Chapter 3 - The First Settlers

The earliest mass of settlers in Marshall County found their home a wilderness. Even in the mid 1830’s the forests of the Yellow River valley still abounded with wild cats, wolves, an abundance of deer, and even the occasional elk or bison. The very earliest of settlers settled near modern day Plymouth and to its south. Wolf Creek, now nothing more than a bridge over a small creek near Muckshaw road was one of the first centers of activity on the then frontier boasting a couple of houses and a grist mill. The parcels of land nearest the planned route for the Michigan Road were surveyed and sold first. At the same time a great many acres were set aside by congress for the purposes of school lands and as swamp lands. These swamp lands especially would remain largely undisturbed and undistributed for settlement until the early 1850’s when they were finally released for sale.This was then the situation when Jonathan Miller, his son Jesse, and his other children purchased their first acreage from the federal government in 1853. Of this land forty acres yet remains in the hands of their descendants. In many ways Jonathan Miller would likely have been a man difficult to distinguish from his contemporaries. He was no doubt a man accustomed to hard labor and the sting of sweat upon his brow. Few today can appreciate how incredibly backbreaking the labor was in those earliest of days on the farm. Trees had to be hewn, fields plowed out of forests. The plows of the farmers all forced to struggle through the soils tearing the roots and pushing aside the rocks. The first twenty years of settlement were no doubt chalked full of both affliction and disappointments. One may imagine though that after a solid seventeen years of labor that things might have been beginning to shape up by 1860 and 1861. Yet it was in these days that the some of the greatest trials were found.None would experience the trials of the great Civil War more closely than Jesse Miller, the already mentioned son of Jonathan. He would, as so many other men, go and serve the Union cause. Yes, just as the farms of the region began to take shape many of those farms’ finest young men would be called to the field of battle. The smell of the soil and fresh cut hay would no longer dance in their nostrils. To the contrary it was the smell of gunpowder that would now stain their sense of smell forever. Little remains of the military record of Jesse Miller. Yet for the purposes of our brief history it should suffice to comment that he did serve and that those days of uncertainty must have been challenging to say the least.About the same time, he wed Miss Serena Wade, daughter of William Wade, a neighboring farmer. He too set his hand to the plow and multiplied the number of acres under the family name. In the years to come Jonathan would go on to his rest, to be buried less than two miles from his homestead. From the hill where his grave lies the farm may nearly be seen. Jesse then continued to set about the business of making a family as well, and in this he excelled for to his union with Serena several children were added. Among these children was a daughter, Florence Ada.To think what she must have been like as a child or a youth would strain the imagination. Yet from the record that remains of her adult life we may assume this: she was independent, thrifty, and a sharp businesswoman. Even more than this, however, way may be certain that above all she loved the farm. Even into her last years it would be her great joy to walk out across the fields and pastures of the home forty acres to sit and fish on the bank of the marsh. No doubt her mind must have wandered beck to those times when, as a child, she must have sat there with her brothers or father or mother and done the same. Seasons had come and gone by those late years. Many harvests, many plantings, and many cuttings of hay had come and gone. Yet her love of home and the land, one must guess, surely never ceased. In those early years, however, long before she entered the memory of those now still living she wed the son of John Seltenright, a prosperous neighboring sawmill owner and farmer. The name of this son was Elmer Seltenright, and this is where our next chapter begins.

