In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, some Americans were unhappy with their economic prospects. Among them were the Reno brothers — Frank, William, Simeon, and John — who lived in Indiana. They decided to improve their financial situation by robbing trains.
Perhaps they were inspired by attacks on trains by both sides during the war, intended to disrupt supply operations. In any case, the Reno brothers were the first civilians to go into the business. They assembled a gang and headed for Seymour, Indiana. At 6:30 p.m. on October 6, 1866, they committed the first train robbery in U.S. history, escaping with over $10,000, a substantial sum in those days.
Two members of the gang were arrested, but they were released after the only person willing to testify against them was shot and killed, and the Reno brothers carried on. During the next two years they robbed three more trains. One robbery, in Marshfield, Indiana, netted them $96,000.
Distressed by the condition of law enforcement in their state, the citizens of Indiana formed not just one, but two vigilante groups: the Jackson County Vigilance Committee, and the Scarlet Mask Society. As a result, vigilantes were readily available when three captured members of the Reno gang were being carried across the state by train.
The vigilantes yanked the gang members off the train and hung them from a nearby tree. A few days later, the vigilantes hauled three more captured gang members off a wagon. They hung them, too, from the very same tree. The tree was near Seymour, at the spot shown in the photo above. (The cross street is Route 50.) It has been known ever since as Hangman Crossing.
The Reno brothers themselves escaped being hung at Hangman Crossing because they were in jail. One, John, was being held in Missouri, but Frank, William, and Simeon were imprisoned in New Albany, Indiana. On December 12, 1868, one hundred vigilantes descended on the New Albany jail, overpowered the prison guards, led the three brothers outside, and hung them on the spot.
You can visit the graves of the Reno brothers. They are in Seymour’s city cemetery, fenced off and clearly marked. Except for John’s, that is. By virtue of being imprisoned in Missouri, he escaped lynching and died peacefully in 1895.
Hangman Crossing is now an unincorporated community. If you wish to live there, you might buy a house in a near-by development. It is known simply as “The Crossing.”
From 1926 to 1950, Route 50 crossed a covered bridge near Medora, Indiana. Though 50 has been re-routed, the bridge still stands. To see it, turn south from Route 50 on Indiana 235. In three miles you’ll reach Medora, a town of around 800 people.
From Medora, follow 235 east for one mile to the East Fork of the White River and the Medora covered bridge.
Covered bridges were first built in the U.S. in the early 19th century. Regarded as engineering marvels, they attracted the attention of travelers from Europe, including Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote about one in 1842 in his American Notes, “We crossed the river by a wooden bridge, roofed and covered on all sides, and nearly a mile in length. It was profoundly dark, perplexed with great beams crossing and recrossing it at every possible angle . . . and I held my head down to save my head from the rafters above . . . and said to myself this cannot be reality.”
Construction of early covered bridges supported economic growth. They eliminated the need to ford rivers, and so made it easier for farmers to get grain and cattle to market. They also improved travel by foot or horse and buggy.
Local builders with experience building ships and barns constructed the bridges using the timber which was abundant in eastern North America. They covered the bridges to protect them from weather damage, because it was easier to replace degraded roofs and walls than to rebuild damaged structural elements. Windows added complexity to construction and were regarded as extras. The Medora bridge was once called “the dark bridge,” because it had no windows and its length made it particularly dark in the middle.
The walls of a covered bridge conceal how it’s built, but photos here, taken during renovation in 2010, show the Medora bridge’s structure. The wooden triangles in the sides of the bridge are trusses, a simple, economical, but strong form.
The curved wooden arches used in the Medora bridge are called Burr arches, first used in 1804 by Theodore Burr, an inventor from Connecticut. They were an important improvement in bridge technology because they increased strength while keeping the bridge deck level. Burr arches also allowed longer bridge spans, making it possible to cross wider rivers.
At 460 feet, the Medora bridge is the longest covered bridge in Indiana. In the bridge’s application for recognition on the National Register of Historic Places, run by the National Park Service, it was called “the longest surviving historic covered bridge in the United States.” The American Society of Civil Engineers recognizes it as the “longest remaining nineteenth century covered bridge structure in the United States.” It should be said, however, that an Internet search for “longest covered bridge” reveals a number of claimants for this honor.
The first covered bridge in the United States was built over the Schuykill River near Philadelphia in 1805, and the first Indiana covered bridge was built near Indianapolis in 1835.
Joseph J. Daniels built the Medora bridge in 1875. It took nine months, cost $18,142, and opened on July 15.
