Joab Ward |
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| Joab Ward was the child of Thomas and Margery Ward, and was
born in 1790. His father, who died in 1839 and is buried in the White River
Cemetery, was born in Guilford County, North Carolina, in 1759. It was in 1782
that Thomas married Mary Margery Pigatt, and Joab was the seventh of that
couple's eight children. In 1818 Randolph County was organized, and like many other familieis in Guilford County at that time the Wards began moving westward through the more settled regions of Ohio and into the frontier of Eastern Indiana. Joab Ward arrived in this area from Champaign County, Ohio, in April of 1819, and on the 7th of that month entered his claim on a parcel of land along the Mississinewa River, west of the trail leading from Richmond to Fort Wayne known as the Quaker Trace. Ward's land was on the southern side of what was going to be Ridgeville. The hard work of clearing the land began, and that same fall Joab erected his permanent dwelling, a sturdy two-story cabin which proved to be even more permanent that he could have hoped, for its stood for well over 100 years on the banks of the river, It was located near the tracks of the early railroads, where the G.R.&I. crossed the Mississinewa, although neighter the tracks nor the bridge were there at the time the cabin was built. Melvin B. Stratton, an Indianapolis broom manufacturer wiht Ridgeville ties, described almost a century later the conditions in which the cabin was built. "At that time Randolph Co. was a trackless forest, and the only neighbors in that entire section of the country were the Lewallyns, where Elmirea McKew's house now stands, and the Burkett Pierce's whose house stood at the old ford near Deerfield Cemetery." The cabin, and the generations of Wards raised in it, saw the history of the county and of the country pass by. Stratton was impressed with the age of the building over 70 years ago, when it was already old, and wrote of the 94 years during which it had stood at the time! "We can harldy realize just how long a time this tis. When this sturdy old pioneer was erected a soldier of the revolution was president of the United States, and its tenants were there to hear the news of the death of every president who has died since Washington. It was old, as age now goes, when eleven years later the first railroad train was operated in Baltimore, and it was still a long half century later before it was to see similar trains pass its doors. It had weatheredd the storms fourteen winters before the great city of Chicago was started. Children born in this house had grown to manhood and womanhood, and had children of their own when the 49'ers started ont heir rush to the then new gold fields of California. Its occupants have discussed, as live news, the purchase of Florida from Spain; the First and Second Seminole Wars; the Black Hawk War; the Mexican War; and the careers and deaths of Clay, Calhoun and Webster. Its children were middle aged and grandfathers and grandmothers themselves perhaps, when the news came of the firing of Ft. Sumpter, and it still stands as one of the best preserved monuments to our early pioneers that Indiana can show today." One of Joab Wards early occupations was building flatboats which were used to float goods down the Mississinewa during periods of high water. Since the railroads were such a long time in reaching the wilds of eastern Indiana, getting goods to market often meant going by river or going by foot. Ridgeville marked the head of that portion of the river which is navigable at high water. Joab Ward made the most of this fact. Joab's son, Thomas, recalled in later years this portion of his father's work: "My father, Joab Ward, commenced building boats about 1835. When the country along the Wabash, etc., began to settle up, the fact made a market for several years, and the people of Wayne and Randolph tried to supply it by sending their produce down the Mississinewa to the Wabash, and thereabouts. Boats were needed, and Ridgeville was the head of high-water navigation, and os father took to building boats and selling them to people to take their produce down the river on. He would build a boat forty feet long by ten feet wide, at 62-1/2 cents a foot, i.e., $25 for the boat, all ready for floating. He would cut the timbers green, from the woods, have two heavy side-pieces sloped rounding upward at both ends, cut a 'gain' in the lower edge to receive the ends of the planks which formed the bottom, pin the bottom planks to the sides and the middle piece, fasten on some ieces of plank at the tip of the gunwale, so as to increase the depth of the boat (making it, perhaps, two feet), stop up the cracks, and she was ready to receive her load along her downward way. This flat boating could be done only in times of flood." |