bicycling through time on the wilderness road

Keith Watkins

Bicycl ing through Time on the Wilderness Road

The generations come and go, and who then remembers?

rom my table in a tearoom in Cumberland Gap, Tennes-see, I could see the sheer face of Cumberland Mountain,

which like Arizona’s Mogollon Rim offers little hope to any-one who wants to cross over to the other side. It was easy for me to understand why the notch that came to bear the _________________

Keith Watkins writes on history, theology, and bicycling. He lives in Vancouver, Washington, just north of the Columbia

River from Portland, Oregon. [email protected] Copyright © 2004, 2010 Keith Watkins

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2 Bicycling through Time. . .

name Cumberland Gap appealed to people who wanted through. What was more difficult to comprehend was why they wanted to make the journey from civilization to wilder-ness, especially since the move forced them into a life that was hazardous and materially primitive. Yet, during the generation immediately following the Revolutionary War as many as 300,000 people left their set-tled homes in Virginia and other states on the eastern sea-board and traveled the Wilderness Road, which Daniel Boone had cut through the Cumberland Gap, into the fertile heartland of Kentucky. Once they reached Kentucky, many of these families stayed, but others continued their pilgrim-age, moving on to Indiana, Illinois, and regions further west. Even Daniel Boone, after devoting much of his life to the conquest of Kentucky, losing several family members to death by Indians, late in life abandoned the state and moved to Missouri where he finished out his years facing toward the wilderness more than toward civilization.

Among the people who traveled from the upland south into Kentucky was Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather—also named Abraham—who took his family over the divide in 1782. After conflict with Indians in which grandfather Abra-ham was killed and young Thomas barely escaped, the fam-ily settled at Hodgenville, a few miles from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where in 1809 the future president was born. In 1816, Thomas Lincoln gave up his business as a cabinet-maker, sold his farm, and moved his family across the Ohio River to a newly developing community in the Indiana wil-derness.

In the mid 1830s, after the major migration through the Cumberland Gap had taken place, my great great grandfa-ther, Benjamin Watkins, took his family through this same gateway to a new way of life. In contrast to the Lincolns, my family didn’t really stop until they reached undeveloped land in the hill country of western Indiana, 75 miles north of the

. . .on the Wilderness Road 3

Pigeon Creek area where the Lincolns had lived until 1830 when they moved to Illinois.

In her 1924 book, In the Footsteps of Lincoln, Ida M. Tarbell offers a romantic explanation of the force that drove these people ever deeper into the American continent de-spite the privation and danger they experienced. Her ac-count of the president’s family begins with Samuel Lincoln who came to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637 and estab-lished himself as a leader of the community. Tarbell follows the members of the family in each succeeding generation who left home and moved to the frontier and proposes that “the same reasons that brought the first American ancestor of Abraham Lincoln” to New England “drove his successors deeper and deeper into the new world.” He, along with his friends, came because he was discontent with “religious, civil, and economic conditions,” but also “because he was young and a wide ocean and a mysterious land invited him.” In each generation thereafter, Tarbell continues, one or more men like that first Samuel Lincoln “pushed ahead into unbroken territory, allured by the hope of larger wealth, of greater freedom of action and thought, of more congenial companionship, and always by the mystery of the unknown, the certainty of adventure.” Because I was traveling through the gap as a tourist rather than immigrant, I knew that this trip carried no pos-sibility of greater wealth and freedom. As I ate my late lunch, however, still uncertain about the accessibility of the Wilderness Trail that has been reestablished through the gap, I did feel a sense of mystery and adventure. With my bright orange Co-Motion bicycle, I intended to join the Lin-coln and Watkins families on the trail that crosses over the notch in the mountain, taking me from Tennessee to Ken-tucky.

Although I could only approximate their routes and would be using a simple but far more sophisticated vehicle than they could have imagined, I would be exposed to the


weather and would feel the shape of the earth in my legs and lungs. As I traveled from Tennessee, through Kentucky to Indiana, comparing the Lincoln and Watkins families, per-haps I would understand these political and familial ances-tors—and myself—more fully. I also hoped that by this journey through Kentucky I could penetrate more deeply into my family’s religious heri-tage, the spiritual impact of Barton W. Stone and the events that had taken place two hundred years ago at the Cane Ridge Presbyterian Church a few miles east of Lexington, Kentucky. Like Thomas Lincoln and Benjamin Watkins, Bar-ton W. Stone was a wanderer—born in Maryland, educated in North Carolina, and ordained in Kentucky. He too became discontent with his life in Kentucky and in his later years moved north and west to Illinois. Perhaps the bicentennial celebrations at Cane Ridge would open up a better sense of who I have become.


Through the Saddle of the Gap into Boone’s Bloody Land

y bicycle journey began at the airport serving Knoxville, Tennessee. At a nearby motel, I unpacked and assem-

bled Co-Motion, and with the help of the woman at the front desk, found a box and tape to ship the soft case, in which the bicycle traveled, to journey’s end in Indianapolis. At breakfast the next morning, a hotel guest told me how to contact UPS to arrange for a pick-up. Then, revealing that she worked for UPS and was on her way to the Knoxville fa-cility, she offered to take my box (and credit card number) and ship it for me. On a warm morning, thick with the hu-midity that usually precedes a storm, I bicycled over pleas-ant rural roads to SR 33, the old Knoxville-Marysville Pike, which offered one of the few ways to cross the Tennessee River.

On the northern edge of downtown Knoxville, a man at the AAA office reported he recently crossed the Gap on the reconstructed trail, and at First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) across the street the custodian offered me coffee and a tour of the facility. As we talked, the rain that had been threatening earlier in the morning began to fall, quickly becoming a heavy downpour. After more coffee and a read-ing period in the church library, I decided that the rain was stopping so that I could safely continue my journey.

Before I could mount Co-Motion, a young woman dressed in cycling gear and riding a good road bike ap-proached. When I called out, hoping that she could help me decide on my route for the rest of the day, she invited me to follow her a couple of blocks to her home. We could study the maps more comfortably on her back porch. As we were finishing our conversation, her husband—also an aggressive

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cyclist—came home, fixed bagels with salmon spread, and invited me to join them for lunch. As I left, Erik told me that next time I should come in the evening and we could sit on the porch drinking beer.

By now, I had used up all morning and part of the after-noon but still had the greater part of the day’s ride to do. I took secondary streets through Knoxville, the Tazewell Pike through suburban communities beyond the city, and SR 33 through New Tazewell to the junction with US 25E. A quar-ter of a mile up the hill on 25, I found the motel that pro-vided my resting-place for the night.

By this time, I had learned that traveling through the Gap has changed significantly in recent years. Ever since the advent of automobiles, two highways had merged at the Virginia-Tennessee border, forming a slow, two-lane pas-sage through this historic pass. Recently, however, a new tunnel was drilled through the ridge and the highways re-routed to a high-speed, four-lane roadway. The old highway through the gap was dismantled and hauled away and the old wilderness trail is being restored. Now the only way to go through the Cumberland Gap is a hardpan and gravel trail, some two miles in length. Since I did not know how to find the trail or how long it would take to walk it, I wanted to allow enough time to enjoy this phase of my journey.

University for the Mountain Folk At the town of Harrogate, Tennessee, a few miles north

of Tazewell, I turned into the campus of Lincoln Memorial University, an assemblage of red brick buildings arranged pleasantly on acres of green grass. At the library, one of the staff took me to a small reading room that housed a collec-tion of books on Tennessee and the Appalachian region. She called my attention to a book entitled The Wilderness Road that had been written by Robert Kincaid, longtime president of the university.


After a couple of hours taking notes, photocopying, and talking with folks, I was ready to visit the Lincoln Museum near the main entrance to the campus. In the main lobby, I was surprised to see a large display case featuring memora-bilia of Civil War general Oliver Otis Howard (1830–1909) who from 1874 through 1880 had commanded the U.S. Army’s Department of the Columbia, with his headquarters at the Vancouver Barracks a few blocks from our home on the Washington side of the Columbia River. During the Civil War, Howard had demonstrated his courage (he lost his right arm in the Peninsular Campaign of 1862) and his abil-ity to handle large forces.

According to biographer John A. Carpenter, the war had also given Howard the opportunity to apply his intense per-sonal faith (cultivated by his membership in the Congrega-tional Church). Believing that as a soldier he was serving a righteous cause, he developed a “religious atmosphere around his headquarters and urged his soldiers to refrain from despoiling citizens in areas where they were fighting. Because of this record and reputation, President Lincoln nominated Howard to be commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. In this respon-sibility, which he assumed in 1865, Howard supervised much of the practical work of the social and economic re-construction of the South.

