Names that run through the record: the Comptons and the publisher's family

1829–1906 · informants, liverymen, editors

Some families appear once in a town's record; the Comptons appear at every joint of this one. Hugh V. Compton, born 18 September 1829 in Butler County, Ohio, brought to this county at six, kept "a first-class livery stable" in New Carlisle and owned it with a 150-acre farm; in 1880 he rode as a "rider" — a sworn constable for the purpose — of the Anti-Horse-Thief Association, and in 1906 the town's Gazette carried a piece under the name Hugh V. Compton. His kinsman Albert H. Compton of New Carlisle stands in Howard's preface as one of that history's named informants. Dr. No single record reached ties the thread into one genealogy, and this section does not invent the knot: the name recurs, at the livery stable, in the professor's preface, on the street sign, and that recurrence is the finding.

The newspaper family of the next generation carries the war into the press. G. M. Fountain was born in South Bend 20 March 1857; his father, Chapman writes, was "killed in one of the last battles of the late war," his mother moved the six children to Mishawaka in 1865 and soon died, and Fountain, orphaned twice over by the war and its aftermath, removed to New Carlisle in the spring of 1880 and established the New Carlisle Gazette, buying out his partner G. H. Alward that August and making the paper Republican. The Gazette's two incarnations are told in the newspapers leg's file, including the unresolved order of its founders' names. The father's name the sketch does not give; the county's Roll of Honor, printed in the war leg's file, carries a Lieutenant Solomon H. Fountain, died 9 April 1865 of wounds received in action — the war's last day. The two statements print side by side in the war file; whether they are one man is a question the records read do not answer, and this section does not answer it either.

Sources

1. Chapman (1880), sketches of H. V. Compton and G. W. Fountain, pp. 776–777; Anti-Horse-Thief Association article, pp. 769–770.
2. Howard (1907), preface (Albert H. Compton, informant); New Carlisle Gazette, 16 Nov. 1906 (Hugh V.
3. Chapman (1880), Roll of Honor, p. 445 (Lieut. Solomon H. Fountain).