The flood of '52

 Here and there, we are reminded that over the centuries of human population in what we know as Indiana, there is occasional heavy rain. As the purpose of the Fairfield 200 blog is to acknowledge two of those centuries as our history, it’s worth noting that flooding caused our demise.

Flooding elsewhere. But in 1852, it’s doubtful anyone blamed the problem on Fairfield, although they suffered all the same. This dispatch published in an outpost paper in Aurora (Dearborn Co.) called the Independent Banner:

A deluge of rain!

“The heavy and continued rains of Wednesday and Thursday (Dec. 25-26, 1852) in the Valley of the two Miamis caused a sudden rise of water in those streams and their tributaries, which yesterday swept in a flood over their banks, carrying away fences, out-houses, dams, mills, lumber and in many places, bridges in its course.

“A larger portion of the Eaton Railway is submerged and several bridges carried away. The Venice bridge on the Brookville and Oxford Pike was so obstructed with floating drift as to prevent it being traveled through.

“The passenger train on the Hamilton Railway that left yesterday with a large number of passengers, passed the bridge beyond Hamilton when a messenger on horseback announced to the conductor that the flood had risen to such a height and bore with such force on the middle pier of the Twin Creek Bridge that it had burst it asunder, and that the adjacent embankment in many places had been washed away.”

In another column:

“At Connersville the river at that point was high and rising rapidly and the water had come so near the telegraph wire which extends over the river that it had to be taken down to prevent the driftwood from carrying it off.”

* * *

Near Fairfield, while the covered bridge was still 2 decades in the future, one assumes a bridge across the river existed, and it probably washed out. A mill on the river there was destroyed (see clip at right).

The Brookville American, on Jan. 7, 1853, published an article saying the Whitewater Canal had been damaged and would be repaired and in working order within a short time.

“The canal must and will be repaired. And it can be done in three months as well as nine. Then there will be six months for the mills and merchandise to be making money – and six months to collect toll. Repair quick and $40,000 in tolls will be saved to the canal and ten times as much to the business of the valley.”

The lot of damage occurred at Cambridge City. “The destruction of private property has been immense.” Serious damage also occurred at a feeder dam near Harrison.

A woolen factory and bridge were destroyed at Laurel, The paper said that “it was supposed in January 1847 that the destructive flood that occurred on the first day of that month was probably a centennial visitor.”

The problem was, people believed it and built their structures along the river assuming it couldn’t happen again. “The ruin and desolation cannot be particularized.”

The paper went on to speculate that farming methods of the time, the digging of drainage ditches, was messing with the ecology of the swamps near the rivers and that they could expect more flooding in the future, perhaps every year. It would be many years before they learned their lesson about tampering with the river.

In the same article, the paper said the Spear and Stevens paper and flouring mills would be repaired as soon as they had the money. The paper said the Spears mill had been damaged several times in the previous 5 years and invoked some patriotic zeal toward the challenge.

“Some Generals by an adroit maneuver, turn defeat into victory. Some men by commercial failure thereby learn to lay a sure foundation for future success and final wealth. In others, their real resources and true greatness are never developed until they are brought out by adverse fortunes.”

Amen.

I don’t know specifically where the Venice bridge was located, but it might have been the one at the state line east of Bath. That bridge was dismantled and rebuilt in Butler County.

LINK TO THAT HERE 

Nice business opportunity

 Ad from the Brookville American, June 15, 1835

MERCANTILE HOUSE

FOR SALE

I will offer at public auction on the first day of August next, a large and convenient property in the town of Fairfield, Franklin county, Indiana. This property is well situated for the mercantile business as any that can be found in the west, the property is nearly new, built expressly for a Store, with two good dwelling houses attached to it. The store house and one of the dwellings are two-story brick, under the same roof. In short, any person wishing to purchase such property would do well to see it before the day of sale.

The condition of the sale will be one third in hand, the balance in two equal payments. Further conditions will be made known on the day of sale by

JOHN PROBASCO

N.B. The property has been and is now occupied as a store with a fine business the purchaser can have immediate possession.

*

The ad does not say who owned the property or what price was being asked. It’s doubtful the structure endured into the 20^th century and was probably destroyed by one of the several fires that hit the town in those days.

John Probasco appears to have been a horse trader and his name is connected to sales of horses in Franklin County at that time. I can’t find another connection to Fairfield. It’s possible he owned the stores. He was from Warren County, Ohio.

I don’t know the meaning of “N.B.”

Brookbank’s genius invention

 In 1905, a Connersville man named Eddy R. Brookbank came up with a device that might have-could have changed the face of American agriculture. But, it didn’t.

Brookbank, who wasn’t living in Connersville at the time, had patented a device he called the Equipoise Cultivator. Built by the Buechner Manufacturing Co. of Battle Creek, Michigan, the device hit the market around 1909 and was in demand for a short period of time.

A newspaper article out of Battle Creek described it as “a new farm tool in the line of sulky or wheel cultivator that bids fair to out-rival anything heretofore made in its line.”

Good news so far. “Through the peculiar construction of this cultivator, the shovels will always enter the soil, regardless of its condition, and will cultivate the soil at an even depth whether shallow or deep. Aside from these features, which have never before been introduced in a riding cultivator, the shovel gange are forward of the operator so that the corn, etc., is in full view and also the weight is entirely removed from the necks of the horses.”

Brookbank received a patent for the Equipoise in May 1906 and set about marketing the machine across several states. In what appears to have been a plan he made up as he went along, Brookbank was usually on hand to demonstrate, explain, and … of course, sell.