Despite determined opposition from President Andrew Johnson, the Ku Klux Klan, and people throughout the South, Howard developed a strong organization, and the program of the Bureau flourished. Much of the early funding came from the Congregational Church’s American Missionary Association. A major part of its program was to develop schools at all levels that could serve the needs of freed slaves; foremost among these institutions was a university in the nation’s capitol that was developed by a small group of Congregationalists. Because of Howard’s active leadership


in the venture, it was named for him, and he served as its president from 1869–1873.

Early in his career, Howard had become a popular lec-turer and writer, and following his retirement from the Army in 1894, he devoted even more attention to these activities. On a lecture tour in 1896, Howard was asked to visit the Cumberland Gap and contribute his energies to an effort to improve educational opportunities in that part of the coun-try. He remembered a conversation with President Lincoln in 1863 when, according to a brochure at the museum (which draws upon Kincaid’s extended report), Lincoln had asked Howard to go through the Cumberland Gap and seize Knox-ville. Speaking of the mountain people, the president had declared that they were loyal, and implored the general, “if you come out of this horror and misery alive,” to do some-thing for “those mountain people who have been shut out of the world all those years. . . . Perhaps we can do them the justice they deserve.” Thirty years earlier, my Watkins an-cestors who were living in Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have been among those isolated, loyal mountain peo-ple. Perhaps that “loyalty” was one of the reasons they had moved out of the South into a free state.

During the war years, the land which was to become the Lincoln University campus had been a plantation owned by a southern sympathizer. Later, it had been acquired by Alex-ander Alan Arthur, an entrepreneur who intended to gener-ate a business empire in the region around the Gap. He organized a company of workers to drill a railroad tunnel through Cumberland Mountain and established the towns of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, and Middlesboro, Kentucky. Hoping to develop a resort in the area, he built a hotel and sanitarium on the former plantation, but almost immediately this venture failed.

Meantime, A. A. Myers, a Congregational minister and missionary who had founded a school for mountain people, wanted to expand his work. Howard agreed to assist in the


project, proposing that the school be a memorial to the late president. In 1898, he became the managing director of Lin-coln Memorial University and during his remaining years as-sumed other titles, providing executive continuity as the institution developed. Because of Howard’s work over a thir-teen-year period, Carpenter says that “the college for the mountain folk is not only a memorial to Lincoln; it is also a living monument of the one-armed soldier.”

One of my visitors at the library had explained how to find the trail through the Gap, and following a quick tour of the Lincoln memorabilia in the library, I picked up the trail on the abandoned right of way of Arthur’s railroad. It was this trail that had brought me to the tearoom in Cumberland Gap. People in the restaurant told me how to get onto the Wilderness Road itself, but when I reached the edge of town, the signs confused me. A woman working in her yard, however, after claiming that she too was confused much of the time, resolved my distress, giving me a simple map that showed the trails through the Gap.

The Saddle of the Gap A quarter of a mile out of town, on former US 25E, I

came to a visitors’ center still under construction. In addition to attractive shelters, the center featured several clusters of larger than life-sized sculptured figures: a group of long rifle explorers, a pioneer family and its livestock, and a buffalo with calves. It was a good place to wait out the rain, which finally began to fall after threatening all day long. A few minutes later, however, the sun came out, and I pushed Co-Motion up a steep hillside where I finally set foot on the hard pan wagon trail that apparently is the actual Wilderness Road on which so many people had trudged to Kentucky. The surface was hard and the road itself was nearly level, which enticed me to mount my bicycle and pedal through this historic pass. Within fifty feet, however, I realized that


only a rider with good technical skills, mounted on a moun-tain bike, could ride this trail. I pushed Co-Motion the rest of the way.

Much of the time, the trail was in bright sunshine, but it also took me through wooded land, with small streams. Its frequent changes in elevation were gradual and short enough that I had no trouble pushing my bicycle, but gradu-ally I was going higher until I reached a point which the weather-beaten sign identified as the saddle of the gap. This was the notch, the lowest spot on Cumberland Mountain, the place where game, Native Americans, and so many pio-neers had passed. Leaning Co-Motion against the signpost, I climbed a few yards up the slope to the monument that the DAR had erected to honor Daniel Boone, the creator of the Wilderness Road. When I came back down, a man in over-alls, who had just walked up from the other end, was exam-ining Co-Motion. After we had taken each other’s picture, with the sign in the background, I continued on while he stayed behind to take more pictures.

In a few hundred yards at a fork in the trail, a sign identified the route to the right as the Object Lesson Road Trail and showed that it was shorter and more direct than the other. It was wide and well-graveled, clearly the route that the park service was recommending. The road to the left, however, was identified as the Wilderness Road, and since my goal was to trace my ancestors’ route, this was the fork that I took. Immediately, the texture changed. Al-though the wide hardpan was still the base, weeds and grass were growing through it. A few hundred yards down course, the trail entered a heavily wooded section and nar-rowed down to a single track of softer soil. At one point, I suspected that the original road may have plunged into the bottom of the ravine, but the trail I was following stayed higher, near the top of the bank.

Still deeper into the ravine, the trail forked again but without a sign to guide the traveler. The left branch was the


wider of the two and led up a short bank and then disap-peared. The other trail, considerably less impressive, swung to the right before passing out of view. I took the wider trail, but at the top of the bank concluded that it would take me no place that I wanted to go. Returning to the fork, I contin-ued forward on the thinner trail, comforted by the map be-cause it felt as though my route was twisting in conformity with the trail that the map portrayed.

For the first time on this trip, I became aware of one hazard of solo travel. Clearly, this part of the route had little traffic, and no one knew where I was. If I had fallen or taken ill, it would likely have been a couple of days before my disappearance would be recognized and a search under-taken. I could hear traffic, however, which gave me the as-surance that I would soon complete my trip through the Gap. A few minutes later, the trail broke out of the woods onto the parking lot for the Thomas Walker trail. As I sat cleaning the mud off of my shoes, my photographer friend, having taken the Object Lesson Road Trail, appeared. A few minutes later, I cycled down to US 25E, following it to Mid-dlesboro, Kentucky, where I found lodging for the night. Even though I had traveled only 21 miles, the day had been full and satisfying.

Hybrid Indians During the day, it had become clear that before I could

understand the Lincolns and Watkinses, I had to contend with Daniel Boone and his tribe. Roadside signs and exhibits at parks during the next two days provided minor bits of in-formation, but John Mack Faragher’s biography fleshed out the story. Boone was the foremost representative of a dis-tinctive type of American pioneer; they were hunters who were based in settlements along the border and spent long periods of time in the wilderness, hunting and trapping ani-mals, preserving the pelts in hope of profit. Faragher points


out that these “long rifles” were often thought of as “hybrid Indians.”

Because the hunters, and the colonists who followed them into the wilderness, were encroaching upon territories claimed by well-defined Indian nations, they constantly faced the danger of attack. The narratives contain many sto-ries of bloodshed, but the white-skinned people continued their drive into the lands beyond the mountains. The colonial governments that claimed a certain degree of sovereignty over the western lands also objected to the efforts of the hunters and woodsmen to Americanize the land across the Appalachians. The complexity of this struggle for western lands was compounded by the involvement of British forces that in alliance with Indians were seeking to maintain sover-eignty in western North America. Yet Boone, with other hunters and entrepreneurs, was determined to create American colonies in Kentucky. His first effort to take his family and others through the Gap be-gan on September 25, 1773, when he led a company that numbered between forty and fifty people from their settled homes in North Carolina. Because there was no road, they could not take wagons and had to travel by pack train, mov-ing through the deep forests in single file. Other small groups joined them and the line of march spread out over a considerable distance.

