Today, we bring you one of Sylvia Henricks’ “Remembrances.” You can read more of Sylvia’s columns weekly in The Franklin Township Informer, or in her book From The Ash Grove (available directly from the FTHS, and via the web site).
Old maps are fascinating to study, and are an almost endless source of speculation when compared with an area familiar to a reader today. Fellow historian Dana Crapo recently found and purchased the useful topographical map of the part of Franklin Township on Shelbyville Road we were wondering about. I used it several weeks ago in writing about the elevation of Scott and Mary Verbarg’s home in Franklin Parke Estates. Their hilltop site was designated as 900 feet above sea level, perhaps the highest spot in Franklin Township.
Another map that Dana recently purchased, and gave me copies of is an 1855 Franklin Township map, the earliest one I know of. I have had a copy of it for several years – Xeroxed myself at the Indiana State Library — but Dana’s copies are sharp and bright, and show more clearly some early “roads” which were later abandoned. A portion of that map is shown above, with the land owner designated as Daniel Moore.
The Society’s Historic Treasures (1978) includes this information (in a longer biography) about Daniel Moore. “He was born in 1786 in Virginia . . .At age thirty he moved with his family to Kentucky. . . later they moved to Marion County, Indiana, locating on a farm nine miles southeast of Indianapolis. . . in what was then an unbroken wilderness, the family proceeded to make a home. The forest was cleared away and a fine farm developed . . . The Moore farm was in the family since 1835 when Daniel Moore received his land grant signed by Andrew Jackson. Their log cabin was built at Five Points and Stop 11 (although the roads were not so named at the time) where they owned additional land.”
Our family’s six acres was not part of the Moore farm, but a parcel of the Nimrod Kemper farm to the south. Shelbyville Road cut through the corner of the Kemper farm as it did at another place the Moore farm. Our six acres includes a two acre field, and a wooded area which I was told was the woodlot for the Kemper farm across the road.When we first moved here I remember some “elderly “ ladies telling me they had picked wildflowers in our woods as children. Except for the field and a small area along Shelbyville Road, our land has never been farmed. We have three large ash trees, two beech trees, and an oak tree with a trunk 15 feet in circumference. Some large rocks in the yard are either remains of a glacier, or dug out of Kemper fields long ago.