The term “equipoise” wasn’t uncommon in those days, though we seldom hear it today. It generally means, balanced in the middle. The word was described to explain how a telephone arm could be handy in an office. “Works like the human arm,” one ad claimed in a 1906 Washington Post.

Brookbank worked the county fairs in Liberty, Brookville and Connersville to sell his cultivator and there’s evidence the machine was popular in the Plains states, chiefly Kansas and Oklahoma in the wheat fields, in 1910.

“Have you seen the new Equipoise Adjustable cultivator?” one agricultural paper asked in May 1910. “It is the most complete farming tool ever placed on the market.” It came with a guarantee. “You may use it until the first of June (about a month) and if not satisfied or won’t do the work, bring it in and get your paper. This is something entirely new, never was in this county before, some sold in the East last year.” (Cherokee, Okla., 4-29-1910).

By then, the cultivator was being made by a firm called Page Woven Wire Fence Co. of Adrian, Mich, though the Battle Creek firm of Buechner Manufacturing had been the original creator. Buechner was more commonly known for making hat racks and metal picture frames for beer advertising.

Brookbank tried several ploys to get the public interested in his cultivator, including giving free dinners to people who bought one during the Connersville Free Fair at Roberts Park in 1910.

A 1906 Connersville news story had predicted the “plows will allow Mr. Brookbank a substantial royalty.”

Turned out, that was not to be the case. In 1909, Brookbank was offering a money-back guarantee on the cultivator, but production had slowed to a crawl. He wasn’t sure he could deliver them before planting season.

In June 1911, a short story in the Brookville Democrat said this:

“Fifteen Equipoise Riding Cultivators will be offered for sale at public auction at the corner of Seventh and Main Streets. Sale will begin at 12 noon. I will offer for sale the livery barn and a good dwelling house. – Ferd Schneider, Agent.”

There’s no news about the product after that, though ads in the Connersville papers from 1912 still had the machine available for sale at Joe Moffett’s livery barn. “Some improvements have been made,” Moffett’s ad promised.

There’s no information on what killed the cultivator. It was possibly underfunded, or badly managed in the production phase. It may have been flawed or simply the victim of a better product from a larger, more reliable agriculture implements maker, such as McCormick or Allis-Chalmers. At least once, production fell far short of demand. A farmer needing equipment would have bought something else.

A horse-driven cultivator should have been useful well into the 1920s, though Brookbank’s invention was actively on the market for less than three years.

Brookbank was born in Jackson Township (near Everton) and was 78 when he died in 1947. He was buried in Dale Cemetery in Fayette County.

 

Emma Pouder, sheriff of Union County

In January 1923, Milton L. Pouder, the elected sheriff of Union County, died in office and was replaced by his widow Emma. She had been appointed by the Union County Commissioners, voting in Liberty at the Jan. 18 meeting.

According to the Liberty Express: “On finding out that Mrs. Pouder very much desired the appointment, the board backed by the opinion of many whom they heard express themselves, decided to appoint her.” She would have needed confirmation from the governor’s office, and she obviously received it.

Emma Pouder was elected in 1924 to a full term and served until she was replaced in December 1927 by Albert DuBois. Milton Pouder had been elected in November 1922, defeating Democrat Jack Booth. Pouder was listed as a Republican. Emma Pouder defeated Democrat William O. Line in the 1924 general election, winning by about 500 votes.

Her strengths were known to be her attachment to prohibition law enforcement and she’s cited in a number of stories between 1923 and 1926 for actively participating in raids on stills in Union, Franklin and Fayette counties. Most of her raids resulted in convictions that included fines and 60-day terms in the state penal farm.

Emma’s time as sheriff is closely connected to the reign of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana and while there’s no direct evidence saying she was a member, many of her raids included members of the Horse Thief Detectives, who were a public arm of intimidation by the KKK.

Pouder was highly popular in Liberty, according to several stories in the newspapers published there at the time. She appointed Virgil Shouse as her deputy.

There isn’t a specific roster of women who served as sheriff in Indiana, but Pouder is obviously not the only one. Oddly, Franklin County had also mulled appointing a woman in August 1924 after Sheriff William VanCamp had been killed near Mt. Carmel by two car thieves.

VanCamp’s wife Bertha had popular support for succeeding her late husband, though the Commissioners did not follow up on that. Bertha VanCamp never held law enforcement office at any time. Bertha VanCamp and Emma Pouder were evidently friends, and one item in the Liberty Express reported in November 1923 that the two had been dinner guests of a Liberty couple.

Emma Pouder, in a 1924 interview, called herself “a plain country woman and I had no thought of entering public life until circumstances seemed to make it necessary.” She claimed she also did the cooking for the prisoners.

One might assume the Klan was involved in her decision to seek her husband’s position, though no such questions were asked of her. The Klan’s influence in Indiana was significant until the end of the 1920s.

Pouder’s most notable law enforcement action came in August 1926 when she was tasked with finding clues that helped convict Willard Carson of Liberty with killing his father, Carson. Pouder led a search for Willard Carson and helped apprehend him.

Emma Pouder was 86 when she died in 1958, and her obituary said she was a native of the Billingsville area.

Milton Pouder was 56 when he died. He had served as a postal carrier in Liberty before moving to Billingsville to farm alongside his wife. It is not clear why he chose to enter law enforcement.

His obituary said he died of the “grippe,” another term for influenza.