Marion County, Indiana - Chapter 5, 1884 (part 2 of 2)

eminent was hardly less conspicuous than the improvement of business and real estate, and it was much more durable. The " Old Seminary" was finished in 1834, and first occupied by the late Gen. Ebenezer Dumont, Sept. 1, 1834. The following January he was succeeded by William J. Hill, who afterwards taught in the old carpenter-shop on the northwest corner of Market and Delaware Streets, where he was succeeded in 1836 by Josephus Cicero Worrall, as he always signed himself in his magniloquent quarterly announcements. Thomas D. Gregg, who died some years ago and left a handsome bequest to the city, succeeded Mr. Hill in May, 1836, in the seminary, and William Sullivan, for many years a justice of the peace and still living, honored by everybody, followed in December, 1836. Rev. William A. Holliday, father of John H., the founder of the Indianapolis News, came next in August, 1837. James S. Kemper, still annually honored in the reunions of the "Old Seminary Boys," succeeded Mr. Holliday in the summer of 1838, and continued till 1845, when Rev. J. P. SafFord, recently deceased in Zanesville, Ohio, succeeded for a short time, and was followed by Mr. B. L. Lang till 1852. Mr. Kemper's methods and success, and his long retention of the school, made him and the seminary so popular as to draw pupils from other States, and the course of study was as thorough in all branches as that of most colleges. A large number of the prominent men of the city and State were pupils at the Old Seminary. Five years ago they formed an association called the " Old Seminary Boys," gray-headed and bald-headed fathers and grandfathers, to hold annual reunions, and with their families renew old games, associations, and memories. Twice Mr. Kemper and his wife have been present, and once Mr. Lang was present. The officers now are : President, Calvin Fletcher ; Secretary, George W. Sloan ; Corresponding Secretary, Oliver M. Wilson ; Treasurer, Ingram Fletcher ; Historian, B. R. Sulgrove. In 1878, at the first reunion, there were " Old Boys" present who had not met their old school-mates and teacher, Mr. Kemper, in forty years. It was a gathering almost unique in any country of the world, and entirely so in Indiana. A meeting of the school-boys and teacher of a school long past in a house long torn away, after the lapse of forty years, was something to remember, at least for the participants. The seminary in 1853 was taken into the free-school system, then first made practical. More will be said of the schools in the proper place.

A few years later than the opening of the County Seminary, mainly for boys, though girls attended for a short time, the Misses Axtell opened a school of corresponding grade for girls exclusively. It was called the " Indianapolis Female Institute," and was chartered by the Legislature at the session of 1836 - 37. The first term began June 14, 1837, in the upper story of the Sanders Block, on Washington near Meridian Street. Subsequently a removal was made to the upper rooms on the same street a halfblock east of Meridian, where the city offices were kept for a time, and burned in the winter of 1851-52. Soon after a frame building was erected on the grounds of the old Presbyterian Church on Pennsylvania Street, south of the Exchange Block, and the institute taken there, where it remained while the Misses Axtell lived. These two schools were a great advance on those previous to their establishment ; but they were not " alone in their glory." In October, 1847, Gilman Marston, since of national reputation as a member of Congress from New Hampshire, a general during the civil war, and a Territorial Governor since the war, opened a school in the rooms afterwards taken by the Axtells, in connection with Mrs. Eliza Richmond. The next summer they removed to a frame specially built for them on Circle Street, near the site of the residence of Mr. W. H. English. It was called " Franklin Institute," and looked like a country church. Mr. Marston left it the following year, 1839, and was succeeded by Orlando Chester, who died in 1840, and then Mr. John Wheeler took it and kept for a couple of years, when it was abandoned. In November, 1839, Mrs. Britton, wife of the Episcopalian minister, opened a female seminary on Pennsylvania Street, near the Underbill foundry, afterwards removed to the building north of Christ Church, and long known as " St. Mary's Seminary," under Mrs. Johnson, wife of a successor of Mr. Britton in the rectory.

he called the " Indianapolis Academy" in the old building above referred to. He was a " character," and not by any means a pleasant one. He did not know much, but be could make polysyllabic poluphlosboyant announcements of the approaching opening of his terms that puzzled the little dictionaries of the day, and would have delighted the classic ears of " Lorenzo Altisonant." They were the periodical jokes of the town. His tastes and habits were as eccentric as his literature. His fondness for tobacco was a ravenous hunger. He tore it off in wads of a mouthful, and crunched it with the eagerness of a hungry Hoosier at a show on a " quarter section" of gingerbread. He smoked as much as he chewed, and he smoked while he chewed. When he didn't smoke he kept the stub of a cigar in his mouth and mumbled it, while he rolled a quid as a sweet morsel under his tongue. When he undertook to explain some mathematical intricacy to a pupil he would spit a shower of damp tobacco flakes on the slate and rub them off to one side like snow off a sidewalk. He whipped incessantly, with little care for provocation, but usually contented himself with a single stroke of a beech switch applied to the pupil in her seat, face to the wall and back turned out, as the house was arranged. He generally made a circuit of the three seated sides of the room about four times in each session of the day, and whipped about one pupil in three in each round. He made the boys saw or chop his wood and carry it into his residence, which was a little shed adjoining the school-house on the north. Some of them were required to lose their Saturday's holiday to help him move to a little frame on the southeast corner of Delaware and Ohio Streets. The girls were made to help his wife take care of the baby, or wash, or do other housework. Of course everybody, boys and girls, detested him. On Christmas-day, 1837, they " barred him out," the first and only time that this old game was played with a teacher in Indianapolis. He was not allowed to get in til! he " treated," which he did with a half-dollar's worth of cider and apples, and got most of both himself His school continued in a feeble way after Mr. Kemper took the seminary for five or six years.

Contemporaneously with Mr. Worrall another character, that would be called in the apt slang of the day and Guiteau a " crank," taught a small school of small boys in the lower room of a frame building on the opposite side of Market Street from the " Academy." His name was Main, and he was a Scotchman of undoubted but utterly unavailable learning. He was as fond of snuff as his compeer of the other school was of tobacco, and he carried a Scotch " mull," made of horn and capped with silver, that would hold a halfpint at least. He was very absent-minded, and given to sitting with his spectacles dropped low on the tip of his nose and gazing away off in the atmosphere, as completely lost to his surroundings as if he were asleep, or holding his head squeezed between his hands with his elbows on the table, staring fixedly at a crack or a nail-hole as a mesmeric subject stares at a dime to induce sleep. In these moods he noticed nothing about him. The boys could play marbles, or pull pins, or run out-doors and roll round in the weeds in perfect safety. If the old fellow should come out of his reverie he would notice no disorder, and had usually to be prompted to know what his next class was. If he wandered off dreaming while hearing a recitation, as he sometimes did, he had to be told what the class was and where the recitation had stopped when he came to himself. Not unfrequeutly he would sit through the better of a halfday's session and never think of calling a class unless reminded by some importunate and preposterous pupil, a weakness, however, that very few boys could reproach themselves with. He taught but a single quarter, and then removed, with his brother, a tailor and his brother-in-law, the first stone-cutter, or one of the first, a Mr. Spear, to Arkansas. But very few, even of the old residents, ever knew anything of him or can now recall him, he was so retiring and indifferent to company, Of the earlier private schools and of the public schools an account will be given in the chapter of schools, with a notice of all the educational institutions of the city.

