Catherine Ttogdon
was bom Oct. 4, 1771, aô Gabriel's Creek and died Feb. 7, 1866,
at Asheboro, North Carolina at the age of 96. She was the
daughter of a wealthy landowner Sa¡nuel Trogdon who ma¡ried
Abigail Julian. He gave his oldest daughter Catherine and her
new husband Abraham Hammer Jr. a 160 acre plantation as a
wedding gift.
Elisha's early education was received at a eor¡es of subecrip
tion schools that met th¡ee months each year when the field
work was done. He learned to read, writa and cipher and becane
well-read on church matters, Hia father Abraha¡n Jr. was illiterat¿.
dolph County. Peter Lawrence ma¡ried th¡ee ti¡r€s and had
twenty-one children. Lawrence and moet of his ch¡ldren lat€r
moved to Spiceland not long after Elisha and Nancy moved
there. Elisha and Nancy were married in the Bethel Meetinghouse, Holly Spring Monthly Meeting of Friends. wherp Abraham Jr. serued as a Quaker minist€r.
Elisha and Nancy'e first iesue waa a ff)n Iaaac Newton, bom
May 19, 1826, i¡r Randolph Cornty. His family a¡d friends
called him Newton. Their oldest daught€rr Abigail was born jueü
one year later in 1880. Their thi¡d child Cathsriue wa¡ bo¡n Oct.
21, 1881,.
Oa June 20, l8æ, Elisha requeetod a¡d was
grantd a crtiñcat¿ from Holly Spring to tbe Milford Monthly Meeting of
Ftiend¡ in Milton, IVayne County, Indian¿ El¡sba end b¡s
Emeley Brookshfue
1813-1890
Emsley Brookshire was born
in
Randolph County, North
Carolina, December 8, 1813. At the age of thirteen he came to
Henry Counüy with his widowed mother, making the enti¡e
journey on foot. In 1834 he entered land northwest of New Castle, and in the same yea¡ married Elizabeth Shelley (131?-1858).
Early in life he became a Methodist minister, but later withdrew from that denomination on account of his abolitionist
principles. In 1846 he became a minister of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, a gÌoup noted for their anti-slavery principles.
For over 40 years he served as a minister of this denomination.
Under his guidance the "Brookshire Settlement" northwest of
New Castle became an abolitionist stronghold. Emsley Brookshire died May 23, 1890, and is buried in the old family ceme,
tery which is located approximately one mile north of State
Road 38 and the Sugar Grove United Methodist Church on the
Sulphur Springs Road.
Far
Êfl
Son Peter was born December f3, 1833, and Mary Jane was
born May 26, 1836. Th¡ee more children were born to Elisha
and Nancy but died young.
Eventually he bought a farm at the edge of Spiceland so the
family would be closer to the Spiceland Friendi Meeting and
rnore accessible
to the growing
Hammer
Montåly Meeting of Friend¡.
a
son
Elisha's son Newton married Charity Wilkinson June
"
25,
1847. She was not of the Quaker faith. On June 21,1848, Elisha
by Spiceland Monthhurch April 21,1852,
became a minister at Spiceland Friends.
On Juty
was much cloeer to the Hawrmer fa¡m. Eli¡ha wer appoiatad an
overrær at Ducl¡ Cræk Mæting Oct. 26, 188?, by Spicdand
h
good
in his family genealogy
home near Spiceland and a
Nanc
trade and
and
faith. In 1860 Elisha
daughter of Elisha
was a cobbler by
onomer.
Elisha Hammer and family were surprised with the arrival on
Jan. 3, 1865, of Jos}ua Natha¡ Hammer, the fourth son of his
youngest brotier John. .Ioshua had fought for three years as a
Confederate soldier until hé was captured and held prisoner in
the Elmira,-New York,. Ya¡kee p"isoner of wa¡ camp. While
there he becanie seriously ill. By some means, parole-of-honor or
by taking the.oath of.allegiance to the North, he was released.
He had ma¡,ried Feb, l, 1859, and had two children. When he arrived, however¡ at th.e home of his aunt and uncle he was seri
at us and murmured, 'Little foxes spoil the vines.' "
Nancy Hammer died Nov. 15, 1870, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Spiceland Friends Cemetery. On Oct. 23, 1873,
Elisha ma¡ried Elizabeth M. Heacock at Hopewell Monthlv
Meeting, Henry County. She was the daughteï of John anä
Elizabeth Heacock.
Elisha Hammer passed away April 14, 1893, at his home in
Spiceland. He was buried in Circle Grove Cemetery in Spiceland. Elizabeth died Feb. 15, 1898, and was buried next to
Elisha.
Writing May 15, 1891 in the New Castle Courier, a biographer said of Elisha Hammer:
"In the latter part of last March when the writer visited Mr.
Hammer for the purpose of learning the facts embodied in this
sketch, he was returning from his barn, hatchet in hand, where
he had been making some needed repairs. He is quite feeble in
body, and his memory is slightly deficient, but it is possible he
may yet live to witness many great and important changes in
human affairs."
[N
PEîÜNE TNOU lHT PIST
OtD IDYENTÑEUEIIT
I}/OBLDeS. o c
Safesú WASIIDR
TLe
*
No Wrûngct
At l¡st the da n g e roo I
hand.cnebing Wringer ic
gone! The I?¡tematic
'Sefety' Drier elimimte
all possibilitiea of accideot
to womco a¡il cbililrø.
*
... ùoú
SpizlrcÍt
Io rhc Natio¡al
a
Vate¡.
matic a manelou¡ new in.
veDtioo ¡eEoves thc se
plus water froo clothea
-
a whole tubful at a ¡¡Eq
*
NO GEARS...