Information such as this is tracked by the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges, which assigns an identifying number to each bridge in its World Guide to Covered Bridges. The Medora bridge is number 14-36-04.
The exact number of covered bridges built in the U.S. is not known, but there may have been as many as 10,000, including 400 to 500 in Indiana. Today, there are around 800 U.S. covered bridges remaining, and fewer than 100 in Indiana. According to the Smithsonian Institution, an average of five covered bridges are damaged or destroyed each year, and according to the Indiana Historical Bureau, a key factor is “careless driving.”
The Medora bridge carried automobile traffic until 1970. In June 2011, a rehab of the bridge was completed, and it is now open for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
For many small communities, covered bridges provided the largest near-by covered space, and they were used for revival meetings, weddings, and political rallies. The town of Medora continued this practice when, on August 3, 2013, at 6:30 PM, it held a dinner party on its renewed bridge. More than one hundred fifty guests dined on fried chicken, ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, grape salad, hot rolls, home-made pie, iced tea, and lemonade.
The Medora bridge has a website, http://www.medoracoveredbridge.org. Go there to learn more, see photos of the renovated bridge, and perhaps make reservations for a future dinner.
The Medora covered bridge, crossing the East Fork of the White River.
Perhaps some people aren’t meant for ordinary life.
* * *
The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War between Great Britain and her American colonies. When Britain signed the treaty, she ceded her claim to what was called the Old Northwest Territory, an area that included the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a part of Minnesota.
This concession was largely due to the efforts of one man, George Rogers Clark.
In January 1779, Clark commanded a force of militiamen at Kaskaskia, a small town near the Mississippi River in what is now southern Illinois. The Revolutionary War was in progress, and the Continental Army could spare no money or men for western adventures, so Clark’s force was made up of local volunteers and funded in part by money Clark himself borrowed.
At the time, the British held a fortification on the present-day site of Vincennes, Indiana, named Fort Sackville. This fort was the strategic key to controlling much of the territory to the northwest, and Clark planned to take it. He was undaunted by the fact that it was 180 miles from Kaskaskia. He wrote to Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, “Who knows what fortune will do for us? Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted.”
Clark began his campaign on February 5, 1779, leading a force of 170 men out of Kaskaskia. As was normal at that time, military travel was on foot, and it rained frequently, forcing the men to march through flooded fields. Rations were issued for the journey, but food ran low during the eighteen days of marching, and sometimes the men went without. At night, they slept on the wet ground.
After eight days, on February 13th, the party reached the vicinity of the Wabash River, but the river and its tributaries had spilled over their banks and flooded the surrounding bottom land. Clark’s goal, Fort Sackville, was on the far side of this water, nine miles away. The men spent the night, as one of Clark’s officers described in his diary, on a “small spot of ground” in “drizzly and dark weather.”
It took them eight more days to cross the flooded river, using canoes they built on the spot to carry their supplies. When the river channels were otherwise impassable, the men rode in the canoes, but more often they waded through water that was February-cold.
An officer described the situation in his diary:
“Set off to cross the plain … about four miles long all covered with water breast high. Here we expected some of our brave men must certainly perish, having frozen in the night, and so long fasting. Having no other resource but wading this plain, or rather lake, of waters, we plunged into it with courage … We thought to get to town that night, so plunged into the water, sometimes to the neck, for more than one league when we stopped on the next hill, … there being no dry land on any side for many leagues. Rain all this day; no provisions.”
Sixteen days after leaving Kaskaskia, on February 21st, Clark wrote in his own diary, “[We] came to a copse of timber called the Warrior’s Island. We were now in full view of the fort and town, not a shrub between us … Every man now feasted his eyes and forgot he had suffered anything.”
The British flag flew over the fort — a pair of two-story wooden buildings, a rectangular parade ground, and four smaller buildings, all protected by a wooden palisade.
The next day, the company crossed the remaining water and reached the land occupied by the fort. Clark wrote that many of his men “would reach the shore, and fall with their bodies half in the water.” Nevertheless, under his leadership they rallied and attacked.
The British had assumed no one could, or would, do what Clark and his men were doing, and they only learned they were under attack when Clark’s soldiers opened fire. Looking out from their fort, they saw what appeared to be a substantial force of attackers, because Clark had issued extra flags to his troops and maneuvered them to give the impression of an army of five hundred men.
Accurate long-rifle fire from the experienced woodsmen in Clark’s force dispatched the gunners manning the fort’s cannon. He then ordered his men to begin tunneling toward the fort from the nearby river bank. The British commander knew this would lead to explosives under the fort’s walls, and he called for negotiations.
