Hindostan Falls, Indiana
Encyclopedia
Hindostan Falls is a ghost town
in Center Township
, Martin County
, Indiana
.
Hindostan was founded at the falls of the East Fork of the White River
in 1816. The settlement sat along the original stagecoach route between New Albany
and Vincennes
and was one of the only roads in the new state of Indiana
, which had been a territory until 1816. By 1820, it was the largest community in what was then still Daviess County
and the most promising town on the White River.
The town was named “Hindostan" by a soldier, Captain Caleb Fellows, an English immigrant who had served with the British East India Company in India before he came to the United States and invested in land along the still raw Indiana frontier. “Things now looked so bright for a fortune,” he said, “‘let it be Hindostan’.”
By 1820, about 1,200 people lived in the new town, making it one of the largest settlements in frontier Indiana. (The population of nearby Louisville, Kentucky
, in 1810 was only about 1,300.) Most of the settlers came from New England and Kentucky, but since few of them were farmers and many were adventurers or merchants from the East, it was not uncommon to see them living on houseboats on the White River.
The surge of population toward new land on the Indiana and Illinois frontiers, as well as Hindostan's location along the stagecoach route, meant that it was constantly open to carriers of disease. This would eventually contribute to the destruction of the town.
Hindostan’s founders laid out 355 lots, a testament to their ambition. A ferry, saw mill and grist mill on the river were run by a New Yorker named Frederick Sholts (or Schultz). (The town of Shoals, near Hindostan, was named after this family). A traveler's account written on July 4, 1816, mentioned “Shult’s” tavern, run by a proprietor “latterly from Seneca County, in New York,” who “has adopted the eastern mode of clearing land and at once lays it open to the day,” probably indicating that Sholts carried out large-scale clear-cuts of timber rather than farming in small open patches in the woods in the manner traditional to farmers from the upland South, who began to move into southern Indiana around this time and shape its culture. The woods around Hindostan in 1820 were dense, deciduous old growth forests, almost all of it now destroyed. Morris Birkbeck
, an English Quaker farmer traveling through Indiana in 1817 en route to the Illinois prairie, wrote of his passage through the forest between Paoli
and Hindostan: “This beautiful country continues as far as Schultz's Tavern, on White river, thirty-six miles east of Vincennes. Most of this hilly district is unentered, and remains open to the public at two dollars an acre.”
Reminiscing forty years later in 1859, a local named Thomas M. Clarke recalled: “Col. Sholts had put up a large hotel, and the land company erected a grist and saw mill. Houses went up as by magic. The highest wages were given to all who wanted to work, and every article of produce, game, or marketing was in demand. There was a large emigration from the East and among them men and women of the highest attainments and most polished manners."
Keel boats on the river transported bread to Hindostan, but meat from the surrounding forest (including bear meat) was abundant and the town exported corn, bacon and "Hindostan oil stone.” Quarries near the town site were mined for whetstone
, which was shipped downstream as far as New Orleans. A whetstone factory stood in the town and was known as “The Hindostan Whit.” Many of the solid antebellum gravestones that dot parts of southern Indiana and have outlasted many stones carved after the Civil War were made from the whetstone quarried around Hindostan in eastern Martin County and western Orange County, Indiana
. Though there are a few whetstone markers in the two remaining pioneer cemeteries in Hindostan, these were carved in the 1840s, after the town disappeared.
Merriam Brown Wise, a female pioneer from Lexington, Kentucky
who moved to Indiana in 1818, recalled in 1872 that instead of immediately building cabins, some new settlers in Hindostan “were obliged to occupy their boats for houses, as they came by water... General William Henry Harrison
, when on his way to Vincennes, took tea with us, on a dry goods box, and enjoyed it as much as if he had been in a palace. At that time a table was a scarce article. We were obliged to send twenty-one miles to get one.” One year later, English traveler William Faux wrote: “Breakfasted at the infant ville Hindostan, on the falls of the White River, a broad crystal stream. The baby ville is flourishing, much building is in progress, and promises to become a pleasant, healthy town before I see it again.”
