Original settlers

 Our history is pretty clear about the original Carolina colony families who came to the East Fork in the early 1800s. We know enough about them to carry on a decent conversation, and we also know which trees they cut down to build the log cabins that are either pictured or discussed elsewhere in this blog. 

Most of that is early in the 2015 entries, which can be easily accessed through the menu on the right. By virtue of paying attention, the various settlers began their Indiana lives in the places marked by the red X's. In case you can't fully grasp the distances, considering the terrain in 1804, the shortage of roads, the large numbers of bloodthirsty elk, deer, wolves, Sasquatch and gigantic snakes, man-eating elephants and horrendous snapping turtles.

All before sunset.

After dark, your worst fears came to life.

The maps are somewhat clunky and maybe confusing. In the time the Hannas, Logans, Templetons et al arrived this territory was in Wayne County, which became Franklin County, which eventually split and shared the turf with Union County. 

These cabins were all within an afternoon's stroll from the Whitewater East Fork or its tributary creeks. That is, if the flesh-eating Yellow Moths weren't in migration.

Gulp.

The X's are approximately a mile apart. The settlers bought a section of land, surveyed by the federal government and managed by a land grant office in Cincinnati. A section is 640 acres, a mile square. Later the government allowed settlers to buy half-sections and eventually even less in an effort to entice less-affluent Americans to populate the valley and the territory.

Once the section was surveyed and its geography recorded in the Deeds and Records, the settler could take possession. Rules after that were pretty simple: Don't eat yellow snow and don't feed the giant pandas. 

Most of these farms/homesteads are under water now. The cabins were all moved to Treaty Line Museum in Dunlapsville, where they still stand. 

These maps are of minimal value for a history seeker, but they do illustrate that we were able to pin down where the original settlers landed. The records are there if you want to learn your history. It's always fun to know something your brother-in-law doesn't know.

Old stories that tell their own side of history

 The nature of local news was that it was always of more interest to people it didn't affect. The ancient papers are full of tidbits, trivia and say-what blurbs that, a hundred years later make ya go .........

HMMM .........................

This nifty item from back in the day tells of Doctor Turner taking a leave of absence to visit Boston for some purpose that even the reporter thought sounded a bit fishy. This was from the 1850s. Maybe the good doc was indeed going fishing and didn't think it was any-of-yer-beeswax.

This one doesn't speak to any nefarious deeds, but it evokes a chuckle all the same. Doc Linegar, proprietor in potions, notions, salts, salves and whatever else ails you, including castor oil, witch hazel and licorice, five for a penny. And in case you need a loan, he has the lowest interest rates in town. From 1902.

Some able speakers were likely to be available in case you wanted to make a point about the evils of the demon rum. The temperance movement in Fairfield was robust, unless you had a wagon that occasionally visited people in Laurel, who also voted down booze by a narrow margin. Nobody who didn't drink was in favor of this. 1867. 

Baseball, as it was played in 1905 -- a raucous affair without much glory or glamour. You brought your team, they brought their team and the umpire worked for peanuts. Bad umpiring was always the complaint when the favorites lost. Fairfield's baseball team doesn't have much recorded history. Most likely just some guys who were taking up a dare. Final score was 17-16. We lost. Ump sucked.

These clips are from old Brookville papers, snipped from online sources that are generally available to the public without cost through your public library. 

All that traction action without satisfaction

Fairfield was inside a conversation in 1911 about being connected to an interurban railroad line that would have gone north through Richmond and south to Cincinnati. The line was to connect Union City to a lot of places in the Miami Valley.

That conversation was worth the paper it was printed on. Regular dispatches from Richmond fed the beast. Traction news was all the rage.

The grand-and-glorious kingmakers in Richmond, seeing themselves as the literal center of the universe, wanted "traction" to Cincinnati. These folks were constantly devising ways of enriching their world by getting other people to pay for it. 

"Traction" is another word for electric train travel. The concept took hold in the late 1890s in urban areas and by around 1905, had hooked many towns together with useful if unpredictable rail travel. Relatively safe is the optimum description. INTERURBAN LINK 

Inadequate management is another. Poorly financed over bad track that was vulnerable to the weather and shoddy construction, the interurbans were a glittering object like you'd get at the carnival -- and essentially equal in investment value. The lines were surveyed by local people and stock was sold on the promise that the money would come with it through various municipal venues.

