MAKING A NEIGHBORHOOD

     December, 1822, Gov. WILLIAM HENDRICKS signed the bill providing for the organization of Johnson county. The population of the county at the time, which was confined mainly to the Blue River and White River settlements, did not exceed 550. There were about 100 families, which was one family to every three and two-fifth square miles. In 1823 the settlement at Franklin was begun and the town laid off. The same year the first settler built his cabin on the south fork of Stott's Creek, in Congressional township No. twelve, in range three east, which Congressional township was, in 1830, incorporated into the political township of Union. This first setter was BARTHOLOMEW CARROLL, who located on section thirty-four, near the place where John Vandiver afterwards built a mill. His family consisted of himself and wife, three sons, WILLIAM, JOHN and SAMUEL, TWO DAUGHTERS whose names have not been handed down, and the grandfather of his children, a very aged man, who died, it is said, when he was 110 years old.
     BARTHOLOMEW CARROLL was a genuine backwoodsman who spent his days hunting and trapping and gathering wild honey. In that early day, and indeed for many a year after, all this region was celebrated for the abundance of its wild game, its fur-bearing animals and its wild bees. It is said that CARROLL would sometimes have as many as 100 bee trees marked in the woods at one time. The CARROLL'S had the country to themselves for three years, when, in 1826, others began to move in. PETER VANDIVER settled in section twenty-five, not far from the southeast corner of the township, where he lived till his death, in 1864. GUNINNE UTTERBACK, a widow, with 8 sons, settled at the place now known as Union village. JOHN GARSHWILER, and JOSEPH SIMPSON moved to the eastern border of the township
     In 1827 I know of only two newcomers, GEORGE KEPHEART, who built a cabin on section twenty-three, and ALEXANDER GILMER, in the northeast corner of the township. But the year following witnessed the advent of nearly or quite a dozen families. PETER ZOOK, SAMUEL WILLIAMS and HENRY BANTA, moved into the VANDIVER neighborhood; BENJAMIN UTTERBACK to the vicinity of his sister-in-law, MRS. GUNINNE UTTERBACK, and ADAM LASH, JAMES RIVERS and JOHN MITCHELL, well up toward the north side of the township.
     In 1825 WILLIAM BURKHART, a young man who was much of a woodsman, and who came to be known in after years by the cognomen of "LITTLE BILL BURKHART," to distinguish him from an older member of his family bearing the same name, was out hunting, and, and in the woods some where between the Hopewell settlement and PETER VANDIVER'S, he struck a runway which he followed westwardly a distance of "about five miles" till it brought him to Rock Lick, on the north fork of STOTT'S CREEK in section sixteen, which ultimately proved to be one of the most famous deer resorts in all the country. For miles and miles in every direction, runways led to and from this lick, and its fame was soon spread abroad, and hunters visited it from great distances. the hoof print of an exceptionally big deer was now and then seen in or about the lick, and every hunter that saw or heard about the big track was at once fired with an ambition to slay that deer.
     Of the hunters who visited Rock Lick in the early times was JESSE YOUNG [SR.], from the Ninevah settlement, whither he had moved from Brown County, Ohio in 1825. What may have been his habit as to the pursuit of game before coming to the new State of Indiana, I am not advised, but it seems that shortly after making his home at Nineveh, he became known as one of the most expert woodsmen and hunters in the country. I have heard from divers sources a tradition of a white deer that roamed the woods and eluded the hunters till its trail was struck by JESSE YOUNG [SR.]. At that marvelous distance it was brought down by a ball from "Old Crate," his hunting rifle.
     He must have visited Rock Lick in 1827, and probably in 1826. When passing through that marvelous forest of White Oak timber then growing on the table lands just south of the lick, his trained eye saw in its rich fruitage a far more abundant and infinitely cheaper food for his heard of swine, than the best tilled fields of corn of that day could produce. And so he drove his hogs out to the White Oak forests of Rock Lick, that they might feed and fatten at Nature's crib, and at the same time he, as their herdsman, gratify his love of the woods.
     In 1828 JESSE YOUNG [SR.] determined to make this township his permanent home, and to that end he selected the east half of the northwest quarter of section twenty-seven, on which to begin home making, but he did not enter the land from the United States till the following year. A cabin, however, was erected the same year in the woods, on a site on which PETER VORIS lived and died; and in the fall of the year, now nearly fifty-nine years ago, he moved his family out and Shiloh neighborhood was founded.
