Dubois County Bicentennial

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Rothert General Store, Huntingburg

George P. Wagner Company, Jasper

County Celebrates 200th DUBOIS COUNTY

SETTLED AND BUILT BY IMMIGRANTS AND MIGRANTS.

By CANDY NEAL cneal@dcherald.com

H

appy 200th birthday to Dubois County. The county’s history is multifaceted, and includes many faces, the most dominant being German. However, the county’s original settlers were Scottish, according to County Historian Art Nordhoff, and came here from Kentucky and Virginia. Those settlers, the McDonalds, traveled along the Buffalo Trace, a worn path created by buffalo, to settle in what is now Portersville, in Boone Township. The William and Jane McDonald family settled in the area in 1801. “They were soon followed by others,” George R. Wilson wrote in his history book about Dubois County, “and built Fort McDonald, the strongest of all local forts ... as a protection against the Piankishaw Indians, for at that date the Indians were the probable owners of the land.” The land that makes up Dubois County was a part of Knox County, then was subdivided into Gibson and Pike counties. The Indiana Legislature decided in late 1817 that there were enough people and activity in the area to warrant a separate county with its own court. Wilson noted that “there were settlers along the White River, as well as southwest of the site of Ireland. A settlement had also been made near Haysville.” On Dec. 20, 1817, Indiana Gov. Jonathan Jennings, approved the legislative act to create Dubois County, stating that the decree would go into effect on Feb. 1, 1818. Dubois County was named after Tous-

Hochgesang Brickyard, Jasper

Betsy Ross Circle Flag Dedication, Huntingburg saint Dubois, the first person to own property in the present-day Dubois County, near Boone Township. Others migrated to the area and started purchasing land throughout the county, ultimately establishing the county’s 12 townships. A synopsis of the townships’ formation is on the next page. German immigrants began to arrive in the 1840s and 1850s. Many of those immigrants came at the encouragement of Father Joseph Kundek, who arrivedin 1838 and founded many of the Catholic churches in the county. “There were about a dozen German families here, but they couldn’t speak English,” Nordhoff said. Kundek came to help those families and to encourage others to move to the United States. As more Germans moved into Dubois County, the original pioneers started moving out, Wilson noted, going to other states. But other cultures have a presence in Dubois County’s history as well. When people migrated into the area,

they brought slaves with them, Nordhoff said. Ultimately, Indiana was a free state; in the 1800s prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, states declared whether they would be a slave state or a free state. A Colored Freedom Settlement was located on land between Huntingburg and Ferdinand. According to information at the Dubois County Museum, Emanuel Pinkston Sr., a free man, married a slave woman named Permilia, bought her freedom and the freedom of a son, and moved north, ultimately arriving in Dubois County. Emanuel bought 80 acres of land near what is now the Huntingburg Conservation Club and built a home. In 1857, he bought another 40 acres, and then another 40 acres in 1870, and then 20 more acres in 1871. This land comprised the settlement. Emmanuel and Permilia had children, and one of their grandchildren, Millie, married Ben Hagen, who came from Spencer County. Ben and Millie’s daughter, Ida P. Hagen, became postmistress of

Frank’s Saloon, Ferdinand

The Herald ■ YO U R C O M M U N I T Y N E W S PA P E R S I N C E 1 8 9 5 DUBOISCOUNTYHERALD.COM

DUBOIS COUNTY, INDIANA

MONDAY, JULY 16, 2018 SECTION B

the Ferdinand Post Office, a pharmacist and fluent in German. The land on which the settlement sat is now privately owned. A cemetery sits on the property; several of the AfricanAmerican pioneers were laid to rest there. The cemetery is maintained by the township trustee. Another notable change in the county’s population was the migration of Hispanics from various Central American countries. The migration came from the south, Nordhoff said, evident by the influx of Latinos in Dale, and then Huntingburg, reaching Jasper. Looking at marriage records for Dubois County, a few Hispanic people were in the county in the mid- and late 1980s. But the explosion occurred in the 1990s, with many marriages being listed in the books. In the beginning, it was Hispanic people marrying Anglo residents. But by the 2000s, that changed. Most marriages were of Hispanic people marrying other Hispanics from the same or different countries. U.S. Census tallies also show a steady increase in the population. In 1990, the Hispanic or Latino population in Dubois County stood at 244 people. In 2000, that number increased to 1,103. In 2010, to 2,521. For 2016, the most current year the Census has a breakdown by race, the total stands at 2,831. The current community is still dominated with Anglo people of German descent. But it’s not unusual to see a mixture of cultures out and about in the county — Hispanic, African, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern. The migration of different cultures that created Dubois County continues.


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