Jay County IN Archives History - Books .....Chapter XII 1896
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Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com December 8, 2007, 11:23 am

Book Title: Reminiscences Of Adams, Jay And Randolph Counties

CHAPTER XII.

    My father was John J. Hawkins. He was born in Bourbon County, Kentucky,
September 25th, 1789, and was a soldier in the war of 1812, and served three
years. My mother was also born in Bourbon County, Kentucky, June 4th, 1789. Her
name was Nancy Sellers Hawkins. I am their youngest child and was born in Eaton,
Preble County, Ohio, October 10th, 1820. My father moved to Jay County in 1829.
We started to move the 1st day of March and arrived in Jay County the 8th. It
took us eight days to travel fifty miles from Eaton, Ohio, to Jay County. We got
to Greenville, Ohio, the 4th of March, the day that General Jackson was
inaugurated president, 1829. The men were marching around a hickory pole with
fife and drums. I asked my father if it was the 4th of July, and he said it was
in honor of General Jackson. I have since learned that it takes the hickory
poles to reach the public crib.

    Our nearest neighbor was ten miles away. The Indians were plenty for three
years after we came, then the government moved them west of the Mississippi. My
playmates were little Indian girls. We shot with bows and arrows, ran races and
rode the ponies. We had no house to live in when we came to Jay County. We built
a half-faced camp by a big oak log and lived in it six months before we built
our cabin. The first thing we done after we got here was to make a brush fence
back of the big log to pen our sheep in at night. Well, the very first night the
wolves came and killed four of the sheep, and don't you think we only had
fourteen doss. I will tell you there names. There was Cay, he was dady's deer
dog; there was Cuff and Ring and Rover, Wallie and Spry, Music and Sound, Rauge,
Sauce, Don, Trail and Loud and Tiger. Well, Don was Brother Joe's dog; he was no
account and all wanted to kill him. Well, when the wolves got after the sheep
they tried to hiss the dogs onto them, but not one of them would go after them
but Don. The next day dady and the boys built a wolf pen and put some of the
dead sheep into it. That night they caught a great big wolf. They took the dogs
and us children to see the wolf; they cut its ham strings and let it out of the
pen and set the dogs onto it, and they soon killed it. The next day father and
the boys went hunting. Daddy killed three deers and Brother Nathen killed two
turkeys. From that time on we had plenty of wild meat. Well, the next thing to
be done was to clear a corn field in the green woods. It was bottom land and
covered all over with spice brush. Brother Sam grubed five acres and the rest
choped the trees down and picked the brush and planted it in corn and pumpkins,
the 25th of May. We had a good crop of corn and such fine pumpkins the sheep had
to be watched. Brother Ben was the shepard. We then cleaned a turnip patch and
raised about five hundred bushels of the finest turnips I ever saw. The 1st of
August, the same year that we came, Town Shalar came and settled right across
the road from the Liber grave-yard and lived in an Indian hut. L. Williamson, a
young man, came about the same time and made his home with us the most of the
time. He and Shalar were both born in Kentucky. Our cabin was twenty-two feet
long and twenty feet wide. It had a great big fire place ten feet wide and a
puncheon floor. That fall the hunters came by the dozen, some from Cincinnati,
some from Eaton and some from Kentucky. Oh, Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky?
It is'nt often that you see a hunter from Kentucky. Later men came to pick out
homesteads. Our house was the stopping place of everybody that came to the
country. We were so glad to see them come. One evening daddy said to the boys,
"we must get up early and go to the rich woods and bring the hogs home to
butcher," so they got up early and Ben said, "I drempt last night that you
started for the hogs and killed a great big bear right in sight of the house,"
and sure enough, he killed the bear just as Ben had dreamed, and sent Sam to the
house for the oxen and cart to haul it home. It was the fattest thing I ever
saw. Daddy says, "Now boys, we go for the hogs to-morrow." We got up early and
low and behold, Ben had dreamed again. He dreamed they started after the hogs
again and daddy told Sam to go to the right of him and Nate to the left so they
would be sure to find the hogs. They went about a mile and saw a gang of deer.
Nate killed two and daddy one and Sam one. They didn't get the hogs that day.
Well, they started and they killed the deer just as Ben had dreamed. Next
morning they asked Ben what he had dreamed, and he said, "if you go you will get
the hogs to-day," and so they did. We always had plenty to eat, game was so
plenty. Our worst trouble was going to mill; we had to go to Richmond, Ind., or
Greenville, Ohio. It took a week to go and come and oh, such roads. The next
settler that came was Phillip Brown, who settled near Liber. People soon came to
settle around us.

    One fall the news came to the men that there was lots of bear out north,
where Adams County now is, so every man in the County went off for to hunt the
bears. Ben Goldsmith lived where Lancaster now is, and Sally May and I went to
stay with Nancy while Ben went on the bear hunt. It was three miles from our
house, and as we went we saw a great big bear; it crossed the road about a
hundred yards in front of us. We were very badly scared, but we went ahead and
soon got there and told of seeing the bear. Before sun down Nancy told we two
children to go to the spring and bring night water. There was four of us, Lizzie
and John Goldsmith, Sally May and me. The spring was close to the creek; John
says, now galls, let's go across the creek and get some grapes and black hawes."
John says, "you get hawes and I'll climb the tree-and get the grapes." Just then
we heard a noise up the tree; we looked up, and there sat a great big hear. I
think it was eating grapes.

