Elijah Lineback — the first family, in two tellings

1803–1839 (Chapman/Atlas) · d. 1837 (Howard Vol. 2)

The settlement's first household, and the works' deepest disagreement — printed whole, both sides. Chapman and the Atlas tell it one way. Elijah Lineback, born 1803, of German origin, came with his wife Elizabeth (née Little) and child on horseback through the wilderness — she "was frequently thrown from her horse while on the journey, but never hurt the baby" — found South Bend at three log cabins, built a cabin there and worked the Michigan road at five dollars a month, then took a quarter-section of Michigan-road land about half a mile north of Lakeville: "for the first night he put up his bed under a sugar-maple tree. 'And the next day,' says Mrs. Rector, 'I had to get dinner for seven of the Michigan-road hands.'" This was the spring of 1833, and Chapman is plain: "They were the first family in the tp., and Mrs. Rector, formerly the wife of Mr. Lineback, is the oldest settler now living in the tp." His son George R., born 9 November 1833, heads the township's firsts as its first child in Chapman and Howard alike (the Atlas's line, as its text carries it, gives November 9, 1834 — the year conflict printed whole in the register, its settler a page-image check). Chapman and the Atlas agree Elijah died 4 July 1839, a member of the United Brethren Church; his widow married Mark Rector, one of the Section 1 Rectors, and raised a second family on the ground. Howard's second volume tells the same life darker and different, and it is not merged: the Linebacks "were the second family to locate within the borders of Union township, a Mr. Garner having preceded them"; Elijah died in "the memorable sickly season of 1837" and "now lies buried in South Bend", having traded his purchase and died five hundred dollars in debt, the farm taken, the widow left with "a couple of beds being her sole worldly possessions", feeding her family picking cranberries at twenty-five cents a bushel. No "Garner" appears in Chapman's or the Atlas's rolls — Howard's first volume puts a John Gardner in the 1833 cohort — and whether Garner is Gardner the works do not say. The son Jonathan carries the family's second generation in both volumes: overland to California in 1850 (reaching Placerville, in Howard's telling, with two Union Township companions and "but thirty cents and thirty pounds of flour between them"), home again, six years the township's assessor on the Greenback ticket, twice drafted and twice hiring a substitute — and headed in Howard's second volume, in 1907, "the oldest living resident of Union township."