Welcome. My name is Eleanor Whitcomb, and for the past nineteen years I have served as the volunteer county historian for Whitcomb County. Yes, the name is a family one; my husband's great-great-grandfather was among the first settlers, though I should say at once that the county was named for a different Whitcomb entirely, a territorial judge nobody in the family ever met. People assume otherwise and I have given up correcting them.

The historical society keeps a room on the second floor of the public library, open Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, where we have the plat books, the newspaper files on microfilm, about four thousand photographs, and a great many boxes we have not yet gotten to. This page is my attempt to put the outline of the county's story somewhere that a schoolchild with a report due, or a grandchild in another state looking for a great-aunt, might find it. It is a beginning, not an ending. I add to it as time allows.

I have tried to be careful. Where the record is thin, I say so, and I would rather leave a question open than answer it with a guess. If you have letters, photographs, or memories of the county, I would be glad to hear from you.

Whitcomb County was organized by act of the legislature in the winter of 1849, carved from the eastern third of a larger county that had grown too populous to govern from a single seat. The land is river hills: the Ashby River runs the length of the county from northeast to southwest, with high limestone bluffs on the west bank and broad bottomland on the east. The first settlers, mostly from Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania by way of Ohio, had been arriving since the 1820s, and by 1849 there were perhaps 2,300 people in what became the county, farming the bottoms and running a handful of mills on the creeks.

The county seat was placed at Whitcomb, then a village of forty families on a bend of the Ashby, over the objections of Rowley's Landing downriver, which was larger and had the ferry. The commissioners chose Whitcomb because it sat nearer the center of the county and, according to a letter in our files, because the Rowley's Landing delegation "arrived in a condition unsuited to argument." The town of Rowley's Landing never forgave the decision, and as you will read below, it did not survive it.

The first county officers were elected in April 1849. The first courthouse was a two-room log building. The first recorded marriage, the first deed, and the first tax list all date from that summer, and we have all three.

The first courthouse (1850-1868) was the log building mentioned above, put up by subscription at the northwest corner of the square. Court was held on the ground floor and the county clerk lived upstairs. It was, by every surviving account, cold.

The second courthouse (1868-1911) was a handsome two-story brick building with a cupola and a clock that never kept time, built after the Civil War for $18,400. It stood in the center of the square where the present courthouse stands. Most of the photographs in our collection from the 1870s through 1910 show it in the background of something else: a parade, a horse sale, a Fourth of July crowd.

The fire. On the night of February 3, 1911, a stove in the recorder's office set fire to the second courthouse. The volunteer company fought it in a hard freeze; the hoses froze, and the building was a shell by morning. The great loss was the records. The deed books and court records in the clerk's iron vault survived, scorched but legible, and they are the reason anyone can still trace a property title in this county. The recorder's own office, however, was where the fire started, and the marriage records, the probate files and most of the early tax lists from 1849 to 1911 were lost. Every genealogist who writes to me runs into that gap sooner or later, and I am sorry to say there is no way around it. We have reconstructed some of it from newspaper notices and church registers.

The third courthouse (1913-present) is the limestone building on the square today, with the columns and the copper dome, dedicated on July 4, 1913. The stone was quarried in the county. It has had a new roof, new wiring twice, and an elevator, but the courtroom is as it was, and the clock, I am pleased to report, keeps time.

The railroad reached Whitcomb in October 1871, and it changed everything. Before the railroad, the county's grain, hogs and lumber went out by flatboat and later by steamboat on the Ashby, which was navigable only in high water and only as far as Rowley's Landing. After the railroad, they went out every day, in every season, from the depot at the foot of Depot Street, and the county's population doubled in twenty years.

The line came through Whitcomb, Fairmount and Coalton, and it did not come through Rowley's Landing or New Bremen, and that single fact explains more of the county's map than anything else I could tell you. Towns on the line grew. Towns off the line died. It was that simple and that unforgiving.

Passenger service ended in 1954. Freight still runs, two or three trains a day, and the 1871 depot, after some years as a feed store, is now the historical society's museum, open Saturdays from May to October. The waiting-room benches are original. The stationmaster's telegraph key is on the desk where it always was.

The county once had eleven post offices. It now has four. Here are three of the places that are gone. I visit each of them at least once a year, and I would encourage you to, though please ask the landowners first.