NO COGS
Never Needs Greaslng or Oillngt
A miracle of inventive magic hae been performed in
developing this great Wa¡her. lt is the ûiet new thing
ín Washers in the la¡t ten yeare, See it asd watch thã
wonderful, quiet one-way washing action
at the
- look
new "Safety" Drier
taLe particular notice
of ite simplicitv and modern beauty and notice also that the
Regulator Switch enables you to etart your waehing and
leave it while you go about your other work . . ] The
Waeher etope automatically at atry time you sct the
regulator. I¿t us ehow you the Va¡her , . . women of
Ame¡ica are all taking about,
Knightstown
Furniture
_l¡
lll¿5¿¡ic
Janice Mayhill, daughter of R. Thomas and Margaret "Peg"
Mayhill of Knightstown and a studenb at Purdue Universit¡',
was crowned the New Castle-Henry County Sesquicentennial
Queen
in 1972.
ì
36 EAST MAIN
STREET
Building_
Go.
PHONE No.
4
From the Knightstown Banner, December 14, 1994.
UONE
THIN
I TIME
Alford... Pierce... Benson... Pavy... Heady... Rose... Tague... Catt. Jordan... Hooker...
Jameson..
Reece
just a few of the names that helped make Henry County basketball an integral part of Hoosier Hysteria.
Now there is a book that finally captures the spirit and essence of high school basketball in Henry County. With profiles, nostalgia and statistics, More Than A Game: A History of Boys Basketball in Henry County offers a detailed look into Henry
County's biggest and most popular form of recreation and entertainment.
The 200-page book contains over 150 photographs a¡d was written by Greg Guffey with editorial and research assistance
from this editor. Here's what you can expect to find in the book:
* Decade by decade history of the high points and low points in Henry County basketball
* A detailed account of New Castle's 1932 state championship team
* One chapter biographies on sta¡s Marion Pierce, Ray Pavy, Kent Benson and Steve Alford
* A look back at each county school, including Kennard, Lewisville, Spiceland, Straughn, New Lisbon, Knightstown, Moorela¡d, Middletown, Mt. Summit, Cadiz and Sulphur Springs
* Detailed accounts of Henry County's Final Four teams; New Castle in 1967, 1971 and 1984; and Shenandoah in 1981
* A history of consolidation with detailed looks at the success of the consolidated schools Blue River, Shenandoah, Knightstown and Tri High
* Biographies of each Indiana All-Star from Henry County
* A pictorial overview of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame
* An appendix filled with statistics, including career leaders from every consolidation, scores from the now defunct Henry
County Tournament, sectional and regional results and much, much more
The hard-back book's jacket was designed by local artist Larry Gosser. Printing will be limited, so order your copy now for
early fall delivery. The books should prove to be a valuable reference guide for Henry County basketball and an excellent Christmas gift for players, coaches and fans of basketball. As an added bonus for ordering early, shipping will be paid. Look for an order blank elsewhere in this issue of the "Historicalog."
These are
HENNT COUNIT'S THNEE !{rcNITIOIIS
(Editor's note: The following paper was presented
was content to rely on Pleas for other information and when
that source failed, to call on the memory of Judge Martin L.
May 21, 198?, at a meeting of the Henry County
Bundy. }Jazza¡d, saw the project as a money'making venture,
Historica-l Society by Dr. Thomas D. Hamm, Assisthe latest in a life of money-making ventures that landed him in
tant Professor of History and Archivist at Ea¡lham
jail more than once. That was the case here. The last person to
College and a member of our Society.)
tackle county history was the late Herbert Heller in his series of
Back in the days when I was taking speech classes, I read
articles for the Courier, later published in three volumes. Hel'
somewhere that all good speeches include quotations from the
ler's work rests on a mass of research, but the necessity of fitBible, Shakespeare, and Lincoln. Since it is my hope to give you
ting his ideas into newspaper article length made it difficult for
a good speech tonight, I will begin by meeting that require'
him to develop larger, broader themes.
ment. From the Bible, I take the historian's favorite text, from
So what I propose tonight is that we look at the history of
Ecclesiastes: "Ask not why the former days were better than
Henry County in a new way: in terms of its people. I am going
these, for thou dost not inqufue wisely concerning this." From
to argue that Henry County has been the product of the migraLincoln, the opening works of his speech at Springfield in June
tion of three groups of people arriving at different times but
1858: "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are
sharing some remarkable cha¡acteristics: all three migtations
tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it."
consisted of people coming up largely from the South, at best
From Shakespeare I quobe Hamlet: "To be or not to be." That
seeking a better life and at worst fleeing desperate poverty and,
has nothing to do with my subject for the evening, but it is
once here, overcoming fcrmidable obstacles to achieve success.
Shakespeare, and thus I have all of the components of a good
The first settlers of Henry County, as I think all of us are
address.
aware, came for the most part from the South, part of a moveThe other two thoughts are, however, quite apt for what I
ment that historians have labeled "The Great Migration." The
propose to do tonight. As we celebrate the centennial of the
1850 census, the first one to record place of birth for Henry
Henry County Historical Society, it seems appropriate that we
County residents, provides us with some interesting statistics.
consider where we are and where we are going by considering
If you exclude the young folks born after their parents a¡rived
where we have already been. I propose to do this not by talking
in Indiana, Henry County's population was about 25Vo bornin
about institutions, or events, or brick and mortar, the usual inOlio,25Vo born in North Ca¡olina,20Vo born in Virginia, and
gredients of local history, but about people: who the people of
15% born in Pennsylvania, with most of the rest from MaryHenry County have been, whence they have come, and what
land, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Considering that most of the
that has meant for our community.
Ohioans were probably born as their parents ta¡ried for a few
A good place to begin trying to understand our history is to
years on their way from Virginia or North Carolina west, it
look at the va¡ious county histories. If you set aside the twô atseems safe to say that about 75% of Henry County's pioneers
lases of 1875 and 1893, which were essentially landowner maps,
had a Southern heritage. That much is familia¡ to us. What we
we find four: Elwood Pleas in 1871, William F. Boor in 1884,
have forgotten is the sort of world from which they came.
