When Isaac Young Taulman was born in Columbia, Ohio, on 2 November 1819,
Indiana-------which would eventually be his home------had been a state for only
three years. Indiana was still in the developmental stage. In the words that
Rogers and Hammerstein would later use to describe Oklahoma, the state Isaac
Young's son, Isaac Newton, would live in several years later, Indiana, too, was
"a brand new state."
BRAND NEW STATE
1819 - 1829
Because it was so new, it was necessary to develop the state's infrastructure to
move products to market and allow travel throughout the state.
Since transportation is so important to any state, Indiana began the process of
trying to build transportation lines across the wilderness. Their actions
centered in four areas: canals, highways, railroads, and ships.
In 1832, shortly after Isaac Young moved to Indiana, Indiana began a
project in the northeastern part of the state to connect the navigable portion
of the Maumee River with the Wabash River---a distance of seven or eight miles.
The Wabash and Erie Canal proved to be a tremendous financial loss, but it
indicated the growth and expansion of the state.
In addition to
the Erie Canal, Indiana constructed the National Road---or as we know it
today---Highway 40. The original plans called for the road to go through
Columbus, in Bartholomew County, the county that bordered Jennings County on the
north and west. However, Indiana Congressman Oliver H. Smith successfully lobied
to change the highways path and run it through Indianapolis. The road first
moved into Indiana through Wayne County in 1827 and in 1831 there was an
appropriation of $75,000 for work that included the bridge over the White River
in Indianapolis making this quite possibly the location for the first ancestor
of Indiana's beloved covered bridges.
In 1836, construction
began on Indiana's first railroad, the Madison and Indianapolis. This railroad
started in Madison and passed through the Taulman farm in Jefferson County, just
north of Madison. Later the M&I became the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
The location of the railroad was a source of litigation between Isaac's mother,
Elizabeth, and the railroad.
A fourth means of transportation
was by boats on the Ohio River. Early on, Madison became a center for
transporting goods on the Ohio River. Goods were shipped down the river to
Madison from such places as Pittsburg and by train from Madison to Indianapolis
and points all over the Midwest.
Madison's first shipyard was
located "just below what is now Ferry Street," built around 1835, this small
facility turned out Madison's first steamboat, the Irvington, on the
Fourth of July, 1836. Despite the fact that this yard produced numerous steamers
in its short existance, the financial panic of 1837 caused boat contracts to dry
up and brought about a momentary pause in Madison boat-building.
The Panic of 1837 hit when on 10 May 1837 in New York City every bank stopped by
a five-year depression, with bank failures and record high enemployment levels.
Isaac Young would have been eighteen when the panic hit in 1837.
Migration into Indiana, mostly from Kentucky and Ohio, was so rapid that by 1820
the population was 147,176. The first state capital was in the southern Indiana
city of Corydon about seventy miles south and west of Paris
Crossing.
In 1816, Abraham Lincoln's family moved to southern
Indiana from Kentucky and settled near present-day Gentryville---about a hundred
miles from Paris Crossing. They constructed a cabin near Little Pigeon Creek
that measured 16 X 18 feet that had only one window.
Life was
difficult in Jennings County. It was the frontier. As late as 1840, Thomas Egan
built a cabin in Jennings County that had a dirt floor with a stump in the
middle of the room with boards nailed on top that was used as a
table.
While this was probably the exception since the story has
survived in Jennings County history, the homes were likely quite primitive.
There is not much reason to believe that Isaac's family lived in a cabin much
different from the cabin in which Lincoln's family lived---at least at first. As
late as 1850, the First Marion Baptist church built a church building from
logs.
1833 - 1845
Very little is known about Isaac
Young's stay in Cincinnati. Exactly when Isaac Young moved to Madison with his
family is not known. It was likely about 1829 - 30 when he would have been ten
or eleven years old. The family bought a 160-acre farm a short distance north of
Madison.
Isaac Young's father, John, died in 1833. At that time
Isaac would have been only fourteen.
Their father's death
brought many changes in their lives. Isaac along with some of his other siblings
moved from Madison to Jennings County and settled in the Paris Crossing area.
Evan, his older brother, moved to Clark County, Indiana, for a while. This move
may have occured when the M&I Railroad went through their farm in 1836
-37, separating the house and outbuildings from the rest of the 160
acres.
Jennings County was a good place to settle. It was easily
accessable to the new railroad that ran between Madison and Indianapolis
allowing farm products to be shipped easily. The terrain itself was appealing.
"Near the streams the surface of the county is hilly and broken, and moderately
fertile, except in the beech flats, at the head of the streams, where it is only
fit for grass. There is an abundance of excellent timber in the county, of which
large quantities are exported. There are also good quarries of limestone, from
which the interior of the state is largely supplied."