Clark insisted on unconditional surrender, and he emphasized his demand by executing five allies of the British. These were Native American warriors who, in Clark’s view, were guilty of killing innocent settlers during raids. At 10:00 AM on Thursday, February 25, 1779, the British surrendered.
It turned out that when the British abandoned the fort, they also abandoned their claim to the Old Northwest Territory, a concession that nearly doubled the size of the original thirteen colonies. The victory earned Clark public acclaim and the title, “Conqueror of the Old Northwest.”
At the time of his victory, George Rogers Clark was not yet thirty. He found no comparable challenge in his future. Within ten years he was forced out of the military, accused of being drunk on duty.
For much of the rest of his life, he struggled to no good effect. He took part in two ill-advised, and failed, conspiracies that sought to free the Mississippi River from Spanish control, even as his younger brother gained fame as the Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Never fully reimbursed for the military expenses he incurred in the campaign against Fort Sackville, he suffered in poverty and had to hide from creditors. He lived his final years in obscurity, needing the care of family members just to survive.
It is the story of a man confused about what to do with his life, and unable to do it well.
And yet …
When George Rogers Clark stood with his men on a water-logged bit of land, exhausted after more than two weeks of marching, wading, and freezing, with the British-held fort in view, he knew what to do.
“Whispered to those near me to do as I did, immediately put some water in my hand, poured on powder, blackened my face, gave a warwhoop and marched into the water, without saying a word. The party gazed and fell in, one after another, without saying a word.”
Perhaps some people aren’t meant for ordinary life.
* * *
You can visit the site of Fort Sackville and George Rogers Clark’s exploit. It is in Vincennes, Indiana, on the grounds of the George Rogers Clark Memorial, a National Historic Park. The park is next to the Lincoln Memorial Bridge where Route 50 once crossed the Wabash River, before it was rerouted to a bypass around Vincennes.
George Rogers Clark National Historic Park
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The painting at the top of the page is an illustration of George Rogers Clark’s march to Vincennes in the American Revolutionary War, 1779. The original was painted by Frederick Coffay Yohn (1875–1933). It appeared as an illustration in the book “The Hero of Vincennes: The Story of George Rogers Clark,” by Lowell Thomas, 1929. It is in the public domain.
The photo of George Rogers Clark National Historic Park at the bottom of the page is by the author.
This house in Vincennes, Indiana, was part of an estate called Grouseland. It was built by William Henry Harrison as his home when he was governor of the Indiana Territory. He was a member of the Whig political party with broad experience in both politics and the military, and he was elected president of the United States, despite a campaign by opposing Democrats asserting he would rather “sit in his log cabin drinking hard cider.”
As you can see, he didn’t live in a log cabin, but his own party embraced the idea that he was a man of the people. They made Harrison the Tippecanoe of the campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” He had earned the nickname when, in 1811, he led a force that defeated the Native American chief Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe.
He became the ninth president of the U.S. in 1840, but his time in office didn’t last long. He died only thirty days after his election.
What happened? There are theories …
The day of his inauguration as president was cold and wet, but to prove he really was a man of the people, Harrison refused to wear either coat or hat as he he rode horseback to the outdoor ceremony. He then read an inaugural address that lasted nearly two hours, despite having been edited to reduce its length. These actions have long been felt to be the cause of his death.
But …
Harrison followed up the inauguration by getting back on his horse to ride in the inaugural parade. He then attended three inaugural balls, and he was hardy enough to survive all that. Three weeks later, however, he apparently contracted pneumonia. It worsened and he died, despite (or because of) being treated with opium, castor oil, leeches, and Virginia snakeweed. As a result, his running mate and vice president, John Tyler, became the tenth president of the United States.
But …
A 2014 investigation of Harrison’s death concluded that he didn’t die of pneumonia, after all. Instead, this investigation found he had had a form of typhoid fever, caused by the location of the White House. At the time, it was near a dump filled with sewage.
***
That isn’t the only story involving Vincennes and presidents. It turned out that William Henry was the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, who became the 23rd president of the United States.
And here’s another one:
Sarah Knox Taylor was born in 1814, two blocks from Grouseland. She was the daughter of a man named Zachary Taylor, and at age 21 in 1835, she married a lieutenant in the U.S. Army named Jefferson Davis.
Unfortunately, Sarah died within six months of her marriage. By doing so, however, she avoided a major conflict of interest.
