Girl Scouts Love State Parks, and a Very Strange Cemetery Visit

In Indiana, it wasn't great timing for the annual Girl Scouts Love State Parks weekend. The forecast called for just enough rain all weekend that one could neither plan confidently nor cancel confidently. Normally, my Girl Scout troop is fairly tolerant of miserable weather (we've happily completed entire badge meetings and cookie booths and camping trips more-or-less in the rain!), but all of the activities that they most wanted to do--full moon hike! Trail ride! Campfire dinner! Earning the Ambassador Photography badge!--called for fair weather.

Also, high school students are so busy! I fear that I'm past the days when I can gather my entire Girl Scout troop together at the same time in the same place. Someone's always got their part-time job or volleyball practice or play rehearsal or a college visit or, ahem, ballet class six times a week.

So it was with a much reduced number of Girl Scouts that I went to a local history program put on by one of our nearby state parks one Sunday morning. Not the whole day of fun some kids had hoped for, but we'd learn some local history, at least, spend some time together outdoors, and, most importantly, earn those fun patches! Honestly, I was going to be thrilled if the rain held off long enough for us to at least take a walk around the historic cemetery and take some photographs.

Happily, the rain held off long enough for us to attend the entire program and have a (quick) picnic afterwards AND take a (few quick) photos for the badge.

Allens Creek Cemetery has an unusual reason for being. The land we live on once belonged to the Miami nation. In 1809, William Henry Harrison unethically "purchased" most of Indiana from the indigenous nations who lived on it, then the Shawnee leader Tecumseh led a protest, then Harrison led an attack on Tecumseh's people that he later used as a campaign slogan, then he talked so long at his presidential inauguration that he became ill, then he died. 

Meanwhile, post-Battle of Tippecanoe but pre-Inaugural speech, let's say around 1815 or so, settlers, mostly Scottish and Irish, came into the area to take over the Miami's former land and farm it.  Some of their descendents were still on that same land, still farming it when they weren't working at one of the local limestone quarries, when the state government used Eminent Domain to buy their properties away from them so Monroe Lake could be built. 

Here's a quote from Herbert Lucas, one of the landowners whose property was taken through Eminent Domain:

"You know, you grown up and read about how they took the land away from the Indians and you don’t sympathize until it happens to you. Then you think about it.” (Salt Creek Valley)

Interestingly, he was also specifically upset that the government planned to take and move the cemetery where all his family, including the great-grandfather who was the original homesteader of his property, was buried. 

Our event was to tour where they put Herbert Lucas' great-grandfather, as well as all the other residents of all the other cemeteries that were moved during this process. 

I'd worried that the tour would be boring for the kids--it was a very deep dive into very local history, and although you know how *I* feel about very local history, the kids couldn't possibly be expected to feel the same.

It was, however, very interesting, and VERY strange!

A volunteer was there to demonstrate the proper way to clean an old headstone. Although you can clean more thoroughly with D/2, or even engage in restoration work, it turns out that you can get most old headstones quite clean with just a low-pressure water sprayer, a soft brush, and a non-metal scraper:

A future community service project, perhaps?

And then we took our tour!

As the naturalist explained, this cemetery held the burials from several prior cemeteries, all moved from the Salt Creek Valley during the preparation to create Monroe Lake. 

[here is where the kittens decided to help me!]

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Here's where the kids and I had our first whispered, furious conversation: That's all they did?!? But surely they missed some people!

We brought this up to the naturalist, and she agreed that yes, they surely missed some people.

Some of the cemeteries that they decided to move would be well underwater when Monroe Lake was completed:

Others actually wouldn't have been, but might still have been subject to seasonal flooding:

When the workers came to move the cemetery, they used the surveyors' work to locate the graves, and when they placed them in Allens Creek Cemetery, they preserved the original placement of graves in location to each other, but put them closer together.