Isaac
Young's older brother Harman Taulman had one of the first saw mills in Jennings
County. It was a sash saw that went up and down. "Sash sawn" boards and timbers
had unmistakable vertical saw marks left by traditional water powered up and
down sawmills of the early nineteenth century.
Harman probably
sawed timber for the Madison to Brownstown plank road, which today is Indiana
State 250. The highway runs from Madison up Highway 7, turns west near
Lancaster through Paris, Paris Crossing, Cana, and Seymour, and then to
Brownstown. The existance of the plank road explains much of the movement of
early folks in the area between Madison, Lancaster, Paris, and on to Seymour.
Harman also owned a store in the area.
In 1845, the
Baptists in the United States fought their own civil war before the rest of the
nation did. Those in the South formed the Southern Baptist Convention and those
Baptist churches in the North that had been a part of the Triennial Convention
formed the American Baptist Convention. The churches in Indiana that the Taulman
family attended were related to the American Baptist Convention with the
possible exception of Coffee Creek Baptist Church. Although Coffee Creek later
became an American Baptist Church, at the time Isaac Young lived it likely was a
Primitive Baptist congregation.
Marriage and Family
1846
-
On 22 November 1846, Isaac married Grisilla Jane Foster (b. 12
September 1826; d. 3 August 1868) Isaac
was thirty-seven and Grissilla
was twenty.
The attached picture is not very good quality,
but it includes sisters Mary Ann Foster Steele (left and
Grissila Jane Foster
Taulman (right) along with their mother Penelope Elizabeth Webb
Foster.
Apparently Isaac first became a property owner when his
father died and in 1835, John's 160 acre
farm was divided among Elizabeth and
her nine children. As a result of the division, Isaac received a
strip of
this farm that was "13 rods in width" but of unknown length. The rest of the
children received
a similar amount of land. A rod is 5.5 yards in length.
Isaac's piece of land was 71.5 yards wide - about
three-fourths the
length of a football field. The dimensions of his inheritance are difficult
to understand
since the farm was 160 acres.
On 28 October
1850, four years after he married Grissella, Isaac Young bought from his
mother
Elizabeth and from John and Susan Taulman five acres of land in
Jennings County for twenty-five dollars.
The farm was about
seven miles outside of Paris Crossing. The house was located "about the third
cross roads west of Commiskey [which] used to be called Millers
Corner....[There was] a blacksmith
shop there. Not quite a mile west is where
grandfather [Isaac Young] lived."
Isaac and Grissilla's first
child was born just less than a year after their marriage. Sarah Catharine
was born on 16 October 1847. Interestingly Isaac's oldest sister also
named Sarah; he likely named
his daughter after his sister. He did not
maintain the Dutch custom of naming his first daughter after
his mother.
About every two years for the next twenty years, a child came into the
family--four girls
and six boys. Isaac Young's father had had nine children;
Isaac Young outdid him by one.
John
Osborn 3 June 1849
Mary
Caroline 17 October 1851
Charles Mandeville 24 August
1853
Perry Burns 17 August
1855
Margaret Clestine 20
February 1858
Elizabeth Ann
24 November 1859
Isaac
Newton 6 January 1862
Albert
Edwin 16 January 1864 (he died when he was less than a
year old)
Edward Alfred 26
January 1866
At the time Isaac Newton was born,
Isaac Young lived in Slate, Jennings County, Indiana.
On 18
September 1850, Isaac and his family lived in Marion Township, Jennings
County. The census that year reflected one of the problems the name Taulman has
often
generated. The census taker misspelled the name
Tolmon. This may indicate that (1) the census taker was new to the
area and did not know the family, (2) that Isaac and his
family were not well
known in the area, or (3) that who ever gave the census taker the information
about Isaac's family could not read and write.
The census also
listed Isaac's wife only as Jane. Apparently she preferred that to
Grissilla. But interestlingly enough, the census lists her as being
thirty-four--four years
older than Isaac. Other evidence indicates she was
born 12 September 1826---or seven years after Isaac was born.
The winter of 1855-56 was one of the coldest winters on record. Persistant cold
marked the period from Christmas 1855 until 10 February 1856. A hundred miles
north in
Germantown, Ohio, on 8 January temperatures were below zero all day
and there was a "piercing wind."
In the autumn of 1857, and
"epidemic of fever ravaged this area" and John and Harriett Deputy--neighbors of
the Taulmans---lost four children between September 29 and
October 11,
1857. Apparently, Isaac Young did not lose any one to the fever, but this had to
affect him to have so many of their neighbors die in such a short
time.
