The first farms — settlement from the fall of 1835, and Chapman's farm roll of 1880

1835–1880 · THE PIONEER FARMS AT SKETCH STRENGTH

The first settlement of the township was made in the fall of 1835 by Christian Fulmer and family. Chapman's narrative continues: "The next spring Thomas H. Wiley came in" — the spring of 1836. Wiley's own sketch in the same chapter conflicts, and the conflict prints whole: the sketch has Wiley arriving in 1834, with his wife and two children, and finding but four other settlers in the township. If the sketch is right, the township's settlement predates its own narrative by two years and Fulmer was not first; if the narrative is right, the sketch's memory reached too far back. The two statements stand as Chapman printed them, and the Story of Walkerton section carries the settlement question with them. What followed was slow: the township "was slow in being settled, but about the year 1850 settlers came in more rapidly and it was not long till it was mostly occupied and owned by the residents." The Dare entry shows what farming the unimproved ground cost: William Dare entered 200 acres from the government in what was then Liberty, now Lincoln, township, and "had to haul his grain to Michigan City with ox teams, the trip consuming two days," there being no railroad in the county; he was accorded the first company right of way across his farm when the railroad came, and lost his life at the railroad crossing on that farm (Howard).

Chapman's sketches give the township's farm roll of 1880 at a strength few townships get — acres and valuations, man by man: Allen Beall, 240 acres (his milling years were spent in Missouri, and no mill of his is seated here); William Bellinger, section 17, 120 acres valued at $75 an acre; James Blain, 160 acres, eight of them across the line in La Porte County; Tobias Cripe, 115 acres at $70 an acre, "farming and stock-raising"; John Cripe and William Cripe, farmers — their father had bought a tract of about 1,000 acres in the township in the spring of 1836, the largest single purchase of the settlement record; Benjamin Eager, 156 acres; Neely Frame, 140 acres in section 13; Benjamin F. Rinehart, 220 acres, in "the independent business of farming"; John Smith, settled in the township in 1852; John Rudduck, a hatter by apprenticeship turned prairie-breaker; Philo E. Ruggles. Jacob Rupel's sketch carries the un-reclaimed township inside the farmed one: the Rupels hunted deer in "the swamps and marshes of the Kankakee" — the marsh edge was this township's southern country in 1880, within a working farm family's own memory. Henry M. Smith's farm, in Howard's telling, shows the scale a generation later: the Smiths' 227 acres, the homestead named Plain View Farm, and the price of the wheat economy in kind — a fire a year after Smith's 1878 marriage destroyed a barn 30 by 64 feet, four horses, 25 tons of hay, 350 bushels of wheat and his implements, on a farm whose owner had begun wage work at fourteen at fifty cents a day.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township chapter, pp. 731–751: the settlement narrative, the Wiley sketch, and the farm sketches (Beall, Bellinger, Blain, the Cripes, Eager, Frame, Rinehart, Rudduck, Rupel, Smith, Ruggles). Read first-hand, whole.
2. Howard (1907), vol. 2: the Henry M. Smith sketch, pp. 948–950 (the Dare entry, the ox-team hauls, Plain View Farm, the fire).