Column spurs memories (8/3/05)

You never know what’s going to prompt a response from readers.

Sometimes you write a piece expecting significant feedback and instead hear the sound of crickets chirping in the distance.

Other times, the phone starts ringing.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about trying to locate a long-abandoned angling road that used to run northwest across eastern Jay County from the Ohio line.

Even before I’d received my own paper at home I was getting comment on it.

Over the course of about ten days, I heard from Marvin Starr and Ron Lingo, both of whom live in the area the old road once cut through. I talked with Darrell Borders, pastor of the Westchester United Methodist Church and maybe the unofficial mayor of Westchester, who flew over the route with Gary Gibson, looking for traces of the road.

Crop coverage, of course, made that next to impossible. And Darrell remembered being told by Madonna Miller, a longtime expert on Indiana and Jay County history, that what was left of the road was most easily visible in winter after a light snow.

By e-mail, I heard from John Young, who also has a copy of the 1876 atlas map, and from former Jay resident Mike Votaw, whose parents farmed in Noble Township when he was a child.

Votaw told me the woods at the east end of his parents’ property ran at an angle where the old road would have been. “When farming this area, the ground was very compact and difficult to plow just adjacent to the angled woods,” he said via e-mail. “As kids we also found many arrow heads along the same stretch of land.”

Both of those points make sense. It was at one time a corduroy road and had originally been an Indian trail.

Janice Stucky of the Jay County Historical Society told me it used to be known as the Huntington Trail.

But of all the responses, the one that stood out most was from Fern G. Thomas Schmieman of Nampa, Idaho.

She wrote to say she was born in Jay County in 1923 on the family farm which was right along the old road. She moved from the county in 1941.

“My great-grandparents moved to the United States from Alsace and on May 20, 1837 they purchased 360 acres of land in Jay County,” she said. “This was approximately twenty-five years before the Homestead Act. The family oral history stated one dollar per acre was paid for it. It was bordered on the north by what was later referred to as the Westchester Road. A church, known during my childhood as the Westchester Evangelical United Brethren Church, stood on the northwest corner of the original farmland. Directly across the road to the west was the red brick one-room Westchester School.”

About 1850, the family (originally Stoltz, but later changing the spelling to Stolz) built a large house on the farm, facing the angling road. That house, on property now owned by Jeff Smith, has long since collapsed as has the barn.

For many years, the farm was owned by Max Thomas, Fern Schmieman’s brother. He died in March of 2004.

“When I was a child,” Mrs. Schmieman wrote, “the men in my family would always have to lift the plows and disks while doing farm work that necessitated crossing the old angling road. Nothing would penetrate the hardness of that road!

“I learned, with my brother’s help, to drive a Model T on that road. It had a nice slope going in a northwesterly fashion in front of the house and Max would park the car atop the rise and allow me to drive down towards Bear Creek. That is also where he would tell me to curl up in a tire and he would send me off down the hill. (Ah, to be that trusting again!)”

Mrs. Schmieman hasn’t been back to Jay County in about 50 years, saying it would be too emotionally difficult to revisit the old homestead.

But she added, “That place will always be met with fondness in my heart.”[[In-content Ad]]