4th. During the short period under consideration were established some of those business conveniences which in old communities soon become necessities ; that is, banks and insurance companies and protection against, as well as indemnity for, damage by fire. The

State Bank was chartered Jan. 28, 1834, to run for twenty-five years. The State took half of the stock, and appointed the president and half of the directors. Bonds called " bank bonds" were issued to pay out the State's stock, and made payable from the State's dividends. These dividends were to be employed as a sinking fund, and make loans to accommodate farmers and purchasers of land primarily on mortgage security ; the president of the bank to be president of the fund management. The profits of the fund as well as the principal were to be applied first to pay the bank bonds, and the remainder was to go to the school fun d. So judiciously was this fund managed that when it was wound up finally some twenty years ago it paid to the support of free schools a permanent fund of nearly four million dollars. The first president of the bank and fund was Samuel Merrill, State treasurer ; the first State directors, Calvin Fletcher, Seton W. Norris, Robert Morrison, and Thomas H. Scott. James M. Ray was appointed cashier, and remained so till the bank was wound up. In the first place ten branches were created in the principal towns of the State, but the number was finally increased to sixteen. Samuel Merrill was president till 1840, when he was made president of the Madison Railroad. He was succeeded by Judge James Morrison till 1850, he by the late Gen. Ebenezer Dumont till 1855, and he by Hugh McCulIoch, Secretary of the Treasury, succeeding Mr. Fessenden. W. H. Talbott was president of the sinking fund in its la.st years while closing up, about 1863 to 1864. The first location of the mother-bank was in the Governor's house in the Circle, then on Washington Street, and was removed to its own building, corner of Illinois Street and Kentucky Avenue, in 1840. In 1837, when the great financial crash Came, the bank and all its branches suspended specie payment May 18th, and remained suspended till Jan. 15, 1842, when the Legislature ordered resumption. This course did not impair either the credit or usefulness of the institution.

The Indianapolis Branch was organized Nov. 11, 1834, with Hervey Bates, president, and Bethuel F. Morris, cashier. The location was on the south side of Washington Street, on the site of the present

Vance Block. The officers and location were retained together till 1840, when the building corner of Pennsylvania Street and Virginia Avenue, corresponding in situation to the parent bank, was finished and the institution removed there. Some years after Calvin Fletcher was made president in place of Mr. Bates, and Thomas H. Sharpe cashier in place of Mr. Morris, and these remained till the bank was wound up. Of the Bank of the State, the successor of the State Bank, but with no State interest in it, an account will be found under the head of " Banks," with a notice of all the banking establishments of the city. In this connection may be noticed the first private bank ever opened here. It was owned by Mr. John Wood, one of the firm in the Pennsylvania Street foundry, and began business in 1838. He failed in September, 1841. In 1839, Edward S. Alvord & Co. did a private banking business for four or five years. At the same time Stoughton A. Fletcher, brother of Calvin, began the same business, either at first or soon after joined by William D. Wygant, on Washington Street, and that was the beginning of a most successful business, now in its forty-fourth year, as Fletcher & Churchman's bank.

The first insurance company was organized here March 16, 1836, under a fifty-year charter, with a capital of two hundred thousand dollars. Douglass Maguire was president, and Caleb Scudder secretary. It never did much, but was in operation till shortly before the outbreak of the war. In 1865 the stock passed into the hands of able managers and a new company was organized, with William Henderson as president, and Alexander C. Jameson as secretary. The Indiana Mutual Fire Insurance Company was chartered Jan. 30, 1837, and organized the next month, with James Blake as president, and Charles W. Cady as secretary and actuary and general manager. It did well for a few years, but the plan was said to be ineffectively contrived, and it met some serious losses and became insolvent, going out altogether about the year 1850.

On the completion of the State-House in 1835, the Legislature provided for its protection from fire by ordering its insurance and the purchase of twenty leather fire-buckets, and ladders long enough to reach the roof. It also proposed to pay half of the cost of a fire-engine if the citizens would subscribe the other half. A meeting was held February 12th to consider the proposition. The old fire company of 1827 reorganized as the Marion Fire Hose and Protection Company, famous for many a year after the '' Old Marion," and the main dependence of the volunteer department for more than twenty years. Caleb Scudder was the first captain. The meeting requested the trustees to levy a tax to pay the town's share of the cost of the engine, and it was done, aided by individual subscriptions, and the Marion end-brake hand-engine, manned by twenty-eight to thirty men, and able to throw an inch stream two hundred feet, was bought of Merrick & Co., Philadelphia, for one thousand eight hundred dollars. The State built a little onestory house for it in 1836, but in 1837 the town built a two-story frame north side of the Circle, with a room for the Council on the second story. It was burned in 1851. The company was incorporated the next year. A second company was formed in 1840, but an account of the whole fire department from the first will be found under that caption. Five fire-wells were made in 1835-36.

