Perry County, Indiana - Chapter 4: Removal of County Seat to Rome, 1916

By official returns, certified to by the clerks of the existing thirteen counties and forwarded to the Territorial House of Representatives at their session beginning December 4, 1815, Indiana's population was 63,897, of which Perry County contained 1,720, including 350 white males over twenty-one. On the 14th of the month a memorial was adopted which Jonathan Jennings, Territorial Delegate, two weeks later laid before Congress praying admission to statehood.

The memorial was referred to a committee with Mr. Jennings as its chairman, by whom on January 5, 1816, a bill was reported to the House of Representatives of the United States enabling the people of Indiana Territory to form a Constitution and State government, and for the admission of such state into the Union upon an equal footing with the original states. After amendment in some of its particulars, the bill was passed by Congress, and with the signature of James Madison, President, became law on April 19, 1816,

In conformity with the provisions of such law, on Monday, May 13, 1816, in the several counties of the territory an election was held for forty-three members of a Constitutional Convention, chosen in accordance with an apportionment which had been made by the Territorial Legislature and confirmed by an act of Congress.

Perry County was represented by the Rev. Charles Polk, whose name appears in the recorded proceedings as "Polke of Perry," a cousin of his William Polk, being "Polke of Knok," a resident of Vincennes. Both men were of that prolific family whose American pro- genitors were Robert Bruce Polk and Magdalene Tasker, his wife, who came from Scotland and settled in Somerset County, Maryland, prior to 1689. The convention met June 10, at Cory don, which had become the territorial capital in 1813, winning out in a contest with Madison, Vevay, Lawrenceburg, Charlestown, Clarksville and Jeffersonville. Jonathan Jennings was chosen presiding officer, William Hendricks, secretary, and the meetings continued from day to day until June 29, when, having completed the work of forming a State Constitution, the session closed by adjournment sine die.

Despite the massive blue-limestone walls and the fifteen-foot ceilings of the capitol building, then new, the warmth of June sunshine in Southern Indiana made its pent-up inclosure irksome to these sturdy pioneers, inured to hardships of the outdoors, so many of their deliberations were held under the shade of the huge elm tree which yet stands near the bank of Big Indian Creek, some two hundred yards northwest of the public square. This tree is Corydon's pride and glory, its preservation being the particular charge of Hoosier Elm Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution.

A delightful pen-picture of this constitutional assembly, drawn by Miss Julia S. Conklin in her History of Indiana, deserves reproduction here, since it may be termed a composite portrait whereof Perry County's delegate was a component part.

"They were a grave, serious body of men, these fathers of our Constitution," Miss Conklin writes, "and is assembled in our legislative halls today would be a strange-looking company, so greatly have manners and dress changed since Indiana became a state.

"They were not much given to fashion, save the fashion of the back-woodsmen, and were as rough and rugged in appearance as the country they represented. Many of them wore homespun - handwoven clothing - made by the pioneer wife and mother without the aid of a sewing machine, cut by rules unknown to the

"Some of them wore the buckskin trousers and coonskin cap of the pioneer, a garb well suited to the exposures they encountered ; heavy high - topped boots covering their feet and lower limbs. But rude as they may have been in appearance, they were men of common sense, firm in integrity and honest purpose, some of whom became truly illustrious in the early history of Indiana."

The same clear-minded, unpretending practical judgment which sent these legislators of unquestionable patriotism and moral stability into the fresh air for consultation, gave Indiana a Constitution inferior to none that was in existence at the time. Its concise clarity of style, its just and comprehensive provisions for maintenance of civil and religious liberty, its mandates designed to provide for public welfare, to protect the rights of the people individually and collectively, all bespeak of its framers their familiarity with the theories of the Declaration of Independence, their Territorial experience under provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, and their knowledge of the principles of the national constitution. With such landmarks in view, the result was a document rendering comparatively easy the labours of similar conventions called later in other states and territories.

No handwriting on the wall, however, needed interpretation for the Trojans of 1816, to signify that their kingdom was numbered and finished. Just as changed territorial limits had cost Vincennes her position as capital, so when the western boundary of Perry county was moved from Pigeon Creek eastward to Anderson River, by the act of January 10, 1818, creating Spencer county, Troy's value as a central point vanished, and another act was soon passed by the same Legislature providing for a relocation of the county seat of Perry county.

Samuel Snyder, of Warwick county; Samuel Chambers, of Orange county; William Harrington, of Gibson county; Ignatius Abell and Jacob Zenor, of Harrison county, by this act were appointed commissioners to meet on the first Monday in March (2d), 1818, at the house of Aaron Cunningham, to re-locate the seat of justice for Perry county.

