Elkhart County, Indiana - Chapter with an unread heading (no. 11 of those read), 1905

Communication

Heaven forming each on other 1o depend. A master, or a .servanl. or a friend. Bids each on other for assistance call, Till one man's weakness grows the strength of all.

Man cannot live alone; he must communicate with others. W'e are iiarts of a great organism. So it is with communities. The time came wlien the railroad and telegraph brought them in closer relations with each other: but even from the first there was communication with the outside world, for absolute isolation is impossible. At first there were no railroads leading out from the eastern cities across the great valley of the ^Mississippi. The ninuntain ranges and dense forests were great barriers l)etween the east ;ind Indiana and Michigan territory. There was a canal from Troy to Buffalo, there were a few steamers on the great lakes, and there was a short horsecar railroad running out of Toledo. There were no roads, but in place of them were Indian trails.

In all lands, however primitive and barbarous, even in the dense forest fastnesses of Africa or South America, there are passages leading from one locality to another. The word best descriptive of such courses of early communication is " trail." Before civilization introduced scientific road making, wild animals were duulitless the markers and siu'- veyors of roads. The narrow, deep-worn, and wavering path through the woods, indicating the route of the deer or bear or other wild denizen between its lair and the spring where it quenched its thirst <ir the spot where it sought its quarry, was the coiu'se \\hich the Indian, and later the white man, took in going through the woods or across the prairie. Trails are easily made, as anyone may know who observes how quickly the turf of a park or meadow is demarked by the regular passage of human feet. And as the wild animal pushed its way through the brush and trees, pursuing the easiest and therefore a winding course to its goal, it left some evidence in the broken twigs and bent bushes and trampled grass of its progress, so that tlie next creature bound in the same direction would pursue the same way and better define it, until

-a new trail was marked out. Thus tlie animals were the first road makers, and blazed the way for their immediate successors, the roving- Indians. The latter would natural!}- extend and connect the trails of animals into certain long avenues of travel across the country, which thev would follow in making their pilgrimages from one hunting ground to another or for their war expeditions.

Thus it happened that when the white nian first came to northern Indiana, as was also true of an}- other part of our country, he found certain coiu'ses of communication already marked out, and these were used by the pioneers until better, broader, straighter and more direct roads could be made. Oftentimes these old trails formed the most practicable and con\-enient route of travel, and were consecpient!}- the basis of a highway ordered and constructed by the state or county. In Elkhart county the familiar Indian trail from Fort Wayne was long the only route of tra\-el bet\\-een the latter place and points in Alichigan territory.

The establishment of county roads was among the first acts of the county officials after the organization of the county. In the record of the board of justices, under date of November 7, 1831, is found a report rendered on a state road running from Logansport via Turkey Creek and Elkhart prairies to the northern line of the state in direction of Pigeon Prairie. Then in the March session of 1832 the " River Road " was reported on, this extending from the western line of the county, mainhfollowing the course of the St. Joseph river on the south side, to Pigeon Prairie. Also an item in the record of the session in May, 1832, ordering that all public roads be laid out in the various districts, shows the progress that communication was making at that early date.

The well known Fort Wayne road was the third to be reported on, the report being made under date of May 31, 1832. This extended from Fort Wayne, via Goshen, to South Bend. Road No. 4, ordered opened at the September session of 1832, was from the west line of the county on the north side of the St. Joseph, as far as Christiana creek, ;md thence in a northerly direction to the state line.

From this time on the commissioners' records are filled with reports of proposed roads in various parts of the county, and many roads were surveyed and opened up for traffic within a few years. It soon became evident to the county fathers that the highways were not sufficiently wide, and therefore at the November session of 1836 it was

The early public highways were of course, comi)aretl with e\en uur present day standards, indescrilxibly rough, muddy, ill-graded, ill-draineil and generally inefficient. During the wet seasons in i)articular the roads were bad. so that a tra\eler returning from journeying west, when asked if he had been through Indiana, replied that he did not know finsure, but thought he must have been nearly through it in some places. Latterly, however, there has been an agitation for good roads. The subject occupied considerable time and attention at the Columbian exposition in 1893, as also at the St. Louis exposition, and is continually being debated at special congresses, good road conventions, in state legislatures and farmers' institutes. The country is waking up all along the line to the importance of having good roads. The general go\-ernment is taking a special interest in the matter. Several of the states have started out in the good roatl cause. 'While it costs a large sum of money to build and keep in repair a good road it is as notliing to the cost of a poor road. There is no greater drawljack to the development of a country than poor roads. They keep back a good country antl they are death to a ])oor one. If farmers were fully to realize how much they would gain l)y improving their roads to town they would mjt rest until the\' were put into fair condition.