About two weeks into the journey, a band of Delaware Indians assaulted one of the night-time camps and during the battle tortured and killed four of the people, including James Boone, Daniel and Rebecca’s son. The murdered peo-ple were buried, in sheets that Rebecca took from her store of household goods, and the travelers, deciding that it was too dangerous to continue, drifted back to their homes. Early the next spring, Boone returned to the site of the mas-sacre and reburied the four young men. A heavy rainstorm enveloped him and he “felt worse than ever in his life.” After building a fire at his campsite, he could not sleep and think-


ing that he heard men coming through the forest, “he qui-etly saddled his horse and rode off into the night.” In March of 1775, a larger and more systematic attempt to create a permanent American colony in Kentucky was un-dertaken. Again, Boone was at the center of the effort, joined by Richard Henderson and others who were scheming to create a trading company and political colony in the re-gion they called Transylvania. Apparently they, like the Puri-tan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, intended to use the legal form of a trading company to create an inde-pendent political jurisdiction. Boone and a small group marked the trail, and a larger group of woodsmen followed, cutting down trees and vines, doing simple grading, and creating a trail that the main company could follow. As Boone’s men finished their work, at a site where the com-munity of Boonesborough would be established, a group of about eighty men began their journey along the new trail and, despite frequent hostile encounters with Indians, reached Boone’s camp. They began the construction of a stockade, but devoted much of their effort to making land claims, planting crops, and hunting food. Later in the year, Boone brought his family to the set-tlement, and shortly thereafter another group of forty to fifty settlers joined them. On July 14, 1776, one of Boone’s daughters and two other girls were abducted by a small group of Indians but on the third day Boone and a small force from the fort rescued them. Through the rest of the year and 1777, Indians with British support intensified their attacks on American settlements, increasing the difficulty of maintaining an adequate food supply.

In January 1778, Boone led a group of about thirty men into Indian country in the effort to manufacture salt for the settlers. They were captured by Indians who took some of them to the English fort at Detroit and enslaved others, in-cluding Boone. In June, Boone escaped and, outdistancing pursuers, reached Boonesborough safely. He was received


suspiciously because some of the reports of the capture had accused him of cowardice or treachery, and he found that his wife and family had returned to North Carolina. Before he could join them, however, the fort was assaulted and held in siege by a strong force of Shawnees. Although the siege was broken, Boonesborough was abandoned. Not until the fall of 1779 was Boone able to gather his family and a new party of settlers—some one hundred in number and one of the largest ever to cross the Cumberland Gap—in order to reestablish a community at Boonesborough. On the journey, they were joined by another party, including the Lincolns. For several more years, colonists lived in constant dan-ger from attacks by Indians, with death a continuing fact of life. From 1775 to 1782, Faragher declares, 860 Kentuckians lost their lives, the largest number in relation to the popula-tion of any place in the nation. This was “the bloodiest phase of the three-century campaign for the conquest of North America.” Surely, something more powerful than the “sense of adventure” was forcing large extended families to move into the wilderness in the face of such great danger.

Another explanation, that deepens Tarbell’s “discontent with economic conditions,” is proposed by W. D. Snively and Louanna Furbee in their fearsome story of murder at Ford’s Ferry, where many travelers crossed the Ohio River down river from the falls. They summarize the economic hardships that were experienced in many parts of the East following the War of 1812. Because England was flooding the Ameri-can market with cheap manufactured goods, American in-dustry and shipping were throttled. The nation was in depression, the U.S. government was nearly bankrupt, and a workable banking system had not yet been developed. Cold weather throughout the summer of 1817 caused wide-spread crop failure, bringing further distress. While the sense of adventure attracted a few people to make the jour-ney across the mountains, “mass migrations occurred only


when social pressures in the East were combined with a popular belief in a promised land to the west.”

On My Way to the Bluegrass After a night’s rest in Middlesboro, I was in a relaxed

frame of mind for the next phase of my trip even though it started to rain just as I was preparing to leave the motel. I had three days to travel the 150 miles that would take me along the Wilderness Road to Paris, Kentucky, which would be my base for the Cane Ridge celebrations. After the rain stopped, I cycled only a few miles to Barbourville where I briefly considered staying at an old motel—perhaps the most miserable I have ever seen—across the street from Union College. Instead, I checked into a modern establishment on the highway, reading and writing during a rainy afternoon.

Although the threat of rain continued the next day, I had to keep going. The highway passed through the Boone Na-tional Forest—little residential development and no sign of commercial activity. Most of the traffic was using I-75, which for most of one day was only a short distance to the west of my route on the old highway. Several times I stopped at historical markers that memorialized Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road. My one disappointment was that I did not see a marker noting Hazel Patch, which was the spot where the trail split, one part going to Boonesborough and the other to Harrodsburg. The only indication that I was near that point was the ugly, large Hazel Patch Baptist Church, high and lifted up in the general vicinity of Mt. Vernon, Kentucky.

A few miles south of London, I came to Camp Ground Methodist Church. The memorial plaque indicated that in 1876, when the present building was constructed, the site itself had already enjoyed a century’s use as a camping ground by “both Indians and whites.” Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury had “held worship” there on his way to the


first Methodist conference in Kentucky (according to the plaque, that stop was in 1790, but Kincaid indicates that it was in 1793).

If any ecclesiastical figure could be given as an exemplar for my self-contained travels by bicycle, it would be Asbury who traveled by horseback, carrying in his saddlebags all that he needed for months on the road. Kincaid reports that he traveled at least 275,000 miles (nearly double my life-time achievement by bicycle), crossing the Alleghenies sixty times. During dangerous times, he journeyed with a guard. Instead of the comfortable motels that I enjoy, however, Asbury had to be content with the hospitality of people along the way, often in crowded log cabins scarcely twelve by ten feet in size. Houses and beds were filthy, and he sometimes suffered from the itch. On the trail, Asbury met other travelers, some of them “men, women, and children, almost naked, paddling barefoot and barelegged along or labouring up the rocky hills, whilst those who are best off have only a horse for two or three children to ride at once.”

Many of the people who lived along the Trail were just as poor. Kincaid recounts that in December of 1796, shortly after the road had been improved—so that wagons with a load weighing a ton and pulled by four horses were sup-posed to be able to traverse it—a traveler named Moses Austin made the 90-mile journey from Cumberland Gap to Crab Orchard, Kentucky, in three days, on horseback. Austin counted eighteen families living along that stretch of the road, “all of whom appeared to be little removed from sav-ages in their manners or morals.”

After a brief stop at the Asbury site, grateful for my me-chanical steed and paved road, I continued northward. Be-cause of rain delays earlier in the morning, I decided not to add an extra loop in order to tour the plantation house of Cassius M. Clay who had been a prominent leader of the conservative antislavery forces in antebellum Kentucky. In-stead, I hurried through the busy town of Richmond in order


to follow the Wilderness Road to Boonesborough. At this point, I cycled along a county road with Otter Creek on my left and a low-lying ridge on my right. Trees on both sides, with branches often reaching nearly to the middle of the road, offered a sheltered passage.

Soon after my departure from Richmond, the precipita-tion that had dogged me all morning returned—at first a gentle mist but then a more determined rain. Hoping that it would soon dissipate, I pulled off the road at Marshall Me-morial Chapel, a small, trim church with a wide porch. For more than an hour I watched the rain as it fell in what seemed like increasing force. When I began to feel chilled, despite my windproof raincoat, I moved back onto the road. There was virtually no traffic, but in several places water streamed down the bank on my right, across the road, into the stream on my left. After fifteen minutes of not singing in the rain, I topped a gentle rise in the road and at that mo-ment, as I pedaled into Boonesborough, the rain stopped.

Rather than going to the actual site of Boone’s settle-ment on the Kentucky River, I cycled over a rise (on an “employees only” road) to the replica of his compound, a dozen or more log buildings surrounding a quadrangle, joined together by a stockade of sharply pointed logs. Al-though the staff was in period costume and accustomed to describing their crafts and the pioneers’ way of life, the rain had left them with no tourists and in a dispirited frame of mind. In the first building, the attendant turned on the heater while I watched the video describing the kidnapping of the little girls and the siege of the stockade that Boone had thwarted. At this point in the day, I had no more inter-est in hearing the attendants’ narratives than they did in telling them. After a quick tour, I mounted Co-Motion and took to the highway one more time.

After twenty-two miles of strong cycling over the rolling bluegrass hills, I came to Paris, the governmental seat of Bourbon County, Kentucky. The county, I discovered, was


given that name because early settlers had a strong fascina-tion with all things French. Later on, as these Kentucky farmers developed their whiskey-making skills, their brew took on the county’s name. The last twenty miles of the day’s ride were through country where all of the fields were dark green with short grass, surrounded by creosoted fences. Dwellings and farm buildings consistently conveyed the sense of prosperity. I saw virtually no sign of people working in the fields. Everything extended around me with a deep sense of peace. The vistas were made more interesting by the absence of the surveyor’s geometrical grid; roads meandered around the hills in soft curves and almost straight lines.

Except for the fact that it was the end of the day and I was tired, this portion of the trip would have been my best cycling of the week.

