Chapter 1- The Hand of God

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” Genesis 1:26-31

At the very beginning of time an eternally august and holy being spoke the worlds into being. The blooming of a flower, the bursting of a volcano, the buzz of the bee, the patterns of weather, the geological formations, and on and on were all spoken into being by the words of the great “I Am,” Jehovah. Yet, despite the immense vastness of his creation Almighty God, according to his great wisdom looked to the future, and must have known that on a small corner of the great spinning world he had created that a little farm would grow up in the fertile soil placed there by him.At the same time, however, the farm today, as known by those who are familiar with it, is not what it was when it was created. In fact the earliest we may guess back to is a few million years removed from our present day. In that era (approximately some 3 to ten million years ago or more) there would have been an ancient river system that covered much of Indiana. This massive river, at least as wide as the states of Illinois and Indiana combined and running from northern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, was actually more of a great seaway. The presence of this great seaway explains the massive deposits of limestone that lie deep under the soils of the Midwest and the fossils of clams and other mollusks that come to the surface of the freshly plowed fields from time to time.Over time however, as the Appalachian Mountains began to appear the features of the land changed as well. The once mighty seaway retreated as the mountains rose across the horizon. From present day Maine to deep in the heart of Georgia the Mountains rose ever on towards the suns. Yet the mountains did not rise alone. As they rose they pulled up with them the foothills, which still exist in many areas such as in Kentucky and Southern Indiana. In that day, however, the foothills stretched nearly into Michigan, so great was the effect of the emerging mountain range. For many millennia this remained what is now Indiana. Were we to travel back in time we would not recognize the land at all. It was hilly, wooded, and roamed by many species of animals now extinct.This would not last, though. Soon the Midwest would be formed into what we know it as today by a historical and geological behemoth known as “the last ice age.” The temperatures dropped, the snow fell and for many hundreds of years the glaciers, massive mile-high bulldozers of ice, progressed slowly growing to the south. During this time the ice extended nearly as far south as Bloomington, Indiana, and even formed a land bridge of ice connecting Alaska to Asia (the means by which the Native Americans came to the Americas). The cold must have seemed as if it would last forever. In those days it was not uncommon to spy a Wooly Mammoth or Saber Tooth Tiger prowling about what would become the Hoosier state. Indiana, known in the current day for the waving fields of green produce would have been known in that day for the drifts of snow and sheer cliffs of ice.Then one day the temperature began to rise again. The slowly marching glaciers halted just before reaching present day Bloomington and began to recede. Yet, it was these glaciers that would form Indiana and the land of which the farm was comprised more than anything else. The glaciers had most noticeably leveled the foothills that had once been created by the rise of the Appalachians. Yet as they retreated they also created other features in the place of those it had destroyed. Working almost as a mighty hand of God the glaciers wiped the ancient Midwestern United States of its hills and valleys, and as they receded, left behind mighty deposits of boulders and vast ranges of loamy, sandy hills. The greatest range of these loamy (sometimes more clay sometimes more sand) hills begins in the St. Joseph River Valley just to the south of South Bend. The hills, which are in fact hardly noticeable to many stretch to the south as far as Rochester and then slope on down at a southeastern trajectory to Peru. As the range of hills grows to the east it encompasses Warsaw, Wawassee, Columbia City, and nearly Fort Wayne. Beyond and south of Warsaw the hills grow to their greatest heights and most sweeping expanses. It is these hills of Kosciusko County that form the many lakes of the region, Lake Wawassee being the greatest in size of them all.Yet, it is at the tip of this range of ever so gently rolling hills that the farm is placed in the mainly clayey and sandy soils north of Plymouth, only miles from the Yellow River. It is here that the farm and its soils were prepared for those would come later, so many thousand years ago.