If a headstone had any carving on it, it was moved, as well--

  

--but if it was a fieldstone or had no discernible carving, it was left and a standardized headstone was put in its place at Allens Creek Cemetery:

At this point, the kids had another furious whispered discussion, then I was marshalled to ask what it looked like when the Black migrant tobacco farmers who had been hired for this project exhumed graves: did they find caskets, or did they gather skeletons, or?

And so here's where the naturalist blew all our minds: in most cases, they found nothing.

The naturalist said (and Will and I Googled it on the way home because we didn't believe her, but she was correct!) that remains, even bones, decompose within 20 years. So what the workers actually did was excavate down until the soil composition changed, then collect the 12 inches of dirt above that line, put it into a box, and bury that box in its new location in Allens Creek Cemetery.

The kids and I were all, "WHAT?!? JUST... WAIT, WHAT?!?"

Government administration, Folks!

This pointless transferral of dirt was also mandatory. If there were any living relatives of the deceased, they could choose to have the remains re-buried in a different cemetery, at their own expense, but the relatives could not choose to simply leave the dirt that used to be their loved one in its spot to be covered by the lake.

In case we thought that this might have been completely fine with the Salt Creek Valley citizens of 1965, the naturalist told us the story of the "missing" cemetery. It had been surveyed, with a census and photographs of the grave locations, but when the workers went back to that spot... there was nothing there. Were they bribed? Did the family members remove and hide all the headstones? Was there an administrative mix-up with the original survey? Nobody knows, or if they do, they're not telling!

After the event, the troop had a picnic in the back of my car, then we tried to work on the Ambassador Photography badge for a few minutes before the rain really got going. One of the kids brought this awesome prism that she let me try out--

--but when I looked up from playing with it I discovered that all my Girl Scouts were actually in the street and I had to go supervise, because those edgy standing-in-the-middle-of-the-country-road photos only look cool if you don't get hit by a car right after you take them!

Frankly, I hadn't expected a lot from this event. All I'd needed was for the kids to not be too bored while we did an activity that was just long enough for them to earn their Girl Scouts Love State Parks fun patch. So I was STOKED at how legitimately fascinating the tour was, and how fascinated the kids clearly were! It was an especially great event for teenagers, because it got them thinking and talking about big questions that don't always have a right answer. Here is just some of what we discussed:

• Why should a government get to take land away from someone who already owns it?
• What's the point of moving a cemetery if you know you're going to miss some of the bodies?
• What's the point of moving a cemetery if there are no actual bodies to move?
• Why couldn't people choose to let their loved ones stay in their original cemetery locations under the lake?
• Would it have been useful to do an archaeological excavation of the cemeteries as they were being emptied?
• Where did the contracted Black workers stay, and how were they treated? And were they hired because they would work more cheaply, or because it was work that made white people squeamish, or because it was work that white people thought they were too good to do, or because it was work that local people refused to do because they didn't want their cemeteries moved?

And of course, most importantly:

• WHAT IS THE REAL STORY OF THAT MISSING CEMETERY?!?!?!?

Smithville News, Just as Riveting Now as it Was 114 Years Ago

 

I went WAAAAY down a rabbit trail last week.

I'm pretty sure this thing I have where I get obsessed with a hobby or a research interest is a positive coping technique for undiagnosed anxiety and/or a negative coping technique for undiagnosed ADD, but regardless, there I was last week, stressed out and anxious, overstimulated and overwhelmed, with the sudden desire to research the history of my property. 

I know the old general store on my land is at least 83 years old, as I have a photo that's dated 1939, showing the general store in business, the owners' bedroom visible through an open door behind the wood-burning stove. It's labeled with the names of the owners, and their surname matches that of the family we bought the house from, so the property was in their family from at least then until they sold it to us.

I'm curious, though, about how old that general store actually is, and how old our house is, and when our land was first cleared for farming, and if it was recorded anywhere who, specifically, the land was originally stolen from, and why it wasn't turned into a quarry like the land just a mile north or the land just a mile east or the land just a few miles south. 

So at some point during a really rough week last week, I was sitting in front of my computer trying to get some work done, and that curiosity all of a sudden became a burning desire. I Googled, and found this website about how to research your historic home, then bypassed all their other useful advice to zone straight in on the "look through historic newspapers" bit. 