The State militia system, as already described, fell into disuse and discredit soon after the settlement of the town, and no substitute was attempted by State or local or individual influence till 1837. Then a meeting was held on the 22d of February to form a military company. Alexander W. Russell, the old militia colonel, was made captain, and succeeded the next year by Gen. Thomas A. Morris, then but a few years out of West Point. He distinguished himself in the first campaign of the civil war in West Virginia by really doing all the planning and work that made that 80 brilliant a success. Gen. McClellan was still in the East, and arrived just in time to see the completion of Gen. Morris' work, and appropriate all the credit of it. This company continued to drill and parade and decorate, public occasions by its excellent drill and handsome gray uniform faced with black velvet till 1845. The company was incorporated in 1838. The following year the Marion Rifles formed a company under Capt. Thomas McBaker. Their uniform was a blue cotton " bunting-shirt" fringed, with blue

A notable event of this period was the completion and opening of what may be fairly called the first " hotel" in the place, in 1836, the " Washington Hall," turned into the "Glenn Block" and New York Store in 1859. It was kept for many years by the late Edmund Browning, and was the Whig headquarters as long as there was a Whig party, as the Palmer House was the headquarters of the Democracy. A complete account of the hotels will be found in another part of the work. The Palmer House, now Occidental, it may be observed here, was begun in the latter part of 1839, and opened in 1841 by John C. Parker, of Charleston, Clarke Co., Ind. The first editorial convention was held here May 29, 1837. The first ladies' fair was held December 31st of the year for the benefit of the Ladies' Missionary Society, and made two hundred and thirty dollars. Professor C. P. Bronson, the first noted elocutionist that visited Central Indiana, lectured Aug. 30, 1836. At the second meeting of the County Agricultural Society, Calvin Fletcher, the orator of the occasion, said that one million three hundred thousand bushels of corn had been produced on thirteen hundred farms in the county. Luke Munsell and William Sullivan both published maps of the town in 1836, the former May 30th, and the latter in October. Revs. James Havens and John C. Smith held a great camp-meeting that year on the Military Ground, August 25th to 30th, and made one hundred and thirty conversions. In 1837, while the metaling of the National road in Washington Street was going on, the trustees took measures to improve the sidewalks. They were made fifteen feet wide in the original plan, but were subsequently widened to twenty, and the ninety-feet streetwalks were originally changed from ten to twelve, and later to fifteen. The property-holders resisted the changes because it increased the expense of improvement, which was charged against the property. This was the first street improving ever attempted. The first clothing-store was opened here in 1838 by Benjamin Orr. In 1839 a mistake of eight acres was discovered in the original survey of the donation. Congress generously added the ground to the donation in 1840, on the memorial of the Legislature. The first Thanksgiving ever held in the State was in 1839, on a proclamation of Governor Wallace fixing Thursday, the 28th of November, as the day. The winter of 1838-39 saw the first attempt at a regular theatrical exhibition with orchestra, scenery, and all the usual adjuncts of the stage. The manager was a Mr. Lindsay. His theatre was the wagon-shop of Mr. OUaman, on Washington Street, opposite the courthouse. He returned in 1840-41, and made a theatre of an old printing-office on the present site of the News building. A few years later another company gave concerts and dramatic exhibitions in the upper room of Gaston's carriage-factory, site of the Bates House.

On the 12th of February, 1839, the Legislature ordered the State officers to buy the residence, recently finished, of Dr. John H. Sanders, corner of Illinois and Market Streets, for a residence for the Governor. Until that time the need of an official Executive residence had not been felt. Governor Noble, the predecessor of Governor Wallace, was a resident of the town, and lived during his two terms in his own house. So did Governor Ray, who, as acting Governor for a year succeeding in the fraction of the term of Governor Hendricks, who had gone to the National Senate, and for two terms, or six years, as regularly elected Executive, held the office nearly all the time after the removal of the capital from Corydon. But Governor Wallace came from Brookville, had no residence here, and for some time lived in a two-story house on the south side of Washington Street, just west of the canal. The Executive mansion was occupied all the time from 1839 till 1863, in the fall, when Governor Morton abandoned it on account of its unhealthiness, and went to boarding with his family till he made a purchase of the residence on the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and New York Streets, where he lived the remainder of his life, and died in the fall of 1877. The Governors all suffered in that house. Governor Bigger, who succeeded Governor Wallace, seems to have contracted there the disease that carried him oflF soon after be left the office. Governor W^hitcomb, who married while occupying the house, lost his young wife there.

Governor Wright lost his first wife there. Governor Willard's wife was always ill while there. Governor Lane only held the office two or three days, and never had a chance to test the morbific influence of the house, but Governor Morton did and left. It and the quarter of a square, or one acre, of ground about were sold in 1865, and compact masses of business houses cover the whole space.

In May, 1838, the split that had for some time been moving deeper into the Presbyterian brotherhood reached Indianapolis and a division was made, fifteen members withdrawing and forming the Second Church, Nov. 19, 1838, under Rev. J. H. Johnson. In May, 1839, Henry Ward Beecher was called from Lawrenceburg, where he began his now famous ministry, and served here till Sept. 19, 1847. The Episcopalians, who had been using the court-house for a church since 1835 occasionally, organized a church in the spring of 1837, and built Christ Church the next year. A sketch of the history of all the churches will treat these more fully.

The first murders in the town took place in the seven years of this period which have been under consideration. On the 8th of May, Michael Van Blaricum drowned William McPherson while ferrying him across the river, just below the line of the present Washington Street bridge, by wilfully rocking and upsetting the boat. His motive appears to have been a sort of contemptuous dislike of his victim, whom he regarded as what in these days is called a " dude," and probably meant no worse than to duck him and spoil his clothes. He asserted that he intended no more. But he was convicted and sent to the penitentiary for three years in October, 1834. He was pardoned when his time was about half out. He was the ferryman of the ferry at that point. The second murder was bloodier and less excusable. It was committed April 27, 1836, by Arnold Lashley on Zachariah Collins. Lashley was a coach-maker, who had succeeded the Johnsons in the establishment on the site now occupied by the post-office and the business houses north of it on the east side of Pennsylvania Street, a Kentuckian and a hot-tempered fellow. Collins was a charcoal-burner who supplied Lashley's establishment. On the day of the homicide he had brought in a wagon-load of coal, and was unloading it in the usual place, when Lashley complained that the coal was dirty, and ordered him to stop unloading it. Collins seems to have been as surly as Lashley was fiery, and went coolly on with his work ; after a few words more of remonstrance, Lashley seized a single-tree lying on the floor and struck Collins on the head or neck, killing him instantly. He was arrested, and after a preliminary examination held to bail. While under bail he ran away and was never seen or heard of here again. Not long after this an Indianapolis or Marion County man of the name of McDowell had a quarrel with some one at a race in Hamilton County, and killed him by a blow that broke his neck.

In 1838-39 a market-house was built for the western part of the town on the west side of Tennessee Street at the crossing of Ohio. Ephraim Colestock was paid three thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars for it, and for making an addition to the East Market. The new house was not used at all for four or five years, and never was used like the old one, though a larger and every way better house. The south end of the same square (held by the State) was occupied by the Arsenal during the war. When the State decided to build a new State-House, the city surrendered the market-house and vacated Market Street, thus giving the State-House two unbroken squares, with the intervening'street making nearly nine acres.