Further provision of the act authorized Samuel Connor, county agent, to annul with every individual who so desired all contracts made for the sale of lots in Troy, each purchaser surrendering his lot and receiving back the money paid thereon, with interest. The donations of the McDaniels, except such portions as had been sold, reverted to them and they were to be paid with interest the price received for lots given. The town plat of Troy should be vacated, should the citizens so desire, and the remaining land owned by the county was to be advertised and sold, ten per cent of the proceeds realized to be used for the establishment and maintenance of a county seminary. All these provisions, except vacating the town site, were duly carried into effect.

The labors of these commissioners (or a majority of them) when they met were conducted along lines closely parallel to the proceedings of that earlier board which had chosen Troy. Accessibility and convenience in transportation logically commanded a location upon the only commercial highway, the Ohio river, and after due deliberation and inspection the choice fell upon a site approximately bisecting the winding course of the county's southern boundary. This was opposite the mouth of Sinking Creek in Breckinridge County, Kentucky, now Stephensport, where the allied Stephens, Minor and Holt families had taken up extensive government grants for services in the American Revolution, Nicholas Minor HI, a member of the same family connection, coming early into Perry County, where many descendants perpetuate his name to the present.

projecting into Kentucky, in May, 1818, Uriah Cummings had laid out under the name Washington a townsite embracing a public square, one hundred and eighty-nine lots, and fifteen outlots. With the exception of such lots as had already been sold, all this land was given by Cummings to the county, in consideration of fixing the county seat thereon, besides the donation a little later of an additional forty acres adjoining. At the same time thirty-five adjacent acres were sold to the county by John Crist for $300.

By way of explaining the speedy change of name, it should be stated that it was necessary, to avoid duplication, the Father of his Country having been honoured during the preceding year, on August 18, 1817, when the newly located county seat of Daviess County assumed the title of Washington in substitution for that of Liverpool, the style under which it had been originally platted.

The many-sided Benjamin Franklin appears to have been next in favour among distinguished Americans worthy of veneration, so the plat was re-entered under the name Franklin in the autumn of 1818, although the last court ever held at Troy, in October of that year, with David Hart as president judge, adjourned to meet in the following February "at Washington."

When, however, the initial court at the new county seat convened, in February, 1819, it was at Franklin, Richard Daniel producing his commission as president judge, with James McDaniel, Sr,, and John Stephenson as his associates. Willis C. Osborn was admitted to practice, though little was on the docket save cases of assault and battery. At the term in May, 1819, Samuel Fribie, Charles I. Battell, G. W. Johnson and G. W. Lindsey were admitted. James Main obtained a verdict of $45 for slander, against John Dunigan; James McDaniel recovered judgment for $349, with interest from April, 1815, against Thomas Polk, James Lanman and David D. Grimes, county commissioners,

Just why the title of Franklin was not retained may never be known to this generation - whether practical considerations, as in the case of Washington, or merely sentimental bias toward antiquity. The probability of the latter is based on a peculiarity of the times, especially marked in Governor William Henry Harrison - an exalted reverence for the republics of Greece and Rome.

Our earliest statesmen naturally directed their attention to those governments in the search for experience whereby they might guide our first tottering footsteps, and such - added to the circumstance that culture in that day was indicated by its wealth of classical allusion - gave to everything set down in writing a strong flavour of the antique.

Harrison far surpassed even his contemporaries in this respect, and even in his papers of state, declares Jacob Piatt Dunn, the Indiana historian, "if Leonidas, Epaminondas and Lycurgus escaped, Cincinnatus, Scipio or the Gracchi were sure to be taken in the net."

Not infrequently is it the idiosyncrasies of great men, rather than their stronger characteristics which are copied by admiring followers, hence the surmise that General Harrison's choice of Corydon as the name for Harrison County's capital (drawn, we are told, from an old-time classic ballad which was one of his favourites), had its weighty influence in the second and final change in the nomenclature of Perry County's metropolis.

No mythical Romulus and Remus figure in local traditions of the period, the level land boasts no Seven Hills as a "throne of beauty" in geographical suggestiveness, yet classic history was again drawn upon by the sponsors for the infant community, and a new Rome was christened, whose history has its beginning not Anno Urbe Condita (from Foundation of the City) but from the term of September, 1819, when the

As ancient Rome outlived the first Troy, even so the years when all Perry County roads led to Rome outnumbered the brief period of Trojan dominance. Best and proudest, however, were the earliest days of Hoosier Rome, Destiny holding in store for the county capital on the Ohio River a period of decline and fall swifter and more complete than that of the Empire which once held sway in the Eternal City beside the yellow Tiber.