Donated by Eppie Litmer of the United Arab Emirates
CHAPTER 1
SETTLEMENT OF THE BATESVILLE AREA
1987 marks the 150th anniversary of important events for Batesville, Oldenburg, and Penntown. For Batesville, it is the 150th anniversary of the founding of Huntersville Evangelical Protestant Church (now United Church of Christ). The founding of this church marks the beginning of the community around which the Town of Huntersville was platted in 1841. Huntersville is the oldest part of present day Batesville.
For Oldenburg, 1987 is the 150th anniversary of both the founding of Holy Family Catholic Church and the platting of the Town of Oldenburg. For Penntown, it is the 150th anniversary of the platting of what was then called "Pennsylvaniaburg", the first town in Adams Township and "parent" of the Town of Sunman.
However, the history of these Batesville area communities did not begin just 150 years ago in southeastern Indiana. This year marks the sesquicentennial of their Indiana history, but the history of some of these communities is six to eight times older than their history in Indiana. For example, the Town of Venne, Germany, from which many of the early settlers of Huntersville came, will celebrate its 900th anniversary this year. That history had been forgotten in this country, but now it is being rediscovered.
Many of the ancestors of Batesville area citizens were first Christianized about 1200 years ago. Much of the religion, diet, culture and values of Batesville area communities originated centuries before the immigrants came to this country. Yet none of the extensive histories written about this part of Indiana has provided more than a glimpse about where these communities came from, what they brought to this country, and the major events that affected their development. That is the purpose of publishing this new history.
Much of the settlement of the Batesville vicinity can be traced back to three areas in northern Germany which were not very far from each other: Huntersville to Venne, Engter, Bramsche and surrounding communities just north of Osnabrueck in the Kingdom of Hannover; Oldenburg to Damme Parish about ten miles further north in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg; and many German settlers in Adams and Laughery townships to Heiligenfelde Parish about forty-five miles further northeast in the Kingdom of Hannover just south of Bremen.
However, the settlement of this area was not exclusively by north Germans. Pennsylvaniaburg was named because many of its early settlers of English ancestry came from Pennsylvania. Penntown was soon heavily settled by south Germans, particularly from Baden and the Bavarian Palatinate. South German settlement was even greater east of Penntown in northwestern Dearborn County.
The entire area around Batesville has long been proud of its German heritage, yet much of this heritage and history has been ignored or forgotten, particularly in the last 50 years. Some families in the communities around Batesville still have 3rd and 4th cousins living in the boyhood homes of their great and great-great grandfathers who left Germany 120 to 150 years ago, but few are aware of each other's existence.
Because this is the 150th anniversary of the founding of Huntersville Church, Penntown, and the Town and Parish of Oldenburg, it is appropriate first to examine the history of both the German and non-German immigration to this region of Indiana, and then to examine the European history of the three areas in northern Germany which have played an important role in the development of Laughery, Adams and Ray townships.
This history should be of special interest to all those
of German descent in this region and to the non-German community as well.
It was this immigration which has determined much of the development and
culture of this area.
EARLY NON-GERMAN SETTLEMENT
The Indians did not have any major settlements in southeastern Indiana at the time of white settlement. There were from time to time Indian encampments such as the one by the Shawnee Indians during the winter of 1788 near the junction of Ripley and Laughery creeks in northern Delaware Township.
Significant Indian presence disappeared in the years after the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. The last meeting of Indians in this area reportedly occurred in 1833 near Metamora where about forty gathered for the last time before being removed further west.
The earliest non-Indian settlement of this area was by Englishmen and people of English and Irish descent from eastern states and Kentucky. White settlement of this area came primarily through Dearborn County, although some settlers came to Napoleon by way of Madison.
Families settled near Lawrenceburg as early as 1796. In 1800 the Indiana Territory was established, and Lawrenceburg was platted in 1802. Gradually settlement extended north along Tanner's Creek and then up the ridge to Yorkville, New Alsace, Hubble's Corner, and Penntown. Another route followed the road from Lawrenceburg to Napoleon.
