Gibson County Courthouse

This town is three miles north of Princeton, the county seat, twenty-one miles south of Vincennes, and thirty-one miles north of Evansville, situated on Sections 24 and 25, Township 1 South, Range 10 West, and on the Evansville & Terre Haute Railroad, and the banks of the Patoka River, from which it derives its name. Patoka is an Indian name and signifies 'log on the bottom," and was applied to the river on account of so many logs having settled to the bottom, which stuck fast in the slimy mud. This town was first called Smithfield, then Columbia, and was platted and recorded as such in October, 1818. We cannot fix the date when Columbia began to assume village proportions. It is undoubtedly the oldest town or hamlet in the county, and that quite a collection of families had built homes and lived here long before it was laid out and recorded. It was for years a stage station between "Stringtown " (now Evansville) and Vincennes, until the Evansville & Terre Haute Railroad made staging over this route a thing that was. The old log building which was erected for a hotel and stage station is still standing, and having been weather-boarded and otherwise repaired, it presents quite a respectable appearance, and, with its veranda or porch extending along the entire front, is suggestive of old time hospitality and comfort to the cramped and stage-weary traveler, the stiff and saddle-chaffed equestrian and the tired and foot-sore pedestrian. There being another Columbia in the state, the post-office here was given the name of " Patoka," and the town assumed the name of the office. Patoka River, though not properly a navigable stream, has had its day of steamboating. During high water boats of small tonnage occasionally ran up as far as the town of Patoka, and two small boats, Staver and Maud, built on the river at and above Patoka, one for the stave trade, the other for handling flats and barges, operated above Patoka for some time, but they are not operating here now, one having been sunk by the ice, and the other, finding it more profitable, is plowing the waters of the Wabash and White Rivers. Thomas H. Martin is believed to be the first hotel keeper, as well as the first spiritual adviser in this ancient village, which is not incorporated, but running on the broad tread or what the "wise ones" suppose to be the more economical plan. She has at this time about 800 inhabitants and has seen better days. Distilleries first made her prosperous, and then crooked whisky sheared her golden locks, nipped her prestine vigor, made her prematurely gray and hurled her on the down grade of the stream of time, from which she is not likely soon to recover; and also disgraced and bankrupted several of her own citizens and made criminals of other residents of the county, only a few of whom were made to feel the power of the law which they had violated. Whisky has ever been one of the staples of this town; two saloons here now, and the time was when merchants and hotels all kept it on sale. A business man here to-day says that on looking over his grandfather's old bills of purchase he found the average about thus: - One barrel of molasses, two barrels of whisky, showing a double demand for the "necessary tanglefoot" over luxurious treacle. Patoka has three churches - Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist - over which the following gentlemen preside as expounders of their faith: - Baptist, W. A. Oliphant, of Fort Branch; Presbyterian, W. B. Crawford; Methodist, Gideon Heavenridge. The school facilities are excellent, having a graded system. The school building is a two story and substantial frame structure with six large, comfortable rooms, five for the different grades and one for general school exercises and school entertainments. The management of these schools has been under the supervision of competent instructors, and are in a prosperous condition.

Passage source: History of Gibson County Indiana, published 1884.

Two miles north of Princeton is Bald hill, which rises to an elevation of one hundred and thirty feet above the town and two hundred and twenty feet above the Wabash river. Movmd Builders are probably responsible for the rounded top, as there are other evidences of this prehistoric race in this part of the state. Considerable bottom land ranges through the western part

Passage source: History of Gibson County, Indiana : Her People, Industries and Institutions, with Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of Many of the Old Families, published 1914.

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 Patoka Township - 7,017 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.