Chapter 2 - Those Who Came Before

Little evidence remains of those peoples who inhabited the Yellow River as the glaciers retreated. Only an arrowhead here or there found in the furrows of a freshly plowed field remain to mark their one time possessions. To the contrary the first written record of the people who lived near the farm is to be found in the annals of the French trappers and explorers.We are told by the earliest accounts that Marshall County was first home to the Sauk and Fox Native American bands. It was the Fox who were already living on and tilling the land when the French arrived on the scene. Shortly thereafter, however, a battle was waged in what is today Green Township, near Wolf Creek between the native Fox and the Pottawatomie, invading from the north. The Pottawatomie emerged triumphant and faded into the background of history until they reemerged in Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois in the days of Black Hawk.The reign of the Pottawatomie would be short lived, however. In the 1660’s and 1670’s the Iroquois of Northern New York would be the first to acquire firearms from the Dutch. By doing this they were able to build an inland empire and drive all others out. To survey the state of Indiana during the latter part of the 1600’s would be to discover that very few Native Americans actually called the state home at that time. The Miami had removed to just beyond the Mississippi and the Pottawatomie had retreated to Michigan and Wisconsin all trembling in fear of the Iroquois. Eventually, the French provided the Pottawatomie and Miami with guns to fend off the marauding Iroquois. Thus, by the time of the Revolutionary War Northern Indiana was again dominated by the Pottawatomie and the Miami, with the Shawnee and the Delaware to the south.The Pottawatomie, a people of the canoe, were likely the most frequent visitors to the farm in the days before settlement. It was them, after all, who named the river that flows near it the “Yellow” a name later translated to English. Indeed, the footprint of the Pottawatomie may still be measured by looking no further than the names of many local places such as the following: the Kankakee River (meaning either the river of swamps or the river of wolves), Nappanee (meaning wheat), and Winamac (the name of a Pottawatomie chief).Eventually the Pottawatomie would be removed in 1838. Their removal became necessary to the powers that be when the Black Hawk War occurred in the early to mid 1830’s. During this time the Pottawatomie nearly joined in league with Black Hawk. Owing to this and that they had sided with the British they were removed that year. The Miami to the south, however, held on for a while longer, not being deported until 1846. Even then the Miami were allowed to stay and a good number of them did remain near Peru, Indiana. The sale of lands in 1838 began the settlement of the territory. Indeed, as soon as the land was cleared of the Native Americans much of it went up on the auction block. The notable exception to this, however, were the vast swamp lands which remained unsold until released for sale by congress in 1850.

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.

An Introduction

The following series of blog postings will be for the entertainment and interest of my grandfather who is currently recovering from open heart surgery in Rochester, Minnesota. The following is a novice attempt at the history of the farm, specifically the 40 acres that have been held by the family the longest.IntroductionMankind has always been drawn to bodies of water. Many a poem was written as an ode to some lake or stream. Many a hymn was inspired by the billowing waves of the oceans. Many a song has been sung of the rivers that run through our lives. Perhaps the Yellow River of Northern Indiana does not have the class of the Seine in France, the mystique of the ancient Nile, or the power of the ever so mighty Mississippi, but like all of these there are many who call its muddy banks home. From the river, so long ago named the Yellow by the natives; the farm is only a short distance. Less than 2 ½ miles separate the river and the farm. From the river the land rises sharply then drops again as one proceeds north, only to begin its slow rise once more. The tile, ditches, and streams of the farm all flow to meet the river as well, adding to its width. As it meanders by the little corner of the world in which the farm is placed it does not seem noteworthy at all. Yet by the time it flows into the Kankakee River in Starke County it has nearly doubled in size. Let us begin our history and discussion of this farm, the Plainview Farm, by looking to this Yellow River and the greater Yellow River Valley of which it forms the spine.An old settler of the county, Charles Reeve, has written the following of the river and its greater valley: “Those who are residents and read the newspapers should rejoice that they live in the safe and beautiful Yellow River Valley. I suppose few of them ever stop to think that they do live in a valley; that westward the land rises from thirty to fifty or more feet to the mile, until it reaches the summit a few miles out and then slopes away on the great Kankakee plains, at only six or eight inches to the mile, to the Kankakee River, it then rises again to the high table land of the prairies; while on the north and northeast it rises in like manner to the summit, and then slopes away to the St. Joe River, and then the same on the east, southeast, and south, to the Tippecanoe. Nor do they regard our inland position and timbered protection, where the wild storms sweeping up the valleys of the larger streams above named and from Lake Michigan and the great Western praries are carried up by the rising land toward us, and so high over our heads instead of tearing us in pieces, while the timber, obstructing the currents, makes clouds and rain, and saves us from droughts. As day after day the reports of the terrible storms all over the country come to us, and the wailings of victims of pestilence leaving knowledge of the awful desolation in their track, are quiet valley is full of peace and safety- no failure of crops, no epidemics, no floods or great droughts, with good lands, ready and convenient markets, no public local debts, schools and churches convenient on every hand, the farmers of the Yellow River Valley should hug themselves with delight in their safety and prosperity.”