Church life in Fairfield

In the days leading up to the end for Fairfield, only three acknowledged churches served the township: The Methodist and Nazarene churches in Fairfield and Old Franklin EUB Church, east of town just off Bath Road. There were doubtless other meeting houses for various Protestant sects.

But prior to that, a number of denominations set up shop in the township, though none endured.

The Methodists in Fairfield were one of the largest congregations in Franklin County in the 1880s. The building was disassembled in the middle 1960s and its bell moved to another church that we are still trying to locate.

In the early days, a Methodist minister at Fairfield would also have served at Coulter's Corner (Bath Twp.) and later at Blooming Grove.

The Methodist building in Fairfield probably seated 250 with comfort. The Nazarene Church was much smaller.

As early as 1806, the Baptist Church attempted to build a congregation in town but, according to historical research I found in the Indiana History Magazine, the Baptists effectively lost a foothold because they simply didn't try hard enough.

"The Baptist churches early attained to an important place, and in many localities they were on the ground and flourishing when the Presbyterian and Methodist denominations made their appearance. In some places, however, these rural Baptist churches were supplanted by other denominations, and the causes of this decadence are attributed by some to the refusal of such churches to grow with the general progress of opinion."

Baptists date back to 1798 in Indiana, with only the French Catholics being older. There is evidence of Primitive Baptists in Fayette County but that sect's impact is marginal at best. An anecdote here: Author James Maurice Thompson's grandfather was a key leader in the Primitive Baptist movement. There is no evidence J.M.T. followed that path.

A Presbyterian Church was founded in 1825 in the Bath area, but the Presbyterians were prominent in the valley earlier than that. Rev. Samuel Baldridge, a native of Virginia, organized a church of 17 members in 1811 near Harrison, and became as an itinerant missionary in the Whitewater Valley after 1814, having various stations from Lawrenceburg to Dunlapsville. Baldridge was a close acquaintance of Robert Templeton and John Hanna, both in Fairfield Township, the magazine research indicates.

The Presbyterians were staunch abolitionists as were the Quakers.

The Old Franklin EUB, which absorbed Fairfield Methodist, has been on the current site since the 1830s. The church's entry into Franklin County dates to 1819 with Henry Fry being the first local leader. It is one of the oldest churches in Indiana that still conducts regular Sunday services. It's also known as Farm Hill.

So were the Quakers, who had less luck establishing in the valley though they were prominent in Wayne County, particularly Richmond (where Earlham College is located) ... but the church (also known as Friends) held meetings in Fayette and Union counties in the 1810s.

Apparently the Quakertown area of Franklin County, which was also flooded, never contained one of the sect's churches. In Jackson Township, Fayette County, the only Quaker church ever to exist in the county was organized in 1818 or 1819.

There was minor Quaker presence in Fairfield, so far as I can determine.

The Quakers were often mistreated because of their refusal to take up arms in the War of 1812 against the British and antagonistic Shawnee Indians. It wasn't uncommon for a Quaker to be jailed for refusal to fight.

Another short-lived sect was the Universalist Church, which had odd beginnings, an even more peculiar format and an extreme minority membership.

A Universalist Church was founded in Fairfield in 1848 and lasted six years before it disbanded, due to a shortage of membership, leadership and resources. The building was located on what we called Jefferson Street in Fairfield (directly west of Naylor's farm). It burned in 1902. There is little record of it beyond that.

Universalists were also quite active in the Bentley area of Fayette County, just north of Blooming Grove (near Everton.)

As a sideline, records indicate the Universalists held a district meeting in the "town" of Philomath, which is west of U.S. 27 between Liberty and Richmond in Union County. (A couple of farmhouses would constitute the town.)

The Nazarenes arrived in Fairfield in the early 1960s and had a small membership at the end. Plans to build a church never reached fruition and services were held in a converted garage directly adjacent to the school grounds. I can't find any information that suggests Nazarenes were in Fairfield in any other time frame.

There was no significant Jewish, Catholic or Shaker presence in Fairfield Township.

-- John

-- Pictured are Fairfield Methodist (top) from 1910; Old Franklin EUB Church; Nazarene Church (bottom).
-- Sources are Fairfield publications, Reifel and the IU research documents, as well as personal recollections.

Check's in the mail

Next time you toss all that junk mail in the recycling tub, remember where it came from.

I suspect that the settlers from the early 1800s would have been overwhelmed by the notion that people would advertise by mail. Getting the mail was a fairly amazing feat.

According to one essay I read, the mail service was seen by President Washington as something much more than sending letters and XFinity ads; George believed that the information dispensed by the post office was necessary for the stability of the union. In his address to Congress in 1791:

The importance of the post-office and post-roads … is increased by  their instrumentality in diffusing a knowledge of the laws and proceedings of the Government, which while it contributes to the security of the people, serves also to guard them against the effects of misrepresentation and misconception.