    We were badly scared, and we ran to the house. There was no door shutter so
we stood a table up in the door and put a bedstead against it and brought the ax
in and prepared to fight the bear, but he did not come. The day that the men got
home Mary Ann Brown, a little girl about eleven years old, treed a bear in the
corn field and went to a neighbors that had gotten home from the bear hunt, and
he came and shot it for her. The men that went hunting did not see a bear. About
that time Tom Shalar took his team and went to Batavia, Ohio, to move his
brother-in-law to this county. I stayed with his family while he was gone. Earl
Porter was building a cabin for his son, George, about a mile below Shalar's. He
stayed with us at night. A lot of hunters came from Kentucky and stayed in a
cabin Tom had built, but had not moved into it yet. Well, they all went a
hunting. In the afternoon two of them came in and they had whiskey and they got
drunk. They came to the house and told us to cook their dinner or they would
shoot us. Mrs. Shalar refused and shut the door, put a bar of iron across it.
They swore they would tear the roof off if we did not let them in. She told them
she would shoot them. There was a log cut out at the back of the house, next to
the prarire, with a greased paper pasted over it to let in the light in place of
a window. She tore the paper off and told me to creep out at the hole and run
into the prarire and run in the high grass until I got out of sight and then go
out into the path and go and tell Porter to come quick. Well, I went as fast as
I could and just as I got to the path I met Porter coming. I was so glad when I
saw him coming if I had been one of the fainty kind I think I would have swooned
for joy. We son got to the house and Porter soon settled them. That night Porter
lay right across the door with his gun by his side. The next day the hunters
pulled up stakes and left.

    Tom Shalar moved to the prarie close to where Camden now is; he was the fist
settler in Penn Township.

    A lot of us girls and boys went to see them; there were eight of us. They
were Jim Simons, John Hardy, Ben and Jo Hawkins, Phebe Simons, Sally May,
Avaline Hawkins and myself. The horses were all in the woods but one, and we had
to go seventeen miles to get there. Our plan was for us girls to take the one
horse and ride turn about. Well, Avaline said she would ride first. Well, she
started and soon got out of sight and that was the last we saw of her until we
got to Shaler's. We walked that seventeen miles against noon. Well, Avaline said
she thought she had better ride on and have dinner ready against we got there
and so she had it all ready. The next day the boys went hunting and killed a
dozen half grown turkeys. We all went fishing and caught a big turtle and a fine
lot of fish. We went to the Indian village at the Godfrey farm.

    When our crop of corn was eaten up by the coons and squirrels we had to buy
our corn for our bread. The boys would pack the deer hides and go to Greenville
and sell them and buy corn and get it ground and bring it home on pack horses
that were trained to follow the leaders without being driven or led. People
moved into the neighborhood with big families of boys and girls, young men and
women, and then our glorious times came. We had house raisings, log rollings,
flax pullings, Christmas and New Years, Holly eve and Valentine drawings, and
always had a dance at night too. Our dances were a different kind to what they
have now; we danced reels and jigs. We were all poor and had no fine clothes; we
all wore home-made clothes; we had no shoes, and wore moscasins or went
barefooted. We had a flax pulling at George Bickels and a dance, and we were all
barefooted; the floor was very rough and I got a splinter in my big toe. Sally
May took my place in the reel while Nancy Bickle picked the splinter out and
rubbed some coon grease onto it, and then I went on with the dance. When such
things happened there were no remarks made about it. I'll tell you why it was;
just because we were all ladies and gentlemen, every one of us. My sister
Avaline got married to James Simmons and moved to Randolph County. They lived in
a shanty built of rails and covered with clapboars until they got their cabin
built. That was before Jay County was laid out. When anybody got married they
had to get their license and a squire from Randolph County to marry them.

    My father took sick in two years after we came to the country. He lived a
year and died, and left us for a better world. You may imagine how we felt but
can never know how it was. Only two neighbors, one six miles off and the other
three, and our father lying dead in the house. My brothers, Sam and Ben, went to
the woods and cut down a tree and split a puncheon out of it and laid father out
on it and dug his grave, and mother made his burying clothes; they were Irish
linen pants and hunting shirt. Tom Shalar went to Winchester and got some lyn
boards and him and Billy Odel made the coffin. It was a great bereavement. Like
all such things we had to bear it. We did the best we could. It has been
sixty-five years since he died, but it is still fresh in my mind. I was eleven
years old when he died. There was no school in the county until I was a woman. I
can only read and write. I can't read figures; I have to write every thing at
full length.

    I am almost seventy-six years old, I am the youngest of the family and all
the one living. I have been married twice; my first husband was Jesse Maxwell,
the second was B. W. Clark. I was a Hawkins; I had four brothers and one sister.
Their names were Samuel, Nathan, Benjamin, Joseph and Avaline.
                                     CAROLINE CLARK.


Additional Comments:

Extracted from:

Reminiscences of Adams, Jay and Randolph Counties

Compiled by Martha C. M. Lynch

Ft. Wayne, IN: Lipes, Nelson & Singmaster

Circa 1896


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