(Sep 28, cont.) From the Thomas W. Parker place I rode a mile east along the Randolph-Wayne county line to Arba Road. This was one of the main destinations for the day. It’s a place where the modern road still follows the old “Quaker Trace.”
In Indiana the Quaker Trace connected Richmond with Fort Wayne, and was so-called because of all the Quakers who moved to this area and who helped build it. It seems also to have been a route on the Underground Railroad, thanks to those same Quakers.
There is also a Quaker Trace in Preble County, Ohio that still bears that name. I’m guessing this Indiana road was continuous with that one, but don’t know for sure.
Note that the Arba Road departs here from the usual section-line roads that go straight north-south or east-west.
The following are the first four passages in the 1882 county history that mention it.
The first road opened through the county was the “Quaker Trace,” from Richmond to Fort Wayne, in 1817. –page 40
The “Quaker Trace” began to be worked in 1825-1828, and much of it is worked and traveled still. –page 62
[Note Mr Smith says the "Quaker Trace" was opened in 1818 or 1819. The Bowens say in 1817; which date is correct we do not know. The Bowens are more likely to be right, since they lived on the route, and one of them helped to make the "trace." --page 63
The “Quaker Trace” was begun in 1817. James Clark, with twenty-five or thirty men, started with three wagon loads of provisions, as also a surveyor and chain, etc., and they marked “mile trees,” and cut the road out enough for wagons to pass. They wound around ponds, however, and big logs and trees, and quagmires, fording the Mississinewa above Allenville, Randolph County, and the Wabash just west of Corydon, Jay County, and so on to Fort Wayne. –page 80, Squire Bowen’s reminiscences
As far as I can tell, no trace of the road remains further north where it crossed the Mississinewa and Wabash Rivers. The roads up there have been straightened out to follow the section lines. It seems to have been gone already by the time the county atlases of the 1870s and 1880s were published.
Here it goes north to the small village of Arba, where the day’s ride ended.
I happened on this by typing in Squire Bowen of whom I am a desendent, I lived on the Arby Pike when I was 11 or 12 yrs old. I have the book that was printed for the Bowen family centennial in 1914.
Sam,
I’m glad you found this. I hadn’t known about the book, but see that it is online at archive.org. I like the way that 1913 reunion treated places on the old family farm, by putting out markers explaining the significance of various spots. Do you know if any of that information still survives? Is the farm still in the family?
If you were to go back there, are there any specific things to see that link to the settlement era days? The pike itself does, of course.
Sam,
One other item. I did a search in this blog for Bowen, and found a mention in one of my posts about Nancy Hawkins of Jay County: “The Prophet Joseph headed north toward Winchester to visit the Saints and assure them that he was alive. The Bowen family lived on Arba Pike near Winchester at that time, and family tradition says that Joseph Smith visited the Bowen house.”
Do you know anything about that or where the information might have come from? I didn’t see any reference to this in that 1914 family centennial book.