Delaware County, Indiana - Chapter 9: Early Transportation and Communication, 1908

The subject of means of communication has recurred again and again in this history of the settlement of the county. Ever since men began to live on the earth, the matter of getting from place to place and carrying things from place to place has been of vital importance ; and the higher the development of society the more perfected become the methods of such communication. It would be impossible to conceive of our country in its present state of civilization without the facilities for movement and transportation which men have devised and improved during the last hundred years. It seems that the principal efforts of men are now bent upon the problems presented in the moving of material and persons from place to place. Transportation is the key to population and also to industry. Cities grow in population accordingly as they are conveniently situated with respect to transportation facilities, or as these facilities are supplied to them when needed. An agricultural district, however fertile, will be improved to the point of profitable production only when means are at hand or are provided by which the products may be readily and economically taken away to the markets. It is little wonder, therefore, in view of the importance of the general subject of communication, that special phases of the subject are at the present time the greatest vital issues, both economically and politically, before the American people. From this point of view the subject has only incidental pertinence to the history of Delaware county; but in studying the general theme of communication this county affords as many concrete examples as any other. The county has had its Indian trails, its paths blazed through the woods, its primitive state and local highways, its toll roads, its free pikes, its limited water routes, its railroads, and its electric lines, each accompanying a new degree of development and marking a new era in the welfare of the people.

Before civilization introduced scientific road-making, wild animals were the markers and surveyors of roads. The narrow, deep-worn and wavering path through the woods, indicating the route of the wild animal between its lair and the spring where it quenched its thirst, was the course which die Indian, and later the white man, took in going through the woods. Thus animals were the first road makers, and blazed the way for their immediate successors, the roving Indians. The latter would naturally extend and connect the trails into certain long avenues of travel across the country, which they would follow in making their pilgrimages from one hunting ground to another or for their war expeditions.

Several of these trails existed in Delaware county long before white man set his foot here. The Indian villages near Muncie, Yorktown and and on the Mississincwa were centers from which radiated numerous trails, several of which had been used so long, were so well marked, that they possessed the importance of "trunk lines" among Indian tribes and as such were widely known and used.

After Rome had conquered a nation she made roads to that nation; so she was in easy communication with the remotest parts of her empire, and they with her. It is said that when Congress first met after the war for independence, under the new constitution, the lack of good roads was much commented upon by congressmen and citizens generally, and various schemes suggested to meet the want. The settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee on leaving Virginia had plunged into the wilderness and had followed Indian traces across the mountains to their new homes. With the acquisition of the Northwest Territory, extending the territory of the United States to the Mississippi, it was recognized that, in order to make this region an integral part of the nation, effective communication must be established between all parts. This necessity was emphasized when, owing to the absence of water communication over the mountains, the Kentucky settlements were practically isolated from the eastern states and threatened to secede from the Union because the government was about to allow Spain to close up the mouth of the Mississippi to American commerce. Before any definite steps had been taken by the government toward connecting the east and west by roads, the Louisiana purchase had widened our boundaries to the Pacific, and, with an energetic and far-seeing statesman like Jefferson as president, the matter of binding these vast areas closely together became a vital question. In the act of Congress, in 1802, by which Ohio was permitted to enter the Union, it was provided that two percent of the proceeds of the sales of the public lands within her limits should be held and applied in the construction of a public highway "from the navigable waters emptying into the Atlantic" to a point on the Ohio river and within the state of Ohio. A like provision was made in the act admitting Indiana to the Union.