Barton W. Stone at the Cane Ridge Bicentennial


Find ing Pr ide in the Ancient Ones

y interest in the Cane Ridge Meeting House and Barton W. Stone, who was its pastor from 1798 until 1812, was

prompted by the fact that he was one of the founders of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which has been my spiritual home from early years. Although my mother was reared as a Lutheran in her Finnish community near Duluth, Minnesota, and my father’s religious background was in the Congregationalist and Methodist Churches, my earliest church experiences were in the Christian Church of St. John, Washington, which was within easy walking distance of the cottage in this eastern Washington town where my dad had grown up and our family lived when I was a young child. Our identification with this religious tradition was renewed when we moved to Portland, Oregon, shortly before my tenth birthday. I first heard about Stone and the Cane Ridge Church during my teen years. Stone was another American of that period who kept moving deeper into the continent. He was born to a com-fortably placed family in Maryland, but after his father’s death, his mother moved her family to western Virginia. When he was old enough to live on his own, Stone moved on, studying in well-regarded frontier academies and travel-ing through Tennessee and other sections of the Southeast. Although he probably entered Kentucky at a point west of the Cumberland region, he made his way to the Lexington area. Ordained by Presbyterians in that area, he was as-signed as pastor at two country churches, Cane Ridge and Concord.

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Cane Ridge Remembered According to Ellen Eslinger’s account of the early history

of Cane Ridge, Daniel Boone had named the area for the bamboo-like cane, which covered much of that portion of eastern Bourbon County. By 1790, threats from Native Americans had subsided and Boone recommended the area to a group of Scotch-Irish settlers from North Carolina who were looking for a place to locate. Leaders of the new com-munity were able to found a Presbyterian church and in 1791 erected a building from large logs of hewn blue ash. The first pastor, Robert W. Finley, left the church under sus-picion of drunkenness, and Stone became the congregation’s second regular pastor. Eslinger reports that the people of the Cane Ridge community favored a more democratic and responsive state government than the one that was operat-ing in Kentucky. Two people whom they supported with their votes for public office were also elders in the Cane Ridge Church.

The people in both the Cane Ridge and Concord churches were also opposed to slavery, even though agricul-ture in Bourbon County was well suited to slave labor. These churches agitated the Transylvania Presbytery, their govern-ing body, to discountenance slave holding among members of their churches, but with little success. Most white church-going Kentuckians, according to Harold D. Tallent, held con-servative antislavery views. They were persuaded that the best society was homogeneous and that when the races were mixed, as they were throughout the South, only a strong system of social control could maintain public order. Many believed that the master-slave relationship, like the husband-wife and father-child relationships, was part of the biblical program for providing order in society. Conserva-tives feared that if slaves were released suddenly and in great numbers, the impact upon society would be devastat-ing. Therefore, slavery could only be discontinued on a gradual basis.


Stone seems to have fitted the Cane Ridge pastoral set-ting quite well, partly because he too was conservative in his antislavery convictions. As did many other Kentuckians, he supported the idea of encouraging released slaves to return to Africa. Although Stone came from a slave-holding family and had inherited slaves, he was opposed to human slavery. After preparing his two slaves for liberty, he freed them and urged other people to follow his example. Yet slavery was the law of the land and on scriptural grounds Stone believed that Christians had to obey the law. Since he doubted that Christians should be involved in the political system, he could recommend only private action; people who followed his leadership were discouraged from using the political process to change the law. Stone resolved his dilemma by moving away from slavery in Kentucky to the free state of Illinois where his private conscience and the law of the land were compatible. Many other wanderers of that era, includ-ing the Lincolns and probably the Watkinses, moved north of the Ohio for similar reasons.

When it came to ecclesiastical relations, however, Stone had biblical warrant to challenge authority. Even at his ordi-nation, he had demonstrated theological independence, and soon he was in trouble with church authorities. After con-testing with the presbytery over doctrinal issues, Stone and five colleagues withdrew and created their own Springfield Presbytery. A few months later, on June 28, 1804, deciding that their reform needed to be even more radical, they pub-lished a short document entitled The Last Will and Testa-ment of the Springfield Presbytery in which they willed that “this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large.” Their document stressed a direct appeal to the Bible for all matters of faith and practice and the complete freedom of each congregation to govern its af-fairs according to the scriptures. The dissidents’ ideas appealed to others in the country-side spread between Lexington and Cincinnati, and over the


next few years several congregations changed their affilia-tion from Baptist or Presbyterian to Christian in the Stone model. In 1832, leaders of the Stone movement met with leaders of another Presbyterian reform movement inspired by Thomas Campbell and his son Alexander and pledged henceforth to work together as one people. From that time onward, the younger Campbell became the intellectual and spiritual leader of the movement. Stone, however, has been widely cited as the leader who represents most clearly the call for the uniting of churches divided from one another. For two days I participated in a series of events on the Ridge: scholarly lectures, recitals of period folk music, wor-ship “in the words of Barton W. Stone,” the introduction of a scholarly dictionary on the Stone-Campbell movement, field trips, and a long Sunday afternoon service of preaching and communion. During the times between events, I wandered around the grounds reading inscriptions on gravestones and talking with people who had come to the celebration, some of them for the same reason that I was there: to see how much of Stone’s heritage we still could claim. I am much like my Cane Ridge ancestor in my resistance to religious authority that would constrict my freedom to come to my own theological and ethical decisions. It would go against the grain to have to subscribe to theological ideas that violate my understandings of science and history. I no longer follow Stone, however, in his confidence that the Bi-ble contains definitive answers to theological questions; nor do I believe that by following the patterns of church life de-scribed in the Bible Christians who are divided from one an-other will come together as one body in Christ.

One of the people whom I met during the Cane Ridge celebrations was a woman about my same age who moved to the area many years ago when she had married into one of the old families. Although she later divorced her husband, she told me that she is forever grateful that he brought her to “this wonderful place.” As we drove over and around the


Ridge, searching in vain for the still-occupied house in which Stone and his family had lived, she pointed out farms still owned by descendants of those first Cane Ridge Christians. I began to understand the mystique of this beautiful country-side that Indians had fought so hard to keep from the white-skinned people who seized it from them.

On Saturday evening, I attended a festive dinner at First Christian Church in Paris, which for the past half century has provided much of the support that has kept the Cane Ridge Meeting House in good repair. The after dinner speaker, a university-based historian from a Kentucky family nine gen-erations deep, urged us to be proud of what the ancient ones had done. The people around me, many of them from old families, were happy to oblige. In Bourbon County, it is clear, dead ancestors are venerated and their final resting-places are enshrined. Perhaps that is why 80% of the people attending the Cane Ridge celebration, according to my cas-ual estimate, were 65 years of age and older. The bicenten-nial was rekindling a respect for tradition even though many of the people—like me—no longer find its ideas persuasive for their religious life.

High Culture in the Wilderness

On Saturday, I had decided to stay for the second day of the Cane Ridge celebration even though this would make it necessary to skip sites related to the Lincoln family: the Nancy Hanks home in Lexington, Abraham’s birthplace in Hodgenville, and the Indiana locations where he had lived during his youth. In times past, however, I have bicycled through Gentryville and Dale, Indiana, two villages he would have known, and with considerable effort I have pedaled up and down the steep hillsides in Spencer County and stopped at the Little Pigeon Baptist Church where Thomas Lincoln was a deacon and Abraham was janitor.


While I would not be revisiting these places, I continued reading about Lincoln’s early life in Tarbell’s biography and Louis A. Warren’s classic book, Lincoln’s Youth: Indiana Years, 1816–1830. These writers discuss reasons for the family’s move across the Ohio River, and two seem to have been most important. When the Lincolns had first come to Kentucky, it was not yet clear that slavery would become an established part of life, but by the time that Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks were married Kentucky had opted to be a slave state. The Lincolns did not own slaves and they were members of an antislavery Baptist Church. There was little that they could do to alter the political and economic sys-tem, and the probability is that they, like most other Ken-tuckians, agreed with the conservative antislavery position. By moving to Indiana, they could escape slavery while still living in a society that was essentially homogenous (since most people in Indiana were opposed to living in racially mixed communities even if the black people were free). The Lincolns also moved because they wanted to secure firm title to their land. Kentucky had a complicated history with respect to establishing legal ownership, and a large percentage of the people, including Daniel Boone’s family and the Lincoln family, found their land claims repeatedly overturned. Indiana, however, had been surveyed under new federal legislation and settlers could secure titles to land that could be relied upon.