     JESSE YOUNG [SR.] came of Scotch-English Presbyterian ancestors who settled at Jones Falls, near Baltimore, about 1680. At the close of the Revolutionary war his father, JACOB YOUNG, having become involved in trade, sold his possessions, paid his debts, and crossing the Allegheny Mountains, settled in Western Pennsylvania. Here, in the midst of a hardy race, JESSE grew to manhood, and in his twenty-third year married MARGARET WILEY, then in her nineteenth year. Subsequently he moved to Brown County, Ohio, where we know that he and his wife were members of the Strait Creek Presbyterian Church, and from Brown County they moved to Indiana in 1825, as we have already seen.
     In 1828, JESSE YOUNG was forty-six years old, and MARGARET, his wife, forty-one, and they had a family of six sons -- JOHN, JACOB, WILLIAM, JESSE, JAMES, JONATHAN EDWARDS and THOMAS, (the advent of NEWTON WATTS, his youngest son and the first to be born in this neighborhood, not being till August 31,1830,) -- and of four daughters -- MARY, SARAH W., ELIZABETH and MARGARET EATON. Three of the boys were stalwart men, and one of the girls was a woman in years.
     Memory has not handed down to us the circumstances attending the building of that first Shiloh cabin. The building of cabins in those days was not looked upon as much of feat. All we know of this one is, that it was built in the woods, and that JESSE YOUNG and his sons could easily have built it without outside help, and that they probably did it. All Shiloh was in the woods. The Three Notched Line Road -- in the early times commonly known by the name of the "Hacked Line", and occasionally as the "Three Hacked Line," -- had been cut out as early as 1822, but between that road and the Morgan County line, along the tier of sections on which the Shiloh cabins were afterwards erected, there was not, when the site for that first cabin was chosen, a "stick amiss." What a wonderful growth of trees made the Shiloh forests of that long ago! Where we today see fruitful farms, then grew such an array of mighty beeches and ashes, and maples, and of giant oaks, and poplars, as only this American continent of ours can grow. So dense was the shade during the summer season that the noonday sun could scarce pierce through the arboreal arches above to the moist home of the blue violets below.
     The down trees were scarcely less numerous than the standing. Imagine these in all stages of decay, some newly fallen and some sunk half their depth in the oozy soil, and lying, some by the side of and others across each other, and all enveloped in thickets of spice wood, green briers and young saplings, and you may understand what an impenetrable barrier would confront the horsemen, and even how hard it would be for the footman to wedge his way through.
     The land chosen for the seat of this new neighborhood being, as it is, a part of the table land between the north an south forks of Stott's Creek, was, in the beginning mainly without natural drainage. Here were to be found swamps flooded from the beginning of the winter rains till the coming of the summer drouths [droughts]; nay, swamps that held water the year round. Can I ever forget those spongy marsh lands, with their heavy timber growths, made up in the main of shapely swamp-ash, heavy topped white elm and straight bolled bur oak trees? And if the picture of those swamp forests could, by any means, fade from my vision, could I forget the myriad voices piping from their lagoons on the advent of the spring thaws and the vernal showers?

     But there was change even in this swamp life. As the sun crept slowly up from the south and touched to life the white crept slowly up from the south and touched to life the white blossoms of the haw and the wild plum , and the dogwood and the crab-apple growing upon the ridges and knolls, the "Chuck cluck cheruck" song gave way to one pitched in a higher key.

     I have never heard a reason given for the organization of the church on Indian Creek rather than in this neighborhood. Of the six foundation members, four were of this neighborhood and two of the Indian Creek. Of the six members, four were women and two men, and the men lived here. JESSE YOUNG was the Father of Shiloh and stood at the front in its organization. From a statement in the record describing the foundation members as "a number of persons residing on the waters of Indian Creek," it might be inferred that it was the original purpose to make the Indian Creek neighborhood.
     *THOMAS W. TITUS the seat of the church, but I cannot believe it to have been so. Very soon after the organization was effected the building of a meeting house was agitated, and I never heard that any other location was talked of than the one adopted. Whatever the reason for effecting the organization on Indian Creek, I cannot but think the purpose from the beginning was to locate it in JESSE YOUNG'S immediate neighborhood.

"Making a Neighborhood", pages 1  2  3
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