0:07 [SPEAKER_01]: I remember the first time I tried to visit the French family grave, just outside of Wabash Indiana. 0:13 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a Sunday, in the middle of winter. 0:16 [SPEAKER_01]: One day before the mini-blizzard that closed county schools, and buried every car on Market Street up to its store handles. 0:24 [SPEAKER_01]: I had just moved to town, and I was feeling the things you feel when you moved someplace new. 0:28 [SPEAKER_01]: I was wondering if the people were nice, and I thought of the friends I hope to make. 0:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And I hope that wall bash was a good place to call home. 0:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Because it was a weekend, I spent the day alone in my new studio downtown. 0:43 [SPEAKER_01]: I thought of the French family who had moved here like I had, 168 years earlier. 0:50 [SPEAKER_01]: They were new in town when they arrived on a wagon in the spring of 1854. 0:54 [SPEAKER_01]: And I realized they must have felt some of what I had. 0:59 [SPEAKER_01]: They must have set here alone, at least in the beginning. 1:02 [SPEAKER_01]: And wondered what life in Wavash would be like, they must have been uncertain and hopeful. 1:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Six months later, they were all dead. 1:13 [SPEAKER_01]: Their heads were smashed, worn by one. 1:16 [SPEAKER_01]: From the youngest infant, 18 months old, to the parents, Aaron and Sarah. 1:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Wavash was a canal town at the time, and what is known as a floating or transient population. 1:28 [SPEAKER_01]: people came and went, according to whatever work was available, and it was not unusual for our family to arrive one week and disappear the next. 1:37 [SPEAKER_01]: So when the French is quietly disappeared on the 9th October 7th, 1854, it was not as alarming as it sounds. 1:45 [SPEAKER_01]: To get a better sense of just how transient the Wabash population was at the time, I set down with local historian TJ Honeycutt, 2:01 [SPEAKER_00]: In our modern world, we picture small towns, and particularly really small towns, say under 400 people as static. 2:10 [SPEAKER_00]: There aren't a lot of people coming and going, usually the people have lived there a very long time, or they have ties that bring you in. 2:16 [SPEAKER_00]: That's not the case in this. 2:19 [SPEAKER_00]: You have a couple of different classes of people who are trying to make it in the West, and they're either coming through to head further west, and they may only be here a couple of days, 2:30 [SPEAKER_00]: or they're going to work here where it's relatively more developed for a little bit. 2:35 [SPEAKER_00]: While they're using this as a base to go even further west and find claims out in say Illinois or Missouri or Nebraska, that was super common here as well where I'm going to live here for a couple of years and move on. 2:50 [SPEAKER_00]: If you're engaged in a business, you're probably going to congregate to larger cities, 2:54 [SPEAKER_00]: But if there's a niche that you can fill, you're going to show up and be a blacksmith and Wabash for a bit before you accrue enough capital to open up a shop in Fort Wayne or Marion. 3:04 [SPEAKER_00]: So there's that whole population as well. 3:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The canal in particular brought a lot of people through the community who are either using the canal to get to a different location. 3:16 [SPEAKER_00]: or who are somehow associated with work on the canal who would be private contractors that are moving through. 3:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Small towns are not static. 3:25 [SPEAKER_00]: You might have that core of people who are the early or large landowners who probably aren't gonna move, but then everyone else is kind of fair game to change. 3:40 [SPEAKER_01]: In the pioneer days, small Midwestern towns like Wavash were almost like restups or fueling stations on the long journey west. 3:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Outside of the coral landowners, these populations would fluctuate with an unusual amount of turnover. 3:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Also, you have just the danger of an unsupervised population, so we have this conception of the Wild West, and Indiana was at this time in history very much the West. 4:09 [SPEAKER_00]: There wasn't a great deal of legal authority around society as we kind of know it didn't really exist. 4:15 [SPEAKER_00]: People were very interdependent upon each other in a sort of local context, where the 4:24 [SPEAKER_00]: longer history than the rest of the community because a treaty happened basically as soon as the state of Indiana existed that the Miami Indians could have a mill built anywhere they wanted at government expense and would be operated at government expense and they brought in Miller and a blacksmith and they chose rich valley basically as the location so they had already been a community there for a while. 4:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Then the French has moved in and one of the early 4:54 [SPEAKER_00]: had already built a number of houses throughout the area. 4:57 [SPEAKER_00]: They were usually pretty rudimentary. 5:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The way these early villages and neighbourhoods were built was not so different from the way housing developments were built today, settlers would sometimes build up an area in order to bring more action in neighbours into the areas in which they had chosen to live. 5:15 [SPEAKER_01]: This would not only increase the value of their own property, but also provide a sense of community and a group of people who could help each other navigate the harsh frontier. 5:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Another common practice was trading in and out of homes in these new areas, and a pattern very similar to our modern trend of house flipping. 5:34 [SPEAKER_01]: The French were living in something like a frontier starter home. 5:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Sort of the routine at the time is you would come to a place, cut down all the trees and start your farm, but then as you got a little bit of income you would build a frame or brick house, but that law cabinet is still there so they would rent it out. 5:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's essentially what had happened with the French's house, as it was somebody's first starter home, and then they were making income off of continuing to rent it out. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: The farm land that Aaron French would have farmed is kind of the same set up. 6:09 [SPEAKER_00]: His landlord essentially was operating a farm in the area, but they had cordoned off a little area around their original home stead. 6:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Your original settler will come in, gird the trees, build their house, and then normally move on, do something else, and rent their original property, or sell out and move west and do the whole thing over again. 6:28 [SPEAKER_00]: That was a whole career path. 6:30 [SPEAKER_00]: If you were the true pioneer, you're gonna set it up and get everything working out and then you've improved the land now, you sell it and move on. 6:38 [SPEAKER_00]: or you sit on it, ran it, and move somewhere else. 6:43 [SPEAKER_01]: When the original owners of the cabin moved out, the Frenches moved in. 6:47 [SPEAKER_01]: They were basically squatting in someone else's hand me down home. 6:50 [SPEAKER_01]: We don't know the exact terms of that agreement, but we know they were living on someone else's land, either out of reduced rate or free of charge. 7:02 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1840, Wild Ash County had roughly 1,400 residents. 7:07 [SPEAKER_01]: By 1854, there were more than 10 times that many, just over 1,4,000. 7:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The main reason for all of this sudden growth was the construction of a new commercial waterway right through the center of town, just two blocks south of the 7:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The original objective of the canal was to open a commercial route to New Orleans or the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes. 7:36 [SPEAKER_00]: And that took a long, long time to complete, and it was more fully functional by the 1840s. 7:43 [SPEAKER_00]: It still really didn't get done for another several decades, and then basically as soon as they completed it, they closed it because the railroad took over. 7:52 [SPEAKER_00]: That boom happened in part because you had commercial access to the canal. 7:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Eventually, the canal was replaced by a railroad track, but the nearest road in downtown Wabash, which I live on, is still called Canal Street. 8:07 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked TJ what downtown Wabash would have looked like at the time. 8:15 [SPEAKER_00]: It would look like your image of Wild West Town. 8:20 [SPEAKER_00]: You've got a couple of stone buildings probably, but a lot of kind of thrown together wooden buildings spread all throughout. 8:30 [SPEAKER_00]: And then some brick houses and some frames, and even still some log cabins in place, or even more rudimentary kind of shanties. 8:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Another weird thing that you would notice right away, 8:43 [SPEAKER_00]: is that there's this weird marriage between urban and rural that we just don't have. 8:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, maybe you'll find somebody who lives in town that keeps chickens or pigeons maybe in a larger city. 8:54 [SPEAKER_00]: That was super common then where you would just have pigs roaming through the streets and they would be tagged and you knew that was the guy who lived two streets up 9:03 [SPEAKER_00]: and it was expected that you wouldn't interfere with its business and that if it got too far afield you would help kind of corral it back to his house. 9:13 [SPEAKER_00]: So you have this weird inner mix where you have a downtown city center that's like a couple of blocks of maybe brick but probably mostly wood business buildings and horses and carriages and so forth and then farm all inner mingled with it. 9:30 [SPEAKER_01]: The community of Rich Valley, in which the French has lived, a few miles down the canal, would have been a slightly smaller version of downtown. 9:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Rich Valley would be the same deal. 9:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Rich Valley's town had several large business buildings. 9:45 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think any of them are really still there. 9:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that you would see is your social centers. 9:50 [SPEAKER_00]: We often portray this western life as being very isolated. 9:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The Pioneers is very self-reliant, but that's not really the case. 9:59 [SPEAKER_00]: You absolutely relied on your neighbors to help you do major building projects, or if you needed medicine that maybe so and so has it. 10:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Public school, as we know it today, simply didn't exist. 