The proposition for a National road first took practical shape in 1806, when an act passed Congress authorizing the appointment of three commissioners to lay out a road from Cumberland, at the head waters of the Potomac in Maryland, to the state of Ohio. This was the beginning of the old Cumberland or National Road, the only highway of its kind ever wholly constructed by the government of the United States, and a road of wonderful significance in the development of the west and the greatest and one of the most romantic highways of America. The National Road, though it was finally extended across Indiana, did not touch Delaware county. But it was pone the less a factor in the county's history. The existence of this road, and the part it played in directing and distributing emigrants, should be thoroughly understood and constantly kept in mind in the discussion of the early settlement of the county. The detailed history of the "Old Pike" has been told, in a most interesting way, by T. B. Searight, under the title given. He generalizes the importance of the highway in the following language: "It was a highway at once so grand and imposing, an artery so largely instrumental in promoting the early growth and development of our country's wonderful resources, so influential in strengthening the bonds of the American Union, and at the same time so replete with important events and interesting incidents, that the writer of these pages has long cherished a hope that some capable hand would write its history and collect and preserve its legends. . . . From the time it was thrown open to the public, in the year 1818, until the coming of railroads west of the Alleghany mountains in 1852, the National Road was the one great highway over which passed the bulk of trade and travel, and the mails between the east and west. Its numerous and stately stone bridges with handsomely turned arches, its iron mile posts and its old iron gates, attest the skill of the workmen engaged on its construction, and to this day remain enduring monuments of its grandeur and solidity." For most parts of the west and a great part of the southwest, this was the most direct route to Washington city. For this reason all classes of people from this part of the country having business at the national capital made it their highway to and from Washington. The stage coaches for the carrying of the mails and passengers were taxed to their utmost capacity, and their numbers were constantly increased. So great was the travel that it is said as many as twenty-five coaches could be seen leaving Wheeling at one time for Cumberland, and as many would leave Cumberland for the west. The freight traffic was even greater. Long and almost interminable lines of huge Conestoga wagons, drawn by four, six and sometimes by eight horses, with their loads of flour, bacon, tobacco, whisky, butter and other products, on their eastward way, or with loads of every imaginable kind of merchandise when bound for the west, might be seen at all times. Then, too, there might be seen similar trains of wagons laden with the household effects of those who were seeking new homes in the west. Thousands of cattle, horses and hogs were wending their way to the eastern markets. "From morning till night," is the description given by another observer, "there was a continual rumble of wheels, and when the rush was greatest there was never a minute that wagons were not in sight, and as a rule one company of wagons was closely followed by another." By day the eye could follow the route from horizon to horizon by the clouds of dust raised bv the crowding caravans, and by night the camp fires blazed at brief intervals as far as one could see.

Here was the great avenue by which the western expansion that bcrjan after the war of 1812 advanced into all the fertile places of the west. For some years the National Road carried the travelers only to the eastern borders of Ohio, and thence they followed the course of the Ohio to their destination, usually continuing the journey by boats, but also by overland journeys. "It is estimated," says Mr. Searight, "that two-fifths of the trade and travel of the road were diverted at Brownsville [in southwest Pennsylvania, near Pittsburg] and fell into the channel furnished at that point by the slack water improvement of the Monongahela river, and a like proportion descended the Ohio river from Wheeling, and the remaining fifth continued on the road to Columbus, Ohio, and points further west. . . .v Before the era of railroads Columbus derived its chief business from the National Road."

In 1827 the National Road was completed through Wayne county, Indiana. The tide of migration, much smaller in volume, to be true, than when it passed over the mountains, was by this means brought within the state of Indiana before being dispersed to individual settlements. Herein we see the principal reason why so large a proportion of the early settlers of this county came from Wayne county. In 1829 Congress appropriated money for opening the road, eighty feet wide, east and west from Indianapolis, and in the course of the next few years about a million dollars was appropriated for continuing the road in Indiana. But before the road was completed through this state, and could assume such importance as it enjoyed along the eastern sections, the railroad era had come and the decline of overland travel was rapid. A rhetorical picture of this change was drawn by Mr. Yancey in Congress in 1846, when he spoke of the road as follows: "When the project of the Cumberland road was first conceived, it was needed as a great highway for the trade and produce of the fertile west to find an outlet on the Atlantic coast. The mountains intervened between the Ohio valley and the Atlantic coast. Steam, not then in such general use as now, had not rendered the upper Ohio navigable ; railroads had not clamped as now with iron bands the trembling earth. The rich produce of the soil found its war to market over rough roads upon the lumbering wagons, and the traveler when jolted over them at the rate of sixty miles a day considered himself as doing a good day's work. How different now I The broad Ohio is navigable by hundreds of floating palaces, propelled against its current by fire-breathing engines. The mountains are pierced by railroads and canals. . . . Why, 5ir, men are behind the times with this old road. The spirit of the age is onward. Thirty miles an hour on land; a thousand miles a minute on Professor Morse's wires is deemed ordinary speed. On this road, my friend from Indiana (Mr. Owen), inform* mc that during parts of the year he has been able to make but two miles m hour on horseback."