In 1849, Sarah’s father, Zachary, became the twelfth president of the United States of America. Twelve years later, at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the man who used to be her husband, Jefferson Davis, became the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
From the Indiana border on the east to the Mississippi River and St. Louis on the west, Route 50 in Illinois passes over 164 miles of rich, fertile earth.
There are things that grow in that earth:
And as time passes, things return to that earth:
Route 50 also changes over time:
Remnants of an earlier Route 50 parallel the current road.
Specifically, imagine you’re an albino squirrel with pure white fur and pink eyes with blue irises. Where would you want to live?
Forget common benefits such as nuts and trees. As a white squirrel, you’re clearly entitled to preferential treatment, and you will certainly want:
Local humans who are encouraged to feed white squirrels.
A city clerk who bottle-feeds baby squirrels that fall out of trees.
Drivers who are required to yield the right of way to white squirrels.
A five hundred dollar fine for running over a white squirrel.
Cats and dogs that are not allowed to run free, so they can’t chomp an unwary squirrel.
Humans who are not allowed to transport white squirrels away from the local area, preventing them from tragically breaking up squirrel families.
Members of the local constabulary who are so squirrel-friendly they have pictures of white squirrels sewn on their uniforms.
A town that offers tourists white chocolate squirrel suckers.
If your town meets all eight requirements, then congratulations, you lucky white squirrel! You live in Olney, Illinois.
Olney is a town of about 8,500 human residents on Highway 50 in southeast Illinois. The first Europeans settled in the Olney area in 1841, living in a log cabin that served as a stop on the stagecoach route between St. Louis and Vincennes, Indiana.
The first white squirrels settled in Olney in 1902. Exactly who discovered them is in dispute, but all agree that the First Squirrels were housed in the window of a saloon, apparently as an advertising ploy. Those squirrels, or their descendants, were released in 1910 when the Illinois legislature outlawed the confinement of wildlife. In fact, the exact spot of the historic squirrel release is known — 802 North Silver Street — but, sadly for tourists, the house previously at that address has since been torn down.
To see an Olney white squirrel, it’s best to head for Olney’s City Park. I did, and when I got there a passing power-walker, noting my California license plates, said, “You’re here for the white squirrels, right?” Before long, I saw one. Used to celebrity, the squirrel obligingly posed for the picture at the top of this page.
If you can’t make it to City Park, there’s the rumor of a DVD containing white squirrel photos and a song, “The White Squirrels of Olney,” but it may only be a rumor.
And if you’re determined to see a real white squirrel, you should be aware that there are alleged impostors out there — impostors, at least, from Olney’s point of view. Kenton, TN, Marionville, MO, Brevard, NC, and Exeter, Ontario, all claim to be the true home of white squirrels. Each town lays out its case on the Internet.
Meanwhile, keep your focus on the end of October. That’s when Olney conducts its annual white-squirrel census. Results are awaited with some anxiety, because the color of white squirrels makes them all too visible to predators, which is why Olney’s cats and dogs are not free to roam. Lately, census takers have found about 150 white squirrels. There’s no word on the number of other squirrels in town, or how they feel about Olney’s preferential policies toward their more famous relations.
On September 24, 1960, every licensed driver in Flora, Illinois, received a brand new, white, 1961 Ford to drive for a week.
Ford delivered more than 1,000 white cars to Flora, selected because at the time it was near the center of the United States population. It was a marketing ploy, but the residents of Flora embraced it, and for that week Flora was known as Ford Town, U.S.A. The top photo shows a scene in Flora during Ford week.
At the end of the week, Flora residents had the option of purchasing their Fords for $1,800. Twelve did. The last surviving Ford Town U.S.A. car was driven by its Flora owner, a Mrs. Beard, for nineteen years, until September 1979.
The residents of Flora pick up their cars
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The photos on this page may have originally appeared in an issue of Time magazine. They are believed to be now in the public domain.
William Jennings Bryan was born in this house in Salem, Illinois, on March 19, 1860.
He ran for president three times, in 1896, 1900, and 1908, losing twice to William McKinley and once to William Howard Taft. Woodrow Wilson appointed him Secretary of State in 1913, but Bryan resigned in 1915 because he opposed U.S. participation in World War I.
Bryan remained active in national matters for the rest of his life, and he helped pass the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1920. This amendment was a comprehensive prohibition of alcoholic beverages, outlawing their production, importation, transportation, and sale. The resulting period, known as Prohibition, lasted until 1933, when the 21st Amendment ended it.
