A Tent A Tive Start
~ by Henry Swain Reprinted from November, 1999
It would make an interesting collection of stories to record the reasons people come from other places to live in Brown County. In 1947 our reason for settling here was primarily money. We looked at Sedona, Arizona and Mammoth Lakes, California. Land there was way beyond our budget and on our way back to Indiana we decided to stop in Brown County and visit John Dixon, a friend who had a cabin on Grandma Barnes road.
I was raised in the flat farmland of central Indiana and we often visited Brown County during my formative years. The hills and streams of southern Indiana were a pleasant change from where I lived. Brown County was our first choice for a home if we stayed in Indiana.
Friend John Dixon steered us to Mabel Calvin Burkholder, who, along with her husband Ralph and helper Gene Willoughby, ran the old Calvin Brothers Hardware store on the first floor of the Masonic building. Mabel sold us a 40-acre tract off Clay Lick road for $ 600. We took possession September 3rd, my wife’ s birthday.
The road into our place did not have a name. From Nashville, we forded the creek five times to get to our acres. Some years later our neighbor Ronald Batten donated land for a right-of-way and we had the road moved out of the creek to higher ground, naming it Wallow Hollow Road since it led to Bear Wallow Hill where it becomes Freeman Ridge Road.
The bottom fields were tall with goldenrod, briars, and ironweed. We pitched a tent and started clearing away brush for a building site. We couldn’ t afford a
bulldozer and did it all by hand with a wheelbarrow and shovel and a Swedish buck saw.
Three corner logs of an old cabin still stood at the site. There was a dug well with two logs on end in it to keep animals from falling into it. Our first building was an outhouse.
I learned how to lay native stone by laying up the privy pit liner with sandstone from the creek. John Dixon showed me a few tricks on how to break and shape the stones.
The next project was to clean out the well and lay new stone up to ground level. By the time that was done I had enough confidence in my stone laying to build a well-house over it. We poured a concrete foundation with a portable cement mixer rented from Gregg & Tucker Lumber store. The late Dean Walker, then a young man, brought us a load of gravel for the mix.
We stayed in the tent until Thanksgiving then went to stay with my parents for the winter at their home near Pendleton. There were some pretty cold nights by the time we left. We had a high-wall officer’ s tent and I can remember upon awakening seeing icicles that had overnight formed like stalactites where the roof met the wall canvas.
We left the site with an outhouse, a wellhouse, and a 24’ x 24’ foundation of stone about half-completed. It was difficult waiting through the winter to get back to our site in the spring. We spent the winter dreaming of our future in Brown County. •
62 Our Brown County • March / April 2015