A laughing contest took place in Hindostan around 1820. As a local historian wrote, "John Smith, of laughing notoriety, settled where Nicholas Cussick now lives (1873), in section one, township two north, range five west. It is told of him that upon meeting a Kentuckian at Hindostan, a wager was made as to who could laugh the longer. After an hour or more of a 'set to', lying down, rolling over amid a large laughing crowd, witnessing the trial, the Kentuckian gave up. Smith said to him, 'I had only begun to smile.' Smith had a large family. All left Hindostan but one daughter."
Elected to the Indiana state senate in 1819, tavern keeper Frederick Sholts proposed that on the basis of Hindostan’s prosperity, a new county (Martin County) should be “struck off” from Daviess County. Vowing to build a courthouse, Sholts and other fellow “proprietors” were “making a City of Hindostan and to give it prominence they must have a new county.” Hindostan was the first Martin County seat.
In the summer of 1820, an epidemic of yellow fever
or cholera
(perhaps a combination of both) broke out in Hindostan. Water- and insect-borne illnesses were the bane of many towns on the Midwestern frontier. Situated along rivers for the purpose of easy transportation, towns were often built on flood plains that bred insects in huge numbers. The ferocity of the epidemic that struck Hindostan, however, was unusual. The exact nature of the disease has not been identified. Some accounts report that it was smallpox, though a yellow fever epidemic struck Vincennes in 1820.
"The sickness caught the settlers in their log cabins and shanties,” says one county historian, “and the forest [lay] unbroken around them. They were unacclimated.” Thomas M. Clarke remembered, “In the fall [of 1820] there came a fever or pestilence that was more universal in its attacks and more virulent, when seated, than any scourge I ever knew, or, I think, ever occurred in Indiana.” Whole families died together and their houses were burned in their wake to prevent the spread of the “plague.” Many of the townspeople were buried in a mass grave, which may hold several hundred bodies (its exact location is unmarked). Numerous accounts claim that the only man in town not at least weakened by the illness was Rufus Brown. Many died, “but many became disheartened and found ways to leave.”
By 1824, less than half the population remained in the town, though many seem to have stayed in the area. "Much of their energy and means were gone,” and they had not yet built the county courthouse that Frederick Sholts had promised to build. “Debts accumulated, property went down, the [land] company broke,” and although he survived the disease, Sholts (who was called “a pleasant genial man... [who] enjoyed a joke equal to any man”) saw his political career in the Indiana Senate vanish.
Sholts was the chief defendant in July 1822 when the county filed a $20,000 law suit against the “proprietors of Hindostan” for failure to build the courthouse. In 1824, the county gave him $900 to build a jail, then sued him in 1826, also for failure to build. Fifty years later, a Martin County writer remarked that “his family is not known here now.”
An economic depression around 1820 worked alongside the epidemic to begin the depopulation of the town. Many families who had moved into the area had bought their land on credit from land speculators. When the economic crisis hit, some families simply defaulted and fled the area. It is possible that Hindostan lost nearly as many residents to the economic depression as to sickness. Residents who remained were unable to pay their taxes and county and local creditors foreclosed on their property.
An interesting piece of local folklore emerged from these hard times. According to rumor, a county tax collector had several thousand dollars of revenue in his possession when he fell ill during the epidemic. He was thought to have buried the money (gold and silver coins) in an iron pot for sake-keeping until the illness passed. When he died, the money's location was lost forever.
James D. Sholts was postmaster at Hindostan in August 1828. Faced with the gradual desertion of the town, the post office was discontinued on December 29, 1830. The once prosperous “baby ville” at Hindostan Falls died out and eventually became farmland. Passing by the site in 1840, John Parsons, a traveler from Petersburg, Virginia, wrote in his diary: "now all that is left of Hindostan is a few crumbling houses by the river, which ripples on as gayly as ever, over its marble white bed of sand and stone. A village fallen to decay is always a melancholy sight, but how much more melancholy in these Western woods, where all else is young and flourishing, and where age and decay would seem to have no part."
