A Marker on Huff Creek

The Marker on Huff Creek is just a small stone, plain, with hand-carved letters proclaiming its message. It can be viewed at eye level from Venus Road, the appropriately named pioneer trail that became a country thoroughfare. The words inscribed on the marker have stood through the years as a testament to an event that occurred on this spot in 1892. In April of that year, a murder took place here. And while the scandalous event captured the attention of the locals for quite some time, the crime was never officially solved. Over the years, documentation of the killing was relegated to ink on the pages of the local newspaper, preserved in the archives of local history -- still there to be discovered and read by those whose curiosity is piqued by the nearly obscured words of the marker. The words inscribed on this little stone monument are: “C.W. Doerr Murdered at this place April 28, 1892.”

The marker stands just six feet from Venus Road, on a little knoll on the edge of property that once was the location of the McDonald School. From this spot, one can look due east over the sparkling Huff Creek unto the beautiful hills of “the Knobs” just a mile from town. Once covered with a virgin hardwood forest of maple, chestnut, walnut, hickory, ash, beech, and birch, these hills came alive with a kaleidoscope of unbelievable color every autumn. Once this show of color dissolved into a layer of crumpled leaves on the hills, the scene became an etching of black trunks and branches against a background of winter bleakness. Spring brought a hazy blush of pale green to the hills that would once again turn into a lush, verdant canopy in summer. Regardless of the season, even today, a hundred years after that virgin forest was harvested and second growth forest has once again blanketed the hills, it is easy to imagine what the area looked like in the days of the event commemorated by the marker. Little has changed in the landscape of the Huff Creek valley situated between town and the Knobs. A few homes have been built in the valley, and a few businesses have sprung up on the side nearest town. But the creek and rolling terrain of the valley are still much the same.

Looking out over this valley and to the surrounding knobs, the beauty captures the mind and inspires inquiries for those who would ponder earlier days here. Before the arrival of the settlers who would make this area into Jackson County, Indiana, in 1816, others traversed this land for a variety of reasons. Throughout the Mississippian Culture periods, from approximately 1000 A.D. until the arrival of Europeans, many Native American settlements developed in the region that would become Indiana. Several tribes of the Algonquin clan inhabited Indiana territory, and it is said that the Miami and Piankeshaw tribes controlled the area that is now Jackson County. This was a rich hunting ground for those natives who roved the area in those pre-documented times. Camping along the Muscatatuck and White Rivers and their branches, leaving signs to be discovered in the far-distant future, these early inhabitants would one day be the subjects of curious musings about those who once roamed these hills and valleys

Explorers, missionaries, and frontiersmen passed this way too. In 1673, French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and French-Canadian explorer Louis Joliet had confirmed the existence of a waterway through the wilderness -- the Mississippi River -- with many navigable tributaries--from the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Following the Mississippi, French fur traders and missionaries had traversed the American wilderness from their Canadian settlement of Quebec all the way southward to their Louisiana settlement of New Orleans. As they searched out the vast unknown wilderness of this continent, they established outposts along the way -- a scattered network of forts and trading posts that connected this wilderness with the French strongholds of civilization to the north and south. Just four miles from the Marker, Fort Vallonia, located near the White River, is one of those forts. It served as an early collection point for flatboats en route to New Orleans with pork, corn, and fruit, as well as hides and furs.

Decades of struggle between the French and English for dominance on the American continent finally culminated in English victory in the French and Indian War, affirmed in the signing of Treaty of Paris in 1763. France surrendered all its claims to the territories east of the Mississippi to England, retaining only New Orleans. England received a great, mostly unexplored frontier that its American colonists had previously been prohibited from entering because of conflict with the French and their Native American allies.

As these British treaties opened up land, thousands of pioneers came from the English colonies in the east, across the Appalachians, as far west as into eastern Tennessee. Adventurous frontiersmen, including the famed Daniel Boone, were among the first English Americans to explore the wilderness, blazing trails -- later to be given the name the Wilderness Road -- that others would soon follow.

Following the Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783, England ceded the territory north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians to the United States. The new Americans eagerly surveyed the great unmapped lands. The Continental Congress enacted the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 which created the Northwest Territory -- the region south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River -- as the first Territory of the new nation. The Ordinance of 1787 established guidelines for organizing the new Northwest Territory into states

In this 260,00 square-mile Terrotory, Indians outnumbered white settlers ten to one. But it would take fewer than twenty years to transform this frontier into an early semblance of the area we know as the Midwest.

The grand experiment of “The United States of America” has shown that, given land and freedom, people will carve out a place to create civilization and call “home.” Just one of many such places carved out of this quickly civilized frontier was a portion of Indiana which became known as Jackson County. In a few years, it would become the site of the events that would be commemorated by the Marker on Huff Creek.