George Hazzard in 1906, and Herbert Heller in the last decade.
Each of these volumes is invaluable, but each also has its ìimitations. Pleas was concerned largely with preserving memories of
the pioneer period and explaining local politics so as to take revenge on his enemies who accordingly howled when it came out.
When Boor's work appeared in 1884, many disparaged it as the
"herd book," consisting mostly of biographies of local worthies
who had proved their eminence by paying ten dolla¡s to be included. }Jazzard's work is unique. About % of his two big volumes are devoted to the Civil War; for the most part Hazzard
The image we have of the pioneers has been set forever by the
old family photographs and the portraits we have hanging
around us - grizzled old men and toothless old women wibh
what Edgar Lee Masters calìed "the serene sorrow of their
eyes." We often forget that when these people a¡rived here in
their twenties and thirties, very often they had cut all ties with
their old homes. Many must have been like Thomas Lamb, who
left Randolph County, North Carolina for Blue River Township
in 1836. He apparently waited twenty years to write back to his
family to tell them that he had arrived safely and was doing
well
-
he would never return, he said; he would not trade his
lit.
they were only a generation or two removed from a world in
tle farm in Indiana for 1000 acres of land in that country. And
even if they wanted to go back, transportation was so difficult
and expensive, and there was so little time to spare, that few
could ever consider such a trip. It was only as the years passed
that they came to romanticize their old homes, that Old Caroliny, as they called it, became a mystical land of babbling
brooks and whispering pines and murmuring breezes arrd
plenty.
In fact the South they left behind was a very different sort of
place. Begin with North Carolina. Few are awa¡e of it now, but,
in the nineteenth century, North Ca¡olina had the reputation of
being the most backward state in the Union. A reporter for the
New York Tribune, visiting Greensboro, N.C. in 18G0, called it
"a state of few emotions morally a comatose state . . . 50,000
square miles of stagnation." One might dismiss this as typical
Yankee prejudice were it not for the fact that Ta¡heels themselves admitted bhe justice of labeling their commonwealth
"The Rip Van Winkle State." A newspaper editor in Raleigh in
1840 summed up the state's problems: on every side were sterile pine barrens, acres of sickly weeds, cabins weathered and
beaten by generations of grubbing poverty. On a typical farm
"a swarm of barefooted child¡en with only a shift to their backs
played in the hog wallow at the door as in the distance their par-
Vi
ev
he
hers had things
rved as a family
of an Indian.
In short, then, most of the early residents of Henry County,
like most of the early residents of Indiana, came fromthe *eás
of the United States considered by most Americans to be the
least civilized, the least admirable, the least desi¡able. This ac-
of "Hoosiers"
ginal meaning
onymous with
erner wrote in
1861 that in Indiana "anyone who is at all merciful towa¡ds the
King's English, and ventures to dress in the latest fashion and
ents bent indifferently over a hoe or axe." Until the 1840's there
were no public schools, a¡d in 1850 the state led the nation in il-
literacy. Even its governor admitted that "North Carolina has
a proverbial reputation for the ignorance and torpidity of her
people." And hanging over all of it was the problem of slavery:
immoral in the eyes of the Quakers, a threat to free blacks, competition for poor whites, and an undesirable institution to small
farmers.
To every generalization there are exceptions, of course, and in
North Carolina there were numerous thrifty, hardworking, aspiring folk. Some, like the Quakers in Guilford and Randolph
and Perquimans and Pasquotank, had a group ethic to support
them. Others simply had to rely on their own values. By the
h
t
North C
citizens left
make the sta
planter class
1820s,
looked
es
a
st
the task of trying to
re-
overty, and the dominant
s. And as these folks left,
the more hopeless the task became. By 18õ0 almost as many natives of North Carolina lived outside North Carolina as within
the state.
The Virginians .n ere a more diverse group. The reputation of
Virginia, of course, had always been different from North Carolina: more gracious, more civilized, the home of the FFVs. The
Virginians who settled Henry County, however, came not from
the plantation country of the Tidewater (although many had ancestors who had lived there a century earlier) but from two other areas: the Shenandoah Valley counties of Shenandoah, Rock-
ingham, Page, and Frederick; and the Appalachian mountain
counties now in West Virginia, most notably Harrison, Monongalia, Marion, and Monroe.
Migrants coming from the Shenandoah Valley were leaving a
prosperousr settled society. For the most part, they had Ïttle in
common with the planters east of the Blue Ridge: most of them
were of German ancestry
Millers, Rinkers and
- Painters andLutheran
Raders, Bushongs and Lindamoods
or German
- owa¡d Pennsylvania,
In the process they had overcome obstacles that seem almost
incredible to us today. The first was poverby. Most of the settlers who came to Henry County came with little more than a
strong back and a willing heart. Land sold for $1.25 an acre, yet
most could afford only to buy the minimal lot available, g0
Many of them, moreover, came from backgrounds and pasts
that did not bode well for the future. The man who named New
Castle, for example, was seeking a home in the wilderness in
which he could live in sin with his sister-in-law without his wife
in Philadelphia tracking them down. Nonetheless he very prudently put alì of his landholdings here in the names of niõ Inai-
ana children, lest
his legitimate heirs,
Iay claim to them
n New Castle was a
Revolutionary vet
had left North Carolina not simply under a cloud but rather under a thunderstorm.
was the very prosperout: land prices were
herit land were being
v
b
b
olution. When the Hickmans and Melletts and Veaches and
Tacketts and Ices and Swearingens arrd Luellens came west
Iegitimate grandsons would become one of New Castle's most
beloved and distinguished citizens.