So I Googled THAT, and found a run of a very tiny, VERY local newspaper that ran from 1908 to 1914 and served a very small radius of population in this exact area. 

Like, a VERY small radius. We're talking *maybe* five miles in any direction. Little areas that are now just a couple of minutes away by car are referred to in this newspaper as being entirely different towns, and the actual city that I live just south of is referred to as a place you take the train to, and if you want to send your kids to high school they have to board there and only come back on the weekends to visit the "home folks."

It's a miracle that a small newspaper like this even survived to be scanned and preserved, because it's always the unimportant-seeming ephemera like this that's lost. Nobody thinks to preserve it, it's great for starting a fire, it's printed on cheap paper that deteriorates quickly, etc., and most of the time, you'll never know it even existed.

But somebody saved many of these papers--not even close to a complete run, alas, but many of them--and they're scanned into my state's digital archives for me to look at...

...and grow completely obsessed with.

I have never in my life read such a gossipy rag! From what I can tell, the editor just let anyone submit whatever they wanted as news, so along with the occasional murder or theft or buggy accident, every week you get a full accounting of who visited whom and who threw a party and who went shopping in the city and how everyone's crops are doing. And if you thought that today's digital social media inspires FOMO, how would you feel if an acquaintance's recent party was in the newspaper, with a full account of every single person who attended, the entire menu, and who was asked to sing and did so reluctantly and charmed everyone with their beautiful singing voice and organ playing?

And then the next week, you got it all again!

People even subtweeted at each other, right in the pages of the newspaper!

So I started reading this newspaper, and felt like I had fallen into a period novel. Every week all the people were up to something new, and there was gossip and scandal and elopements and fights. And, like, if you lived here in 1908, no part of you was safe. Can you imagine if you went to a party, and at the party you were literally voted "Ugliest Boy?" And then it was IN THE NEWSPAPER that you went to a party and were the ugliest boy there?!?

I horrified Syd by showing her the article at the end of the school year (which was April 16, I'm assuming because after that date everyone needed to go plant corn), which gave the full name of all the eighth-grade graduates of the local schools, as well as EVERY SINGLE KID'S GPA. Including the kid who only earned a 76, poor thing!

Everyone more or less had to get used to me saying, "So, you want to hear the news of 1908?", and then telling them about some local scandal or crime. There were, for instance, a lot of elopements:

There was another one where a 38-year-old guy ran off with a 16-year-old girl. They hired a buggy and fled from the city down to the little town five or so miles south of me, where they'd hoped to catch the train down to Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl's dad had wired every train station around and then gotten on his own horse, and he actually managed to catch them at the Harrodsburg depot. But when the couple saw him, they ran off into the woods and didn't come back out again until the next day. The dad then dragged his daughter back home with him, but she told the reporter that she'd run away again as soon as she could.

They'd also put it into the paper whenever someone left their spouse, including this chance encounter of a spouse who probably thought he'd gotten clean away:

Also in the newspaper was plenty of good advice, stuff like gentleman shouldn't spit on the sidewalks, and ladies should try to dress up a little more and iron their ribbons when going to town, and how to talk on the telephone:

But there were also plenty of actual crimes. Syd and I reckon that there was a serial killer running around 1908-1909 Smithville. Over about 18 months, I saw THREE reports of men found lying on the train tracks, decapitated. One guy wasn't immediately identified, so they took him to the mortuary and invited the public to come look at him to see if anyone could identify him. He was eventually identified as a guy from Alabama, and although he was found on the train tracks, the coroner said that it looked like someone had tried to decapitate him with a pocketknife, but stopped at his spine and left him on the tracks for the train wheels to finish the job. The murder was blamed on "Italians," and left at that.

Two more times, then, in 18 months, there was a report of somebody found decapitated on the train tracks, but each of those times, the report said that they'd probably been walking home at night intoxicated. One guy, it said, looked like he had lain down to go to sleep on the train tracks, which... okay? And the other guy, it said, looked like he'd fallen and hit his head on the tracks. 