Bryan also rejected the idea of evolution, arguing that it undermined the moral instruction provided by religion. He was a lawyer, and in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” he prosecuted a substitute biology teacher. The teacher, named Scopes, was accused of teaching that mankind descended from “lower life forms.” This was a violation of a Tennessee law. Clarence Darrow defended the teacher in the trial, but Bryan won the verdict. The play and movie, Inherit the Wind, dramatized the trial.
Bryan’s support of prohibition and opposition to evolution may make him seem out of step with more modern thought, but consider some of his other positions: He advocated for an eight-hour work day, the right to strike, and a minimum wage, along with women’s right to vote. He also called for public financing of political campaigns, agricultural subsidies, ending legal gender discrimination, and a guaranteed living wage.
William Jennings Bryan was renowned as an effective speaker, and this skill kept him in the public eye from 1890, when he was elected to the House of Representatives, until his death in 1925. He made his most famous speech in 1896 to the Democratic National Convention, in which he attacked the “Cross of Gold,” decrying the gold standard and advocating for increased use of silver coins. When the Democrats responded by nominating Bryan as their candidate for president, he became the youngest person to ever receive an electoral vote for the office.
He died in his sleep on July 26, 1925, a few days after the conclusion of the Scopes trial. The trial is not considered to have caused his death.
Route 50 passes Carlyle Lake, the largest lake wholly within the state of Illinois, fifty miles east of St. Louis. The much larger Lake Michigan, with banks near Chicago in northern Illinois, touches on parts of other states.
A dam, shown above, created the lake in the 1960s by blocking the Kaskaskia River. It took several years for the river to fill the planned reservoir area and create today’s lake.
Long before the dam was built, an important road passed through the area. That road had once simply been a path through the prairie, blazed by Native Americans, but when settlers arrived, they used the path for delivery of one of their most important needs: salt.
In 1808, surveyors marked the route as a wagon road, to improve the delivery of salt and other supplies. They used horses to lay out part of that road — not men on horses, but horses, by themselves. Surveyors led a female horse a day’s distance away from her newly born colt. When they released her, the mare used her instincts to return to her foal. The surveyors followed the mare, noted her path, and the horse choices became part of the road.
People in the area called the new route the Goshen Road, because at first it ran from a pioneer settlement named Goshen to a salt works near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. It then followed the old Native American path toward newly settled communities. For a while, it was the most important route in what is now southern Illinois.
When the Goshen Road reached the Kaskaskia River, it couldn’t go around, because the river flows north to south for 325 miles, and wagons couldn’t ford the river after heavy rain. A small suspension bridge built in 1859, over 100 years before the nearby dam, solved the problem.
The nearby town of Carlyle, Illinois, named the bridge the General Dean Suspension Bridge, in honor of a resident who was taken prisoner during the Korean War. Shown in the photo above, the General Dean Bridge provided a major crossing of the Kaskaskia until 1920, when Route 50 bridged the river just downstream.
It may be hard to believe while walking across the short General Dean bridge, but the Kaskaskia is the second largest river system in Illinois, after the Illinois River. It drains over 5,700 square miles, from central Illinois to its mouth where it reaches the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi River forms the border between the states of Illinois, to the east, and Missouri, to the west, and near the junction of the Kaskaskia and the Mississippi, you’ll find the first capitol of Illinois, the town of Kaskaskia. In 1881, a flood diverted the Mississippi into a new channel, putting Kaskaskia the west of the river. So to get there you’ll have to go through Missouri, because the state of Missouri now surrounds the town of Kaskaskia, still part of Illinois.
In the 1990′s, Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, the main airport in this area of the midwest, was experiencing demand that stressed its capacity.
In response, St. Clair County in Illinois built a new airport east of St. Louis, shown in the photo above. It was intended to capture overflow business from Lambert Airport. This idea was fiercely opposed by almost everybody on the Missouri side of the border.
Soon, Lambert Airport began a major expansion, and, at almost the same time, American Airlines bought TWA, which was using Lambert as its hub. American closed the St. Louis hub in favor of Chicago. Suddenly, there was no capacity problem at Lambert, and no need for an overflow airport.
As a result, for years the terminal area at Mid-America looked like the photo below. No passengers, no luggage, no action at the check-in counters. What they did have, though, was piped-in music, playing eerily throughout the empty terminal.
Mid-America turned to providing services to neighboring Scott Air Force Base. From time to time a minor airline has offered a few flights to and from the airport. So far, none have lasted long.