The few lines that survived avoided these pitfalls. World War I took care of the rest of it, siphoning off resources to be sent to Europe to fight the conflict there. Twenty years of promise. All in all, probably worth it.

The line was to go from Richmond south through Liberty, Fairfield, Brookville, Cedar Grove, on into Harrison and Cincy. The total cost in 1911 dollars was a little over $1 million, to be paid for one town at a time.

By 1912, nobody in Richmond was interested in it. Instead, Milton wanted a line to Connersville, which might have included Liberty and Oxford. Richmond stopped caring about its line to Union City and decided Portland was better.

Chicago didn't care. They were building what we now use as the South Shore to South Bend, where it could go anyplace the public wanted it to go. Everybody wanted traction and the mere topic spurred incredible frenzy. (The South Shore continues to be a strong and viable commuter line, a modern hat tip to the past.)

If all the problems that could kill traction hadn't happened -- the one monster that could, did.

We know it as the automobile.

Traction was amazing and magical. It helped create Indiana's passion for high school basketball by making tournaments possible for schools that otherwise traveled in the mud. It spurred industry, moved people into a different (not necessarily better) world and conceivably could be a solution to some of our environmental problems today. That is not an absolute. Nothing ever is.

Treaty Line Museum

After the people who did the surveying were done, the folks who were left to rescue the East Fork's history went about it logically. They found all the ancient log cabins built by the original pioneers and moved them all to a field in the tiny hamlet of Dunlapsville, just north of the northern end of the lake.

Union County.

Log cabins built by the Logans, the Hannas, others from the valley were all nestled into what was to be a working pioneer farm. It was a great idea without much support. It shut down in the late 80s for lack of money and inspiration -- and it was left to rot away.

It's doing that. Old buildings rescued from Quakertown and the valley are getting no attention, most likely won't from the Union County Historical Society, which mows the grass and not much else. The village is worse than it looks from the road.

The cabins are from the early 1800s and were built generally by the Carolina Settlement which was the first to buy and enter land in the area west of Mount Carmel and north of old Fairfield. Their lands stretched mostly into present-day Union County not far from the Whitewater River, East Fork. 

The cabins are interesting. 

At one time, the village endeavored to show what life was like in the early days. A grand objective. Dunlapsville is probably the worst place on Earth not under water to put up such a museum.

The log structures appear to be in remarkably good condition but weather has a way of ruining roofs. One assumes that after 200 years, these things have defied nature and will continue to do so. One also hopes that somebody else takes charge of this project.

 

Other towns named Fairfield at one time or other

Oakford

We know, through reading about the history of the pioneer days, that forms of “scrip” were frequently used as currency. When money was scarce, local economies were forced to use a bartering system to create trade.

The effect was almost always a disaster.

Today, we call it a “rebate.”

This from Rick Bales of Kokomo, Indiana, who was curious about it and its value. My interest is in the Thomson store, which doesn’t show up on any “Google” searches of southeastern Indiana. It may have been in Cincinnati. Or it could be Thom(p)son. In any event, there is no Thomson who ran a store in Fairfield.

But there was a community at one time in Howard County by the name of Fairfield that eventually changed its name to Oakford.

 Warren Krise of Loveland, Colorado, fills us in on that bit of trivia.

Hi John,

I’m writing to let you know that your Fairfield, Indiana is not the first Fairfield, Indiana to meet an unfortunate demise.

I grew up in Oakford, Indiana, but my father, who grew up there also, always called it Fairfield.

Oakford is just outside Kokomo.

An old map of Taylor Township, Howard County, Indiana. Fairfield is shown clearly on the map. 

The story I was told is that the original town was named Fairfield and the interurban station was named Fairfield but there was already a Fairfield in Indiana so the post office had to have a different name. Somehow it was named Oakford. 

I don’t know when this change took place. It existed as both Fairfield and Oakford for many years depending upon whether you were riding the train or getting your mail.

OTHER TOWNS CAME AND WENT, OR STAYED 

Dayton

Susan Yost Clawson writes and offers a bit more insight about Fairfield's importance to Indiana. Even when we weren't important, we were still first. But we were happy to share.