Elkhart count^- has not 1jeen behind ijther counties in the good roads mo\-ement. Some excellent macadam roads may lie found along the main traveled routes, and something additional is being done each year. A great improvement o\'er former times has been wrought, and the difference this has made in the transportation of produce to market is wonderful. Now farmers living along or near the line of these roads can come to town with all that their wagons can hold up. with comfort to tlieir teams and themsel\es. These roads have been the means of opening man\- good farms where liefore was a wilderness, and the \alue of lands has greatly increased. Of coiu'se they ha\e cost in the aggregate a great deal of money, but the increase of \-alues Iw these improvements fully repays tliose who ha\e to bear the expense. It was improved roads tliat made possible the change from ox teams to horses, and again from wagons to liuggies; and how do we know but that in a few^ years the roads \\U\ be so hard a.nd sniootli in all weather, and automobiles will be so impro\-ed, that the farmers will go speeding

(iood hridges are a part of good roads, and the county has heen careful to provide them. During the early days the streams were either crossed at fords or by means of ferries. When the Rev. Isaac McCoy passed through the county on his way to the Carey Mission in 1824 and came to the confluence of the St. Joseph and Elkhart he crossed the former on a rough pirogue, and in the passage the boat was overturned and it was with much ado that the possessions and persons of the company were rescued. But gradually the ferries gave place to bridges, and side by side with the records ordering new roads will Ijc found appropriations for needed bridges in the county. With the development of the county the rude structures spanning the streams gave place to better, safer and more beautiful ones; at first wooden bridges and latterly, in many cases, stone and iron ones.

Perhaps some of tho.se yet living in the county can remember the old ferry maintained at the mouth of the Elkhart river for some years. A license to establish such a ferry on the St. Joseph river was granted to Havilah Beardsle}- at the May session of the commissioners in 1832. This license was granted in cijnsideration of a payment to the county of four dollars per annum, and that the boat used as a ferry boat should be forty feet long by nine broad. The tolls fixed ranged from se\entyfive cents for each wagon with six horses or oxen, to one cent for each head of sheep, hogs or goats.

There is a story of the primitive times when each traveler was hailed with the salutation, " ^^'hat is gning on in the outside world?" and the weary w^ayfarer was gladly fed and housed in return for the information that he might impart to the household concerning the events transpiring beyond the immediate communit}-. In truth there was a time when news - if such it could lie called when it was often very old when it reached the hearers - had no regular lines of dissemination and was carried only by the chance traveler. All pioneer communities have experienced such a situation to some degree, and the early settlers of Elkhart county had little definite connection with the outside world, although living in a comparatively modern age and only a few vears before the invention of the telegraph.

Accordingly one of the first improvements sought after actual home and shelter and means of subsistence were provided was a postal service, such as all the settlers had been familiar with in their former homes in the more settled regions. " In the sjjring of this year. 183 1, I think it was," says Mr. J. H. Defrees. " a mail route was established between Fort Wayne and Niles, the mail to be carried over it once in fom" weeks. In the fall of the same year the postoftice increased the speed from once in four weeks to that of once in twn weeks. Many of you. no doubt, v\ell remember how elated you felt when you heard the sound of the old tin horn, lilown by ' Old Hall ' as he came wending his way through the grove east of the village (Goshen), with his ' tantrum ' sorrels, himself astride of one, and the mail bags, containing news irom the ' settlements,' on the other, with a ' string ' fastened to the bits of the leader in order to guide him in the right path. The old horn with its music discoursed sweeter strains to its hearers than did ever Hall and Arnold's in their pahniest days." Think of it! one mail in four weeks, or in two weeks. Now, radiating in all directions through the country, ap- 1 reaching within convenient distance of every home in the county, are the rural mail routes, delivering packages, letters and the metropolitan dailies once a day and with greater regularity and punctuality than was the case in the larger towns less than half a century ago.

The postal service in the year 1837 at Cioshen is indicated by the following item in the Goshen E.vf^rc'ss: "Mail arrival and departure: Western mail arrives from Xiles \ia South Bend every Sunday and Wednesday evening; departs e\ery Tuesday and Saturday morning. Eastern mail via Fort Wayne arrives every Monday and Friday evening; departs Monday and Thursday morning. Southern mail via Leesburg arrives every Thursday at 12 o'clock; dqjarts every Thursday at I o'clock p. m." And the same piper, on September 16, 1837, calls attention to a project for carrying the mail from Fort \\^ayne to Niles, Michigan, in four-horse coaches, and praises the proposition as " a grand undertaking," whereby this beautiful county would be opened up to immigrants, who naturally followed the easiest lines of access to new countries. " The mail from Ft. \\'ayne to Niles." says the editor, " is now carried through on a horse."