10:12 [SPEAKER_01]: A member of the community might volunteer to teach for a six-week period in an abandoned building, but that was about it. 10:19 [SPEAKER_01]: So the French children would have spent most of their time helping on the farm and hanging 10:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Generally, children in this era would either be engaged in farm labor or other kinds of labor tasks around another thing that's pretty commonly remarked on by diaris in this era as that children basically were just in the street. 10:41 [SPEAKER_00]: They were just kind of out doing whatever kids did at that time because they weren't heavily supervised. 10:48 [SPEAKER_00]: That was considered normal unsafe that you had the 10:55 [SPEAKER_00]: In this community, into the 40s, schools would just close it to say new and they would lock the kids out and they would just roam the streets for an hour and a half and it was expected that everything would be fine. 11:06 [SPEAKER_01]: And by 40s, he means the 1940s. 11:09 [SPEAKER_01]: So you know in the 1850s, it was a total free for all. 11:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The only real restriction of the freedom of the French children would have been the demands of farm life. 11:19 [SPEAKER_00]: For the French family, when they were farming it, it would be farm life as normal, and in some ways it may have even been easier than some of the earlier children who had to pioneer and maybe sleep in a tent for a couple of weeks when they first got here. 11:33 [SPEAKER_00]: The expectation would be since they're renting that property. 11:37 [SPEAKER_00]: The record doesn't really show that there were out buildings and things, but I would be almost certain that there's like a chicken coop or some kind of building near the house from the ag aspect of that farm. 11:48 [SPEAKER_00]: You've got some infrastructure in place and they're responsible for taking care of the farm. 11:53 [SPEAKER_00]: The male children would generally be involved in the harder tasks. 11:58 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to get too strict on gender roles in this era because that's another thing that we've sort of have a weird conception about that women were absolutely always in the home in this period. 12:07 [SPEAKER_00]: It's portrayed that way in literature, but that's not practical. 12:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Women would learn how to harness the horses and plow the fields and all the stuff as needed. 12:16 [SPEAKER_00]: For the French children, they would definitely be helping out their mom and dad with the various tasks. 12:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Aaron's health wasn't great, so I assume there's a probability that either his wife 12:26 [SPEAKER_00]: the neighbors and their children and his children are heavily engaged in the business of trying to make the farm work. 12:33 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's Horsen Plow based agriculture, our mules, your chickens, and so on are a primary source of reliable food. 12:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that we really don't think about is we're used to even if you're desperately poor today, you're not going to go days without eating. 12:49 [SPEAKER_00]: And in this period, you may go several weeks where you're not eating regularly. 12:55 [SPEAKER_00]: either because you don't have it or something went wrong. 12:58 [SPEAKER_00]: So chickens in that sort of thing are incredibly valuable because it's a pretty reliable source of protein and food. 13:04 [SPEAKER_00]: And in the French family's case, it's discussed by the bystandards. 13:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Once Erin's health got really bad, they started taking charity from the people around them, which was normal in the period. 13:16 [SPEAKER_00]: If a family was down and out or having a hard time, the neighbors 13:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Plow the fields are taken the harvest and make sure that things were still okay. 13:25 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think you could rely on that arrangement and perpetuity, but since Aaron's health had gotten bad, the local people had helped them out the year prior and the year of in 1854 to help get the harvest and put it out and all the same. 13:40 [SPEAKER_00]: So the kids would probably be enlisted even more heavily in that the normal. 13:49 [SPEAKER_00]: People generally only had one or two sets of clothes. 13:53 [SPEAKER_00]: In order to wander it, you had to do all kinds of weird things to it where you've got to wash it a certain way and hit the soap out of it because you can't dry it correctly and agriculture is all by hand. 14:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Tons of hand tools takes forever. 14:10 [SPEAKER_00]: You're siphing all your wheat by hand. 14:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Just tons and tons of work throughout the whole day just to make basic changes to your life. 14:18 [SPEAKER_00]: And also food preservation is super important so everyone's participating in very labor intensive things basically all the time. 14:29 [SPEAKER_01]: As TJ mentioned, the original buildings of Rich Valley are gone, but a small cemetery remains, and the Frenches are buried there. 14:37 [SPEAKER_01]: I found its location on Google Maps, but when I reached the marker, I couldn't find any driveway. 14:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Eventually I just pulled off alongside an empty field, as I did I saw a man from a neighboring house, getting his mail in my rear view mirror. 14:51 [SPEAKER_01]: When I asked about the cemetery, he pointed deep in the woods behind his house, 14:58 [SPEAKER_01]: I could see a low, snaggle tooth clearing of grey headstones, scattered in the haphazard way of old cemeteries. 