Rowley's Landing. The ferry town, the county's largest settlement in 1849, with two hotels, a distillery and a newspaper. It lost the county seat in 1849 and the railroad in 1871, and the river took the rest: the 1883 flood carried off the wharf, and by 1900 the post office had closed. Today there is a gravel boat ramp, a historical marker the society put up in 1976, and, if you know where to look in the woods above the ramp, the foundation stones of the Rowley House hotel. The cemetery is on the hill and is still tended by the county.

New Bremen. A German colony laid out in 1855 by a land company that promised a town, a church and a school on the ridge road. About thirty families came. The soil on the ridge was thin, the water was bad, and the land company went bankrupt in the Panic of 1857. Most of the families moved into Whitcomb and Fairmount, where their descendants still are. The church was finished and stood until 1931. The cemetery remains, with inscriptions in German, and it is one of the loveliest quiet places in the county.

Coalton. A mining town on the railroad, founded 1882 when a seam of coal was opened in the hills east of Fairmount. At its height, around 1910, it had perhaps 900 people, a company store, a school and two churches, and a reputation. The mine closed in 1924, the company houses were sold off and moved or torn down, and the post office closed in 1938. The tipple foundations are still there, and so is the school, which is a private home now. We have an oral history project on Coalton that we began in 1984, when a number of people who had grown up there were still with us. It runs to forty-one taped interviews, and it is the thing I am proudest of.

Anyone in the county over the age of seventy will tell you about January 1937, and you should let them. It rained for most of the month, on ground that was already frozen and then already soaked, and the Ashby rose higher than it had ever been recorded and stayed there for two weeks. The bottomland east of the river went under entirely. In Whitcomb, water stood four feet deep on Depot Street and lapped the bottom step of the courthouse. Fairmount, on higher ground, took in several hundred people from the bottoms, and the high school gymnasium was a dormitory until March.

The county lost two people, a great many animals, most of the winter's corn and hay, and every bridge on the river but the railroad bridge. What it did not lose is worth saying too: the town of Whitcomb organized itself within a day, the churches fed everyone, and the men who ran boats through the bottoms pulling families off rooftops were, in most cases, men who had lost their own farms the day before. The society has a scrapbook kept by a Fairmount schoolteacher that winter, with a page for every day, and it is the single most-requested item in our collection.

The levee on the east bank was built by the federal government between 1939 and 1941, and it has held. The high-water mark from 1937 is cut into the limestone at the corner of the courthouse, about the height of a tall man's shoulder. Go and look at it. It makes the story real in a way that words do not.

The county turns one hundred fifty this year, and we intend to make a proper fuss. The celebration is on the courthouse square in Whitcomb, Saturday and Sunday, October 16 and 17. The program, as the committee has it now:

• Saturday 10 a.m. Parade, with the high school band, the fire company's 1938 pumper (bought after the flood), antique tractors, and every organization in the county that owns a banner.
• Saturday noon to 5. Historical society exhibit in the courthouse rotunda: the 1849 tax list, the 1911 fire photographs, the 1937 scrapbook, and the Coalton oral history tapes on a listening station. I will be there all day and will happily talk your ear off.
• Saturday 2 p.m. Old settlers' reunion and pie social on the lawn. Descendants of the 1849 families are asked to sign the register.
• Saturday 7 p.m. Community band concert and the reading of the 1849 organizing act from the courthouse steps, as it was read in 1949 at the centennial.
• Sunday 2 p.m. Sealing of the time capsule, to be opened at the bicentennial in 2049. The capsule will hold this year's newspapers, a 1999 telephone book, photographs of every schoolroom in the county, letters from the fourth-grade classes to the fourth graders of 2049, a Whitcomb County Fair ribbon, and a printed copy of this very page, because I suspect the computer files will not be readable by then and paper has a better record.

If you have something small that belongs in the capsule, write to me before October 10. We have a box eighteen inches on a side and it is filling fast.

Early this year, looking for other people doing what I do, I found more home pages here on GeoCities.us about local history, family history, collections and the way things used to be than I could keep track of, and I started a WebRing to tie them together. It is called the Time Capsule WebRing, it has thirteen member sites as of this month, and you can read about it, see the whole list, and find out how to join on the Time Capsule WebRing hub page. The ring box at the bottom of this page will take you to the next site in the ring.

Related pages I recommend, on and off the ring: Millbrook Township Historical Society, Love Letters from the War, Korea, 1952: A Rifleman's Notebook, and Postcards from the 1950s.