Ferries still ran on the White River at Hindostan Falls into the 1840s, and the mills were in operation until just before the Civil War. Domestic disputes were recorded at Hindostan in 1830, and several assaults and batteries were recorded.
In 1828, the county seat was relocated to Mt. Pleasant, several miles away. This town site was then abandoned by most of its residents in 1853 for a nearby site, now called Loogootee, four miles from Hindostan. The county seat, however, was moved to Trinity Springs, a health spa, then to Shoals in 1871. Shoals today has a population of 1,200, which puts it at about the size of Hindostan during its short prime.
Ghost town
A ghost town is an abandoned town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, or nuclear disasters...
in Center Township
Center Township, Martin County, Indiana
Center Township is one of six townships in Martin County, Indiana, USA. As of the 2000 census, its population was 1,734.-Geography:According to the United States Census Bureau, Center Township covers an area of ; of this, is land and is water.-Unincorporated towns:* Dover Hill at * Hindostan...
, Martin County
Martin County, Indiana
As of the census of 2000, there were 10,369 people, 4,183 households, and 2,877 families residing in the county. The population density was 31 people per square mile . There were 4,729 housing units at an average density of 14 per square mile...
, Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
.
Founding and early history
Hindostan was founded at the falls of the East Fork of the White River
White River (Indiana)
The White River is a two-forked river that flows through central and southern Indiana and is the main tributary to the Wabash River. Via the west fork, considered to be the main stem of the river by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the White River is long.-West Fork:The West Fork, long, is...
in 1816. The settlement sat along the original stagecoach route between New Albany
New Albany
New Albany is the name of several places in the United States of America:*New Albany, Indiana*New Albany, Kansas*New Albany, Mississippi*New Albany, Ohio*New Albany, Pennsylvania*New Albany High School *New Albany High School...
and Vincennes
Vincennes
Vincennes is a commune in the Val-de-Marne department in the eastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris. It is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Europe.-History:...
and was one of the only roads in the new state of Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
, which had been a territory until 1816. By 1820, it was the largest community in what was then still Daviess County
Daviess County
Daviess County is the name of several counties in the United States :* Daviess County, Indiana* Daviess County, Kentucky* Daviess County, Missouri...
and the most promising town on the White River.
The town was named “Hindostan" by a soldier, Captain Caleb Fellows, an English immigrant who had served with the British East India Company in India before he came to the United States and invested in land along the still raw Indiana frontier. “Things now looked so bright for a fortune,” he said, “‘let it be Hindostan’.”
By 1820, about 1,200 people lived in the new town, making it one of the largest settlements in frontier Indiana. (The population of nearby Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...
, in 1810 was only about 1,300.) Most of the settlers came from New England and Kentucky, but since few of them were farmers and many were adventurers or merchants from the East, it was not uncommon to see them living on houseboats on the White River.
The surge of population toward new land on the Indiana and Illinois frontiers, as well as Hindostan's location along the stagecoach route, meant that it was constantly open to carriers of disease. This would eventually contribute to the destruction of the town.
Hindostan’s founders laid out 355 lots, a testament to their ambition. A ferry, saw mill and grist mill on the river were run by a New Yorker named Frederick Sholts (or Schultz). (The town of Shoals, near Hindostan, was named after this family). A traveler's account written on July 4, 1816, mentioned “Shult’s” tavern, run by a proprietor “latterly from Seneca County, in New York,” who “has adopted the eastern mode of clearing land and at once lays it open to the day,” probably indicating that Sholts carried out large-scale clear-cuts of timber rather than farming in small open patches in the woods in the manner traditional to farmers from the upland South, who began to move into southern Indiana around this time and shape its culture. The woods around Hindostan in 1820 were dense, deciduous old growth forests, almost all of it now destroyed. Morris Birkbeck
Morris Birkbeck
Morris Birkbeck was an early 19th century Illinois pioneer and publicist. He served briefly as the Secretary of State of Illinois.-Early years:...
