Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor: North Salem, like every Hendricks County town, has endured calamity and sensation in its history.

In one of the town’s saddest tragedies, three 16-year-old girls made a fatal mistake on a cold January 1856 night and suffocated in bed after bringing a pot of burning charcoal to warm their sleeping chamber.

Come the morning they were discovered dead from asphyxiation. Christena Fleece of North Salem and Nancy Hunt were buried together at Fleece Cemetery. Catharine Ashby was buried in Montgomery County. Their deaths, widely reported, “cast a gloom over the entire neighborhood.” Among those mortally injured by the Sinker portable sawmill explosion at the 1869 State Fair was North Salem sawmill engineer William Pierson, who was “dangerously” scalded. He underwent treatment at the National Surgical Institute in Indianapolis and was sent to the home of friends, but took a sudden turn and died.

The explosion killed at least 30 – some never identified – and injured 50. The papers spared readers nothing in describing the carnage and mutilation at Morton Place, site of the fair back then. “Heads, arms and legs were found . . . several hundred feet away.”

William Lockhart of North Salem, 26, was House Doorkeeper at the Capitol when he contracted smallpox in February 1873 following a visit to the state’s Southern Penitentiary. He was immediately “removed to the Pest House” and soon died.

A senior at Northwestern Christian University (eventually Butler University), Lockhart planned a career in the ministry. A spire marks his final site at North Salem’s Fairview. An inscription says he’d served three years in Company H, 7th Indiana Infantry.

“A verdant youth,” North Salem’s Bufe Slusher thought he’d earn money driving folks at 10 cents a ride back and forth during the 1873 Indiana State Fair & Exposition. The innocent, waiting for his first fare, blocked the street, causing quite a stir. Finally, a policeman hopped in Bufe’s hack and told him to drive to the station house on Alabama Street.

Arriving, Bufe learned his fare had arrested him. He paid his bail, then demanded 10 cents, which was declined. Bufe resolved to secure payment in advance from “all fellows with brass buttons on their coats.”

A North Salem-area farmer named Sheets was shot and seriously wounded while working in his fields in September 1880, most likely for his role in “ferreting out a band of thieves who have been the terror of that neighborhood for more than a year past.”

A man sought for larceny in July 1884 at North Salem fled and a deputy accidentally shot him in the leg, intending just to scare him. Jailed, the man suffered “intense agony” from lockjaw, and a doctor gave him only a slight chance to recover.

The Saturday night “North Salem Riot” in October 1899 was started by “members of a Tennessee colony” who had only recently arrived in town. In a “desperate street fight,” Tennessean William “Shade” Mackey, who had “tried to run the town to suit himself,” was “quieted with a bullet through the head.” Druggist’s clerk William Ragan was expected to expire (but he didn’t), and many were injured. Mackey, a farmhand, had claimed two murders back home. Trouble had been “brewing” for some time, and the melee began when some of the Tennesseans, heavily armed, went looking for mischief in the store. Attempting to “quell the disturbance,” Ragan found himself being trampled and beaten, perhaps to death. He managed to pull two revolvers and started shooting.

Another account holds that Ragan, “noted for his fighting proclivities,” was called out and waved two large revolvers over his head. Days earlier, the local Murphy boys had challenged the Southerners to a duel.

Everyone drew their weapons and the battle began. “Women fainted” and men without guns looked for cover. More than 25 shots were fired.

In the aftermath, “the town is quiet, but the Tennesseans are vowing vengeance and the citizens are arming and organizing for an attack.”

Ragan, “a gambler and well known to the talent in Crawfordsville,” was charged with murder. It was the first murder trial since the notorious 1895 Hinshaw case in Belleville. In April 1901, Ragan was “released from further annoyance by the State,” after two hung jury trials in Danville.

Paul Miner Lizton

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