The Runs

(Sep 28, cont.) Less than a mile east of Carlos, there was another excuse to stop: fence posts. In this case they were concrete corner fence posts that had been painted red. At least I presume they once served as fence posts. Now they’re just monuments.

The farm at the end of the lane belonged to a Phillips family in the 19th century. A Thomas Phillips who had come from New Jersey was the patriarch, and was the first owner of this land under the English-American system of land ownership.

It seems I’ve run into several settlers in this part of Indiana who had come from New Jersey. The Cateys in the post about A Country Church and a Pile of Rubble also came from new Jersey, for example.

A mile further to the east I slowed down for the children of Bloomingport.

The 1882 county history makes mentions of “runs” in this area, such as Phillips Run, Poplar Run, and Big Run. Modern maps show Cherry Run, Thin Run, Cream Run, Vandyke Run, and many more. Some of these seem to be intermittent waterways — the upper reaches of small streams that are dry for much of the year.

I got to wondering where this term “Run” came from. There are some well known runs, such as the one that gave its name to the Battle of Bull Run. I don’t happen to know what kind of waterway that one is. There is the community of Birch Run in the Michigan thumb. But “Run” as applied to a waterway isn’t a comman usage anywhere I’ve ever lived, at least not that I’ve noticed.

To investigate, I fired up my old version of Adobe Illustrator/MapPublisher, and imported the shapefiles for streams and waterways for a non-random sample of counties. Then I selected the waterways that had the characters “Run” in the name, and highlighted them in red in the map shown above. The other waterways are shown by thin, brown lines.

Randolph County is outlined in a heavy line towards the bottom center. Carlos and Bloomingport are in the greyish circle at the bottom center of the county. The Ohio/Indiana border is shown by a heavy blue line.

My technique for selecting the runs out of all the other streams was imperfect. It may have resulted in places like Runnymede Creek being included on the map, if such a one exists. But I think most of them are runs.

It looks like the term does get used quite a bit in Randolph County and its neighboring Indiana counties, more so than in places further to the north. But it’s not much used in Darke County, Ohio, which lies just to the east, or in any of the other Ohio counties I looked at.

I wish I knew if the usage pattern reflects the origins of the settlers — if the first settlers to this part of Indiana came from parts of the United States where these small, intermittent streams were called runs. Or if the naming system is something that just developed locally. Or if it developed after the settlement era. Or if it reflects real differences in the topography. Or if it reflects different ways of compiling the data by Census bureau personnel, such that the Ohio people did it differently from Indiana people. (The data came from Tiger Census files.)

It would also be interesting to know what happens to the pattern as one goes west and south. But the above is as much as I felt like doing for now.