My favorite case, however, is that of one Emanuel Dean of
Guilford County, North Carolina. In 1851 his father-in-law complained of him in a lawsuit that Dean was "a very trifling fellow
. . . a drunkard, gambler, rake, and spendthrift" who had ,,com-
municated diseases, the result of depravities to his wife" and
bhen (as if it were the course one would naturally expect of such
a man) "went to Indiana."
One
of the worst problems that the early citizens of Henry
County had to face was taming the violent spirit of the frontier.
For many, fighting, usually bolstered by drink, was a way of
proving one's manhood. And it was not simply wrestling. While
weapons were unthinkable, gouging out eyes, biting off ears
and noses, pulling out hair by the roots, and kicking out teeth
was considered perfectly acceptable behavior. And almost any
occasion could degenerate into this. One pioneer remembered
that the militia musters, which usually consisted of one part
drill and three parts drinking, always provided "a plentiful harvest of gouged eyes, bitten ears, mashed noses and bruised
faces.
"
Yet there was a county court system, and it made valiant efforts to try bo stem the bloody tide. An hour or so spent with
the minute book of the Henry Circuit Court for 1823 to 1830
makes highly instructive reading. From 1822 to 1827 ninetytwo indictments were handed down. Sixty-eight were for assault and battery or affray, with the rest scattered between
rape, gaming, extortion, robbery, vagrancy, perjury, larceny,
lewdness, and selling liquor without a license. We can gauge
something of the state of things by considering these edifying
facts; the first action of the court was to fine Andrew Shannon
for profane oaths and then place him on a grand jury; that at
the same time Samuel Batson was pleading guilty to two
counts of assault and battery he was being appointed justice of
the peace for Liberty Township; that two of the first bills for extortion handed down were against two of the three county commissioners; and that of the twelve men "good and true" who
were serving on the first jury, two were under indictment themselves.
This combativeness was reflected in other ways. It meant
problems for the pacifist settlers, such as the Quakers and
Dunkers. It was this question that led to the first recorded political battle in the county's history. According to Indiana law,
all able-bodied men between 18 and 45 were to muster for militia training twice a year. Quakers ignored this, of course, since
it violated their consciences and, besides, Indiana hardly
seemed in danger of invasion. In the 1820s the county's first
sheriff, Jesse H. Healey, whose wife was an ex-Friend, showed
no inclination to collect fines from conscientious objectors. In
1824 two of Healey's enemies, Ezekiel Leavell and John Anderson, became, respectively, sheriff and associate circuit judge.
Anderson also managed to get himself appointed paymaster of
the local militia unit, an interesting office, since no one was being paid. They took aim at Healey through his Quaker constituents. Leavell and two deputies began by descending on the
house of Meshack Lewelling, a prominent local Quaker and supporter of Healey. To collect a $2.50 fine Leavell and his cohorts
had not only broken into Lewelling's house and broken some
furniture, but had also seized a horse worth ten times the fine,
and all without a warrant. Simultaneously, Anderson filed suit
in his own court, presumably with the object of acting as judge
and prosecutor simultaneously, to collect from Healey the value
of all of the muster fines not collected from loca-l Quakers during Healey's term, a sum that would have bankrupted any man
in the county. Healey and the Quakers, however, had the last
laugh. Although they fought the Lewelling case all the way to
the Indiana Supreme Court and lost, one of Healey's friends,
the bellmaker associate justice Jacob Thorp, discovered that
Irish-born Anderson was dispensing justice without the formality of having become an American citizen. And as Quakers continued to pour into the county, they remembered who their
friends were. Leavell went into political oblivion while Jesse
Healey wenb to the legislature.
Even the institution usually credited with bringing education
and many of the oüher facets of civilization to the fronüier, organized religion, had rough going in Henry County, and Henry
County was probably superior in most respects to mosb of the
rest of Indiana. It was a commonplace in the East, especially in
New England, in the 1820's and 1830's that the Ohio Valley
was on the verge of barbarism. Indiana was considered almost
as prime a missionary territory as Burma or Borneo, and the
hardy souls who were willing to plunge into the backwoods edi
fied ladies missionary societies and financial supporters with re-
ports of paganism, heathenism, and open infidelity on the
White and the Wabash.
These Easterners had, of course, their own axes to grind, and
all shared an attitude that civilization ended not too fa¡ west of
Philadelphia. Yet there are numerous indications that a majority of Henry County's residents in years before 1850 were at
best indifferent to church membership. In 1845, for example,
the New Castle Presbyterian Church had but bwo ma.le members. And those churches that, existed often had trouble holding
on to their members. Between 1826 and 18õ1, for example, the
Duck Creek Monthly Meeting of Friends in Greensboro expelled 410 members for va¡ious lapses from grace. For bhose
who enjoy chronicles of human frailty an hour or so with some
of the surviving early church records, like those of the Duck
Creek Friends or the Lick Creek Baptist Church can be most in-
structive.