Tarbell and Warren describe a social culture among pio-neer families that was much higher than I had previously imagined. When Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln moved to Indiana, exchanging a developed community for the raw edge of the frontier, they brought civilization with them and immediately began the task of replicating an orderly life in their new setting. According to Warren’s reconstruction of a normal process, the Lincolns would have lived in an open-sided shelter only the two or three weeks that it would have taken them to construct an enclosed and reasonably


weather-tight cabin for the family. They had access to only a few books, but these were well adapted to transmitting the high culture of American civilization, and although schooling was almost non-existent children were taught to read and write. A steady routine of reading aloud around the hearth, with all of the family participating, would have marked fam-ily life, and opportunities for tutoring supplemented the meager opportunities for more organized schooling.

Warren’s recounting of Thomas Lincoln’s business activi-ties and Abraham’s working experiences indicate that the normal processes of commerce and government were taking place despite the roughness of the physical circumstances. People moved with considerable ease from isolated farm-stead to life in towns and activities in larger trading commu-nities. When Abraham Lincoln, as a young adult, moved to New Salem, Illinois, he entered a society that, while housed in material simplicity, participated seriously in the political and economic issues of Illinois and the nation. As Lincoln’s venture into the law and politics became successful and he moved to Springfield, he transferred an established way of life into a setting that was materially more sophisticated than those in which he previously had lived.

After deciding that I would not travel through the Lincoln sites, I made plans to devote Monday to a long ride from Paris, on US 460 and then US 60, to Louisville where I would cross the Ohio on the old US 31 bridge. Then I could spend the final three days of my cycling trip on a more lei-surely romp through Indiana scenes pertinent to reflections upon my Watkins ancestry.

The first American Watkins in my family was a man named Abraham who emigrated from England toward the end of the 1700s. He lived in Virginia long enough to marry and sire two sons and then, following the example of many other Virginians, moved deeper into the continent. The fam-ily traveled in a southwesterly direction, along wagon trails between the steep, nearly impenetrable ridges of the Appa-


lachian Mountains. By century’s end, the family had settled in Claiborne County, Tennessee, in the shadow of Cumber-land Mountain. On April 6, 1797, another son was born whom they named Benjamin.

While the family was living in Tennessee, probably in 1826, Benjamin married Hannah Jones, who was four years his junior. Her father, Abram Jones, had been captured by Indians when he was eleven years old and lived among them until he was twenty-five. Before the young family re-sumed its northwestern migration, four children were born to Benjamin and Hannah: William (1827), my great, great grandfather Abraham (1830), and twins Anna and Rachel (1832). Following the birth of the twins, Benjamin and Han-nah decided that it was time to move onward.

Joining a stream of immigrants, they made their way through the Cumberland Gap, which by now had become a wide and well-traveled wagon road. Kentucky had estab-lished a tollgate at Cumberland Ford (near Pineville) and Virginia had placed one near the Gap itself. Despite the rug-ged nature of the route, which was now called the Wilder-ness Turnpike, it carried a heavy traffic of settlers going west and business people and commerce going both direc-tions. The initial rates, Kincaid reports, were 9 pence per person (with women and children under ten passing free), 9 pence for a horse, mule, or mare, and 6 shillings for a wagon with four wheels. Large herds of cattle and hogs were driven through the gap, with the hogs following the cattle to “gather their wastings.”

They would have kept to the main route until they reached Hazel Patch, near the modern town of Mt. Vernon, where the family had to choose. They might have angled to the west on the route that led directly to the falls of the Ohio, or they might have taken the route that I had fol-lowed, through Boonesborough to Lexington, and then westward through northern Kentucky to Louisville and the falls. Logan Esarey has identified several places where pio-


neers ferried across the Ohio, including Cincinnati and nearby Aurora, the Carrollton-Madison stretch, and Jeffersonville-New Albany near the falls. Since Benjamin and Hannah’s first location in Indiana was in the center of the state, they might have chosen Ash’s Ferry near Carrollton and taken a trail that in its modern form has become Indi-ana SR 7, a peaceful road I have cycled several times. If they had traveled toward the falls, taking a ferry in the Jef-ferson-New Albany area, they would have traveled north on the Traders’ Trace, which on modern maps is US 31, from Louisville to Indianapolis.

Although they didn’t face danger from Indians, they did risk robbery and murder at the hands of desperadoes. The most notorious, the Harp brothers, had been killed in 1799 and the systematic robberies and murders at the Ford Ferry had been closed down by 1833, but other vicious men and women preyed upon travelers on the trails, at ferries, and as they moved along the waterways.

Whichever route the family traveled, they would have passed through small cities that had, in addition to many log houses, fine brick and stone buildings, some of them already more than forty years old. My long day took me through Frankfort where one of the most impressive old residences was a two story red brick house that had been built in 1800 on land once owned by Aaron Burr. If my family had been traveling through in May of 1837, they might have glimpsed Daniel Webster and his family as they visited John J. Crit-tenden who lived in the house from 1819 until 1863.

After cycling through Frankfort’s historic residential dis-trict, I decided that it was time to find real coffee. Even when brewed with half of the recommended amount of wa-ter, the motel “coffee in the room” that I had been drinking for ten days was a poor imitation of my own coffee at home and the strong brew at the Heritage Place Starbucks. On a street facing the railroad tracks in downtown Frankfort, I


found a coffee bar and a wonderfully inviting bookstore of which it was a part.

The woman staffing the bookstore spoke with accented speech that revealed her German upbringing. With amaze-ment, she asked about my journey, as though she could not believe that I was doing it by bicycle. She told me that the store, which sold used and new books, was owned by a pro-fessor at Kentucky State University, which I had passed on my way into the city. She showed me several shelves with books on Kentucky and adjoining states and then left me to enjoy coffee and my search for books that might be useful in my efforts to understand the travels of my forebears. The most interesting that I came across, most of them published by the University Press of Kentucky, were of a recent enough date that I hoped to be able to find them through a library back home. My load was already heavy enough and I had no desire to add more weight and bulk to my pack. Reluctantly, I left the store to continue my journey to the west. Although there was no shoulder on the old federal high-way, most of the route took me through peaceful country-side with little residential buildup and incidental traffic. In contrast with the manicured appearance of fields and berms in the region around Lexington, this portion of the route passed some farms that were as meticulously tended as any in the wealthy region farther east, but others that were scraggly looking places. As I neared Louisville, everything changed. The highway widened to four lanes with shoulders and the traffic load increased significantly. My travels through quiet rural areas, at least for a while, were finished.

In mid-afternoon, I cycled steadily on the grit-laden bike lanes, with heavy arterial traffic as US 60 made its approach to Louisville. A suburban Starbucks gave me the chance to buy my first New York Times since beginning the trip, but by now it was late enough in the afternoon that I couldn’t take time to enjoy their coffee, even though the barista assured me that there is always time for coffee. Near downtown,


where most of the traffic veered to the left, I cycled into an old, regentrifying neighborhood, the first Louisville neigh-borhood that I could imagine living in with pleasure.

Crossing the Ohio My route took me under a freeway to the River Road,

which I followed into downtown, past fancy high-rise con-dominiums (also inviting places to live), and under the old bridge that would be my route across the Ohio.

Pioneers, of course, had to cross the river in a more primitive way. Smaller streams could be forded, although the process was often dangerous. On large rivers like the Ohio, however, most travelers used ferries. The boats com-monly used, Logan Esarey reports, were poplar skiffs, some twenty feet long, propelled by one oarsman. When a family appeared, the people were taken across first and then the wagon was taken apart and carried over. Livestock had to swim, tethered to the stern of the boat. Warren reports that charges were fixed by law: $1.00 for horse and wagon, 25 cents for a man and horse; 12 ½ cents for foot passengers, and no charge for children under ten. Charges for Benjamin and Hannah, their four young children, and a wagon might have been $2.00. If they had other stock, oxen to pull a wagon and milk cows, they might have been additional charges to get them across the river.

There is no record of how Benjamin and Hannah fi-nanced their move. Did they have cash from selling out in Tennessee? Did they carry food with them from stock pre-served before they moved? Did they camp at designated places along the route? Or stay in inns or roadhouses? Did they stop along the way for a season or two? Did they travel with others from their community in Tennessee who also were looking for a new home?

The family worked its way north to Johnson County, In-diana, south of Indianapolis, where Benjamin and Hannah


stayed for a time. During that time their son Isaac was born, and two years later the family continued another sixty miles west and a little south to Greene County in the hills west of Bloomington. Their migration ended as they took possession of land in Beech Creek Township, in the northeast corner of the county.