In a fair consideration of the means of cnmmunication which the county has employed, the stage coach must be included - the old " twicea-week " stage coach. It was a slow mode of travel but the passengers had a good time. The rate of speed in pleasant weather and with favorable roads was perhaps seven or eight miles an hour and the average cost was perhaps five cents a mile. The vehicles have been forgotten as completely as the days they represented. When the steam horse, which at iirst plowed the waters, took to land in the east, the finest of the stages were taken west and some of them as far as the Rockies. But'what has hecome of tlie less pretentious ones which were not worth transporting? No one knows; they have simply dropped out of existence. But what memories cluster around them! How the people at the taverns, yes, and all the villagers, looked and longed for the coming of the stage coach ! What a hustle there was on its arrival ! What hand-shakings! What greetings ! What interchanges ! What life! The stage brought the latest news from the outside world, brought the newspapers, brought the mails. But the uncertainty and irregularity connected with all this were very unsatisfactorv.

Only by picturing to ourselves the past can we rightly appreciate the present. The ])essimist will continue his growling about the present state of social and material ciinditions, will complain that the world is fast verging to wrack an<l ruin ; that men and manners are not so good now as in "the good old days" : that the rain does not fall so plentifully, that the sunshine is not so abundant, that the grain does not grow so high, that the fruit is not so large nor so lucious ; and that affairs of church, state antl society are sinking to the "demnition bowwows." But the man of clear vision and unbiased judgment will calmly regard the world of yesterday as a happy and glorious memory of the times agone. lutt will consider it as only in the first and feeble steps of progress toward our present plane of enlightenment and culture, and. grateful for the gifts of the present, will look forward with even greater hope and anticipation to the to-morrow of the world.

It seems better, therefore, to ]Mcture to our readers what the life and conditions of our county were in the ]>ast. and. with the present always before them, to allow them to draw their own conclusions concerning the historical progress of Elkhart county. But before concluding this part of the narrative and before entering upon the historv of the railroad period, we shall adduce a few more instances of the development of means of communication which have had a remarkable effect u])on the methods of living to-day and fifty years ago.

There is probably not a person in Elkhart county \\lio does not at least know of the telephone, and in hundreds of homes and in nearly every business house will be found one of these instruments. sO' necessary an adjunct of modern life. Every road has its line of poles and strings of wire, binding together separate homes, communities, villages, and distant cities. But how many of us forget the modernness of the lelep'hcme. A. Graham Bell was conducting his successful experiments in the early seventies, but the first time the invention \vas exhibited in a practical form to the general public was at the centennial expositi(_)n in Philadelphia, in 1876. A standard encyclopedia, published in 1877. in describing this invention, speaks of it as "telegraphic transmission of articulate sounds," and further goes on to state as the climax of the wonderful discovery that "we may confidently expect that Mr. Bell will give us the means of making vnice and spoken words audible through the electric wire to an ear hundreds of miles distant.'' And now, with our ear at a receiver in Elkhart county, we may hear the tick of a watch nine hundred miles away in New York ! Only so short a time are we sei> arated from the primitive past. Various telephone antl telegraph companies are now operating their lines in and through this county, and the news of the war in the far east comes tO' every village as soon after the occurrence of the events as in former days a report concerning a trial at Goshen, would reach the country districts of the county. And the future historian may detail the displacing of our telegraph and telephone systems by wireless telegraphy and telephony, and record many other wonderful things that we not even dream nf at the beginning fif this century.

From the foregoing it appears that the world is coming to be all of a piece. Once every little community could live by itself, make its own clothes, wagons, tools, and all the articles necessary- for its existence. But the Robinson Crusoe ideal of man or community is now thoroughly discredited. With the coming of railroad, telegraph, telephone, etc.. closer relations were established, and communities and states became de- ])endent upon each other. The same is true in larger form. Once our nation could live by itself and avoid entangling alliances with other nations, but that time is past. Ocean greyhounds and cables have made it impossible. To-day the United States can no more be a nation by herself than South Carolina could be a state by herself. She must perform her proper part of right and justice among the nations of the earth.