536                     HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY

was anticipated with anxiety on the part of an interested population.
Among the spectators who witnessed the initiation was William C.
Wiltse, who promptly engaged to take the first sack of twenty-five
pounds of flour turned out and pay $1 for it. When delivered to him,
he lost no time in taking it to Mrs. Aikins’ bakery, with instructions to
make up and bake one or more loaves at once, in time for supper, which
was done as ordered. It was a source of satisfaction to him to know
and to say that he and his family had eaten the first loaf of bread baked
from the first flour produced by the “Peerless” mill.

                        Longest Train of Cars.
    The longest train of cars ever hauled over the Brazil branch of the
Evansville & Indianapolis Railroad was taken from Brazil down to Clay
City on Saturday, the 10th day of September, 1892. There were in the
make up, not counting the engine and tender, seventy-two flats, or coal
cars, and three box-cars. The entire length of the train was computed
at two thousand nine hundred and forty feet, three hundred feet more
than a half mile.

                        Reformed by Lynching.
    Among the characters of notoriety in the early history of the county
were the twin brothers “Shack” and “Shade” Phipps, who were asso-
ciated with that gang of desperadoes known as the “Bandits of the
Prairie.” Their brother, Jesse Phipps, lived on what is now and for
nearly fifty years past has been known as the Moody place, adjoining
the town of Middlebury. About the year 1850, when “Shade” was visit-
ing and spending the night with Jesse, a party of regulators, as they were
styled at that day, assembled about the house, took him out and lynched
him under a large beech tree then standing by the roadside, at a point
between what are now the Mary E. Kress and the Robert Vanhorn places,
less than a half mile south of the old town. Very soon after this,
“Shade” left the country and went to the state of Iowa, locating near
Boone, Boone county, where he acquired a home and lived the remainder
of his days a peaceably disposed, respectful and good citizen.

           Returned After Twenty Years to Care for His Mother.
    At the time that colored men were brought into Clay county to
work in the mines, in 1872, Michael Noonan, then seventeen years of
age, living at Knightsville, left home and was not afterward heard from
by his mother nor any other member of the family. After the lapse of
ten years the family abandoned all hope of ever hearing from him and
mourned him as dead. On Friday evening, December 16, 1892, after
the lapse of twenty years, a stranger appeared at the family residence, at
Knightsville, who saluted Mrs. Noonan as “Mother,” who proved to be
the missing and supposed long lost son, the mother, of course, not recog-
nizing him, When he assured her of his identity there was rejoicing in
the widowed mother’s heart, as well as with other members of the
family, over the return of the wanderer. All these years he had been
in the regular army, had saved his earnings, and had come back home
to care for his mother in her declining years.

                        A Corporation With a Soul.
    There is at least one instance in the history of Clay county in dis-
proof of the proverbial saying that corporations have no souls. From
the home news columns of the Brazil Democrat of September 15, 1892,
is copied the following: “One day last week a special agent of the Chi