Other settlement routes went north up the Whitewater River valley towards Brookville and east from Aurora towards Versailles. John Conner established trading posts near Cedar Grove in 1803 and at Connersville in 1808. However, those routes did not directly affect the Batesville area.
In about 1811 some of the Alley brothers from Virginia settled along Pipe Creek in Franklin County. Martin Ewbank and his son, John, settled a mile north of Guilford in the same year. John Kelso from Ireland settled 3/4 of a mile northeast of present day Dover as early as 1813.
In 1814 Daniel and Henry Wooley settled in Shelby Township of Ripley County becoming the county's first white settlers. In 1815 Richard and Dorcas Wortman from Kentucky settled five miles west of Sunman, and Robert and Nansy Johnson had settled in the Penntown vicinity by the same year.
David Perrine of New York City arrived in the Yorkville vicinity in 1816, the same year Indiana became a state. Also that year the Osburn family arrived in the vicinity of St. Mary's in Franklin County. In 1817 William George and his brother settled in Ray Township near present day Oldenburg.
The Lawrence family from Pennsylvania settled around Lawrenceville by 1818 where a United Bretheren Church was established nearby in 1819 or 1820. John Sunman, Sr. and his son Tom arrived in 1819 from Holtby near York, England. They settled west of Penntown where he, his wife Ellen, and two sons are buried on the point across the lake-in Indian Lakes campground.
Napoleon was among the earliest settlements in the area having been platted in 1820. It was located at the junction of the Michigan Road from Madison to Indianapolis and the road from Lawrenceburg to Napoleon. The Elias Conwell house built in 1822 at that junction is still standing as is the nearby Central Hotel built about the same time.
Many of the early churches in Dearborn and Ripley counties were Methodist or Baptist. The Baptist Church was particularly strong among New Englanders. A Baptist Society was established in the Penntown area in 1823 as a branch of the Little Cedar Grove Baptist Church south of Brookville. It became the Pipe Creek Baptist Church in 1832.
Franklin Baptist Church was established south of present day Negangard's Corner in 1823 as a branch of 2nd Manchester Baptist Church at Hogan Hill. The Methodists also began meeting in various homes and schools around Clinton about 1830. St. Paul's Methodist Church south of Sunman is the outgrowth of this organization.
The first Catholic Church in southeastern Indiana was
built at McKenzie's Crossroads (Dover) in 1824 by Irish Catholics from
Maryland. They had established a congregation there as early as 1820.
Just east of Dover is an area still known as "Tipperary".
SOUTH GERMAN SETTLEMENT
Some Germans had been among the earliest settlers in this vicinity. Phillip, Casper, and Jared Michael from Baden purchased land one mile southeast of present day Weisburg in 1817 and 1818. They were part of the first large German migration to America in the 19th century.
These immigrants of 1817 had suffered a series of disastrous crop failures culminating in unusually extreme weather in 1816, "the year without a summer". The immigration was a spontaneous movement driven by panic and despair.
A sense of restlessness and instability had also been created by the Napoleonic Wars which the restoration of the old regimes in 1815 could not subdue. Many of the immigrants came from southwestern Germany where Napoleonic sentiment was particularly strong. The area of heaviest emigration was from the Dreisamkreis around Freiburg, Baden.
Crops improved in southern Germany in the fall of 1817, and many of the people who had attempted to leave experienced great difficulties and failed to reach America. Consequently, emigration became unpopular, and it was not until around 1830 that Germans once again began to migrate to America in any great numbers.
In December of 1833, Thomas W. Sunman, the son of John Sunman, Sr. wrote to his brother John in Cincinnati, "I hear there is more Dutch in these parts, tho' some that are here are already discouraged having spent his money in land, has no friends or any thing to live on." In January of 1837, Mr. Sunman wrote that he was buying land at sales in competition with the German immigrants.
