The settlement of 1835, and the settler who said 1834

THE FIRST SETTLEMENT, IN TWO PRINTINGS

Lincoln Township was settled a full generation before it was organized, and its first settler is dated two ways by the record itself: both county histories put the first settlement in the fall of 1835, by Christian Fulmer and his family — Chapman in his Lincoln chapter (p. 733), Howard in his (p. 290) — with Howard's fuller line running: soon after came Thomas H. Wiley, Philo Ruggles, Joshua Cole, Washington Fuson, Thomas Barton, Archibald Goit, Samuel Lorens, Ebenezer Jones, Charles and Jackson Usher, Charles Havens and Morris Frost. Chapman tells the pace plainly: Wiley "came in" the next spring after Fulmer, and settlement was "slow until about 1850." But Wiley's own biographical sketch, printed in the same Chapman volume, tells it a year earlier and from inside: he arrived in 1834, he said, and found "but four other settlers in this (Lincoln) tp.," with "all his near neighbors" Indians (Chapman, p. 749). The two datings stand unmerged — the narrative line of both books (fall 1835, Fulmer first) against the settler's own testimony (1834, four settlers already present, the ground's Potawatomi still his neighbors). The John Cripe sketch fixes the next wave: the Cripe family moved into Lincoln Township in the spring of 1836, the father buying some 1,000 acres (Chapman, sketches, pp. 748–750). The land these families took was, in Chapman's summary, "marshy and wet, fast being reclaimed by draining," and the township's business was "farming and stock-raising" from the first (p. 733). There was no town in it, no post office, and no township government of its own — Lincoln was a reach of Liberty Township — for thirty years. What the settlement waited for was a road of iron.