History of Lawrence County, Indiana
Transcribed passages are from the following book:
History of Lawrence and Monroe Counties Indiana
1914 B. F. Bowen & Co. Inc. Indianapolis, Indiana
CHAPTER III Early Settlement of Lawrence County
Lawrence County was first a portion of Knox and Harrison Counties.
In the year 1814 it became identified with Washington County, and in 1816 a part of Orange County. The county of Lawrence itself was created in 1818...
The first years of the nineteenth century saw very little settlement in the county by white men. The Indians were hostile and the perils of making a home were great. The slow immigration of the tribes to the West had not yet begun, and the pioneer hesitated to be the first to combat with their treacherous customs. The Ohio river was then the avenue of commerce to the Middle west and consequently the settlement of the state proceeded northward from this river. The advance was slow made so by the necessity for large numbers to keep together in order to repel the Indian attacks. Not until the year 1811, the year of the Battle of Tippecanoe, did Lawrence County receive any numbers of white families.
Records show that probably the first settlement of any consequence was made at a spot where Leesville, Flinn Township, now stands, on the eastern border of the county. The settlers of this place had left Lee County, Virginia, in 1809 and passed the next winter in Kentucky. In February 1810 they came to the above mentioned place and built a fort near the present grist mill in Leesville. The block-house completed the men journeyed back to Kentucky after their families. These families were the Guthries and Flinns, who were attacked by the Pottawatomies later, and their names have been perpetuated in the history of the county as the highest types of honor, courage and self sacrifice, and today their descendants are numbered among the most respected citizens of Lawrence County. Daniel Guthrie and his sons and Jacob and William Flinn were the men of the group, and each was a frontiersman skilled in all the arts of pioneer life, in hunting, fishing, farming and in fighting the warlike tribes. Daniel Guthrie is noted as being one of the Continentals who defeated General Braddock prior to the Revolutionary War.