CIVIL WAR
1860 - 1865
On November 6, 1860,
Abraham Lincolm was elected the sixteenth President of the Untied States. In
January after Lincoln, a known opponent of slavery, was elected
president,
the South Carolina legislature called a state convention. The delegates voted to
remove South Carolina from the union known as the United States of
America.
The secession of South Carolina was followed by the secession of six
more states -- Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas --
and the threat of
Secession by four more -- Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee,
and North Carolina. These eleven states eventually formed the Confederate States
of America.
Of course, Indiana produced many
pro-slaveryadherents, but the overall atmosphere was anti-slavery. However,
something about the atmosphere helped instill in Lincoln
some of his
anti-slavery beliefs.
The atmosphere likely filtered into
the thinking of many of those in Jennings County -- including Isaac Young and
his family.
Jennings county played a significant role in the
anti-slavery effort. Less than eight miles from Paris Crossing where Isaac
settled was the town of Lancaster. Anti-slavery
Baptists had built
Eleutherian College in Lancaster in the 1840's to educated men and women,
regardless of race, in the same building. This was a rarity for the
time.
The school was founded by Rev. Thomas Craven of Oxford
Ohio, who came to Lancaster as a guest preacher at the Neil's Creek Anti-Slavery
Regular Baptist Church. He
told of his dream where whites and blacks, men and
women, and students of mixed blood would attend classes together. Many
residents of the area offered to help and,
working together, a school
dedicated to freedom and equality was built on a hill overlooking the
community.
This building was also used for Underground Railroad
activities. Today the building that housed the college is a National Historic
Landmark, listed on the National Register
and the Network to
Freedom.
In 1861 when Isaac Young was forty-two years of age, he enlisted in the
9th Indiana Legion for thirty days. Not much else is known about his military
service. To have been
gone longer than thirty days would have created a real
hardship on his family. He had seven children at home plus a wife. The youngest
Elizabeth Ann was three, and the
oldest, Sarah Catharine, was fourteen. He
may have enlisted to draw the salary, which was $13 per month for Union
privates.
As the Civil War approached, feelings in Indiana ran
high. Indiana was a free state, and Jennings County was a significant stop on
the Underground Railroad.
One story that certainly made the
rounds of all the storytellers involved a slave, Alexander McClure. In April
1860, McClure who weighed 200 pounds shipped himself
from Nashville,
Tennessee in a two-foot by three-foot box to the well-known Underground Railroad
conductor Levi Coffin (who was then living in Cincinnati, Ohio).
Placed in a
box at 10:30 a.m. and shipped by the L&N Railroad from Nashville, he made
the over fifteen-hour trip to Seymour, Indiana, where the box had to be
transferred
to a train heading to Cincinnati. Sadly, in the process of moving
the box, the train station employees dropped the box, and out came Alexander, he
was arrested and sent
back to Nashville.
Thomas Hicklin, an
active abolitionist in Jennings County, operated an Underground Railroad station
one-half mile east of San Jacinto in Jennings County and piloted
blacks to
another station on Otter Creek in Campbell Township, and to a station at the
home of John Vawter, a Baptist minister. Instead of continuing on, some
fugitives
remained in a black settlement southwest of Vernon.
In 1861 the Vernon Banner reported that about nine hundred yards of
flannel had been purchased and manufactured into shirts for the two companies of
soldiers from
this county, who were quartered at Camp Morton in
Indianapolis.
In 1861 the Vernon Banner also reported
that a citizen of Montgomery Township had been selling fat hogs to a firm in
Louisville, which were contracted for some time
before hostilities broke out.
Those shipping the hogs declared "contract or no contract" no more shall be
shipped. The Banner affirmed that action. "That is right. Stop
the
traffic forthwith Our brothers and sons have gone to defend the flag of our
Country and we must not feed the traitors who are to meet them in battle
array."
Union General Lew Wallace was asked by Governor Oliver
Morton to help defend Indiana against a group of approximately 3,000 Confederate
cavalrymen led by
General John Hunt Morgan. They crossed the Ohio River at
Brandenburg, Kentucky, on July 8, 1863, and left the state by crossing the
Whitewater River at Harrison on
July 13, 1863.
On 11 July
1863, Morgan's Raiders traveled to Paris Crossing and then to Vernon where they
changed direction and camped at Dupont, Wallace's troops arrived in
North
Vernon then marched on foot to camp near Holton.
The 9th Indiana
Volunteer Infantry Regiment was a volunteer infantry regiment in the Union Army
during the American Civil War. It was organized on 22 April 1861, for
three
months service in
Indianapolis.