To make things even more difficult, when churches were established, they often proved prone to division, and a.lmost no
denominations were immune. The case of Henry County's early
Baptists provides an excellent example. We know that between
1820 and 1834 at least seven Baptist churches were formed in
the county: Blue River near Knightstown, Ebenezer in Franklin
Township, Liberty in Liberty Township, Little Blue River near
Messick, Lebanon and Lick Creek in Prairie Township, and a
congregation that may have been known as Upper Symons
Creek near New Lisbon. Yet by 1850 only two remained, Lebanon and Ebenezer, and the latter was quite weak. The rest evaporated in a series of schisms. Some had deserted the fold for
Alexander Campbell's Disciples of Christ, whose favorite targets were Baptists; then the remainder had become involved in
a bitter "Means" and "AntiMeans" controversy. [One of the issues was not simply whether good Baptists were allowed to
drink - few Baptists were ready in those days to swear off that
good creature of God, corn liquor
- but whether they could join
societies to encourage temperance. Some extreme Primitive
Baptists looked on this as dangerous innovation, since temperance societies are not mentioned in the Bible, and became
known as the Whiskey Baptists.l
Even the presumably pacific Quakers were not immune to
this spirit of contention - indeed, it fractured them badly. In
the 1820s the Friends meetings at Hopewell and Greensboro
were involved in a controversy over the preaching of a New
York Friend named Elias Hicks that split all of American Quakerism. The Hopewell Hicksites left quietly, contenting themelves with producing the first book known to have been published by a resident of Henry County. The Friends at Duck
Creek Meeting in Greensboro were more cantankerous. There
the Hicksite leader left his Orthodox brethren avowing that
"Elias Hicks was as good a man as Jesus Christ and that a certain approved minister ought to be killed off. " There must have
been something in the waters of Duck Creek that induced controversy. By 1850 there were four different groups in Greensboro calling themselves the Society of Friends; the Orthodox
had split into "Body" and "AntiSlavery" factions, while the
Hicksites had divided into "Loyal and Progressive factions."
This divisiveness explains why a village the size of Greensboro
has three cemeteries; apparently the Anti-Slavery Friends never got around to establishing bheir own.
In shori, bhen, the people who settled Henry County as pioneers were a tough old bunch. They lived hard, fought hard,
and, when they bothered with religion, fought hard over it. By
the 1850s, however, the rough edges were obviously being
somewhat softened. The frontier rowdies who gloried in combat
had moved on farther west. Whiskey had been banished by local
option and the proliferation of temperance societies. Politicians
still foughb each other, but Henry County had become such a
one-party Republican stronghold that the only battles to be
found were those which pibted conserva0ive against radical Republicans, battles now confined to caucuses or bhe columns of
At the close of the wa¡ such as had been able to survive returned to find everything impoverished horses gone, cattle, if any poor; the merest pretense
of farming going on, tools worn out and antiquated,
ha¡ness mostly ropes, vehicles in the last stages of
the 'one hoss shay.' . . . We learned to do with little
and to live on corn bread . . We could no more get
coffee, sugar or tea than we could get papers, and
those who had these a¡ticles on hand saved them for
sick people. We drank hot water tea sweetened with
sorghum, and made coffee of parched wheat and
d¡ied sweet potatoes, which was a great deal better
than many modern substitutes for coffee. There
were no stores, and nothing to buy goods with if
there had been. We were all clothed in homespun
cloth, which had the redeeming quality of lasting a
long time. Our shoes were of the coarsest leather,
made from the skins of animals butchered on the
farm
even candles were a great item. The house-
hold furnishings were in as dilapidated a condition
as the farm tools . . During the war if any of our
cooking utensils or tableware were broken, we had
to do without those necessities Our road were
well nigh impassible. We have many streams and
William Henry Harrison Bea¡d
1840-190?
After over 30 days of wandering through the woods and mountains he arrived in Raysville on September 6, 1861, never returning to his old Guilford County, North Carolina home. He
was the father of Charles A. Bea¡d (1874-1948), known while he
lived as the "Dean of American Historians."
the bridges had almost all gone to wreck or had been
washed away.
This is the memory of a member of a fairly well-to-do family in
one of North Carolina's wealthiest counties. In the poorer ones,
like Alleghany or Wilkes or Yadkin or Surry, the situation was
even more desperate. Many must have been in the situation
thab my great-great-grandfather Reece faced in 1878. Before
the war, his father had been a fairly prosperous farmer in Yadkin County, North Carolina. Then came the wa¡. The oldest
the Courier. And the churches had, for the most part, eased
their in-fighting and had settled down üo concentrate on converting the unsaved, and working together to raise the level of
local morality.
There was still much to do, of course. The public school system was in its infancy and had been established in the county
by onìy a narrow margin. Already the rising price of land was
forcing some out, who looked to northern Indiana or Iowa or
Kansas. And some residents of Henry County, the black Winslows or Thurmans or Bundys had to face the fact that they
were still deprived of virtually all rights by law and that in 1851
% of Henry County's voters had approved a section of the new
state constitution that forbade black settlement in the state
and established a fund to deport those who were aheady here.
But by 1861 the pioneer period had come to an end. Henry
County ranked among the uppermost fifth of Indiana counties
in terms of wealth and population. The Civil War, of course, was
a disruptive influence, but its end brought a seeming renewal of
prosperity.
That was also important, however, because it began a second
migration to Henry County, one that would continue early into
the twentieth century. This was in many ways a continuation of
the first migration in that it drew primarily on the same areas.
Between 1861 and 1920 hundreds of people from North Carolina and Virginia arrived in Henry County, fleeing ha¡d times at
home and seeking new opportunities in the north.
These migrants were leaving behind the terrible poverty and
the devastation that bhe Civil War had brought. Some had fled
north at the outbreak of bhe wa¡: Quakers who feared being
caught between warring armies, or Unionists trying to avoid
service in the Confederate Army, like William H. Bea¡d, the father of the historian Cha¡les, who slept in ditches for 500 miles.
Those who remained behind were in a desperate situaLion. A
North Ca¡olina Quaker described the situabion in Guilford
County in 1865:
Frank Reece
1859-1925
This old tintype of young Reece, age 16, was taken about the
time he left Norlh Carolina to come bo Henry County.
brother of the family was drafted into the Confederate Army
and came back dying of tuberculosis, which he imparted to two
of his sisters. Confederate quartermasters took most of the
stock during the wa¡, and Stoneman's Union cavalry completed
the job in 1865. By 1870 only 90 acres of worn out land were
left, valued at less than $1 an acre, and to be divided among 11
children.