The last division of the second period of the city's history is that extending from the abandonment of the public works to the completion of the first railroad and the organization of the town under a city charter in 1847. Its leading features are: 1st, The establishment of the State benevolent institutions or asylums, or the adoption of measures with that object, in 1843 and the two or three succeeding years ; 2d, Political events and excitements ; 3d, Incidents wholly local and not important, but worth attention as marks of a development ; 4th, Religious movements.

1st. The Legislature, having been repeatedly solicited by petitions and memorials to make some provision for the insane, deaf and dumb, and blind of the State, in 1839 addressed Congress on the subject of a grant to assist in making such a provision. This was never done, and there was no good reason why it should have been done or should have been asked. On the 31st of January, 1842, Governor Bigger was ordered by the Legislature to correspond with the Governors of other States and the officers of like institutions and ascertain the cost and modes of construction and management of insane hospitals, and on the 13th of February, 1843, was ordered to obtain plans to be submitted to the next Legislature. This was done, with the effect of securing a tax of one cent on one hundred dollars to create a building fund for an insane hospital here. This was the 15th of January, 1844. On the 13th of January, 1845, Dr. John Evans, Dr. L. Dunlap, and James Blake were appointed commissioners to select a site of not exceeding two hundred acres. They chose Mount Jackson, then the homo of the Indiana poetess, Mrs. Sarah T. Bolton, and her husband, the first editor in Indianapolis or the New Purchase. They reported the selection with a building plan to the Legislature the following session of 1845- 46, and on the 19th of January, 1846, they were ordered to begin work on the building, and to sell Hospital Square 22, and apply the proceeds, with fifteen thousand dollars from the State treasury, to the work. The central building was begun the same year and finished in 1847, at a cost of seventy-five thousand dollars. The south wing was added in 1853-56, and the north wing in 1866-69. A great many minor changes and additions have been made at one- time or another. The frontage is six hundred and twenty-four feet. The centre building is five stories high, including a basement and top half-story. A belvidere on the centre building is one hundred and three feet above the ground. The wings are three and four stories high. The third floor of the building in the rear of the centre is used as a chapel, with a seating capacity of three hundred. The other two stories are used by the employes as kitchen and dining-room, steward's office, sewing-rooms, and the like. In the rear of this building is the engine building, with pumps and heating pipes and other necessary apparatus. A sewage system discharges into Eagle Creek. Water is supplied by a system of water-works on the Holly plan, like that of the city, with ample protection by fireplugs and hose against fire. The whole structure is lighted with gas. It can accommodate six hundred or more patients at a time, with the necessary attendants. The suporindents have been, in order of succession, Dr. John Evans, Dr. R. J. Patterson, Dr. James S. Athon, Dr. James H. Woodburn, Dr. Wilson Lockhart, Dr. Orpheus Everts, Dr. Rogers, and Dr. William B. Fletcher. The last has very recently introduced the system of intelligent restraint and kind treatment in place of manacles and strait- waistcoats, with, so far, decided success. A few years ago the Legislature concluded to make additional provision for the insane, who could not be accommodated in the old building, and ordered a new one, directly north of the old one, on a plan furnished by the late Edwin May, architect of the new State-House. It was two or three years in building, and has but recently been finished. It is used mainly or wholly for female patients, and will accommodate suitably some seven or eight hundred. The frontage is about eleven hundred feet, with a centre building and three wings on each side of it, each one retiring some feet back from the line of the other, making the front a series of steps. It is nearly three hundred feet through the centre to the line joining the rear of the extreme wings. Within the year sites have been selected by commissioners for asylums for the incurably insane, for whom hitherto no provision has been made, though warmly urged by Governor Baker ten years ago. There are to be five of them, located at different s'uitable points in the State. The sites selected are Fort Wayne, Evansville, Richmond, Terre Haute, and Lafayette. At present, and ever since the asylum has been open, patients found to be incurable have been returned to their friends to make room for curable patients. In 1857, in consequence of the failure of appropriations in a party quarrel in the State Senate, the asylums were all closed and the inmates returned to their homes. The insane in some cases were put in poor-houses. In others the counties made arrangements to pay for their care in the State institution here. This paralysis continued for four or five months, and then Governor Willard concluded

On the 13th of February, 1843, the Legislature levied a tax of one-fifth of a cent on one hundred dollars, for a fund to establish an asylum for deaf mutes. In the spring following William Willard, a deaf mute teacher in the Ohio institution, came here and opened a private school for similar suiferers in October, receiving sixteen pupils the first year. On the 15th of January, 1844, the Legislature made the school a State institution, and Governor Whitcomb, Secretary of State William Sheets, Treasurer of State George H. Dunn, Rev. Phineas D. Gurley, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Rev. Love H. Jameson, Judge James Morrison, Dr. L. Dunlap, and Rev. Matthew Simpson were appointed trustees, with authority to rent a room and employ necessary teachers. They rented the residence, a large twostory frame, recently erected by Dr. George W. Stipp, on the southeast corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets. The State Asylum or school was opened here Oct. 1, 1844, one year after the opening of Mr. Willard's private school. In 1845 the Governor by authority appointed a new board of trustees, but continued most of the old members on it. In 1846 the school was removed to the three-story brick Kinder building on the south side of Washington Street near Delaware, and remained there four years, till the completion of the asylum building at the corner of Washington Street and State Avenue, in October, 1850. This site was selected in 1846, the trustees making a purchase of thirty acres for the necessary grounds. The building was erected in 1848-49, at a cost of thirty thousand dollars. Additions have since been made to it and to the ground, so that the latter now contains one hundred and five acres, and the aggregate cost of the former has been about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The grounds are beautifully ornamented with forest and other shade-trees and various kinds of flowers and shrubbery, with winding walks and drives and a conservatory, besides playgrounds and an orchard and vegetable garden. The larger portioti is used for pasture and farm ground. Mr. Willard was superin- tendent till 1845, then James S. Brown was appointed, and served till 1853, when he was succeeded by Thomas Mclntyre, who was retired under a change of system and management about three years ago. The number of pupils varies from year to year, but will run from two hundred and fifty to three hundred usually. Successful efforts have recently been made to teach articulate speech by motion of the lips.