During the half-century that I have known Indiana, the hill country where they established their home has been an isolated part of the state, but in the 1830s this would not have been the case. Already, plans were underway for rail-roads and canals that would connect major sites along the Ohio and Wabash Rivers with potentially important places in the middle of the state. Their entire journey from the Ohio to Johnson County and on to Greene County took them through country that even then was on one or another of the transportation arteries that were developing. When the Watkins family made their journey, however, travel still was on exceedingly primitive roads. In his history of Indiana, James H. Madison quotes Bayard Rush Hale’s description of a road from the Ohio River to Bloomington: “the most ill-looking, dark-coloured morasses, enlivened by streams of purer mud crossing at right angles.”

In the 1840 federal census, Benjamin was 43, Hannah 39, and the seven children ranged in age from 17 to 1. Abraham was 10. On January 17, 1850, he married Eliza-beth E. Crockett from a neighboring family, and the young couple took possession of a farmstead a mile south of their childhood homes. They gave birth to ten children, beginning with Hannah born in July of 1851 and ending with Cora born in June of 1874. The eighth was Marshall Bullock Watkins, my grandfather, who was born on August 4, 1870.

By the primitive trails available to these families, the county seat in Bloomfield was ten or twelve miles distant. Much of the land was hilly, with steep slopes, and heavily forested with grandly proportioned deciduous trees. Hugh Gaston, the first settler in the township, had settled his fam-


ily there in 1822. His son-in-law was John Bullock and half a century later the Bullocks and Watkinses were close enough that Abraham and Elizabeth named one of their sons for a friend from the other family. In 1834, Moses Ooley, a miller from Greene County, Kentucky, bought land and built a mill on Richland Creek, a mile or so, south of my great grand-parents’ farm.

In contrast to communities such as Spring Mill, Indiana, the village that developed near Ooley’s mill was a couple of miles distant, on higher ground. It was surveyed in 1859 and named Newark (pronounced with accent on the first syl-lable) after the town in Ohio. The village became a trading post and a center of logging activity. In 1879, with more than 100 residents, Newark’s commercial and public enter-prises included pork packing, milling, three grocery and dry goods stores, an I.O.O.F. lodge, two churches, a school, a doctor, and daily mail service. The Newark post office was open in 1866 and continued in operation until 1910.

Since Greene County had been organized in 1821, the rudiments of the American political and commercial system had already been in place for two decades when the Watkins migration took place. Troubles with Indians had been van-quished in this part of the territory, which meant that the settlers could focus their entire energy upon creating homes in the wilderness. It can be presumed that like the Lincolns a generation earlier the Greene County settlers built tempo-rary shelters and then more substantial log houses. They cleared fields by girdling the large deciduous trees that for-ested the hills and meadows: sugar maple, beech, tulip pop-lar, sycamore, oak, and hickory. They planted crops: vegetables for the table and corn for animals and humans alike. Their diet was heavy with meat, much of it game hunted in the forests around their little farm. They gathered greens, berries, and nuts from the abundant supplies in the woods around them.


From various accounts of rural life in the mid eighteen hundreds, we can develop a portrait of the way of life that the Watkinses and other families created in the settlements of Greene County. On one extreme, is the description that Edward Eggleston offers in The Hoosier Schoolmaster, a ro-mantic tale set on the Indiana banks of the Ohio River in the 1850s. In his story, a one-room school, with intermittent in-struction, formed the center for a dispersed neighborhood of farmers and artisans. Families lived in primitive shelters, depending upon hunting and subsistence farming for their livelihood. Literacy was neither wide-spread nor highly val-ued, and relations between people, both within family units and between neighbors, were crude and stripped bare of de-cency. Graft and intimidation were stronger forces than law-ful behavior and civility. The meager religion offered by Baptist and Campbellite preachers used hellfire to frighten people into true religion and decent living.

Yet, not far away a town represented civility, education, and lawful conduct; by moving to town, bathing on a regular schedule, dressing in city clothes, and joining the Methodist Church (Eggleston had been a Methodist preacher), people from the country could become teachers, honest county offi-cials, and good citizens.

Louis A. Warren’s characterization of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood in another southern Indiana setting gives a gentler and more positive picture of life down on the farm. Perhaps the greatest difference is Warren’s assumption that the peo-ple who moved to the Little Pigeon community were the same kind of people who lived in the settled towns of Ken-tucky and Indiana—people with some degree of education, respect for law, sense of decency and order, and determina-tion to maintain love in the family and civility with neigh-bors. Whereas for Eggleston, primitive material surround-ings were a sign of a mean culture among the people who lived there, for Warren the same environment was only a


temporary challenge as people continued a cultural life that was similar to the one that had been left behind.

Recollections of Beech Creek pioneers published by the Greene County Historical Society (but with little documenta-tion), indicate that they were more like the people Warren describes than those in Eggleston’s novel. “They had a high regard for religious interest,” one essay declares, “and held Christianity as the great civilizing power, without a recogni-tion of which the country would not be fit to live in.” As they moved to their new homes, they established churches simi-lar to those they had left behind. Since Indiana did not cre-ate an effective system of public education until after the Civil War, the first generation of settlers had to develop schools on their own. The Greene County writer describes the log school houses that people built and noted that “it was not unusual for boys to travel three or four miles through dense woods to school, blazing their way the first time going over the route.” The girls, we can suppose, also attended these schools. During the 1840s and 1850s, how-ever, more than 15 percent of white adults in Indiana were illiterate, a higher rate than in any other northern state. At the same time, the northeastern states reported illiteracy of less than 5 percent.

Warren states that within a year of his arrival in Indiana, Thomas Lincoln had undisputed title to his land, in a state that prohibited slavery. His family was decently housed, and its food supply was assured. The Lincolns had neighbors enough and lived within a structure of civility and well being. The children, says Warren, “shared in the hard work of life in the wilderness,” but “in that very wilderness they found excitement and beauty far beyond any they had imagined. It was virtually a boy’s paradise.”

Another positive view of pioneer life is given by Logan Esarey, who was born on a farm just north of the Ohio in 1873, only three years after my grandfather was born on another Indiana farm about a hundred miles to the north-


west. Esarey earned a Ph.D. in history at Indiana University and taught history at that school for nearly forty years. In a slender book published after his death with the title The In-diana Home, Esarey describes the kind of people who came to Indiana: immigrants from many parts of western Europe, college graduates from any of the eastern states, sons from aristocratic families, and people who had been traveling from one place to another looking for a better life.

With considerable energy, Esarey denies the accusation that he found in the accounts written by eastern historians, that these settlers in Indiana were “poor white trash.” Ac-knowledging that they were poor, Esarey insists that they were no poorer than the people who had settled the other states. Like Warren, he describes a way of life that required hard work but which was marked by plentiful food and a surprisingly rich pattern of social interaction. Unlike Warren, however, Esarey objects to the romanticism of Hoosier rural life, claiming that such a point of view was possible only to those “who have never suffered the strain of trying to win a family living” from one of those farms.

Cemetery in Newark, Indiana


And Melancholy Marked Him for Her Own

ecause I had allowed only three days to complete my trip, I had to take a direct route to Greene County

rather than the one my family took: a diagonal course through the southern Indiana towns of Salem, Mitchell, Bed-ford, and Bloomfield. Early in the day, approaching a town once called Providence but now Borden, I read a sign with its slogan: “A little town with a big future.” Down the road, I came upon Borden’s Community Church, a pleasant modern building standing by itself in a well-shaded grassy area, and some distance further, the town’s new post office, also oc-cupying its own site far removed from anything else. Too bad, I thought, that these important institutions have aban-doned their town.

Just beyond a factory of the Kimball Company of Jasper, Indiana, I came to the old town, stretched out to dry be-tween the highway and the tracks. At one crossroads an old woman was scavenging in a dumpster parked near a store building that looked abandoned. Some buildings looked as though they had been empty for years and others as though they could scarcely sustain life. A few residences gave the appearance that their occupants were maintaining a fairly high standard of living.

North of town, the highway ran along the base of a wooded ridge. For some distance—perhaps a mile or two—trees were broken up, with the upper portions still dangling from the lower parts. Some of the houses along the road showed serious damage. A man working in his yard con-firmed my suspicion. “We had a tornado go through on Mothers’ Day evening. I lost my roof, but no one was hurt.”

B


“The community would have been better served,” I com-mented, “if the trees had been left alone and the old buildings in town been hit.” He agreed. The Kimball plant, he told me, made office furniture, and he had worked there for more than thirty years.

Cycling toward Salem, the seat of Washington County, I passed a large, well-tended field on a high bank, with a long line of new automobiles, trucks, and SUVs lining the high-way. Set back in the field was a long low building, and the signs identified it as the administrative center of a General Motors agency. Closer into the center of town, I passed a retail sales pavilion operated by the same company, and li-cense brackets on cars and trucks indicated that it had loca-tions in other southern Indiana communities. Apparently, zeal, persistence, and business acumen could still contribute to business success, even in places far from the city.