Hi, John,

I was fascinated ... because of a story connected to my home town, Dayton, Indiana, in Tippecanoe County.

The story goes that when the town was founded in 1829 the folks tried to get a post office under the name of Fairfield but were told that wasn't possible because there was already a post office by that name in the state.

I never knew where this "other Fairfield" was. So then another guy arrived and platted an addition to the town and offered to donate land for a school if he could name the town.

This was all agreed to and he named the town Dayton, after the largest town in the area of Ohio where he came from. And a post office could be obtained under that name. We are still here and so far, so is the post office.

So, even considering the similar story you report about the town in Howard County, it looks like your town might be the original Fairfield post office. Sorry to hear that the town was flooded in the 1970s, but I am fascinated to find the location of the "original" Fairfield post office.

No idea where "Fairfield" PH 393 connected

Turnpike madness

 A few entries in the blog have dealt with roads, transportation of any sort and the realization that ...

Nonetheless, the year 1867 was hot-and-heavy when it came to turnpike thrills in Franklin County. Left turns only.

Stop at the gate.

Pay toll.

 Are you carrying contraband, illegal firearms, narcotics or wanton hussies?

You would not be lying about that, right?

On to the topic. The idea that 120 acres was worth $9,000 in 1867 -- that was a bunch of money. There may have been land speculation going on as well, since conversations were intense about a possible railroad line that would have affected Oxford and routes north to Richmond. Liberty, however, was the Everyman Dream. Better than Brookville, they opined. 

BROOKVILLE POLITICS, CANALS AND MORE

Certificates and documents of an official nature

These have no special significance. They exist; therefore, they might be interesting.

Belly up, George insisted....

In 1902, the town was being asked to allow George Maharry the right to open a saloon, general store and pool hall on Main Street. 

The town, however, had other ideas. Saying no to booze was easy for two-thirds of the town. And they gathered in Brookville to make that abundantly clear.

George was part of a somewhat prominent family for the time. The guy lived until he was 79, spending his final years in a somewhat simple state in Fairfield. Alt spelling on the name: Meharry, in case you go looking for him. 

The Fairfield blog has several entries that discuss alcohol, Prohibition, its effects and the nature of corn, corn whiskey and other forms of entertainment. Consult the menu on the right for more.

THIS LINK WILL GET YOU STARTED 

Railroad that sort of didn't/did happen

 

The yellow line is the proposed route, so far as we can tell.

A railroad history expert says that in 1854, a rail line was being proposed from Hamilton, Ohio, across Bath Township to Roseburg, on north to Cambridge City and eventually Chicago. According to him, the line was to cross the state line a little north of Reilly, go through an area between Old and New Bath, and cross the river somewhere around Brownsville.

This rail line was platted and land evidently secured somewhere near Billingsville, although that's where most of the story ends. It's likely the plan was dropped for financial reasons and inevitably because of the civil war.

There was very little industrial population in Indiana until 1880, so the rail line would not have served many people. Most likely it was just rich people thinking they could manipulate land values. Railroads were always fond of doing that.

But we didn't get our canal either.

 Learning more about the almost-railroad through Jersey toward Roseburg. Sometime after 1858, the C&O modified its plan and decided to make the short line cross into Indiana at Peoria in Springfield Twp., where it had a grain stop in Raymond and on to a grain stop on the toll pike from Colter's Corner to Oxford. That grain stop eventually became the town of Bath. A post office was supposed to be put there but the government accidentally put it in Colter's Corner and in fixing their mistake, just changed the town to Old Bath, which then created New Bath.

The rail line went north, instead of northwest, through Cottage Grove and finally a little grain stop in Harrison Township owned by a guy named Kitchel. The train then went on to Richmond, etc.

The line had been platted in 1858, according to Reifel's history, and was put on hold until the Civil War was over and the railroad building boom made for an amazing industry. Evidently, and we can't prove this, the C&O through Bath and Kitchel was originally supposed to cut northwest through Roseburg and on past Brownsville and Connersville toward Cambridge City and thence to Chicago.

It obviously made sense to go straight north instead and connect elsewhere than to build a rail bridge across the East Fork north of Dunlapsville. Still, that's speculation.

