Paul Minor

To the Editor: At 420 pounds, Phil Kreigh was “the biggest Democrat” in Indiana in March 1896.

The farmer apparently was north Franklin Township’s Democratic committee. Another source, recalling his tours with Barnum & Bailey Circus, cites his top weight at 775 pounds. He rests at Stilesville Cemetery. Politics was big in Stilesville back then. Governor Conrad Baker, a Republican, and U.S. Senator Thomas Hendricks, Democrat, convened their fifth “joint discussion” (a debate) in Stilesville in September 1868.

The Democratic convention for the local congressional district was held at Stilesville in August 1878. Being on the National Road then apparently had its advantages. Governor James “Blue Jeans” Williams addressed “the democratic yeomanry.”

Former U.S. district attorney and Congressman John Hanna spoke at a town jollification in October 1880.

California suffragist Nellie Holbrook and Nebraska’s Paul Vandervoort spoke at Stilesville’s political rally in October 1884. Vandervoort was a former commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Patriotism! Young ladies of Stilesville were complimented in the Indianapolis Journal in August 1863. Union soldiers pursuing “the traitors” in Putnam County stopped to rest at the town. “It was not known they were coming, but in less than an hour the patriotic ladies had prepared . . . an excellent and plentiful supper.”

Overwhelmed by the women’s “cordiality and grace,” the soldiers declared they were “’going for them’ as soon as the war is over.”

Crimes were outstanding. Forty were poisoned near Stilesville in June 1851 and doctors believed 29-30 would not recover, the Putnam County Sentinel reported.

“The person implicated as being accessory to this horrid deed is said to be an old woman anxious to get rid of some grand-children.”

She reportedly poisoned a barrel of flour meant for her intended victims, but it ended up being used by a family hosting a quilting party. The victims immediately began violently vomiting and exhibiting signs of poisoning.

The old woman was brought before a justice of the peace, but was released due to insufficient evidence.

A Stilesville snowball fight gone bad in February 1874 ended with knives drawn, and a boy of 11 stabbed another in the abdomen. He was jailed.

White Caps almost lynched a man implicated in his wife’s poisoning in early April 1888, but when he refused to confess, the mob cut him down and ordered him to leave the county by morning.

“But for his pugnacity,” O.A. Hume of Stilesville would have fallen victim to footpads on South Illinois Street, Indianapolis, in November 1874. In other words, on-foot highwaymen picked the wrong guy to rob.

In March 1877, two doctors and another fellow were charged with digging up a just-buried woman from a Greencastle cemetery, hiding it in a stable near town and then taking it to Stilesville, “or vicinity,” where they dissected the remains. They were released on $200 bail until the circuit court’s next term. One of at least five town doctors, Allen K. Heavenridge practiced from the mid-1870s until at least 1899. The Rush Medical School graduate died in 1902, age 72, and rests at Stilesville Cemetery. I don’t know whether he or the others dug up bodies. Heavenridge was vice president of the planned 150-mile Indianapolis, Eel River and Southwestern Railroad, intended to serve small towns and “running through the best coal fields of Indiana.” He promoted the railroad at Belleville in February 1882 and it was said the company’s $2 million in capital stock “foreshadows success.”

The failed plan would have been “of inestimable value to those beautiful, but tomblike, villages.”

Stilesville was considered “a quiet village” in comparison to “the commercial town” of Coatesville in 1883.

That tiny Franklin Township town was expecting “a boom in the near future” in mid- 1885, waiting “patiently for the development of the evolvement.”

One boom already had occurred. Stilesville’s Martha Cooper won 25 yards of carpet at Danville’s July 4, 1887, celebration in a contest for the matron who could “show up” with the most kids under 21. The wife of Methodist Episcopal minister Shelby Cooper claimed 13 children ranging from 24 to three-years-old, with 12 still at home, but I wonder whether she’d overlooked one, because more than one source cites 15, with one dying in infancy.

Paul Miner Lizton ______________________________________________________________________