POST
CIVIL WAR
1866 - 1913
Isaac belonged to the Coffee
Creek Baptist Church. He had joined this church by baptism July 1864 when he was
forty-five and left December 1872 by transfer of his letter
to another
Baptist church. The records do not indicate to which church he
transferred. The date of his leaving would have been after Isaac married
Elizabeth married Elizabeth
Wells 28 September 1870. Elizabeth may have had
some influence in the matter. The Coffee Creek records show a [Grisilla:] Jane
Taulman who joined Coffee Creek Baptist
Church in February 1864 and died June
1869.
According to Fred Everett Taulman (b. 15 December 1886),
Perry Burns Taulman's son, "First Marion Baptist Church....is where we all went
to church. Grandfather
[Isaac Young] is buried there, but Grandmother was
buried at Mr. Zion Methodist Church cemetery. There was no space for
Grandfather by her side." It may have geen to
the First Marion Baptist
Church that Isaac transferred his membership when he left Coffee Creek Baptist
Church.
The First Marion Baptist Church had been organized
on 26 April 1849. In 1850 the church erected a log church about twenty-four by
thirty feet with two windows on each
side. For night services it was lit with
tallow candles.
In July 1871 the pastor William Gillaspie
conducted a protracted meeting that lasted for several weeks. During that
period, over sixty additions were added to the church.
Isaac Young left
Coffee Creek Baptist Church in 1872. This revival may have enticed him to move
his membership.
Thomas Hill Ser. was the first pastor of the
Coffee Creek Baptist Church and served until 1838 when old age compelled him to
resign. He performed the marriage ceremony
for Isaac Young and Grissilla
Jane. Thomas Hill Jr. was then called and served for nearly twenty-eight years
[1868], his being the longest pastorate the church ever had.
Grissilla Jane died 3 August 1868. She left seven children ranging in age
from twenty-one down to two years of age. Her oldest child Sarah
Catharine had married only a year earlier. All the other children were still
at home. Her youngest Edward Alfred was only two. Grissilla is
buried in the Mount Zion Methodist Church Cemetery in Marion Township along with
an infant named Grissella J. The evidence is strong that she died in childbirth.
Two years later, Isaac Young married Elizabeth Wells on 28 September 1870 when
Isaac Newton was twelve. Elizabeth had one son named Jim (Bud) Wells who was
very
close to Isaac Newton. When Isaac Newton was approximately fourteen,
Elizabeth died 26 July 1876. Two years later, 12 May 1878, Isaac Young married a
third time
to Mary Jane (Smith) Burnett in Scott County. The
grandchildren referred to Mary Jane as Granny. Isaac Young
did not have any children by either Elizabeth or Mary
Jane.
Esther (b. 25 December 1896), who would have been five when she left Indiana,
remembered Isaac Young as an extremely quiet man who was very good to his
family.
"The children worshiped him; we thought he was wonderful. He had a
slight stroke; strokes run in the family. November 1901 was the last time we
ever saw him [when]
we left Indiana [to move to Missouri].
The first two of Isaac Young's children married but had
no children.
Sarah Catharine married Griffin Stradley. They
had no children. She died 1 January 1908.
John Osborn
married Harriet Donnel; they had no children.
Mary Caroline
married Joseph Ancil Simmons, 3 April 1870. She had nine children-eight
boys and one girl.
Charles Manderville married Melissa Jane
Arbuckle 6 December 1874. They had eight children-four boys and four
girls.
Perry Burns married Victoria A. Foster; they
had five children-two boys and three girls.
Margaret Celestine
married William Henry Arbuckle on 28 March 1878. They had three
girls.
Elizabeth Ann married Henry Waggoner 12 December 1877.
They had twelve children one girl and nine boys. Two other children died
possibly as infants, they were unnamed.
Isaac Newton married
Mary Ann Hoskins 20 February 1890 in Cole County, Missouri.
Edward Alfred married Ida Musick and they had six children--two boys and four
girls.
Isaac Newton was the first one to roam far
from "Back Home in Indiana." However, he would return after a few
years absence. His other siblings all stayed in the general
area.
Isaay Young continued to live in the Jennings County area.
In the 1910 census, Isaac (ninety) and Mary Jane (seventy) apparently were
living with his step-son, Jim Wells. Isaac
Young died 24 May 1913 and is
buried in the Marion Church Cemetery.
border
USE YOUR BACK BUTTON TO RETURN TO JENNINGS COUNTY
INGENWEB
Typed for INGenWeb by Sheila
Kell
November
2, 1819 - May 24, 1913