Many of the German settlers of the 30s also came from Baden in southern Germany and from Alsace, then in western France. Others came from Bavaria, the Bavarian Palatinate (or Rhein Pfalz), HesseDarmstadt, Wuerttemberg, and Switzerland. Once again the crops in the grape-growing regions of southern Germany had failed. The years 1830 and 1831 were also marked by cholera, political upheaval and turmoil throughout Europe.
The southern German immigrants were mostly small farmers whose lands had been divided and subdivided through divisible inheritances. They were people who had some possessions, but they were afraid of losing what little they had.
This time, once the immigration began, it did not stop. The successful immigrants wrote home in the words of the German poet Goethe, "Amerika, du hast es besser!" These immigrants to southeastern Indiana from southern Germany were primarily, but not exclusively, Catholics.
A small community of Catholics from Grosswallstadt in northwestern Bavaria (between Frankfurt and Wuerzburg) settled around St. Peter in 1833. German settlement from Alsace occurred around Yorkville where Mass was first celebrated in 1833, around New Alsace where a Catholic Church was established in 1833, and around Hubble's Corner where a Lutheran Church was also established in the year 1833.
Protestant settlement from the Palatinate, Baden and Wuerttemberg is seen around Blue Creek at St. Jacob's Evangelical Protestant Church (now U.C.C.) which was established in 1838, and at its sister church, St. John's at Pennsylvaniaburg, established in 1840-41.
Catholics from Baden, particularly from Offenburg, established
a church at St. Nicholas west of Sunman in 1836 and at St. Pius further
south in 1854. Protestants from Baden also settled along the Napoleon-Lawrenceburg
road. German Catholics who settled in 1840 around Morris (then called
Springfield) came from both Baden and Oldenburg, Germany. They attended
either St. Nicholas or the Holy Family Church at Oldenburg until St. Anthony's
congregation was established at Morris in 1856.
NORTH GERMAN SETTLEMENT
By 1837 many of the more recent immigrants were coming from northern Germany. Some of these immigrants were particularly affected by enclosure of common lands and by difficulties in the cottage linen-making industry around Osnabrueck caused by the industrial revolution. In 1837 a financial panic struck U.S. cities, prices of farm commodities soared, and German immigrants in Cincinnati headed towards the countryside for the security of land.
Much of the immigration to Laughery, Ray and Adams townships came from the area along the irregular border between the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg and the Kingdom of Hannover on a line between the cities of Bremen and Osnabrueck. Three groups came in large numbers:
North German Catholics, particularly from the area around Damme in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, settled around Oldenburg, Indiana, beginning in 1835. Between 1830 and 1849 some 3,440 emigrants left Damme. A copy of a list of their names is available at the Batesville Public Library.
The second group of immigrants to these three townships came from the Protestant communities surrounding Damme. They established Huntersville Church just a few miles south of Oldenburg, Indiana, in 1837. These Protestant settlers at Huntersville came from towns which form a horseshoe around the western, southern, and eastern sides of Damme Parish. Many of them came from the towns of Bramsche, Engter, and Venne on the southern side of that horseshoe.
Thus Huntersville and Oldenburg families were neighbors back in Germany. The ties between these two communities are much deeper than commonly realized.
In the 1840s a third group of immigrants from the Syke-Heiligenfelde-Wachendorf vicinity south of Bremen settled west of Hubble's Lutheran Church near present day Sunman. They also established St. Stephen's Lutheran Church near what is now Spades in 1843 and Adams Lutheran Church in the southwestern corner of Adams Township in 1852.
Some of this immigration from the Syke-Heiligenfelde region was caused by a potato blight, particularly around 1845 and 46. This blight affected much of northern Europe. Immigrants from the Syke vicinity also settled around Fink's Evangelical Protestant Church north of Osgood and around the Lutheran Church at Napoleon.
Because these three groups were particularly significant around Batesville, the third and fourth chapters in this history will focus on their north German heritage. The next chapter will continue the story of immigration to the Batesville area until the present day.