The first postal service in the Indiana territory is vaguely around the year 1803, mostly from Vincennes to Louisville and vice-versa. Not much population elsewhere. By 1814 or so, the post-roads concept (roads designated and funded by Congress to deliver the mail) had caught on and places like Fairfield were on the path to be served.

By 1820, Fairfield had its own post office, according to an old Atlas Gazetteer. Charles Shriner was the first postmaster. I can't find how long this post office functioned but I think it may have at least been until the 1880s. Exactly where it was located is unclear but I would imagine it was in one of the general stores in the downtown area. I have heard that it was in a little house just to the north of the Odd Fellows lodge.

From the Indiana History Magazine:

From 1834-38, Route No. 3,025 ran from Richmond to Cincinnati, the mail being transported twice a week, in stages from Richmond to Brookville, and three times a week, in stages, from Brookville to Cincinnati. Abner McCarty received $1.200 for the performance of this duty. The towns along this route that received mail from these stages were. Abington, Brownsville, Liberty, Dunlapsville, Fairfield, Brookville, Cedar Grove, New Trenton, Harrison (Ohio), Clark's Store, Miami and Cheviot. The total distance was 76 miles.

Those early days were odd. The recipient paid for the delivery, and it wasn't cheap. This was long before the introduction of the stamp.

First 40 miles - 8 cents
40 to 90 miles - 10 cents
90-150 miles 12.5 cents plus
25 cents for distances of 500 miles.

In 1801, that was a lot of money. Bad weather, accidents, Indian attack, illness, drunkenness, and willful neglect easily upset the schedules. There were frequent complaints by the populace and the postmasters. The carriers weren't inclined to be too concerned about complaints.

Sources for this item are diverse.

-- Benjamin Franklin is credited for developing the American postal service. Thank him for your Christmas cards.

Native tribes

First off, this isn't an essay on why we ought to be guilty about how the native Indians were treated during the pioneer settlement era. The crimes against the tribes are well-documented.

Instead, this is a tip-of-the-iceberg attempt to examine some of the tribes which inhabited the area at the time the Carolina settlement began to occupy lands in what was then known as the Northwest Territory.

Fairfield Township is on the cutting edge, literally, of the time. The western edge of the township, about a mile west of where the town stood, was the boundary for the Greenville Treaty of 1795. At that treaty signing, the whites agreed to stay east of the line and the tribes could have everything west of it. That included Chicago and we all know how THAT turned out.

Most of the tribes went along with the deal, brokered by the fabled Mad Anthony Wayne, for whom Fort Wayne is named. Either him or Bruce Wayne, who was also Batman.

Tribes in the Indiana-Illinois-Ohio-Michigan area at that time were Pottawatomie, Wea, Iroquois, Miami, Kickapoo, Piankashaw, Delaware and Shawnee. Trying to keep track of all their movements and leaders is next to impossible. A few guys you might start with are: Tecumseh, his brother known as the Prophet, and Little Turtle. Search at your whim. For fun, also search for Princess Mishawaka and Grey Wolf.

Main land brokers were the Miami, who sold off most of the state to William Henry Harrison even though they probably didn't actually own the land. That happened in a series of cessations over a period of about 40 years,

Ohio Historical Society:

“Between 1818 and 1838, the American Indians of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois gave up most of their land except for small reserves. The Wyandot alone relinquished title to four and a half million acres. The Miami ceded 6,700,000 acres in Indiana, and 297,000 acres in Ohio.”

The Fairfield area was mostly inhabited by Shawnee, who sustained a fairly large footprint across most of the eastern half of the country, ranging south to the Carolinas and north into parts of Canada. They ended up generally in Oklahoma after officially leaving Indiana. Various historical essays suggest the Shawnee were still in Indiana in the 1840s, though in small unorganized numbers.

We mentioned Tecumseh and the Prophet, his deranged brother. Those two had conspired to make war on the whites, angry that treaties were being signed for the removal of the native tribes. Well ... they had a point.

They just didn't do wars very well and in 1811, the battle of Tippecanoe crushed the native resistance to white advancement in Indiana. I've seen various accounts of that battle. The Prophet had the deluded notion that the New Madrid earthquake and the appearance of a large comet were good omens. They were omens, all right.

The following year, 1812, when the U.S. was at war with England, native tribes were thrust into the fray again and at least one report claimed renegade Shawnee in the Whitewater Valley were creating problems. I found no evidence of any atrocities, however. Shawnee sided with England in the war, the result of poor judgment. Tecumseh was killed in a battle in Canada, and that was that.

The valley itself is ripe with Indian history and the ancient Mounds tribes left lots of arrowheads and artifacts along the East Fork of the river. Anyone who grew up in Fairfield probably had at least one arrowhead. From Farm Hill south toward Brookville, lots of old mounds -- which date farther back than we can know. Mound builders were common across the Ohio Valley, as far as the Illinois territory near Kaskaskia. No one seems to know what ended their existence.

