The settlers of 1828

THE FIRST SETTLEMENT, IN TWO PRINTINGS

The town's first settlers are dated a year apart by its own records, and the earlier date has the stronger record: Chapman states it twice — the Moats among the county's arrivals of 1828 (p. 332), and in the Penn chapter, "The first settlers were William and Timothy Moat, who located here about 1828, on section 17" (p. 790) — and Howard agrees, "came in 1828" (p. 295). The town's published history puts the arrival in 1829, adding that they came "presumably" by the river; neither book states the route, and the conflict prints as it stands, the books governing the year. The settlement's own voice comes down through a memoir the town history attributes to Samuel Ireland under the title "Memories of Penn Township" — an attribution neither county history knows: Chapman's Ireland informant is S. I. H. Ireland, who "related" reminiscences the 1880 history used, and the memoir's beats are printed in Before the City with their provenance stated exactly. What those beats describe is a settlement sorting itself into named neighborhoods on the ground the ice had made easy — Pleasant Valley and Willow Creek on the river, Moat's Prairie on the south side (the later Eberhart Farm), George West and his son-in-law Thomas Babcock on the Baugo — while Chapman's own settler list runs Holt, Skinner, Cottrell, Curtis, the Byrkits and the Irelands (p. 790). Settlement preceded every instrument of town-making: when these families arrived, the last cessions touching the ground were still being signed, the township did not exist, and the plat was nine years off. The people came first, then the paper; the Story of Osceola section keeps the record's order.