In 1844-45, during the session of the Legislature, some of the pupils of the Kentucky Blind Asylum came here, under charge of the late William H. Churchman, and gave exhibitions at Bcecher's church, which the legislators attended largely, and seemed deeply interested in one of them. Mr. Dirk Rousseau, senator from Greene, and brother of the late Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau, proposed an arithmetical problem for one of the blind boys to solve by mental process, and not making it very clear in his oral statement he wrote it out, took it up to the pulpit, and carefully held it before the sightless eyes, reading it slowly, and tracing every line with his finger. For a moment the absurdity of the thing did not strike the audience, and then it all came at once in a roar that shook the house, and that first wakened the senator's attention. He blushed, laughed, and came down to his seat. The Legislature was fully satisfied with the evidence afforded by this exhibition, and levied a twomill tax to establish a blind asylum. The Secretary of State, John H. Thompson, Auditor Horatio J. Harris, Treasurer Royal Mayhew, with James M. Ray and Dr. G. W. Mears, were made commissioners at the following session to apply the two-mill fund, either in approving a school here or maintaining the State's pupils at the Ohip or Kentucky institutions. Mr. Churchman was appointed to address the people of the State on the subject, and ascertain the number of blind requiring public assistance in acquiring an education. On the 27th of January, 1847, Dr. George W. Mears, Calvin Fletcher, and James M. Ray were appointed commissioners to provide the necessary buildings and make arrangements for a school here, with an appropriation of five thousand dollars for a site and furniture and other necessaries. SetoD W. Norris replaced Mr. Fletcher, who declined, and the school was opened Oct. 1, 1847, in the same building that the Deaf and Dumb School first occupied, southeast corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets. Nine pupils attended at first, but there were thirty during the session. In September, 1848, a removal was made to a three-story brick, erected for a workshop, on the asylum grounds, - the two squares north of North Street, between Pennsylvania and Meridian Streets, formerly " Pratt's Walnut Grove." Here the school was kept till the completion of the asylum proper in February, 1853. It was begun about three years before. The cost of the original building and grounds was one hundred and ten thousand dollars. The main central building is ninety feet front by sixty-one feet deep, and five stories high ; at each end is a wing four stories high, thirty feet front by eighty-three feet deep. The total front from east to west is one hundred and fifty feet. A Corinthian cupola crowns the centre building. A portico stands in front of the centre, and iron galleries or colonnades surround the two lower stories of the wings. The average attendance of pupils is over one hundred, a considerable majority of whom are usually females. The superintendents have been William H. Churchman, from Oct. 1, 1847, to Sept. 30, 1853; George W. Ames, brother of the bishop, from Oct. 1, 1853, to Sept. 30, 1855 ; William C. Larrabee, previously a professor at Asbury University, and afterwards editor of the Sentinel for a short time, from Oct. 1, 1855, to Jan. 31, 1857 ; James McWorkman, from Feb. 1, 1857, to Sept. 10, 1861 ; William H. Churchman again, from Oct. 10, 1861.

The Female Prison and Reformatory, a short distance northeast of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, was recommended in the message of Governor Baker in 1869, and an appropriation of fifty thousand dollars made for it, under the management of a board consisting of Judge Elijah B. Martindale, of the city, Gen. Asahel Stone, of Winchester, and Joseph I. Irwin, of Columbus. They obtained a plan of Mr. Hodgson, architect of the court-house, and went on with the work as far as they could with the money. The failure of appropriations in 1871 delayed and greatly embarrassed the Board, and the institution was not ready for the reception of subjects as early as it should have been by two or three years. It has now been in successful operation some eight years, under the charge of Mrs. Sarah Smith, and has realized all the reasonable expectations formed of its service. A good deal of trouble has been caused by the sewage of so large a house with so many inmates, but the last Legislature made an arrangement with the city to assist in building a sewer to connect with the city system, which will remove all ground of complaint. The Reformatory is one hundred and seventyfour feet long, consisting of a main central building, with side and traverse wings, one hundred and nine feet long. The whole structure is two stories high, with a basement and Mansard story. The completed portion is but a fraction of the whole contemplated structure, which is to be five hundred and twenty-five feet long. The character and purpose of the institution may be best judged from the definition of them in the act creating it, drawn by Governor Baker. A " House of Refuge for the Correction and Reformation of Juvenile Offenders" was provided for by an act of the Legislature approved March 8, 1867, with an appropriation of fifty thousand dollars and a board of managers consisting of Charles F. Coffin, of Wayne County, Judge A. C. Downey, of Ohio County, and Gen. Joseph Orr, of La Porte County. The " family system" of treatment was adopted under the superintendence of Frank B. Ainsworth and his wife, who began their service Aug. 27, 1867. On the 1st of January, 1868, a workshop and three residences were completed, and the Governor issued a proclamation that the institution was ready to receive inmates. The grounds contain two hundred and twenty-five acres, a half-mile or so south of Plainfield, Hendricks Co. The number of inmates is about two hundred usually. The institution is noticed here, though not in the county, because it forms part of the same system as the Female Reformatory, and it was really drawn to a central location by the capital.

2d. Until the fall of 1840 no man of national distinction had visited Indianapolis. Gen. Harrison was here for a week in January, 1833, came on the 11th, was banqueted and made a speech on the 17th, and came again on the 13th of January, 1835 ; but at that time Gen. Harrison was little known outside of the

" Northwest Territory," which was so largely indebted to his courage and judgment, and it would be straining terms a little to speak of him as a man of " national reputation." In those days of slow communication and of newspapers that troubled themselves little with news, what was known in one section was not quite so readily diffused in others aa now, when a night incident on the Pacific is known all along the Atlantic on both sides the next morning at breakfast. The nomination at Harrisburg in December, 1839, was a revelation to a good many wellinformed men east of the Alleghanies. For a number of years the general had been clerk of Hamilton County, withdrawn from public sight and interest, and that seclusion had helped to make his an unfamiliar name even at home among the generation that had grown up since the days of Tippecanoe and Tecumseh. Thus it came that Indianapolis was all in a ferment on the 13th of October, 1840, to see the Vice- President of the United States and the reputed slayer of the great Indian chief, the statesman. Col. Richard M. Johnson. He passed the night of the 13th at a tavern a few miles east of town, Aquilla Parker's probably, and came in next morning at the head of a long procession which had gone out two or three miles to meet him. He was taken to the Walnut Grove, on the square north of the site of the Blind Asylum, and made a very indifferent little speech, in which occurred two exhibitions of indiflferent taste, short as it was. Something required an allusion to the preceding Sunday and something he had done that day, and he said he had no scruples about doing necessary work on Sunday, adding by way of humorous enlargement that he " had written his Sunday mail report on Sunday." This was. a report on a series of petitions from over-zealous religionists asking the suppression of the transportation and distribution of the mails on Sunday, made in 1828 and so well constructed that a good many believed somebody else wrote it. Whether true or not, it was impertinent and sure to be offensive to the religious element of the population to say it was a Sunday job. In reference to his public services he said he had " that morning at the tavern stripped to the bufi' and showed a friend who shared the room, the scars of five wounds re- oeived at the battle of the Thames." As he was on an electioneering tour, and within a month of the election, there was a rather unpleasant savor of Roman mode of electioneering in this public parade of his wounds to solicit votes. He was a better fighter than statesman. Tilghman A. Howard, who had been beaten for Governor the August before, made the speech of that occasion.