Years ago, I led adult bicycle tours that used Salem’s First Christian Church as an overnight site, and for old time’s sake I stopped. The pastor was on vacation, but three or four women were gathered in the church office, one of them reading the Disciples Yearbook to check on the affiliation of a Christian Church in Kentucky where a family member was soon to be married. Another of the group identified herself as the director of congregational ministries. While we were still living in Indiana, she had been moderator of the Chris-tian Church in Indiana and was well acquainted with my wife. When I asked about a place to eat lunch, she offered me a hamburger and baked beans, left over from a fund raising dinner the youth group had served the previous Sunday.

When lunch was finished, I followed the group’s recom-mendation and cycled down the alley to the John Hay Cen-ter, a genealogical library and historical park named for a Salem native who had been one of Abraham Lincoln’s close associates and later a prominent national figure. I was sur-prised to see a pleasantly designed, single story brick build-


ing (with basement). Not only were the grounds beautifully maintained, but the interior was immaculate. Three or four people were handling files or working at computers. When I told them of my interest in Greene County, one of the men showed me a shelf with histories and genealogies related to that county. Not knowing what I might find in Greene County’s library and museum in Bloomfield, I decided to use the materials before me. There was plenty of time to make it to Bedford, my destination for the night.

After finishing my review of the books, I wandered through the museum itself. A man wearing jeans and a baseball cap joined me, pointing out several exhibits, includ-ing a group of highly polished brass artillery shells. When they had arrived at the museum, he had spent half a day polishing them so that they would look good. I realized that he was a member of the staff, largely self-taught but zeal-ous for his work, and one reason why this museum was such an appealing place.

The next day, my route took me into an increasingly hilly country, much of which seemed far removed from the press of urban life and traffic. Halfway between Bedford and Bloomfield, I was surprised by the expensive new residences along the highway near the villages of Hobbieville and Cin-cinnati. Studying my map, I concluded that residents proba-bly made their money in Bloomington, half an hour’s drive in one direction, or Crane Naval Depot only a few miles the other way.

The County with a Heart in its Center By the time I reached Bloomfield, most signs of prosper-

ity and tranquility disappeared. Heavy trucks pushed through Courthouse Square in both directions, but the build-ings around the square were battered, with only half a dozen people walking along. The courthouse itself was com-promised in appearance, its backside seemingly held in


place by scaffolding. When construction to expand the build-ing had started, someone told me, it was discovered that the foundation was built on sandy soil, and the building be-gan to slide. Now the challenge was to stabilize the building before any more work on expansion could take place.

Having seen the dilapidated Courthouse Square, I won-dered what I would find at First Christian Church where my friend Verl Underwood, and his wife Joan, had begun his ministry in 1953. What I found, a block or two west on Spring Street, was a traditional building glowing with signs of health and, to my surprise because so many southern In-diana Christian Churches have become independent congre-gations, the Disciples’ chalice logo boldly displayed on the church’s well-painted sign. During Verl’s five years as pas-tor—at a time when Bloomfield was a thriving community, with all of the business around the courthouse in good con-dition—the congregation grew.

Under his guidance, the congregation adopted a new constitution and by-laws, including as was customary at the time a declaration that the congregation was related to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Forty years later, the congregation was debating whether it should be considered a part of the Disciples of Christ in Indiana or a part of the independent fellowship of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ. Someone came up with the nearly forgotten con-stitution, which had never been revised, and that old docu-ment helped to determine the congregational vote.

An even more striking contrast to the dismal state of the courthouse was the Bloomfield Eastern Greene County Li-brary a block south of the courthouse. I tethered Co-Motion to a railing around the corner from the high staircase lead-ing to the front doors of a red brick Carnegie building. Ex-tending beyond the historic structure was a much larger building of brick and glass, all of it appearing to be in vi-brantly good repair. That same sense continued inside the building where everything was immaculate. The old building


and the new opened into each other in an appealing way. One of the staff took me to the genealogy section where Greene County materials were shelved and later introduced me to the library’s director who explained how the new facil-ity had come to be. She had used a funding mechanism that Indiana law no longer allowed. Technically, a non-public en-tity owned the new construction and the library leased the space. Consequently, the bond issue for the project could not have been stopped by petition. Voters had to take their objections to a public hearing after which a committee evaluated the project and approved it.

Her comments implied that because of their anti-tax mentality, voters would have scuttled the project, but in-stead, this moldering community now has one public institu-tion that shimmers with high quality and even higher possibilities of public service. After meeting the director, I thought it only right that the women’s literary group to which Joan Underwood had belonged half a century earlier had met at the Carnegie library and called itself the Argo-nauts. My positive impression of the library might have been influenced by a stack of four-color book marks advertising a series of book discussions, sponsored by the library, around the county featuring Lance Armstrong’s book It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life.

At the director’s suggestion, I stopped at the courthouse to buy a four-color map of Greene County before continuing my journey into the hills. Prepared for emergency-911 use, the map shows all roads, both public and private, but alerted users that “not all roads shown…are maintained by the County of Greene.” An extended historical note on the Greene County Orginization [sic.], which took place in 1821, states that the first board of commissioners created five townships and arranged for justices of the peace to be elected in each one. In later meetings, they appointed in-spectors of elections, overseers of the poor, constables, lis-ters of property for tax purposes, and supervisors of roads


for each township. At their first meeting, the commissioners adopted a seal for the county: “a heart in the center, sur-rounded with an olive branch. Thus, Greene County started out with an emblem of peace and safety stamped upon her official papers.”

The rational order of the surveyors’ guild is evident in the rectangular shape of the county and townships, and in the layout of a few roads that adhere to the geometrical grid, which exhibit the rational and orderly system for laying out land that had been established by the Ordinance of 1785. This system made possible the numbering system that is the primary basis for identifying roads throughout the county. It presumes that the county is laid out in a grid of north-south and east-west roads, at mile intervals from the center of the county seat town. Thus Newark, the village of my Watkins ancestors, is located at the intersection of County Road 735E, which is a north-south road 7.35 miles east of the center of Bloomfield, and County Road 735N, which is an east-west road the same distance north of Bloomfield’s center point. In the northern half of Indiana, anyone knowing these coordinates could find the location with little difficulty even though many of the roads are not continuous.

In Greene County, however, this system conflicts with the terrain itself—the maze of hills and hollows, laced with creeks and wet places and rivers, joined together by roads that started out as game trails and wagon roads winding around the hills rather than running over the top. In such a world as this, the shortest way was not the fastest or best way home. I had come to Bloomfield on SR 54, which like other state highways in Greene County followed the buffalo rather than the surveyor.

Even with the map, I struggled to find my way to New-ark; the real road twisted and turned even more than the map revealed and I sometimes reached intersections where it was difficult to decide which way to go. Had I followed my


instinct at one of those points, instead of trusting the county’s signs, I would have wandered toward the south into a maze of roads where one could be lost forever. A little further, I came to a tiny general store tucked into an alcove on the side of the road. The young man plopped down in a reclining chair behind the counter told me that he worked in Bloomington, eighteen miles away, and that he and his wife moved out here because they wanted a home in the coun-try. He explained that Newark was not far away and de-scribed the short and relatively easy route through McVille to Bloomington that I could take after finishing my business in Newark.

At the next intersection, however, only a few turns fur-ther down the road, I was as confused as ever. A rustic looking man in an old pickup told me that Newark was three miles off that way, and he pointed back the way I had come—instructions which I knew were wrong. Before he could pull away, I called out to a young woman driving up in a late model convertible with a dog on the seat beside her. To my question, “Which way is Newark?” she responded by pointing to the road that went to the right, which my study of the map had already convinced me was the way to go. “I’m taking my dog for a ride,” she said, and turned down the hill toward Newark.

“I don’t know this country very well,” the man in the pickup confessed as she disappeared from our sight. Nod-ding in agreement, I followed the convertible down the hill into the woods.

Only later did I discover that I had been close to the land that Abraham Watkins’s older brother William had cho-sen when he went to farming on his own, and to the site of Watkins Spring, which had been the source of drinking wa-ter for people in Newark until 1992 when Eastern Heights Utilities ran a water main through the village, after which public access to the spring was closed.