Elsewhere in Indiana, Pottawatomie and Miami are still in evidence, though in small numbers.

An old bridge across the Whitewater between Fairfield and Dunlapsville was known as Shawnee Ford.

-- The wigwam pictured here was apparently fairly standard housing for a 19th century Shawnee family.

Robert Green

One of the alleys I walked in pursuit of trivial and interesting tidbits about the town's history took me to a man named Robert Green.

Green just doesn't make any sense.

The original settlers in the Fairfield area -- Hanna, Templeton, Logan, Ewing -- showed up within a sensible time frame. They had all come from South Carolina and had all entered the valley within a year or so of each other. Ewing actually didn't, but he's still pretty close to the lead dog.

Green ain't in that group.

Yet August Reifel's 1915 history suggests Green was the first person to enter land in the township, January 1804, Section 23 ... and that's all it ever says about him. What puzzled me was, if he had been among the original group of Carolina settlers,why isn't he mentioned as part of it? What happened to him? He bought land before anybody else did, vanished from the face of the Earth and that's that. Reifel disappointed me.

I would have asked that question and if I didn't get an answer, I would have said so.

He didn't.

Green is simply a matter-of-fact guy who had the money to buy land he never intended to use. He came from somewhere for a reason, bought land for a reason and ... see ya boys!

Reifel's insertion of this "fact" was parroted by everyone who used the 1915 history as "gospel." Reifel made more than one mistake in his 1,280-page documentary. (By the way, most county histories were written that year. The library is full of these things.)

So I did some snooping through old Bureau of Land Management files and found Robert Green -- and yes, it appears that REIFEL WAS WRONG.

And he will always be wrong. Green entered the land in 1814 -- a full TEN YEARS after Reifel claimed he did. He probably should have known this, maybe did and had a brain cramp. He is dead, therefore forgiven. We are fairly certain that Green is also dead.

Green sold the land in Section 23 a couple of years later to a man named James Risk. I have no idea what happened to Risk. Green shows up a few other places in Union and Dearborn counties, alleging it's the same guy. I don't know more about him than that.

Section 23, the SE corner where Green bought, is just north of the Old Franklin Church.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to fix some history.

-- John

-- The accompanying photo is of the Logan cabin. Robert Green may have spent time there. 

An education in schools

Lots of information on Indiana pioneer schools.

While our focus is generally on schools in Fairfield Township, we have most of that covered in the Fairfield Schools publication that Marilyn and Julie produced. It's at the library in Brookville and it's mesmerizing.

Truly, it is.

In digging through some of the early records, I learned that there was a very early school near Sims Cemetery, which at the time was still part of Franklin County. There was also evidently another school  on Templeton's Creek on the south end of the township. That was in the 1830s.

Schools in the early days were interesting in many ways, including:

* It was quite difficult to find qualified teachers.
* Students prior to 1849 were not necessarily entitled to a state-funded education.
* Literacy in Franklin County in those first years was considered very high.

So, what did the students learn? This from the Indiana History Magazine, (1930, Michael Bossert):

Webster's Elementary Spelling-book, first printed in 1803 or 1804, is a much more scholarly book. The edition most used in early Indiana was that of 1816. It is a speller, interspersed with stories and fables, like those credited to Aesop. It also contains maxims and sayings of the Poor Richard type. There are also so-called "Useful Lessons" which deal with facts of arithmetic, geography, other sciences, and morals as well.


Students usually went to school only in the late fall and winter months, after the harvest was completed. As the state became more urbanized, so did attempts to curb truancy.

In 1849, the Indiana General Assembly passed legislation that attached schools to property taxes and ensured that education would be free for everyone. The idea was not universally popular, since religious schools and more conservative areas of the county wanted more control over their children's education. Fairfield Township, considered progressive, was heavily in favor of free schools. By contrast, Highland Township (Klemme's Corner) was heavily German and those people preferred a private approach.

Three schools existed in Fairfield Township during the 1800s, and there were dozens of such rural, one-room structures in the area. One school was in Farm Hill, another on Saltwell and the main school in the town. Its location was pretty much in the same spot from start to finish.

More interesting was the role of the Sunday school in those early days. Students who attended were more likely to be instructed by a teacher of some "character" even if the subject matter was highly religious in nature. But the kids learned to read their Bible lessons and picked up a bit of morality along the way.

The beef about bad teachers was common:

The want of competent teachers to instruct in the township schools is a cause of complaint in many sections of the State, and it is to be regretted that in employing transient persons from other States, containing but little qualification or moral character, the profession is not in that repute it should be.