You know what I think, though? I think that a serial killer was murdering people and then leaving them on the train tracks to get decapitated by the train. Because how likely is it that THREE people would just happen to land on the train tracks just exactly the right way to get decapitated in this one small area in 18 months?

And then there was the time that people went to the Christian church one morning and found a dead dog on the pulpit, its head on the Bible and a handwritten note next to it that read, "I'm trying to get to dog heaven." A couple of weeks later, the paper said that a guy had accused his son of putting the dead dog in church and his son had shot at him and then ran away.

And THEN there was the time that they were having an ice cream social at the Mt. Ebal Church and some young men rolled up in their buggy. One of them, the Sipes boy (the newspaper then paused for a long reminiscence about the time that the Sipes boy's mother had died in the middle of winter and his father had piggybacked the boy to a neighboring farm in a snowstorm and gotten frostbite on his feet), took out a revolver and started shooting at the sky. This scared the horses, so one guy told the Sipes boy to put his revolver back in his pocket, and the Sipes boy shot him three times point blank.

The newspaper ran regular reports on the guy's eventual full recovery, and the Sipes boy's continued stay in the county jail. 

Okay, and THEN there is the whole saga of the Angora cat. There was an article in the paper about how Harold Allen lost his Angora cat, and was offering the unheard-of sum of $25 as a reward for her recovery. I don't even know how someone would even have gotten an Angora cat into the backwoods of Indiana back then, but I guess the train did run everywhere. So we don't hear anything else for a few months, and then one day there's an article in the newspaper about how Dillon Deckard caught a long-haired white cat the other day, and he thought about skinning it but decided instead that he was going to keep it.

I was all, "HEY! That's Harold Allen's cat!!!!" But, you know, I'm the only one over here binging two years of Smithville News in a weekend. For everyone else, several months have passed. Mary Travers turned down her teaching post so she wouldn't leave her father without a housekeeper. Charlie Delgar grew a pumpkinvine up his apple tree and now it's dangling giant pumpkins down like apples. Judah Harden had to shoot his dog after it savaged the postman. Bloomington took down the hitch rack outside the courthouse and all the farmers are big mad about it and say they'll just mail order from Indianapolis if Bloomington doesn't give them anywhere to tie up their horses. So maybe Harold's cat is just old news, and Dillon Deckard can keep her.

But don't worry--people did remember Harold's cat.

This was basically all I talked about all weekend, so much so that Syd and I now talk about them as if they're real--and on Tiktok:

"She's a 10, but she earned the lowest grade in her class."

"She's a 6."

"He's a 9, but he found Harold's Angora cat and he's keeping it."

"He's a 2."

"She's a 4, but she turned down a teaching job so she could stay home and 'be the housekeeper' for her father."

"I think she's still a 4?"

"He's a 10, but he put a dead dog in the church and then shot at his father."

"He's a -1."

But in all of Smithville, for all of the two years' worth of weekly gossip news that I read, this news was what made me feel the most feels:

To be honest, I was pretty offended on Grandma Woodward's account. Like, the nerve of calling some old woman pathetic when all she's doing is minding her own business sitting on her porch?

A few months later, though, the newspaper reported that she'd died, and then it called her a "good woman who was always doing good deeds for others." Awww! And then the NEXT week's newspaper had about twenty different notices of all the people who'd traveled to her funeral at Mt. Ebal church, including one guy who'd closed down his entire school for the day so he could attend. 

It was Grandma Woodward, then, who inspired me to my next great idea and the next step in my great obsession.

This, Friends, is Mt. Ebal church, about five miles from my house as the crow flies:

It is now an Airbnb, and was the source of its own run of news in the currently gossipy local newspaper of today. I guess it had been unsold for a VERY long time before the current owners bought it, and people were accustomed to parking in its lot when they visited the cemetery across the street, and also for funerals. But the new owners were not allowing this anymore, and people were so mad that they held a bunch of public meetings to try to get the owners to let them keep parking there. The restaurant a block down the street even said that people were welcome to park in their lot and walk over, but nope, people were all, "I can't walk a block! I can only walk across the street!"