Graves in the Country Church Yard On my previous trips to Newark, beginning in the 1960s

when my father’s cousin Shirley Baker Waltz had taken us there, I had always come from the other direction. Driving from Indianapolis, I had turned west at Bloomington and traveled to the village of Solsberry, several miles southeast of Newark. Coming from that direction, the church and cemetery were the first evidence of the village, but on up the road there were remnants of the town that my grandfa-ther had known, including a two-story building that once housed a general store. Coming to the village from the other direction, and twenty years later, I saw nothing that looked familiar, but a small sign identified a deeply shaded stretch of road with a few dwelling places as Newark. Not until I reached the church and cemetery did I recognize my sur-roundings.

As I walked around the cemetery, looking for Abraham’s grave, a man came up to talk. He confirmed my impression that while the village is reverting back to nature, the ceme-tery continues to grow at a lively pace. In recent years, the grounds have been enlarged; several burials have taken place, and others are expected soon. In fact, he and several other people had come to the cemetery that afternoon to measure off new grave sites in a far corner of the cemetery. “Some people think the church owns the cemetery,” he told me, “but that’s not true. It’s a community burial ground.”

After revisiting graves that I remembered from my ear-

lier visits, I sat in the shade of a tree between the church and the oldest part of the cemetery, eating a little lunch. Why has this place been so interesting to me and others of my family in the west, I wondered. None of us had lived here nor had we known anything about this place and these people until 1963 when I had rediscovered the Indiana roots of the Watkins family. Over the years I have taken my chil-dren there, watching them scamper around the gravestones,


finding Watkins after Watkins. I have taken my mother and my brothers and sisters there, and my genealogically in-clined cousin. Each of us has found here some connection with the people from whom we have come—people who be-cause of our grandfather’s early and suspicious death had been completely unknown to us.

Throughout the years, we had always known about our mother’s family, the immigrant Finns who farmed in Minne-sota and ran a notorious saloon in Portland, but we had known virtually nothing about our father’s heritage. Newark is the place where the Watkins family we have known is re-united with the Watkins family that had had been forgotten.

Now that we know something about our Watkins origins, what have we learned? That our father’s family was like hundreds of thousands of other Americans who traveled through the upland south across Kentucky and the Ohio River into the Northwest Territory. That they were yeoman farmers, determined to find a place where they could have clear land titles and didn’t have to deal with slavery. That for the most part, they lived decent lives but were so ordi-nary that none of them made it into the biographical entries in published histories of Greene County. That some of them were churchgoers, and at least one of them might even have belonged to the Christian Church.

From various papers, ledgers, and diaries that have come into our western family’s possession, we can discern the pattern of great grandfather Abraham’s business affairs. In addition to receipts related to his farming enterprise, the records describe timber sales, information about loans to family members and neighbors, insurance papers, and wills. Frequently Abraham traveled to the county seat in Bloomfield and to a larger town of Spencer to conduct busi-ness and socialize with acquaintances over beer. The im-pression given by these records is that he was engaged in a wide range of business ventures and maintained effective


personal connections that extended far beyond the secluded farms where he lived his entire life.

Knowing this about the Watkins family in Indiana, how-ever, tells us little about our grandfather Marshall Bullock Watkins who left his birthplace as a young man, settled for a while with a brother in South Dakota, completing Normal School while there, and then moved on to Spokane where he taught school, went into politics, and married a young German woman from a village much like Newark. After sir-ing three children, he separated from his family and disap-peared—dying a few months later from shock following a gunshot wound to his leg, we have discovered only recently.

Who was this man, our grandfather Marshall Bullock Watkins? Other than what we could see in the large portrait our father had inherited, which showed him to be a hand-some young man, everything about him had been sup-pressed—deliberately forgotten—by those who had known him. Was he pushed from home because the cheap land was already taken and business was depressed? Was he “the westering type,” to use a term that John Mack Faragher ap-plies to some of the Boones? Was he the one in his genera-tion who was drawn west by the sense of mystery and adventure, as Ida Tarbell identifies in each generation of the Lincolns? Or was he the member of the family with weak character who squandered his life in reckless actions?

In the few years that he lived with his children, did he convey character traits or cultural values from his own up-bringing in the hills of Greene County? Or did he leave them only his genetics of intelligence?

Although I was sitting in this country churchyard in mid

afternoon rather than at twilight, I felt some of the same melancholy that Thomas Gray portrays in his “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.” I too sat in a world quiet enough that I could have heard a beetle wheeling “his droning flight,” and the Newark cemetery was a place where the


“rude Forefathers of the hamlet” were sleeping, “Each in his narrow cell for ever laid.”

Here the emotional tone of this entire trip came into its fullest form—my feelings at Cumberland Gap, along the Wil-derness Trail, at Cane Ridge, and now in Greene County. Few of the forefathers and mothers whom I have been re-membering while cycling through this country achieved re-nown enough to be remembered through the generations; most of them, including Benjamin and Hannah Watkins and the family they procreated, lived out their lives in obscure places, without acclaim or notoriety. Yet each of these peo-ple experienced the common ventures of human life, some more than others, and then brought their time on earth to a close.

Gray’s poem gives little attention to the terror of life or to the hope that its unfulfilled possibilities will be realized in a heavenly afterlife. His frame of reference is the hamlet where we work and rest, love and find love, and then come to the church-yard one last time. He closes his reflection with the epitaph engraved upon another stone, soon to be settled into place at a fresh grave.

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (‘twas all he wish’d) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode (There they alike in trembling hope repose), The bosom of his Father and his God.


Reflecting upon Gray’s Elegy, Sandro Jung says that the monuments in graveyards “in themselves do not hold the energy to remember the deceased; rather, the deceased have to be remembered by those still alive, by those who cared for them.” For Gray, “the dead are in need of ‘some fond breast’ that may keep their memory alive.” Yet the generations come and go, and who then remembers? Gray’s answer is that as each of us “rests his head upon the lap of Earth” he reposes on “The bosom of his Father and his God.” God remembers.

During my final day of cycling, traveling over familiar roads to Indianapolis where I would visit friends and family, I pondered my own demise and whether my remains should be deposited in a place where they can be a memorial to my life for generations still to come. I wondered if my children and grandchildren will be interested in cemeteries? Will they search out shrines like Cane Ridge, old family sites like Newark, and the Watkins-Sassenhagen burial grounds in the Palouse Country of Eastern Washington? Will they feel any need to visit the Hiukka graves in Esko, Minnesota, and places around Portland where more recent generations of Watkinses and Catons now find their narrow cells?

And if they come to these places where the memory of human lives is made geographical, will the memories en-courage them to live their lives as did those who went be-fore—in quiet, steady, useful ways, at peace with the world around them, with one another, and with God?


Bibliography Bauer, Don, and Norma Watkins Bauer. “Watkins Genealogy”

(Newberg, OR, 1997). Carpenter, John A. Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard. Introduction by Paul A. Cimbala (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999). Eggleston, Edward. The Hoosier School-Master: A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1899; first published in 1871). Eslinger, Ellen. “Some Notes on The History of Cane Ridge Prior to The Great Revival,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 91/1 (Winter 1993), 1–23. Esarey, Logan. The Indiana Home (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1953). Faraher, John Mack, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992). Green, Fess. Wilder-ness Road Odyssey: A Cyclist’s Journey Through Present and Past (Blacksburg, VA: Pocahontas, Press, 2003). Henderson, Denise. “General O. O. Howard’s Fight for Education of the Freedmen.” http://members.tripod.com/ ~americanalmanac/oo-howard.htm. “History of Beech Creek Township,” Collected by Greene County Historical Society, Bloomfield, Indiana, 2002. “Howard, Oliver Otis.” http://www.infoplease.com/ce6people/ AO82423.htm1 Jung, Sandro. “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.” www.litencyc.com’php/sworks.php? rec+true&UID+5392. Kincaid, Robert L. The Wilderness Road (Middlesboro, KY, 1973; first published in 1947 by Bobbs-Merrill). Madison, James H. The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: In-diana University Press, 1986). Manning, Russ. The Historic Cum-berland Plateau: An Explorer’s Guide (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993). Rumsey, David, and Edith Pratt, editors. Cartographica extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed (Redlands, CA: ESRI, 2004). Snively, Jr., W. D., and Louanna Fur-bee. Satan’s Ferryman: A True Tale of the Old Frontier (Frederick Ungar, 1968). Tallant, Harold D. Evil Necessity: Slavery and Politi-cal Culture in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003). Tarbell, Ida M. Abraham Lincoln and His Ancestors (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997; first pub-lished as In the Footsteps of Lincoln, 1924). Warren, Louis A. Lin-coln’s Youth: Indiana Years, 1816–1830 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1991; first published 1959). Williams, D. New-ell. Barton Stone: A Spiritual Biography (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000).

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