On the 11th of June, 1842, ex-President Van Buren came here, and was received, like Col. Johnson, by a procession of military companies, firemen, citizens on foot and horseback and in wagons and carriages, with the music of the first brass band, and taken to the Palmer House, where he was welcomed in a formal speech, and responded, standing in the open carriage, in a very neat and graceful little expression of gratitude and the usual civilities of such occasions. He had a reception at the State-House, by request of Governor Bigger, in the evening. The next day being Sunday, he attended Beecher's church in the morning and the Methodist in the evening, and left on Monday by stage for Terre Haute, getting an upset at Plainfield, it was said at the time.

Henry Clay, about whom a greater curiosity, and for whom, in consequence of the strength of the Kentucky settlers, a greater admiration was felt than for any other man in the nation, came here on the 5th of October, 1842. He was received east of the town by a greater crowd than was ever assembled here before, and, says Mr. Ignatius Brown, " considering the means of travel then and since, a greater crowd than has ever been gathered since." A fine woods pasture belonging to Governor Noble, east of his residence, was the place of ceremonies, which consisted of speeches and a profuse " lunch" it would be called now, but was called a "barbecue" then. There were two or three speaking-stands, but none but his own were used while Mr. Clay was speaking. He spoke for more than an hour, and certainly did not surpass anybody's expectations. There was no occasion for feeling or enthusiasm in a formal speech of response to a popular reception, and there was none on his side and none due to his eloquence on the other. He was followed by Senator John J. Crittenden and Governor Thomas Metcalf, " the Old Stone Hammer," who both made better speeches than their chief. They were followed by Joseph Little White, a member of Congress from the Madison District of this State, and he made the best speech of the day. He was capable of doing it at any time, except when Mr. Clay was fully roused. He was a born orator, like Sargent S. Prentiss, whom he greatly resembled in intellectual readiness and affluence. Other speeches were made by home orators, but they have parsed away with the occasion and are forty years deep in oblivion now. The entertainment continued for two days longer, in which a review of the military companies was held by the Governor, a display of fire-works made, an agricultural show visited, and, it was said, a three-mile race witnessed between " Bertrand" and " Little Red" on the first race-course ever opened here. It was maintained but a few years, three or four from 1841, and was situated on the south side of the Crawfordsville road, about a mile west of the river.

On the 5th of August, 1844, Gen. Cass visited the town, and was received like his distinguished predecessors, though with hardly so large a display of popular interest, and was escorted by the procession to the Military Ground, where Governor Whitcomb made a welcoming address, and the general responded at considerable length. A Presidential contest was at its height, and he made a strong and long electioneering speech, followed by Senator Edward A. Hannegan and others. He held a reception at the Palmer House, and left in the evening for Dayton.

The great Presidential contest of 1840 excited no more feeling in any town in the Union than in Indianapolis. Local meetings and mass-meetings, speeches, Tippecanoe songs, Whig emblems, " log cabin" breastpins, little canoes, - the significance of which must be traced through the final syllables of an Indian name that had no relevancy to causes, - ostentatious parade of cider-barrels, and imitations of " latch-strings," and scores of varied forms of enthusiasm that everybody felt to be silly when the fever was gone, kept the whole community in an incessant turmoil for nearly a year. Processions in weather so cold that enthusiastic Whigs froze their ears by keeping their hats waving to their " hurrahs" too long, great " dugout" canoes filled with young ladies and little flags, imitation cabins drawn on big ox-wagons, enormous choruses to very silly songs were the leading features of the Whig side of the contest. On the corner where the Bates House stands, a cabin of buckeye logs - a compliment to Gen. Harrison's Ohio residence - was built, and barrels of cider kept constantly running when there was a Whig meeting in the town. One of the Whig songs, and the most popular, because, like the lion's part in the " Midsummer Night's Dream," it " was nothing but roaring," and capable of employing all the strength of all the lungs within the radius of a half-mile, began thus:

" What has caused this great coaimotion, motion, motion, The country through ? It is the ball a rolling on for Tippecanoe and Tyler too, And with them we'll beat little Van. Van, Van is a used up man, And with them we'll beat little Van !"

It makes one feel cheap to think that such rubbish as that could have any effect on the opinions or action of a great nation, but it had. " Lillibullero" was not better, and it helped James II. off the throne, so our folly of 1840 was not singular. On the Democratic side the contest was managed in a much more decorous way. They could not help it, for they had nothing in their cause or candidate to excite enthusiasm, and, in the expressive slang of to-day, the Whigs had "got the bulge." The Democrats had too many sins of a long period of power to answer for. Centre township gave thirteen hundred and eightyseven' votes in the Presidential election in November, and Harrison got eight hundred and seventy-two to five hundred and fifteen for Van Buren. The population of the town in 1840 by the census was two thousand six hundred and ninety-two.

The contest of 1844 was not so one-sided. The Democrats did quite as much fooling as the Whigs. They raised hickory-poles and the Whigs raised ashpoles, a suggestion of Mr. Clay's home at Ashland, about as apt and significant as the canoe of 1840. Both sides had singing clubs, and sang the silliest of rhyming rant to the most monotonous of " nigger" tunes, then in the first full tide of popularity. " Old Dan Tucker," "Lucy Long," "The Blue-Tailed Fly," " Buffalo Gals" were the favorite airs of both sides.

The Whigs for some reason made the " coon" a party symbol, but what it symbolized nobody appeared to know. It was paraded numerously in processions and mass-meetings, and Whigs often alluded to themselves as " coons," and spoke of the thieving little beast with affectionate rapture. One of their songs expressed this preposterous sentiment :

Van Buren's " pet name" was the " fox" in 1840, and Lindenwald was his home. But out of all this fuss and flummery there never came any intelligible reason for the adoption of the coon as a party symbol or suggestion. The Democrats ought to have balanced the case by adopting the " possum," but they did not. In 1840 the Democratic ladies made little show in the parades, while the Whig ladies were active and constant in all that could help their friends. In 1844 the female part of the contest was very evenly balanced. That was the last of the roaring, singing, pole-raising, political folly. The annexation of Texas, the Mexican war, and the growing prominence of the slavery problem made issues too serious for empty or ribald songs and the puerile agencies that had served their turn and needed to be forgotten.

