Photos of the downtown stores

 

Somewhat unimposing, but the two general merchandise stores at the Main-Main Cross intersection. To the right, the taller building, was our Town Hall, known at times as Johnston Hall.

The grocery on the left was owned by George Jinks, Lucille Burke, Roland Updike and finally Willie T. Davis.

The store next to that had various tenants, including Bert Luker. At the end, the Corps of Engineers coaxed in a small restaurant for workers in the valley. This photo taken by Luann Himelick sometime in the late 1960s.

Another view of the Town Hall after Fairfield had been evacuated due to the onrushing flood. The building was erected in the 1880s. The building served many functions, including Halloween parties, Christmas dinners, school lunches and a variety of annual events, as well as serving as our township's voting site. The empty lot next to it once contained a creamery. 

Photos of the Fairfield schools

 This one is the original school, built sometime after 1900.

The second one is the last one, closed in the middle 1960s.

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