Reifel concludes in the 1915 history that the land for the railroad out of Billingsville was surveyed and partially graded. The work stopped for reasons not clear -- it was probably financial. When the war started, manpower shortages doomed it.

But it was eventually built and New Bath prospered. It also has its own post office now. Colter's Corner remains just Old.

BATH AND STORIES ABOUT IT.

The above map shows the rail line. Find Cottage Grove. It's just west of there.

Cclips from the 1867 Brookville American showed an advocacy for a railroad from Ohio across through Fairfield, and to points north.  As of April 1868, people in Richmond were still bellyaching that the railroad wasn't interested in this. Turns out, they were partly right. 

In truth, some people really were interested and in the early 1870s, a line was completed from Richmond north to Fort Wayne through the town of Winchester. The towns financed their own chunk of the work through stock sales and other nefarious methods. The Cincinnati connection was completed in an alternate way around Eaton, Ohio. More or less. 

The East Fork never got railroaded, which would not have made a difference. A lot of the track between Richmond and Fort Wayne was abandoned. Most likely, people ride bikes there and never give a second thought to Fairfield.

Which was what the Cincinnati-Richmond-Fort Wayne Railroad did.

RAILROAD PANIC 1873 (OUR SIDE OF IT)

Photos of kids and social groups

Many photos were provided during the years that the Fairfield history was being gathered, sorted, recorded -- and essentially left to its own devices. Those will stay in the dustbin of time.

1. Nobody remembers these people.

2. It's no longer interesting.

Why it's no longer interesting is that group and school photos from the 1940s are essentially all alike. They meant something at the time, and the people who it meant something to are long gone. We are talking an entire lifetime or two In some cases, three or four generations. 

Those who will be looking for Fairfield history in the future are probably looking for evidence that the town had any supportive value. That's always subjective. In any case, most photos we received over the years were less-than-complete about identifying the people being photographed. We tried to fill in some of the blanks with marginal success. It stopped mattering. 

Here is a representative photo just to prove they existed. 

There are places to find nostalgic group of family photos. The Brookville (IN) Public Library is the place to start. They have books on this subject. Several, in fact.

 

Dam construction photos

 These are from the collections of Tom Wewe and Mary Beth Siebert. More detail is available through the Brookville Library or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Links to both:

BROOKVILLE LIBRARY

DETAILS ABOUT THE LAKE

Dam construction

Fairfield south side with SR101 wrapping around the valley

Control tower, 1967

Constructing a base for the dam

The lake began to fill in the mid-70s.

Work at Fairfield Marina. Remnants of this little bridge
are still visible if you know where to look at the foot of the hill.

The dam at Brookville. It's safe, they say.

1966

Music music music

 The photo is from the Lori Goodman collection. She is a member of the Johnston clan of Fairfield, among the original settler families and merchants in the community in the late 1800s. Without connecting all the Johnston dots -- and there were many -- one man, Omar Johnston, stands out. 

He is apparently one of the builders and developers of the town's cornet band, which may have been really good, really really really good, or just another cornet band. Most towns had something of that nature, and they were often attached to community events, graduations, weddings, parades and holiday festivals. There isn't much detail on them or where the musicians learned their craft. As a rule, the wealthier people gave their children music lessons. 

There are many old newspaper articles that say a town's "orchestra" was to perform at a function. Definitions matter in towns of 250 residents. The photo is from around 1910 and was taken in the town's central Square. 

This clip is from April 1902, Brookville newspaper. Odd Fellows were one of several social societies in town. 

Lodge life and all its glory

 If two roads intersected anywhere near a field of grazing cows, a secret society was set up in Indiana in the 1840s. Most of them were loosely connected to church principles, and all of them have endured in one shape or another. Perhaps their mission is different. One suspects traditions date back to ancient times.

Fairfield had several such clubs, including the racist Red Men, the Odd Fellows, the Pythias and the Masonic Lodge. Of that lot, the Masonic Lodge still holds a spot in New Fairfield. No idea what happened to the others. A Brookville newspaper in March 1854 published an article that reported the Odd Fellows Lodge was near completion and that the first floor was already being occupied. So, that place was about 120 years old at the end. 

The Fairfield Masons were formed in 1849 and got a charter the following year. Their building on Main Street was one of the town's architectural 'icons,' if that's possible. The charter was relocated to New Fairfield in the early 1970s when a clubhouse was built there. 