3d. There may be grouped here a number of little items of city progress of no special importance in themselves, but worth notice, as first things always are, if they grow to importance later. In the spring of 1840 the Council made two fire cisterns, the first of the kind. In July, 1842, T. W. Whitridge, who subsequently became quite a distinguished artist in New York, opened the first daguerrean gallery here, but afterwards betook almost exclusively to painting. At this time and before, Jacob Cox, the oldest and most eminent artist in the State, was painting portraits occasionally while working at his trade as a tinner. During the fall of 1842, James Blake, always foremost in enterprise, or only mated by Nicholas McCarty, began the manufacture of molasses from the juice of corn-stalks, a prophecy of the later sorghum manufacture which he lived to see. The enterprise failed soon, because the product was tinged with an acid taste that seriously impaired it. Still, a good many used it while they could get it because it was cheap. The manufactory was near Mr. Blake's barn, on North Street, between Mississippi and the canal, or in that vicinity. The Indiana Horticultural Society was organized Aug. 22, 1840, Henry Ward Beecher being one of its leading promoters. It gave several fine exhibitions of fruits and flowers during the half-dozen years of its existence. On the 10th of April, 1841, a public meeting was held to make arrangements for appropriate services on the occasion of President Harrison's death, and on the 17th business was suspended, an imposing funeral procession formed, and addresses delivered by Governor Bigger and Mr. Beecher. The 4th of May was observed as a fast-day all over the country for the President's death. On the 25th of April, 1842, at two o'clock in the morning, a loud explosion was heard in the grocery of Frederick Smith, a little one-story frame on the south side of Washington Street, near Delaware. Those who heard it and hurried in found him lying in a heap of laths and lime, and shattered plank, and fragments of grocery-goods, terribly burned and bruised and unconscious, but not dead. He was left so for some hours till the coroner came. He afterwards recovered and left the place. On a fragment of plank or the lid of a goods-box he had scrawled in German with chalk an unintelligible account of his reasons for his suicidal attempt, but the only decipherable words were " envy of bread." He was thought to have been partially insane, and to have tried to go out of the world in the blaze of an exploding keg of powder. Why he didn't was a mystery. This was said at the time to be the first suicidal attempt in the town. Not far from the same time a man by the name of Ellis committed suicide by hanging himself in his barn in Washington township. The Smith explosion, however, was not the first case of suicidal mania. Some years before it a boy by the name of Alexander Wiley, a brother of William Y. Wiley, long a prominent and respected citizen, drowned himself in the river somewhere below the bridge, for some difierence with his father, Capt. Wylie, then a popular tailor on Wash- ington Street ; at least that was the universal belief at the time. The body was found a week afterwards in a drift a few miles down the river, terribly mutilated by fish or carrion-birds. The annual Methodist Conference met here Oct. 21, 1840, with Bishop Soule as presiding officer. During the fall of 1842 lecturers on mesmerism excited a good deal of interest and had a good many believers.

In February, 1843, " Washin'gton Hall" took fire, about two o'clock in the afternoon, and was fought zealously all day, and barely extinguished and safe at dusk. The engines had to be supplied with water by lines of buckets from pumps at the corner of Meridian Street, and in front of Mothershead's drugstore on Washington Street, and from several private wells. Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most daring and effective of the workers, and got his clothes frozen on him and his hair full of ice, as did hundreds of others. The Old Seminary boys were dismissed by Mr. Kemper to go down and help in the bucket line. The loss was but three thousand dollars, but that was the biggest fire that had ever happened here at that time. Miss Lesner opened the Indianapolis Female Collegiate Institute in the " Franklin Institute" house, on Circle Street, September, 1843. In June, 1843, Robert Parmelee began the manufacture of pianos here on the south side of Washington Street, a little west of Meridian. It did not last long or amount to much. The fall before 1842, E. J. Peck and Edwin Hedderly began the manufacture of lard-oil on Washington Street. In April, 1844, was laid out the " Union Cemetery," east of and adjoining the " Old Graveyard." In 1833 Dr. Coe had added a considerable section, and in 1852 Messrs. Blake, Ray, and Peck made a much more considerable addition on the east and north, long known as the " New Graveyard." With the addition made in 1844 the cemetery extended from the river to Kentucky Avenue, and northward to the Vandalia Railroad. In 1860 a large plat between the last addition and the river was platted as an addition, and used chiefly for the burial of Confederate prisoners who died in the camp hospitals here. But little else of it was ever used as a cemetery, and after Crown Hill was ready for use the dead were removed there, and the ground occupied by the Vandalia Railway Company for freight-yard tracks, wood-sheds, blacksmith-shop, round-house, and engine-house, and Ferguson's pork-house was put on a part of it. Washington Street was graded and graveled in July, 1845. In the same year the old Methodist Church, erected in 1827-29, began to crack and grow unsafe, and was torn down and replaced next year by Wesley Chapel. In 1843 the Methodist Church, growing unwieldy, divided, and one part retained the old church on the corner of Circle and Meridian Streets, the other used the courthouse while they were building a new house, known as Roberts' Chapel, on the corner of Pennsylvania and Market, the present site of the Journal office. It was completed in 1844, under the pastorate of Rev. J. S. Bayliss. In 1868 this church was sold and converted into the Martindale Block, and a new church was soon begun on the corner of Delaware and Vermont Streets. It is of stone, and not yet fully finished, but it is one of the finest church edifices in the State. The first city clock, built by John MofiFatt in 1853-54, was set in the steeple of Roberts' Chapel in 1854, and remained until 1868, when it was removed by the fire engineers. In the summer Seton W. Norris built, on the southwest \ corner of Washington and Meridian Streets, the \ block torn away a few years ago to make way for the present Hubbard Block. It was the finest building in the place in its day. The Locomotive, for , several years a popular literary weekly paper, was started by the apprentices in the Journal office. In the summer of 1846 the audacity of the gamblers provoked the citizens to harsh measures, and a public meeting appointed Hiram Brown, the oldest member of the barj^anjj one of the ablest, to the special duty of prosecuting them. His work, with a repetition of the public meeting the following year, drove off the worst of the dark-legged fraternity. The depot of the Madison Railroad was built in 1846, and was a substantial intimation that the long isolation of the town would soon be broken. Property had already taken an upward turn, and values were improving in the hopeless section of East South Street, then a country lane, and Pogue's Run Valley. Complaint | was made of the selection of so remote a site as South Street east of Pennsylvania, but being fixed the Council began improving the streets leading down there across the swampy bottom, and the propertyholders straightened the creek from Virginia Avenue to Meridian Street.