15:05 [SPEAKER_01]: But the only way to get there, he said, was to do another neighbor's driveway, about a quarter of a mile away. 15:11 [SPEAKER_01]: It was an older woman, and I would need her permission he warned, as access was possible only through private property, I knocked, but she wasn't home. 15:20 [SPEAKER_01]: not wanting to make my first impression in Wabash by trespassing. 15:24 [SPEAKER_01]: I reluctantly turned back the next day it's snowed and it didn't stop until the following weekend. 15:29 [SPEAKER_01]: So for the rest of that week, I sat in my empty studio in my empty building on an empty street in this empty town, thinking about the French family on their secluded hill a few miles away. 15:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The oldest was 15:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Tillman, six, and then an infant girl of about 15 months. 15:52 [SPEAKER_01]: I know what it's like growing up sleeping rough in Central Indiana, and I thought of these kids in the summer of 1854. 15:58 [SPEAKER_01]: I imagine they spent their days holding the farm together and trying to make friends as all kids do. 16:05 [SPEAKER_01]: They must have laid awake at night listening to the crickets in the war of cicadas that every Indiana resident knows too well. 16:13 [SPEAKER_01]: They must have dreamed of 16:14 [SPEAKER_01]: By the time I finally made it to the cemetery, a few weeks later, the snow had melted. 16:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Inpatient from weeks of waiting, I just parked along the road and decided to walk through the woods. 16:25 [SPEAKER_01]: It's typical Indiana brushland, a low scribe of light green foliage, and then bent gray limbs. 16:32 [SPEAKER_01]: A narrow creek winds along the edge of it, bubbling softly, almost politely, and a familiar Midwestern way. 16:39 [SPEAKER_01]: According to TJ, 16:47 [SPEAKER_00]: It is a really great example of a pioneer era cemetery. 16:53 [SPEAKER_00]: It's something that we don't think about. 16:55 [SPEAKER_00]: We have access to Google. 16:56 [SPEAKER_00]: You can ask it in a question. 16:58 [SPEAKER_00]: They had textbooks on how to do these sorts of things, how to set up your log cabin, how to set up your early farm because maybe you would learn, but it's good to have a reference work with better ideas. 17:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And as a result, these pioneer era cemeteries are almost always built along a creek. 17:15 [SPEAKER_00]: and they're usually on an elevated area. 17:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Although the theory of disease wasn't what it is today, they knew that you wanted an elevated zone with good drainage for your bearing place. 17:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And the Rich Valley Cemetery fits that to a T. It's on an elevated area. 17:35 [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of out of the way. 17:36 [SPEAKER_00]: There's not going to be a lot of activity around it. 17:39 [SPEAKER_00]: And today it's wooded on all sites. 17:40 [SPEAKER_00]: They probably cut every tree down when they built it. 17:43 [SPEAKER_00]: So all the timber there is new. 17:45 [SPEAKER_00]: But it's up on this elevated area. 17:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The creek is right behind it. 17:50 [SPEAKER_00]: And basically like hugs like two thirds of the thing I would say. 17:54 [SPEAKER_00]: So that way you don't need it really fenced in. 17:56 [SPEAKER_00]: It's got unnatural set up there. 17:58 [SPEAKER_00]: And most of the names in that cemetery are the Keller family who were some of the first people ever to be brought in. 18:06 [SPEAKER_00]: They were 18:07 [SPEAKER_00]: actually the first marriage in the county was a killer, so they are very early and well represented throughout there, but it's sort of in the modern conception of a cemetery it doesn't fit anymore, it's not excessively large, it's very small, most of the stones were probably made by somebody in rich values, pretty local. 18:26 [SPEAKER_01]: At the far back of the cemetery, at the edge of the hill over the ravine, you find the French family stones. 18:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Behind a small 19th century stone, roughly the size of a large textbook, you find a much larger one, erected in the last 10 years. 18:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Each stone represents the whole family, as they are all buried here in a single grave together. 18:47 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a quiet, secluded shaded area, as good as any in the area for a final resting place. 18:53 [SPEAKER_01]: but this is not the location of their original burial. 18:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Their first resting place was in a hastily-doubt shallow grave, in which they were stacked, one on top of the other by their murderer, the New York Times described it like this. 19:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Their skulls were all broken in, and the legs of the old man French and his wife were broken. 19:12 [SPEAKER_01]: so that they could be doubled up and forced into the hole, which was three or four feet deep. 19:17 [SPEAKER_01]: They were laid in a heap, the father and mother at the bottom, and the children on top. 19:22 [SPEAKER_01]: There were three girls in two boys. 19:24 [SPEAKER_01]: The children were much decayed, but the parents were still sound, and were easily recognized by those who had known them. 19:32 [SPEAKER_01]: For as much trouble as it was to find the Frenches, I didn't have to seek out the grave for the main convicted of their murder. 19:42 [SPEAKER_01]: His head is on a shelf, in my studio, along with the rest of his body, in a glass case underlocking key. 19:50 [SPEAKER_01]: He moved into the French house one day as a border, shortly before the French family mysteriously moved out. 19:57 [SPEAKER_01]: They were never heard from, again.
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