State Geologist Blatchley of Indiana relates what became of the Indiana division of the road. "In 1848 the road was turned over to the respective states through which it passed. In 1850 the Wayne County Turnpike Company was organized and took over, under a charter granted by the state, that portion of the road, twenty-two miles in length, within that county. The company then graveled the road and operated it as a toll road until 1890-94, when it was purchased by the several townships through which it passed and made free from tolls. From Wayne county westward the road passed through Henry, Hancock, Marion, Hendricks, Putnam, Clay and Vigo counties. That portion in Henry county was secured by a private corporation, graveled, and made a toll road about 1853. In 1849 the Central Plank Road Company, composed of prominent citizens of Marion and Hendricks counties, was granted that portion of the road extending from the cast line of Hancock county to the west line of Putnam county, for the purpose of constructing a plank road. With the granting of it to these several corporations the old National Road as a public institution, fostered by the nation or the state, ceased to be. It had fulfilled its high purpose, and was superseded by better things which owed to it their coming." As a final tribute to this old highway it "carried thousands of population and millions of wealth into the west, and more than any other material structure in the land served to harmonize and strengthen, if not save, the Union."

So we saw, during the twenties and thirties, a constant stream of population flowing along the Old Pike by way of Wayne county. Very early in the history of Delaware county, probably at the time the county was organized, there was a well defined and well traveled road leading from Richmond northwest into this county. This was not a way that had been marked bv surveyors and legally "made," but was blazed through by the settlers, each party that came that way adding some little improvement - cutting down a few trees, wearing away the undergrowth, dropping logs in the low places - by which this became a highroad.

One other route by which the population of the east found outlet to the new west calls for mention here, though it was of very much less importance to the settlement of Delaware county. In 1825 the Erie Canal, after eight year? in building, was opened to traffic, and the waters of Lake Eric flowed across the state of New York into the Hudson river. The land-bound commerce of the Atlantic seaboard found, in this direction, outlet to the eager west, and, borne along the same channel, the grain harvests of the inland were brought tn the markets of the world. It was no uncommon thing for fiftv ark-like boats, loaded with passengers and freight, to depart from the eastern terminus of the Eric canal in a single day, passing to the west at the rate of four miles an hour. Before the waters were turned into the "Big Ditch" the toilsome urging of creaking wagon had not carried a fraction of the commerce that passed along this waterway.

The Erie canal not only gave a tremendous impetus to western expansion and development, but it partly changed its direction. Before 1825 the trend of westward emigration had been down the Ohio valley. The great water courses were fringed with settlements, when the inland country was still an unbroken wilderness. The regions bordering the rivcrways and great lakes were populous before a tree had been felled for a settler's cabin on the fertile prairies and woodland of northern Indiana and southern Michigan. A map of the highways of traffic of the United States in the year 1825 shows a network of routes along the Ohio valley, but very few north of the watershed into the great lakes. The homescekers who traveled across Lake Erie to its western end would, on their arrival at Detroit, find one generally used road to the west. That led southwest to Monroe, up the valley of the Maumcc, past Defiance, Ohio, through Fort Wayne, Indiana, thence northwesterly around the lower bend of Lake Michigan to Chicago or farther west. Fort Wayne, built on the site of the old Indian trading post, Kekionga, already mentioned, had been a recognized station and meeting point for a century, and was, in 1825, the converging point for several other roads leading from different points along the Ohio river. This northern road undoubtedly had its influence on the settlement of counties a.i far south as Delaware, but it was small as compared with the National Road. In the northwestern counties of Indiana, however, the larger part of first settlers came in by way of Fort Wayne. Since the land office at which was entered most of the land now comprising this county was located at Fort Wayne, that town had an important relation to the early settlers. Many who came to the county by way of the southern route were compelled to make the journey of seventy miles to Fort Wayne in order to secure land certificates. It is related that to avoid this trouble the settlers often employed some one who was familiar with the procedure at the land office and who became a sort of agent for the settlers in negotiating their land entries, making the trip frequently between this county and the seat of the land office.

mcnt road," which is the oldest road defined by white men in Delaware county- It was laid out in the early twenties in order to provide a route by which the Dclawares, who had ceded their land at the treaty of St. Mary's, might be moved to the west. Its course approximated very closely the present line of the Big Four Railroad, running from Greenville, Ohio, through Randolph county at Union City, passing in the vicinity of Smithfield and leaving the county at the present site of Daleville.