Governor Whitcomb issued his proclamation calling for volunteers for the Mexican war May 23, 1846, and Capt. James T. Drake speedily raised a company, with John McDougal, afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of California, as first lieutenant, and Lew Wallace, now general and minister to Turkey, as second lieutenant. It was made part of the First Indiana Regiment, of which Capt. Drake was made colonel. It spent the whole year of its enlistment guarding the mouth of the Rio Grande, where Luther Peck, sod of the first Lutheran clergyman here, was drowned. Two other companies were raised in May and September, 1847, by Edward Lander, elder brother of Gen. Frederick Lander, and Capt. John McDougal. They were put in tlie Fourth and Fifth Regiments. It may be noted here that in numbering the regiments raised by the State in the civil war, the five Mexican regiments were counted first, and the first Indiana regiment in the late war was the sixth.

4th. During the fall and winter of 1842 and the early spring of 1843 a strong religious excitement prevailed throughout the West, and nowhere more absorbingly than in Indianapolis. The preaching of the " Second Advent" by Samuel Miller had attracted the attention even of those who had not the slightest faith in his calculations or his interpretations of Daniel's "time, times, and an half." The spirit of religious revival was abroad, and in spite of the inevitable extravagancies of religious enthusiasm it wrought as much permanent good probably as any that ever disturbed the self-seeking of any community. The " second coming" gave especial force to the exhortations of tlie time, and when the great comet blazed out all along the western horizon it gave a special force to the predictions of the " second coming." One of the portents was there before the eyes of all the world, and it gave encouragement to the invention of many more ; meteors went flashing down the sky, leaving fiery trails that broke up into little patches which finally took the f'onii oF letters and read, '- The Lord is coming." Strange intimations of the great catastrophe were found in marks on leaves, sometimes on prophetic eggs of strangely inspired pullets, sometimes on the hark of trees, or the accidental lines of rain-drops. They were all paraded with gloomy exultation in the Midnight Cry, a paper of the Second Advent, published in Cincinnati by Joshua V. Himes. The " unrespective" secular press laughed at these fantastic phenomena. They called the " Second Advent" organ the Midnight Howl and the Evening Yell, and insisted that the mysterious letters made of a meteor's tail spelled " Pay the printer." But the revival went on, not exactly separated from the advent excitement but independently of it ; all the churches felt it. About the time the comet appeared a young preacher of considerable ability, who had given the " advent" prophecies close study, came to the town and preached a series of connected sermons on the subject in several of the churches, principally in the Christian Church on Kentucky Avenue, and the First Lutheran Church on Ohio Street near Meridian. One gloomy, rainy night, when he was preaching at this latter place, there was a strange lurid glare all over the western sky, reaching up to the zenith, and looking as if the world were really on fire in the back yard, as the congregation was dismissed and got out of doors into the drizzling rain. The sermon had described with considerable graphic power the portents that would precede Christ's second coming, and the impression was still vivid on the minds of many. That awful red light spreading over the thick clouds all around both poles and up to the zenith seemed a realization of the most terrible anticipation of the sermon. Nobody fainted or screamed, but a good many women and not a few men looked at it as they never before had looked at an earthly conflagration. It proved to be the burning of a few large ricks of hemp cut and stacked on a farm on the river bank at the ford of the Crawfordsville road.

Several of the most confident of the Adventists made themselves ascension robes, and some sold or gave away their property. One of the leading men sold out and joined the Shakers in Ohio. One woman became permanently insane and was afterwards put in the asylum.

The failure of the world to " come to lime," or rather eternity, on the 1st of April, 1843, or thereabouts, which was the date that Miller's calculations had determined to be the limit, did not undeceive any of the devout adherents. The prophet or interpreter of prophets recast his calculation and concluded that June was a safer limit than April. The failure then began to tell on the delusion of pretty much all who ' had not undeceived themselves before, and the " Second Advent" fancy disappeared entirely.

It will not be beneath the dignity of a local history to notice in this connection that there were three places chiefly used for the baptism of converts, where the rite was applied by immersion, - the river at the old ferry, as often on the west as the east side, because the water shoaled very gradually on that side, and on the east there was a "stepping ofi'" place that would take a man in a swimming depth in a few steps ; another was in the canal at Washington Street, but less used than the canal at the Kentucky Avenue bridge. It was here that Mr. Beecher first practiced immersion, after a declaration that he had no more faith in the efiBcacy of the rite in that form than any other, but would administer it in the way that best pleased the subject of it. A very common feature of Sunday was a procession or crowd going from some up-town church to the river or canal to administer baptism at the close of the morning's services. When porkhouses spoiled the river and sewage befouled the canal the churches betook themselves to baptisteries. The colored brethren, whose church was on Georgia Street west of Mississippi and very near the canal, went to the Georgia Street foot-bridge. The creek was never used for this service, or, if at all, very early in the settlement's religious development.

The beginning of the year 1847 wafi^ marked by the highest flood ever known in the river oefore or since, though that of last February could have been but little below it. On the first Sunday of the new year the water was at its highest. It covered the whole of the river bottom. Fall Creek and Eagle Creek bottoms, and in many, places came up level with the surface of the blufis. It ran over the top of the middle pier of the National road bridge, and several times the big trees and masses of drift borne down on the furious current looked as if they must strike the sills and girders and sweep the structure away. The National road west of the river was covered " hub deep" from the bridge to the bluff. In two places the current was so strong as to cut great gaps across the heavily macadamized roadway, and pour down the south slope of the grade into the low ground of the bottom in a violent cataract that churned the soft alluvial soil into thin mud and carried it off. In this way two deep pits were dug, the largest of which was probably one hundred feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. A frame house on the south side of the road T^as washed off by the flood and lodged in this hole, where it stuck, leaning dangerously over for several months, but was finally removed, and is still standing near its former site in Indianola. These two huge scars left by the flood remained more or less conspicuous for twenty years. The mischief done by it was so general and serious that the Legislature extended the time of paying taxes by land-owners in the river bottoms, and probably remitted them altogether in cases of especial hardship. The canal bank along the river near the Michigan road was washed away, the feeder-dam injured, the Fall Creek aqueduct washed out, and the Pogue's Run culvert on Merrill Street torn away. The old " ravines" in the town made their last serious disturbance in that flood.

The 22d of February, 1847, was celebrated by a procession of the mechanics of the city, who marched to the Christian Church on Kentucky Avenue, and were addressed by the late John D. Defrees, then recently become proprietor and editor of the Journal. On the 26th a general meeting of the citizens was held at the court-house to take measures for assisting in the relief of the distress in Ireland. A good deal of good work was done here by committees and by individual liberality.