It is not surprising that many who faced this situation chose
to leave. By 1900 this had taken on the proportion of mass migration in certain areas of North Ca¡olina, especially Wilkes
and Surry and Yadkin and Alleghany counties. The historian of
Rockford, North Ca¡olina, the train station for Surry and Yadkin counties, writes that in the 1890s loaded wagons were a fix-
ture in the train yard. As they pulled up, the stationmaster
would sing out: "Where be ye bound, New Castle, Injanny or
,}
Marshalltown, Ioway?"
Once in Henry County, these migrants seem to have caused
scarcely a ripple. More often than not they came as young, single people. My great-grandmother whose father, Frank Rçece,
who arrived from North Carolina in 1878 remembered that her
family had some relative from North Carolina with them every
summer for almost twenty years. Sometimes they came up on
the train, sometimes they walked; one year two showed up as
fugitives from the chain gang. By my calculations Frank
Reece's settlement was responsible for bringing in at least 31
other relatives who remained permanently, and heaven only
knows how many others who worked for a few years here then
went back to Ca¡olina or on to Iowa. The young men usually
found work as farmhands until they married and rented a place,
then tried to save enough for a mortgage. The young women
could work as hired girls until they snagged a husband. This
second migration did not bring substantial change. Many of the
new a¡rivals had aunts and uncles and cousins who had come
before the Civil War, so they had family ties. Their religion,
morals, values and even politics were usually not much different from those of Hoosiers. Settling in the countryside, they
were scattered, not clustered in "Little Ca¡olinas." Perhaps
most important in the long run, they did not marry each other.
In 1882 the state of Indiana began to require place of birth on
marriage license applications, so I looked at ten years' worth,
1882 to 1892, here in Henry County. I found that about IÙVo of.
the people married here in that period, about 50, were from
North Carolina and Virginia. 31 of the 50 married people born in
Indiana, while most of the Ta¡heels who ma¡ried fellow Tarheels were elderly folk who may well have been living here 40 or
50 years. What this meant is simple: North Carolina migrants
were rapidly assimilated into the population. Those who lacked
kinship ties rapidly acquired them here. In short, these participants in Henry Counby's second migration fit.
By the time we reach the third migration, however, we begin
to talk about a different world. Henry County changed d¡amatically between 1900 and 1920. Population figures tell part of the
story. Between 1860 and 1900 the population of the county
grew by less than 2,000, from 23,000 to 25,000. Between 1880
and 1890 ib actually fell. Between 1900 and 1940, however, it increased by 13,000, usually about 5,000 people per decade, with
a lull, of course, during the Depression. The population of New
Castle, about 3,400 in 1900, almost tripled by 1910 to over
9,000. By 1920 it was 14,000, and until 1960 it continued to
gtow at a rate of about 2,000 per decade.
It was the coming of the factories, of course, that made the
difference. The Krell-French piano works, the Hoosier Kitchen
Cabinet factory and later, of course, in 1907, the coming of the
Maxwell brought in bhousands of people. These three employed
almost 3,000, and, assuming that each factory employee probably meant th¡ee other people moving here, we can see the rapid
take-off. By 1903 the New Castle Democrat was writing that
New Castle had received more propositions for building factories than it could possibly handle, largely because of a housing shortage. "Every boarding house is filled up, and plenty of
new places started . . . Although 200 dwellings have been built
in the last year, it will take 300 more to accommodate the peo-
\ililliam Henry Elliott
t844-L9L4
Former editor of the New Castle Courier
well this situation was aggravated. By World Wa¡ I there was
such a housing shortage that some new arrivals were living in
tents out on the Spiceland Pike.
This rapid growth raised a good many questions, questions
no one seems to have wanted to deal with in any organized way.
The men who "boomed" New Castle as a home for new industry
assumed that the way of life of a factory tow¡ of 20,000 would
be the same as it had been in the farm-country county seat of
3,000. A reporter for an Indianapolis newspaper who visted
here in 1907 was struck by this sense of continuity:
Will Elliott used to edit the Courier with one hand
and push the baby buggy with young George with
the other. Now "W.H." is "Colonel Bill," ripe in
years and experience a¡d with two changes of
clothes and baby George . . . is managing editor of
the same Courier.
The old timers have not forgotten the thunderbolts
that D.W. Chambers used to hurl from the presses
of the Democrat in favor of Horace Greeley, whom
he helped nominate for the presidency in 1872, and
the same Democrat is now edited by W.S. Chambers, who has a hankering for Congress just as his
father had many years ago.
Along with traditional leadership, they also wished to preserve the town's mores. "It is not a wild and woolly sort of
place," the reporter observed, but instead offered "every opportunity of healthful & desirable place of residence; a good clean
healthful little ciby, with a good moral atmosphere, splendid
churches well attended, good schools well officered and under
the guidance of as bright and conscientious a lot of üeachers as
can be found." It tried hard to keep its new population away
from temptation. When an enterprising newcomer named Max
Gordon brought in 55,000 bottles of beer and 5,000 bottles of
whiskey, for example, the police and courts rose in righteous an-
I
t
DavidW. Ch"-bers
A Civil War veteran, for many yea¡s he was the editor of the
New Castle Democrat.
ger and subjected Gordon to a heavy fine. The liquid refreshment, however, had already disappeared into thirsty gullets.
The key to this desire to preserve this old way of life, of
coursei was the cha¡acter of the newcomers. The men who were
responsible for the coming of the factories were quite clear on
that subject. "New Castle does not want any ignorant populaüion of any race to come in to search for work. It needs law-abid-
ing, peaceable, intelligenù people . . . the same kind as
it
has
now." And it knew where to find those people: among the "rich,
productive, and profitable farms of Henry County." It was they
who would save New Castle from being overrun by "Foreign
offscourings" with "unpronounceable names" as was happening in so many other factory towns.
