A Day in the Life of Tippecanoe County

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1836

• John Tipton, former secretary of state, gave the Tippecanoe Battlefield site he bought in 1829 to the State of Indiana as a memorial to those who fought.
• First Presbyterian Church opened a non-free public school, taught by a man named Bailey, at Fourth and South, and later built a schoolhouse near 11th and Ferry where men named Fred Stone, Bladen and Heuld taught at various times.
• Leading news items of the year had to do with Wabash & Erie Canal construction progress, railroad and bank stock sales, store openings, postal and steamboat news, elections, ceremonies, speeches and town board activity.
• Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, an Easterner with a Lafayette home, a heavy investor in Indiana farmlands, especially un drained prairie, became U.S. Commissioner of Patents, a post he held until 1845.
• The Indiana Legislature authorized a Wabash River bridge at Lafayette, but no action followed until about 1845.

1836

Logan Esarey wrote in 1928 that a Lafayette fire department "with a written constitution was organized as early as 1836."

1836

Logan Esarey wrote: "As the town prospered the taste for luxuries increased. Bales and boxes of 'new fashions and fabrics' lined the area about the wharf. ... An advertisement of 1836 shows that one boat alone brought, besides great quantities of staples such as coffee, cheese, salt and canned fish, sausage, molasses, and powder and shot, over 2,000 boxes of cigars and 145 barrels of whisky and wine. Large warehouses were eventually built on the river to accommodate the trade."

Late 1836

John Frank, 21, junior editor of the Wabash Mercury, fatally stabbed merchant John Woods in an argument over a November election bet. Attorney Rufus A. Lockwood handled Frank's defense, claiming self-defense in a trial in October, 1837. Lockwood's nine-hour summation won acquittal from a Lafayette jury and established him as an extraordinary lawyer. [BACKGROUND: A transcript of Lockwood's defense is preserved by the Tippecanoe County Historical Association. Lockwood left Lafayette in the 1849 California "gold rush," later went to Australia. Returning to Lafayette in 1857, he died when the ocean-going steamer "Central America" sank between Panama and New York City.]

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