MyIndianaHome.net

Vevay Reveille, Jan. 3, 1895

A PIONEER
Sends a Donation to the Orphans Home of Vevay, and Then Speaks of the
Unorganized Society That Relived Suffering in Early Times—Much Interesting Pioneer History, With Many Pleasant Allusions To Well Known Switzerland County People.

DEAR FRIEND BAIRD:—I wish, through the Reveille, to express my appreciation of the kindly notice those beloved humane people of the Children’s Home Society gave me in its columns; and, in return, and front sense of pleasant duty, for a Christmas offering, I send them the little sum accompanying this. Since learning of that organization to relieve the suffering little ones, an unorganized society that aided the big as well as the little ones, presents itself before old memory’s eye; yet never out, but always fixedly in old memories.

When my grandfather and father with their families landed from their boat onto Indiana soil, at Vevay, sickness accompanied them, while in a very few days they felt the pangs of sorrow in the death of my mother’s brother, and following that bereavement, in less than four years, came the death of grandfather, grandmother, my mother’s babe, her brother-in-law, and one other of the family. But, in all that sorrow and death, the hand of that ‘‘unorganized” society was felt, in its solacing core and effective relief, and most lovingly beginning in Vevay in that first affliction.

Our people soon moved out to Jacksonville, grandfather in a hewn log house on the Dodd Lindley place, where the Betts-Morrison house now stands, and father in a little one room cabin that stood between the McCullough store room and the house which John H. Case built sixty years ago last summer, and which was since owned and occupied by my old friend I. C. Smith. From that cabin my father, in five years, moved into nearly all the cabins around about and they were not few.

All that, after leaving a firm in York state, which he bought of the ‘‘Holland Purchase Company,” cleared up, paid for as fast as the payments became due, and with a comfortable house to live in, and where my oldest sister and I were born; but that craze to go to “Injeany’’ so overcame him, that he determined to leave that comfortable home, which was a fixed fact, only to find the realities of poverty, sickness, and death, in that falsely dreamed of Eldorado of the west. Father sold his farm to his brother, but who soon died, and never paid father a cent, while it reverted back to the company. Their farms joined, and grandfather was the first to suggest the move, but mother protested to the last, yet was compelled to yield. She used to talk to me about it, and would cry as she would say: “My folks were all going, but I had a home and wanted to stay there.’’

In the spring of 1821, E.T. Spencer’s father lived in a double log cabin on what has ever since been called the “old still field,” as Guy Peabody had operated a still house there. Father planted the whole side hill with corn and Mr. Spencer allowed him to live in one of the cabins, but before the corn made its appearance a heavy rain came and made a gutter of every furrow up and down the bill, and then father soon returned to his cabin in town. That side hill was soon after that, covered with a forest growth of timber and I suppose remains so.

Up to that time sickness was not the exception, but the rule, in our family, as well as with the older settlers, while poverty stared us in the face all the time, yet the solacing care and loving hands of those old settlers saved us from much suffering,

After trying, with such poor success, farming on the lulls, grandfather and father were allured by the rich soil of the river bottom to rent, in the spring of 1822, the farm of David Dufour, above Vevay, but against the advice of others and who predicted sickness, and too, which prediction was terribly realized, as grandfather died there on June 29. Then those dear neighbors who had advised against their going down into the very jaws of death, went down with their wagons and hauled us all back to the same house we had left three months before, and where grandmother died on July 16 in the Dodd Lindley house.

Every one of us were sick for months and mother’s babe died September 2 while she and father were not able to follow it to the grave. I took the last look at the dear little creature in its coffin, setting on the chest, which my father brought from Vermont with, all he possessed in it, and which relic I now have. Mr. Stow very kindly led me all the way to the grave and allowed me to look into the sacred hole.

Very early in that year the Stow family moved from Vevay into the double log cabin on
Gen. Keen’s, later Printer’s Retreat farm —and at once they and our people became lovingly intimate. They were of those who protested against our people going down onto that river farm, and many years after, that dear mother Stow talked with me about it, as though those sad consequences had just happened-- so deeply were they bedded in her heart’s sorrow. Virgil Stow drove his father’s team that helped to remove us back, and twenty years after talked to me about—that sad duty kind friends performed, and mentioned, what I well remembered, that the trees and fences below Mt. Sterling were covered with caterpillars, and on the ‘‘Tom’’ Gilland farm, fence, hung in chunks big enough to fill a half peck measure - the same as in 1831, the memorable year of frost, locust and catterpillars, and when that insect so nearly destroyed the famous hundred acre orchard of Geo. Craig, below Vevay. That pest began to collect on a wild cherry tree in our front yard, and covered every leaf, when an inch hole was bored in the tree, three inches deep, filled with brimstone and a plug driven right after it, then within an hour, they began to come down and collected near the ground in a bunch large enough to fill a peck measure, and before only a few holes were made in the leaves.

Much sickness and destitution for five years after coming to this state, was our lot, yet the loving heart and ready hand of that ‘‘society’’ was felt by us in every need. It was loving feeling among the older settlers that the new ones must be looked after, and their needs attended to, while of the special ones who were always attentive to us, I can remember the Peabodys, Hiram and Augustus, Joel Wilson, the Nelsons, Jacksons, and Stows, after they came—we preceded them about three years - and David Lester. He was clear out our neighborhood, yet his grand heart reached out to us; as father often afterwards said he never could forget him for two bushels of corn he brought him, as it made him feel rich.

There were three young women Alvia, Kate and Betsy Jackson, one of whom was a constant attendant in our cabin of suffering, all that season after our return from that river farm. Kate was so struck with me that she promised to wait until I got to be man, and then marry me, and to hasten my arrival to that state she bought me a pair of trousers --- but, “fever’n ager” boils so covered my little anatomy that I couldn’t wear them, and cried and cried in my slips, while she went and married a man in pants.

My now departed, dear parents never forgot all those kind attentions from those lovely people, while, after they came to even a moiety of a comfortable living. They reached out to aid the sick and needy, and by precept as well as by example, taught me to imitate them.-while I do thank my Heavenly Parent that I was not an unwilling learner.
A. S. KINGSLEY
Indianapolis, Ind.