To a certain extent this hope $¡¿s ¡e¡lizsd in the early days. A
look through the 1909 city directory shows how a significant
proportion of the townsfolk bore familiar Henry County names
simply were moving in from the farms of the townships
-or they
perhaps adjoining counties. But this population was limited,
since New Castle was competing with other factory towns
Muncie, Richmond, Anderson
- which were also building their
prosperity on the automobile. Ultimately the coming of the factories would bring to New Castle its third great migration out
of the South - the Kentuckians.
A good place to start here is with some statistics, but unfortunately the sort of statistics that I needed proved difficult to
come by. I found some suggestive ones in the 19õ0 census. In
that year almost 307o ol Henry County's population was born
outside of Indiana, virtually all of them in the South. (Unfortunately the statistics did not specify place of birth). Henry County ranked sixteenth among Indiana's 92 counties in percentage
of non-Hoosiers
- just about all of the counties ahead of it were
locatæd on the state's borders, such as Vanderburgh or Lake, or
contained major cities like Indianapolis or Fort Wayne, or both.
Even more revealing ale some statistics of my own compiling. I
decided to check the marriage records at the cou¡thouse to get
the birühplaces of people being married here in 1900, 1910,
1920, 1930, 1940, 19õ0, and 1960. In 1910, 6l% of the people
married in Henry County were natives, with another 35% coming from other counties in Indiana. Only one person from Kentucky was married here in 1910 and that was a middleaged
Walter S. Chambere, Sr.
1870-19õ0
Once the editor of the New Castle Democrat, he was later the
owner and editor of the New Castle Timee and the New Castle
Courier-Timee.
woman born in Covington. By 1920, Kentuckians made up 107o
of the people being married, while the percentage of Henry
County natives had fallen to 30%. By 1930 the Kentucky percentage of the population had increased to 2l%o, In 1940 the
percentage of people marrying in Henry County who gave Kentucky as their birthplaces had fallen to 187o, but íf you add in
those who had parents born in Kentucky you can calculate Ken'
tuckians making up around a quarter of the population. By
796O 47Vo
of the people being married in Henry County were ei-
ther Kentuckians or the child¡en of Kentuckians.
Statistics are simple, however, compared with the problem of
explaining what brought these thousands of people to New Castle. Here I am venturing into uncharted territory, since no local
historian has ever taken up that challenge. In Herbert Heller's
th¡ee volumes, for example, you will look through the indexes in
vain for a single entry for Kentucky or Kentuckians. No oDe
could tell me who the fi¡st was. The following is based in part on
observation over the years, partly with conversations with
those who made the trip north, partly on reading in a variety of
sources.
Kentuckians came to Henry County for the same reason that
previous migrants had come out of the South: the search for a
better life. Such a search, however, had a number of facets.
Probably the most important was poverty, pure and simple
poverty. Most migrants here from Kentucky seem to have come
from two areas on the edge of the Cumberland plateau: south'
eastern counties around Albany, Somerset, and Monticello; and
more centrally located areas around Morehead. These were ex'
hausted lands at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most
of their inhabitants were farmers, but farrning was a poor life.
The soil was for the most part hilly and rocky; those lucky
enough to have a piece of bottom land would often find even
that a mixed blessing, since the cutting off of the timber had
caused erosion and often produced spring run-offs and freshets
that could bring down a devastating flood in almost the twinkling of an eye. Most of the farms were small - one hundred
acres would have been considered a plantation in mosb areas
and the ìiving that could be made even from a large one was precarious. In grains like corn or wheat they could not compete
with more fertile lands, leaving tobacco as the only cash crop.
And tobacco growing was never a pleasant way of life.
It
in-
volved back-breaking labor of hoeing and weeding and sometimes picking the tobacco worms one by one from the plants; te
bacco was more affected by the vagaries of weather than most
crops; and, finally, until the 1920s, the price was controlled by a
combine of manufacturers that always saw to it that the price
paid was low. These counties also lacked the blessing and curse
of coal that brought fortunes to a few farther east in Harlan or
Pike. Thus for those who desired something better there was no
choice but to leave.
These migrants were leaving behind more than just poverty,
however; they were also leaving behind a way of life, a way of
life that seemed almost impossibly primitive to outsiders. Per-
haps its best-known aspect was violence. In eastern Kentucky
the Civil Wa¡ had literally pitted family against family and
neighbor against neighbor and once the was u¡as over, as one
Kentuckian historian put it, the wa¡s began: bhe incredibly bitter Kentucky feuds. For most of the nineteenth century, law
and order never functioned in large portions of Kentucky. In
Rowan County, for which Morehead was the seat, for example,
things became so bad late in the nineteenth century that the
state legislature recommended that its government be abolished and that it instead be run under martial law. In two years,
at least twenty murders had been committed there, along with
sixteen attempted murders, in a feud between the Ma¡tin and
Tolliver families. All this in a county with a population of just
over 6,000. }iIazarò' Kentucky was the scene of the murderous
French-Eversole war. By 1888 half the residents of Haza¡d had
fled the gunbattles that were openly being waged in the streets.
In Clinton County, one family simply took over the court system. An observer described it this way:
A murder case was docketed for trial and numerous
friends of the defendant appeared at the courthouse
heavily armed and in a belligerent mood. When the
judge called the case for trial, the defendant's father, a man of about 50 with huge handlebar whiskers and two immense pistols, rose and waìked to the
bench. Wringing the gavel from the fingers of the
startled judge, the feudist rapped the bench and an-
t
nounced "Court's over and everybody can go home.
We ain't agoin to have any court here this term,
folks." Thus ended that judicial term.
Those who came to New Castle and Henry County did not
bring their feuds with them, or at least I can find no evidences
of that. Indeed, many probably came for the precise reason that
they wished to escape this cycle of violence, which was a1gravated by the demand for moonshine during Prohibition. The
culture however, was difficult to escape, and many of the arriv-
als in New Castle tended to settle disputes with a resort to
force. When the factories tried to resist the coming of the
unions in the 1930s with forms of pressure that ranged from
subtle suggestions to goon squads, some of the local organizers,
natives of Hazard and Albany, $¡ere more than willing to respond with a few broken a¡ms and broken heads.
