Almost at the Hawkins Cemetery

(Sep 27, cont.) Usually I ask permission before going into a cemetery that’s on private property. Nobody has ever objected, but it doesn’t hurt to ask when there is someone around to ask. But this time I figured the sign saying “Hawkins Cemetery – Sign donated by the Jay Hawkins King Family” was an invitation.

While riding to this place, the following passage from Caroline Hawkins Clark’s reminiscences is one that I had in mind.

Daddy killed three deers and Brother Nathen killed two turkeys. From that time on we had plenty of wild meat. Well, the next thing to be done was to clear a corn field in the green woods. It was bottom land and covered all over with spice brush. Brother Sam grubed five acres and the rest choped the trees down and picked the brush and planted it in corn and pumpkins, the 25th of May. We had a good crop of corn and such fine pumpkins the sheep had to be watched. Brother Ben was the shepard. We then cleaned a turnip patch and raised about five hundred bushels of the finest turnips I ever saw.

It’s the part about farming the bottom land. I can understand how settlers would have looked for good bottomland in the country along the Ohio River, where the only good places to farm are in the bottoms. But this country is not cut up like that.

There is a stream here, though. The driveway drops down into a little valley toward the horizon in the distance. It’s where a small stream flows into the Little Salamonie River.

To get to the farm place at the end of the drive, one has to go across this steel-floored bridge. I did look around at the bottom land, but didn’t take any photos of it. Other than the fact that settlers needed to live near water, it still isn’t clear to me why those bottom lands were the first to be planted into crops.

YTD mileage: 2036.5