Meanwhile, Bossert's essay says:

Sunday schools developed rapidly in Indiana. The fifth annual report of the American Sunday School Union in 1829 recorded one hundred Sabbath schools in the Hoosier state with 741 teachers and 5,651 scholars. 

Pictured is the old elementary school at Fairfield. It was replaced in the early 1950s. For more on that, consult the Fairfield Schools publication at the Brookville Public Library.

What this is ... and is not

Marilyn Luke Gausman and Julie Schlesselman, who put together the Fairfield book in 2010, present an observation about the town.

"During the 1950s and 1960s, when many small towns throughout the United States were celebrating their sesquicentennials in grand fashion, the town of Fairfield had no reason to celebrate or even plan for one, for by 1965, the year it should be celebrating, the little town already knew of its inevitable death.

By 1970 the town had been abandoned and its people scattered virtually everywhere. Many moved to Liberty, Blooming Grove, Brookville or Ohio. Several families purchased lots in New Fairfield, but that area never evolved into what the original town was.

Eventually all buildings in Fairfield were razed or salvaged. Nothing was left standing; anything that could possibly float to the top of the waters to be impounded in the upcoming years, simply vanished. Ironically, the town forsaken in the name of flood control rarely flooded; and in a strange twist of fate, the land where the town once stood was under water forever by 1974."

This blog is a quick-hits attempt to grasp the history of the town, based on some rather diverse resources. Nearly everything we will see here is the product of research. There isn't any new information about the history, at least none that we are obviously aware of.

Key sources of information are: Reifel's history from 1915, complex and unwieldy; the various editions of the Indiana History Magazine, which date back to 1905, also complex and cumbersome; and, our own Fairfield history recollections, "Town Under the Lake" and "Fairfield Schools."  Virgil Davis's history yields more insight. As well, an 1882 Atlas essentially parrots what we know from other sources.

This is not an attempt to present the history of Fairfield. That's neither practical nor sensible. Our Fairfield books have done that, in ways that are far more personal than a straight-shot linear chronology.

But it is an attempt to sustain interest in the town, its history and the people who lived there. Much of what we know is enhanced by our rich and diverse imagination. Some of that, we have learned, is just plain wrong. None of it is irrelevant.

I have some insight about the churches, the schools, life in the valley as it relates to the native Indians, and some of the characters who brought it all together. These will be quick hits, short on yawn, long on wow.

Northwest Territory

Like almost anything, if you want to know where you are, you need to know where you were before you got there . . . unless you are like the elderly woman I followed in traffic the other day.

Sad but true.

Anyway, why the so-called Northwest Territory eventually became Indiana, eventually became Franklin County, eventually became Fairfield Township, eventually became part of a federal lake . . . hey, we got that covered!

Trying to keep this simple, perchance to make it interesting, the deal was:

The Brits and the French were snarling at each other for the 11th time in 11 centuries, this time in what they called the Seven Years War. It was being held in Europe with many lords, earls, dukes and sir-types all involved. As usual, the soldiers were catching the rotten end of the pole. This was in 1752.

A couple of years later, the war spread to North America where the vastly outnumbered French wanted squatting rights at Fort Duquesne, home of the Pittsburgh Parrots. The fighting commenced in a raucous fashion and up stepped a guy we all knew as Geo. Washington, who single-handedly led the Americans and the Britskies to a hard-fought victory. Later, George would have his picture on the quarter. Later on, in a fantasy land we call "the capital."

So ... around 1763, the British and the American Colonials defeated the Frogs and their indigenous allies (aka the Cleveland Indians) and took control of all the land east of the Mississippi River, except for Florida (which Spain got in a 3-way trade.)

Fast-forward to a later time when the Americans, fed up with Lipton and the Hanovers, tossed the tea into the sea (get it? tea in the sea?) and all hell broke loose, leading to Betsy Ross making a flag and Geo. Washington asserting that all we had to fear was the porcupine.

America won that one, 1-0.

As a result, the new United States got all the land that the French had lost in the previous war (the French and Indian war, as we learned in 5th grade) . . . and by 1800, the new president, Th. Jefferson, introduced the 2-dollar bill and told people to go west, and speak with Horace Greeley.

Seriously, Jefferson's expansionist dream was generally the result of making it up as he went along, but the migration of settlers into the Ohio Valley and finally into Indiana was the stuff of legend. Genius, in fact. Deceitful, opportunistic, at times violent and cunning. But it worked.

By 1801, the first settlers left South Carolina and came up the mountainside, cut through to the west and came up through Kentucky to the shores of the great river Ohio. There, they began the process of building their homes.

I assert here, as an anecdote, that Jefferson bought the Louisiana territory on the west of the Mississippi from the French in 1803 despite the fact that the purchase was unconstitutional. Jefferson said, "To hell with the law. I'm buying it anyhow."

-- I have no idea who produced the brutal battle scene that I've used to illustrate this post. But, thanks.