Once here, however, these new migrants faced hardships of
many kinds. The worst was economic. Often the father of a family would come ahead and work and save to bring the rest of the
family up. Others were often cast adrift with little more than
the clothes on their backs and trainfa¡e. I think of one fifteen-
year-old girl sent up her alone by her mother from Clinton County, Kentucky, because her father was dead, her mother had too
many mouths to feed, and rumor had it that there was work in
Indiana. Often to save money two or th¡ee related farnilies
would crowd into a house intended for one. And their diet would
consist largely of cornbread and bea¡s not because a Kentucky
palate cleaved only unto that, but because it was cheap and filling and could go fa¡ to feed a big family.
Probably worst, however, was the prejudice that greeted
them. Every community has a da¡k side to its history, and for
Henry County I think that it would be the hostility and derision
that often greeted the newcomers. They were set off from the
rest of the population in a number of ways, of course. Their
speech immediately identified them. So often did their clothing,
the part of town in which they lived, their very names. They
also had to cope with the often bitter legacies that they brought
with them. Aside from poverty, the worst was usually the heritage of the Kentucky public school system, which unüil the
1960s had the reputation of being one of the worst in the country. Compulsory attendance laws were not enforced, the teachers were often barely literate themselves, books were twenty or
thirty years old. Anything beyhond the eighth grade and the
one-room school was unthinkable for all but the most well-to-do
fami-lies, as late as World Wa¡ II, since most counties had but
one high school in the county seat and no bus system. Thus anyone who wanted to attend from the county had to raise the
money to boa¡d in town, even if his labor and the wages it might
bring could be spared. Few were in such a situation. Thus newcomers from Kentucky started far behind. And they experienced the sort of taunts and humiliation that only the cruelty of
little child¡en can deal out.
Thus it was that a local mythology was created, and we all a¡e
familiar with it so I don't need to repeat it here. Kenùuckian
jokes became a staple of local humor. About the leasb offensive
one I ever hea¡d dealt with the curriculum of the Kentucky
school system: readin', ritin', and Road 3 to New Castle.
Faced with this sort of bigotry, and I think that it was that,
the newcomers fought back as best they could. At times it
might be something as primitive as a fight on a school playground or in a bar. At times it might take the form of escape: to
leave as soon as enough money had been earned to buy a decent
piece of land, or to go down home every weekend or once a
month or for the surnmer, Intermaniage was another way, My
analysis of the ma¡riage records shows that it was not until the
1960s that most county residents with a Kentucky heritage
stopped marrying others from the same background. Institutions were another means of resistance and escape, probably
the most notable of which were churches. Most of the newcomers did not join the First Methodist or First Presbyterian or
First Friends. Instead they found solace in older, less cosmopolitan forms of religion that refused to compromise with modernity, whether it be the fundamentalism of the Southern Baptists
or the emotionalism of the Pentecostals or the strivings after
complete sanctification of the Naza¡enes. It is amazing to me
how many Henry County churches, some in existence for perhaps half a century now, have yet to have a pastor born or educated north of the Ohio River.
By the 1960s this third migration had come to an end. New
Castle had ceased to boom and opportunities lay elsewhere.
And as migration slowed many of the old prejudices slowly disappeared. As the second and third generations inter-married
with the "old" families and went to college and became doctors
and lawyers and businessmen and mayors and teachers, they
just gave the lie to the old stereot¡ryes. Some still linger, but I
think that for most people born since World War II they have
ceased to become a concern.
What, then, are we to make of it all? I think that we can d¡aw
th¡ee conclusions.
First of all, I think it clear that Henry
lated by remarkably similar groups of p
ent times. The simila¡ities between the
a¡rived in the 1820s and the Kentuckians who came in the
192Os are striking: both fled
y and hardship,
both faced derision and hostili
o thought themselves blessed with more favo
, both overcame
disadvantages to arrive at prosperity and respect. The search
for betterment is a theme that unifies 1?0 years of local history.
That takes us to our second challenge: what faces us when the
world changes? For 160 years Henry County flourished because
it offered employment on its fa¡ms and in its factories to men
and women who would come with little more than a willingness
to work ha¡d. Those days are gone. Offered a choice between social stability and cheap labor, American society seems to be
choosing the latter. For some that may bring the essence of
prosperity: an abundance of goods at low prices. But Henry
County, displaced as a producer of those goods, may not share
in that prosperity.
Finally, I think that we
as an organization are offered a chal-
lenge. The Henry County Historical Society was founded a cen-
tury ago by men who were child¡en of the pioneers out of North
Carolina and Virginia. Their interest, and the interest of those
who came after them, has been the preservation of the mem-
ories of thaü first migration. That we have done as well as any
group in the Midwest, I think. That challenge comes for us in
dealing with the second and third migrations. Some of its participants still survive, and their memories contain a wealth of history of a world that is rapidly passing away. Our task for the
next century is to preserve the heritage of our last century of
Henry County history with the same zeal that we preserved
that of the pioneers.
out HEilRT touilîT scH0ots
All sketches by Courier-Times afiist Larry Gosser
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Kennard High Sòhool
HENRY COUNTY HISTORICÂ,LOG
Fall,1990
No.2
Vol.18
Knightstown Academy (later High School)
Non Profit Org.
U, S. POSTAGE
PAID
Permit No. 67
Ft)UNI}ID
Published twice a year by the Henry
County Historical Society, Inc., 606
South 14th Street, New Castle, Indiana
47362.
Richard Pickering Ratcliff, Editor,
303 South Pearl Street,
Spiceland, Indiana 47385