, an English Quaker farmer traveling through Indiana in 1817 en route to the Illinois prairie, wrote of his passage through the forest between Paoli
Paoli
Paoli may refer to:People:*Amalia Paoli , Puerto Rican soprano, sister of the better known Antonio Paoli*Ambrose De Paoli , Roman Catholic cleric and Papal Nuncio*Angelo Paoli , Italian Carmelite...
and Hindostan: “This beautiful country continues as far as Schultz's Tavern, on White river, thirty-six miles east of Vincennes. Most of this hilly district is unentered, and remains open to the public at two dollars an acre.”
Reminiscing forty years later in 1859, a local named Thomas M. Clarke recalled: “Col. Sholts had put up a large hotel, and the land company erected a grist and saw mill. Houses went up as by magic. The highest wages were given to all who wanted to work, and every article of produce, game, or marketing was in demand. There was a large emigration from the East and among them men and women of the highest attainments and most polished manners."
Keel boats on the river transported bread to Hindostan, but meat from the surrounding forest (including bear meat) was abundant and the town exported corn, bacon and "Hindostan oil stone.” Quarries near the town site were mined for whetstone
Whetstone
Whetstone may refer to:* Whetstone, a sharpening stone used for knives and other cutting tools* Whetstone , a benchmark for measuring computing power* Operation Whetstone, a nuclear test program in the 1960s- Places :United Kingdom...
, which was shipped downstream as far as New Orleans. A whetstone factory stood in the town and was known as “The Hindostan Whit.” Many of the solid antebellum gravestones that dot parts of southern Indiana and have outlasted many stones carved after the Civil War were made from the whetstone quarried around Hindostan in eastern Martin County and western Orange County, Indiana
Orange County, Indiana
As of the census of 2000, there were 19,306 people, 7,621 households, and 5,342 families residing in the county. The population density was 48 people per square mile . There were 8,348 housing units at an average density of 21 per square mile...
. Though there are a few whetstone markers in the two remaining pioneer cemeteries in Hindostan, these were carved in the 1840s, after the town disappeared.
Merriam Brown Wise, a female pioneer from Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington is the second-largest city in Kentucky and the 63rd largest in the US. Known as the "Thoroughbred City" and the "Horse Capital of the World", it is located in the heart of Kentucky's Bluegrass region...
who moved to Indiana in 1818, recalled in 1872 that instead of immediately building cabins, some new settlers in Hindostan “were obliged to occupy their boats for houses, as they came by water... General William Henry Harrison
William Henry Harrison
William Henry Harrison was the ninth President of the United States , an American military officer and politician, and the first president to die in office. He was 68 years, 23 days old when elected, the oldest president elected until Ronald Reagan in 1980, and last President to be born before the...
, when on his way to Vincennes, took tea with us, on a dry goods box, and enjoyed it as much as if he had been in a palace. At that time a table was a scarce article. We were obliged to send twenty-one miles to get one.” One year later, English traveler William Faux wrote: “Breakfasted at the infant ville Hindostan, on the falls of the White River, a broad crystal stream. The baby ville is flourishing, much building is in progress, and promises to become a pleasant, healthy town before I see it again.”
A laughing contest took place in Hindostan around 1820. As a local historian wrote, "John Smith, of laughing notoriety, settled where Nicholas Cussick now lives (1873), in section one, township two north, range five west. It is told of him that upon meeting a Kentuckian at Hindostan, a wager was made as to who could laugh the longer. After an hour or more of a 'set to', lying down, rolling over amid a large laughing crowd, witnessing the trial, the Kentuckian gave up. Smith said to him, 'I had only begun to smile.' Smith had a large family. All left Hindostan but one daughter."
