Crawfordsville-Shannondale Turnpike - Montgomery InGenWeb Project

Briefly, the Crawfordsville & Shannondale Turnpike Company and the Crawfordsville & Darlington Turnpike Company both organized under legal statues the last day of August in the year 1865. Each built its road, the C&D built six miles at $10,000; C&S 7 miles at $12,000.... BUT here come the problems :) Each company had sold individual passes for their turnpikes. Then, upon the completion of the individual roads, On November 19, 1866, the two corporations decided it would be easier to run the roads under one company, thus the Crawfordsville & Shannondale Consolidated Turnpike Company. WHOA! Then, the plan came to be that another legally organized turnpike company, Fredericksburg Turnpike, would go in with them to form the Crawfordsville & Eastern Turnpike Company. It's getting complicated. Now, it is to be known that the stock holders, board of directors, etc., okayed this however, the new company did not legally registered the goings-ons. They did get the old stock certificates and holdings back and cancelled all that. They had ONE board of directors were sued and sued, collected tolls and the like, then the state discovered the problems and sued the C&ETC, which directors of course were the same as the C&D and C&S Turnpike companies. Then the company sued their realtor __ Collings thinking he got them in all the trouble although the directors were highly intellectual men themselves. They won in the local court but Collings took them on to the Supreme Court where the decisions were reversed and the company ordered to fold. That they did keeping the original three companies, going back to collecting their own tolls, maintaining and building bridges and appeasing their stock holders. Pretty hard to know exactly what had happened, though, as from the time the Crawfordsville & Shannondale Consolidated Turnpike Company until August 1882, the "corporation" did not elect officers, hold meetings, keep books, make any debt, but still allowed everything to go through the fake company. Now, how's that for one crazy story? The above Hiram Mote hopefully got to use his pass for many years, but who only knows. It is known that President Volney Q. Irwin had once been a rich man, very rich man but at his death in July of 1903, had but $15,000 although fairly impressive for the time, a mere pittance of what he had once had during the turnpiking days. George W. Hall, secretary of above who signed Hiram Mote's pass is still under investigation - written by kbz