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1776 – 1839 · the pre-city service roll
The Revolution — a tested negative: Howard states the county's whole Revolutionary record in one sentence: "Two soldiers of the Revolution, however, lived here for some time, and their bodies now repose in the old City Cemetery; they were Peter Roof, senior, and Isaac Ross." The old City Cemetery is South Bend's. No Revolutionary War veteran is named as a Penn Township or Osceola settler in Chapman's Penn Township chapter or biographies, or in Howard's Penn Township or Osceola sections — the chapters were read whole for this section, and the negative is printed as a finding, not an omission. Howard's own contrast makes the point: Olive Township gets a Revolutionary burial list (Fred Druliner, James Ranstead, Hamilton Cemetery); Penn gets none.
The War of 1812 — the county list, and Penn's one-generation-removed share: Howard names seventeen county men of 1812 — Thomas J. Allen, John B. Chandonai, Daniel Cottrell, Ransom Curtis, Theophilus Case, Archibald Defrees, Christopher W. Emerick, Daniel Heck, Christopher Lenz, Artemus Johnson, Peter Johnson, John Mack Sr., Jesse K. Platz, Jehu Meredith, Peter Roof Jr., Claybourne Smith and John Sample — and seats none of them in Penn Township. Two cautions ride on that list: Chapman's Penn settlers include a Samuel L. Cottrell and a James Curtis, who are different men on the face of the two texts from Howard's Daniel Cottrell and Ransom Curtis, and no text read connects them; they are not merged here. What Penn ground does hold is the next generation's testimony. Chapman's biography of Nelson Moon of section 6 — who came to the county in 1839 and settled in Penn Township — records that his father, Reynolds Moon, "was a soldier in the war of 1812," and that Nelson married Betsey Hoard, "daughter of James Hoard, dec., a soldier in the war of 1812." Both soldiers were already dead when Chapman wrote; neither text states that Reynolds Moon or James Hoard themselves settled on Penn ground, and this section does not say they did. The settling sources are named in the closing register: the 1812 pension and bounty-land files under both names.
The claim that cannot stand as printed: Chapman's biography of John Squires of section 6 (born in Butler County, Ohio, 12 June 1810, by the same biography) carries his own telling of Fort Stephenson: "He was in Fort Stevenson with General Harrison when that place was attacked by the British, and states that Harrison would not attempt to hold the fort, and was on the point of evacuating it, when one Col. Croghan asked for 100 volunteers to help him defend the fort." Fort Stephenson was attacked on 2 August 1813 and held by Major George Croghan; Harrison was not inside the fort; and a man born in June 1810 was three years old that August. The biography gives no unit and no enlistment. The claim is printed as Chapman prints it, flagged as irreconcilable with the birth date printed beside it — an old man's borrowed memory, most likely, but the file prints the conflict and does not resolve it. The compiled service records of the Ohio militia (NARA) are the settler.
The ground in 1832: the township's own first brush with a war is the Black Hawk scare of the year Penn was organized: Chapman's Penn chapter records that the settlers sent a delegation to Pokagon, who "would remain neutral during the contest." The county's minute-man company (Capt. Hiram Dayton's) was seated at South Bend and Portage Prairie, not Penn — context, not this ground's company.
Sources:
- Howard, Ch. XIV §II, pp. 715–716, and the Roll of Honor introduction, p. 731.
- Chapman, Penn Township biographies — Nelson Moon, pp. 831–832; John Squires, pp. 838–839; Penn Township narrative, pp. 788–790 (Black Hawk delegation).