Elected to the Indiana state senate in 1819, tavern keeper Frederick Sholts proposed that on the basis of Hindostan’s prosperity, a new county (Martin County) should be “struck off” from Daviess County. Vowing to build a courthouse, Sholts and other fellow “proprietors” were “making a City of Hindostan and to give it prominence they must have a new county.” Hindostan was the first Martin County seat.
Sickness and disappearance of the town
In the summer of 1820, an epidemic of yellow fever
Yellow fever
Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....
or cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
(perhaps a combination of both) broke out in Hindostan. Water- and insect-borne illnesses were the bane of many towns on the Midwestern frontier. Situated along rivers for the purpose of easy transportation, towns were often built on flood plains that bred insects in huge numbers. The ferocity of the epidemic that struck Hindostan, however, was unusual. The exact nature of the disease has not been identified. Some accounts report that it was smallpox, though a yellow fever epidemic struck Vincennes in 1820.
"The sickness caught the settlers in their log cabins and shanties,” says one county historian, “and the forest [lay] unbroken around them. They were unacclimated.” Thomas M. Clarke remembered, “In the fall [of 1820] there came a fever or pestilence that was more universal in its attacks and more virulent, when seated, than any scourge I ever knew, or, I think, ever occurred in Indiana.” Whole families died together and their houses were burned in their wake to prevent the spread of the “plague.” Many of the townspeople were buried in a mass grave, which may hold several hundred bodies (its exact location is unmarked). Numerous accounts claim that the only man in town not at least weakened by the illness was Rufus Brown. Many died, “but many became disheartened and found ways to leave.”
By 1824, less than half the population remained in the town, though many seem to have stayed in the area. "Much of their energy and means were gone,” and they had not yet built the county courthouse that Frederick Sholts had promised to build. “Debts accumulated, property went down, the [land] company broke,” and although he survived the disease, Sholts (who was called “a pleasant genial man... [who] enjoyed a joke equal to any man”) saw his political career in the Indiana Senate vanish.
Sholts was the chief defendant in July 1822 when the county filed a $20,000 law suit against the “proprietors of Hindostan” for failure to build the courthouse. In 1824, the county gave him $900 to build a jail, then sued him in 1826, also for failure to build. Fifty years later, a Martin County writer remarked that “his family is not known here now.”
An economic depression around 1820 worked alongside the epidemic to begin the depopulation of the town. Many families who had moved into the area had bought their land on credit from land speculators. When the economic crisis hit, some families simply defaulted and fled the area. It is possible that Hindostan lost nearly as many residents to the economic depression as to sickness. Residents who remained were unable to pay their taxes and county and local creditors foreclosed on their property.
An interesting piece of local folklore emerged from these hard times. According to rumor, a county tax collector had several thousand dollars of revenue in his possession when he fell ill during the epidemic. He was thought to have buried the money (gold and silver coins) in an iron pot for sake-keeping until the illness passed. When he died, the money's location was lost forever.
James D. Sholts was postmaster at Hindostan in August 1828. Faced with the gradual desertion of the town, the post office was discontinued on December 29, 1830. The once prosperous “baby ville” at Hindostan Falls died out and eventually became farmland. Passing by the site in 1840, John Parsons, a traveler from Petersburg, Virginia, wrote in his diary: "now all that is left of Hindostan is a few crumbling houses by the river, which ripples on as gayly as ever, over its marble white bed of sand and stone. A village fallen to decay is always a melancholy sight, but how much more melancholy in these Western woods, where all else is young and flourishing, and where age and decay would seem to have no part."
Ferries still ran on the White River at Hindostan Falls into the 1840s, and the mills were in operation until just before the Civil War. Domestic disputes were recorded at Hindostan in 1830, and several assaults and batteries were recorded.
In 1828, the county seat was relocated to Mt. Pleasant, several miles away. This town site was then abandoned by most of its residents in 1853 for a nearby site, now called Loogootee, four miles from Hindostan. The county seat, however, was moved to Trinity Springs, a health spa, then to Shoals in 1871. Shoals today has a population of 1,200, which puts it at about the size of Hindostan during its short prime.