No real details other than what Reifel reported in the 1915 county history that gave promotional service to such clubs around the area. There were lots of such social groups, as well as their women's auxiliary clubs. The women were active in civic affairs and were notably present in raising money for the Red Cross during World War I. 

Reifel says the Fairfield Masons had 39 members in 1915. It is probably more than that now. The Masons are quite popular, even after nearly 180 years in Fairfield. 

A MOST PECULIAR ORGANIZATION IN BROOKVILLE BACK IN THE DAY 

The Lodge icon lamps were still attached to the building
even as it was being demolished. 

Essays and memories

 Much of our history depends on our memories, real or modified to fit the fun.

Feel free to peruse the rest of the blog, with the oldest entries at the bottom of the menu on the right. You may share the links with others. 

Glenda Reese Smith

Since we moved a few months into my third grade, my teacher memories are of Mrs. Moore in first and second grade. I spent a lot of time wondering about her eye patch. Was there an eye behind it? Or just a big hole? Not that I would ever ask, of course.

Well, I just loved that woman. First of all, she would pull our loose teeth. She pulled my first one. And not long after that, another one was loose, but I managed, quite by accident, to pull it myself in the restroom. I thought she might be mad, but she stood me up in front of the class and said how proud she was that I had done that by myself.

Seriously, if I could have forced more teeth out, I would have, because nothing was better than to have Mrs. Moore brag on you. [And just as an aside to the tooth thing ... Rosemarie Hanna brought a dime to school every day, and after lunch she would spend it at the Davis store. Her friends, me included, were always happy to offer our advice on what to buy. A dime. Every day. A dime was what the tooth fairy brought me for all my hard work yanking out my own tooth. [I was sure Rosemarie was rich and probably lived in a castle.]

One day, early in my second grade year, my mom drove to school to pick us up. I don't know why--it wasn't a usual thing.

Anyway, Mrs. Moore came out to the car to talk to her. I jumped in the back seat with my little brother, Nicky, who was five. Nicky started reading out loud from my reader. (Yes, we played school a lot at home.) Mrs. Moore heard him reading and told my mom, "Put him on the bus tomorrow."

And just like that, Nicky was in first grade. Simple times. Shortly after he started to school, Nicky got sick. He was in and out of the children's hospital in Indianapolis, sometimes for weeks at a time. And I was jealous. I was sure he was having a great time opening presents and learning to make potholders. When it was time for him to go back to the hospital, he would cry because he had to go, and I would cry because it wasn't me.

Mrs. Moore understood that. She gave me the responsibility of reporting on Nicky and, if my report wasn't good, he would not be eligible for the nickel conduct drawing at the end of the week. And so I would (not so sadly or truthfully) inform her that Nicky had misbehaved in the hospital, and she would gravely put that mark beside his name. Looking back, I see the error of my ways.

If his name had remained in the drawing, I would have had a second chance at that nickel!

Mrs. Moore had an interesting way of treating injuries. If you scraped your knee or elbow on the playground during recess, she would clean it up, paint it with mercurochrome, and then paint your initials on your hand -- your own badge of courage.

However, if you were injured doing something careless or something you should not have been doing (like wrecking Carol Klein's bicycle at recess), Mrs. Moore cleaned it up, painted it liberally with stinging iodine and, you guessed it, no initials. And to make matters worse, my parents were aware of her system and iodine is impossible to wash off.

And my last, and fondest, memory of Mrs. Moore ... My mother had made me a blue plaid dress with a circle skirt from a feed sack I had picked out myself from the grain mill in Bath. To someone who often wore her brother's hand-me-downs to school, I thought it was beautiful.

I thought I was beautiful. And so the very first day I wore my beautiful new dress to school, I was absolutely prancing.

And so at recess I was at the top of the slide. Just as I started to go down, Bimbo Browning accidentally(?) stepped on the hem of my dress. As I slid down, my dress started ripping in about a one inch strip around and around and around.

When I hit bottom, I was standing in the top of my dress and my slip. The long tail of what had been my twirly skirt was stretched up the slide, with the end still under Bimbo's foot.

I was mortified. I reeled my dress in and ran screaming into the classroom. Mrs. Moore, bless her heart.