We parked at the back of the cemetery, and walked around looking for Susan Woodward and my other newspaper friends. 

I found lots of familiar names:

It was Syd who found my prize for me:

You'll be pleased to know that not only was Grandma Woodward much beloved in life, but in death she had PRIME placement front and center in the cemetery. Check out how close she is to the church!

I haven't quite worked up the nerve to mention to the rest of the family that I also now very much need to visit the Clear Creek Christian Cemetery, Knights of Pythias Cemetery (which is also in the middle of a field now, sooo...), and several now abandoned limestone quarries...

The Newest Bark Ranger of Indiana Dunes National Park: Day 4

 

On this day, we had time for one final adventure before heading back home. Instead of visiting another beach, Will wanted to hike the Great Marsh Trail, so off we went!

We picked the perfect time for our final hike--you can see in the photos how that mostly clear blue sky became overcast in just the hour that we wandered around, spying on egrets and monarchs and frogs:

After finishing our hike just as the skies finally opened up, all that remained was to pop back by the Visitor Center so that the newest Junior Ranger and Bark Ranger of Indiana Dunes National Park could take their oaths, and then we were ready for my teen with a learner's permit to terrify us both during her very first long drive on an interstate highway!

One day, I think she'll even be brave enough to pass another vehicle!

The Newest Bark Ranger of Indiana Dunes National Park: Day 3

 

We had some business to accomplish on this morning! Our prospective Bark Ranger had finished pretty much all of her required activities, but this prospective Junior Ranger still had some work to do, so we went on a hike:

It was a misty, overcast morning on the Bailly Homestead, but we had the place to ourselves as we wandered around:

Look how lush and green the trail was!

After a short hike through a forest full of sugar maples, we reached the working Chellberg Farm:

Luna had a BIG adventure here!

I am very unsure of Luna around farm animals. She embarrassed me by barking at draft horses at Kentucky Horse Park, and I still hold over her head the one time, years ago, that she lost her mind and mortally wounded a chicken and I had to behead it.

Honestly, I might still be in low-key hysterics from that one...

So even though these sweeties looked as content and happy as... well, this--

--I was extremely reluctant for Luna to do this--

--and then this--

--and then this!

The pig didn't seem particularly fazed by our slightly overexcited dog, but pigs have a lot of teeth and I didn't relish the idea of carrying a dog with her face half bitten off the long hike back to the car, so I made Will pull her away and we all hiked back, faces unbitten, through a woods that was now looking a lot more like this:

It started raining before we were quite finished, but don't you find that weather that's unpleasant to humans is often the best for spotting wild critters? Look at my new friend, the gray ratsnake!

Back, then, to our Airbnb for snacks, a glass of wine for the grown-up, and a lovely interlude watching Luca courtesy of our Airbnb's Disney+ subscription.

I REALLY liked our Airbnb!

Luca was perfectly timed, because by the time the credits rolled, the sky was blue again. 

Back we went to the beach!

I could have really liked Central Avenue Beach--it was much quieter than West Beach, and had a much easier walk to get to with a fun scramble down a dune at the end--

--but the whole time we were there, we were absolutely mobbed by some sort of horrible, stinging fly. I didn't bring any anti-stinging fly repellant, and anyway, they were also clearly biting Luna, as well.

We, at least, could escape entirely into the water--

--but Luna is still scared to go out beyond her knees.

Will had the brilliant idea that Luna would be less susceptible to horrible fly stings if she was covered in sand:

It was obviously the best of many good decisions made during this trip:

As I was taking four thousand photos of our adorable dog with sand on her snoot, I happened to notice that the beach we were on was clearly adjacent to the beach that Matt and I had walked on our own trip to Indiana Dunes the month before:

And that's how I came full circle on this trip, happily achieving my dream on almost the very same spot where I first dreamed it.