Soldiers before the town: no Revolution, no 1812 man of this ground

1776 – 1835 · 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. This ground was unbroken Kankakee marsh and thicket until 1835 — the town's own history page opens on deer herds, wolves and catamounts — and no Revolutionary veteran is named as a settler of this ground in Howard's Lincoln Township section or in any text read. The negative is printed as a finding, not an omission.

The War of 1812 — the county list, none of it seated here: 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 on this ground. Howard's Lincoln settler roll, read whole, names the men who came in 1835 and after — Christian Fulmer, Thomas H. Wiley, Philo Ruggles, Joshua Cole, Washington Fuson, Thomas Barton, Archibald Goit, Samuel Lorens, Ebenezer Jones, Charles and Jackson Usher, Charles Havens, Morris Frost — and calls none of them a soldier of 1812 or of any war. A settler of military age in 1812 could stand behind one of those names; no text read says so, and this section does not say it either. The 1812 pension and bounty-land files under those names are the settler, named in the closing register.

The ground in 1832: the county's Black Hawk scare belongs to the years before settlement here; the minute-man company the county raised (Capt. Hiram Dayton's) was seated at South Bend and Portage Prairie. Context, not this ground's company.

Sources:

1. Howard, Ch. XIV §II, pp. 715–716 (the county's Revolution and 1812 record); Ch. VIII §10, pp. 290–291 (the Lincoln settler roll).
2. Town of Walkerton, official history page (walkerton.gov/history.html) — the 1830 ground as the town itself describes it, drawing on Chapman (1880).