Blue River Friends Hicksite Meeting House and Cemetery

The first adv.enturer, who became for a time a settler of Washington township, was Jesse Spurgtn. His home was in North Carohna and .he came west in 1804 on a prospecting tour. He stopped a while at the "Lick," east of Salem and went back to his old home, telling many wonderful stories about the Indiana territory. In the spring of 1805 he brought his family west. They first built a small cabin on the southwest quarter of section I4. where he resided until 1808. The lands being then subject to entry he relocated on section 25, where he lived a few years and then pushed on to the Illinois frontier.

Passage source: Centennial History of Washington County, Indiana : Its People, Industies and Institutions : with Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of Many of the Old Families, published 1916.

The next man to locate in the township was George Brock. He was burn in \'irginia and came to Clark's grant in 1805. He remained on the grant two years, putting in considerable time hunting and prospecting "back in the wilderness." In the summer of 1807 he finally located a piece of land that was to his liking, it being section 8, just north of Salem. He and his two sons-in-law, Fred NeidifTer and Adam Barnett, each built cabins on this land in the fall of 1807 and moved their families up from the grant early the following spring.

Passage source: Centennial History of Washington County, Indiana : Its People, Industies and Institutions : with Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of Many of the Old Families, published 1916.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Washington Township - 12,709 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.