Harrison Town

Harrison Town

Among the first settlers in this town were J. W. and A. H. Kaump, who came in 1836 and settled on Sections 13 and 15 respectively. Abram Travis settled in Section 10 in 1835. In 1837 Chauncey Jones and Obed King came and settled on Section 1, and Dickinson B. More¬ house in Section 30. In 1840 Mr. King was killed by a tub of rock falling on him while he was digging a well. In 1838 Absalom Mc¬ Cormack settled in Section 34. In 1839 0. S. and Obed K. Jones came and settled on Section 12 and John Shipley on Section 10. In 1838

Cams settled near Whig Diggings. John N. Eayers and James T. Murphy came to the town in 1840. That same year James Likens set¬ tled in the west side of the town near Rockville, and in 1846 opened a farm on Section 17. In 1847 Thomas McMahon settled in the town. In June, 1840 James Gillespie and Timothy Carrington laid out a town called Tippecanoe on the southeast quarter of Section 12, but no town was ever built there.

There has been little bloodshed in the town, despite the roaring times of Red Dog Diggings. In the spring of 1881 Noah B. Gammon shot and killed C. P. Rice in a dispute about a private road. The trial excited a great deal of interest. On the first trial the jury disagreed, and on the second trial Gammon was convicted and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.

In 1833 Stewart McKee, an energetic Scotch-Irishman, came to Platteville with the intention of putting up a grist-mill, as he was a mill-wright. But the locality was greatly in need of a saw-mill, and Mr. Rountree advised him to establish one and aided him to do so. A suitable waterpower was found on the Little Platte, about five miles southwest of Platteville, in the town of Harrison, and the mill was speedily erected and put into operation. The great demand for lumber by the incoming settlers taxed the mill to the full of its limited capac¬ ity. It furnished lumber for the building in Belmont used by the legis¬ lature of 1836, illustrated on page 132, and for Rountree's new store in Platteville. Every settler's house for twenty or thirty miles around contained lumber from McKee's mill, if it were only slabs for roofing. In 1836 he added a run of stones for grinding corn, a much needed institution. He then leased the mill for a year to Adams & Co. At the expiration of the lease he resumed control and kept it until 1858, when he sold it to George Marshall, who ran it several years and leased it to a man named Zimmerman. After that it was aban¬ doned. Its ruins may still be seen on Section 24.

Stewart McKee was a prominent man and well known all over Grant County. In 1848 he obtained a divorce from his second wife. The Herald said of it: "Stewart McKee's divorce case has cost more time and money than all the public printing the county has to pay." After selling his saw-mill, he went to St. Louis, and from there to Belleville, Ill., where he died about thirty years ago. His son David remained in the county and attained some prominence as an editor, lawyer, and soldier.

In 1828 Martial Detantabaratz began a settlement on the west side of Platte River about half a mile above the confluence of the Little Platte. He had an ambition to build a city there, and he called the place Paris. He built a furnace and put in a store there. In 1835 he and N. E. Thouron, of Philadelphia, laid off a town plat. Very little can be learned about this place or its residents. It appears that John Nicholas lived there in 1833, Moses Stewart in 1838, and 0. L. Stone in 1839. In 1839 Detantabartz built a toil-bridge across the Platte at Paris - the first bridge we learn of in the county. In 1842 Edward B. Thurtle kept a tavern at Paris. It does not appear that there was ever a post-office at the place.

Detantabaratz (called by the French' "Lejaune" - the Yellow) got into financial difficulties and through them almost into a duel with David G. Bates, a prominent business man of Galena, of whom "Detan" had borrowed freely. The Frenchman chose swords as the weapons, and as he had been a dragoon in the French army, he had so much the advantage of his antagonist, who was quite unskilled in fencing, that the duel never came off. The financial difficulties of the founder of Paris on the Platte increased to such an extent that he

In 1828 Asa E. Hough built a furnace on the Platte a few miles below Paris and named the place Gibraltar, but it never became even a village. Hough built a saw-mill a short distance up the river from the furnace. In 1834 he abandoned the furnace and built a residence near the mill. In 1845 he went to Potosi to live and died there the next year. Although a pioneer, smelter, sawyer, and farmer, he was a scholarly man. He became noted for his success in agriculture and the raising of blooded stock.

Settlement And Organization Of Paris

The town of Paris was one of the original towns organized in 1849. It was then thinly settled, the city of Paris having vanished. The few old settlers whose names can now be learned were: Robert Durley, who settled in the town in 1834, Isaac Hornbeck, who settled on Section 21 in 1844, Thomas Longbotham, on Section 22 in 1846, Frederick Maring, on Section 21 in 1856, and Josiah Willev, on Sec¬ tion 25 in 1858. About the beginning of the war the town began to be settled up with Germans, who now constitute the bulk of the pop¬ ulation. In 1850 the town had a population of 391 ; in 1855, 496; in 1860, 682; in 1865, 771; in 1870, 907; in 1875, 940; in 1880, 876; 1885, 803; in 1890, 778; in 1895, 832.

The surface of the town being mostly steep hillsides and clay ridges, it is not first-class farming land, and the population has been largely drawn off the last twenty-five years to the more fertile prairie lands of the West.