She moved a desk into the coat room. She took my dress off and gave me her sweater. And all afternoon, while teaching, Mrs. Moore sat at her desk and basted my dress back together enough that I could wear it home.

Wilson: original Fairfielder

Fairfield was platted October, 1815, by Hugh Abernathy, George Johnston, Tomas Osborn and James Wilson, the four corners of their respective lands being in the center of the platting.

James Wilson was born in 1779 in Virginia. His father was one of four brothers who served in the Army during the Revolution and was the only one of the four to survive the conflict.

In 1800 James came to the Indiana Territory, settling in Jefferson County where, in the following year, he married Nancy McCarty, who had been born in a Kentucky fort in 1785.

In 1808 Wilson decided to try another locale and with his rapidly increasing family moved on to Franklin County. By 1815 the population of this Whitewater Valley county had increased to the point where another trading post, closer to some of the settlers than Brookville, seemed necessary and feasible.

Consequently, Wilson and the three neighbors platted a town to be named Fairfield, located in the northern section of the county and centered at the spot where the lands owned by each of the men came together.

Evidently they all had high hopes for the future of the then non-existent Fairfield, even believing that someday it might become a county seat of a new political subdivision for “the proprietors donated a public square in the center of the plat and this is still used for such minus the coveted courthouse.”

If Wilson was disappointed in the non-growth of his first plan, he was willing to try again.

About that time (1817), Jacob Wetzel had finished work on his historically significant “trace” across Rush and Shelby counties.

W(H)ETZEL TRACE BLOG ITEM FROM THIS WEBSITE

Soon after Wetzel had completed his work on the trace, Wilson, accompanied by a “man named Logan and one named Hanna,” came up the newly opened path, following it as far as its junction with Blue River.

Here, Wilson decided, was a goodly site for a new home and he immediately returned to Fairfield to fetch his three oldest sons. The four soon returned to the spot he had chosen and began the building of a cabin — the first home in Shelby County.

On January 1, 1819, Wilson, his wife, four daughters, a baby boy and the 11-year-old Isaac started on their journey to their new abode.

Around nine o'clock in the evening of the third day, they arrived at their destination and found that the older boys, who had completed the log structure during their father's absence, had a roaring fire burning on the hearth to welcome them.

Caw, caw

Jimmy Boyd lived in the house just south of the Methodist Church. We lived in the house directly north of it. Like all kids, we lived our fantasy world with a degree of sincerity … one that lasted the length of the summer. When school started, we’d drop the whole thing.

But there was a barn not too far from the house that had a loft. We took a broom up there, swept it out and made it our clubhouse.

OK, now that we had a clubhouse, we needed a club.

A pretty special one, we decided. No girls allowed, naturally. We were in fourth grade.

Owing to the time, two major images came to mind:

DAVY CROCKET

PETER PAN

So, Jimmy, Joel and I developed, built and maintained the exclusive (very very exclusive) Jolly Roger Club.

We were pirates.

Why we weren’t frontiersmen was simple: Davy Crockett had been killed at the Alamo and that was last year, anyhow. We had lost our coonskin caps.

When it was time for the club to meet, Jimmy would ride over to our house on his bike, stop outside and go “Caw, Caw!” That was the sign. A bit of a takeoff, it was, on the old, really really old “Lassie” show where the kid with the dog (the one before Timmy; the kid, not the dog)) had a friend named Porky or Sylvester. Their greeting call was “E-Aw-Kee.” Do your own research.

But when meetin’ time came, we met. We shared Kool-Aid and Reese’s Cups and almost anything we could get to eat. Tomatoes served nicely.

We had a flag, complete with a skull and crossbones on it and a few other special secret codes and signs. No girls allowed.

Jimmy was learning to play the clarinet and his mother made sure he did his lessons. Joel and I were either inept at music or disinclined to care much about it, but Jimmy was doing a pretty good job. I could never blow a note. 

Jim Boyd was director of music at Franklin County High School in Brookville for many years, which made us all proud. 

-- jcu

 

Basketball at Fairfield

 

Team photos from various times in the 1950s-1960s. 

The 1954 team won the Franklin County tournament title. That was a big deal.

LINK TO A PREVIOUS POST HERE

1954

1956

1957

1961

1962

Fairfield's gymnasium