At Home in Brown County
“ Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”— Robert Frost
“ Home is where the heart is.”— Anonymous
“ Be it ever so humble, there’ s no place like home.”— John Howard Payne
~ by Mark Blackwell
Home is something pretty important to almost everybody. Most folks will say home is where they come from. Sometimes home is where they are residing at the present time. Sometimes, home is a house and sometimes it is a parcel of land. For some folks it’ s a state, a town or a city, or a country. And sometimes it’ s a county like Brown.
Hardly anybody who lives here says they are from Nashville. We all tend to say we’ re from Brown County. That’ s not because Nashville isn’ t a great little town. Brown County is a unique area of Indiana that many people know about. It is rough and hilly, not wellwatered, and for a long time, not easy to travel.
One could make the claim that sleepy old Brown County was awakened from its indifference to the outside world in 1905. That is the year that the railroad came through and made the county accessible. In1907 a painter named Theodore Clement Steele purchased some acreage down by Belmont leading to the development of an artist colony.
T. C. Steele was an artist of some renown and had studied and painted in Europe. He had a good reputation among fellow artists in Chicago and extended an invitation for them to come and experience the unsullied atmosphere of a preindustrial Brown County. They came and some stayed. And in time Nashville and Brown County became home to them.
I have found that, historically, some people like to name their homes. George Washington had“ Mount Vernon.”“ Monticello” is what Thomas Jefferson named his home. And so, too, a lot of the artists in Brown County did the same. T. C. Steele called his Brown County home“ The House of the Singing Winds.” The first artists around Nashville referred to the area as
44 Our Brown County July / August 2016
“ Peaceful Valley.” But for the natives, whose art was just getting a living, home was called by whatever ridge or holler where it was located.
And those homes were most generally log cabins and a few acres. For the old settlers and their progeny, home was everything. It was the place where you grew your food and raised your kids and livestock. It was the place that kept you warm( er) in the cold weather, dry( er) in the rain, and cool( er) in the shade of big old spreading maple trees on hot summer days.
Home was where the relatives and neighbors gathered for impromptu play-parties, quilting bees, corn-shuckings, and for all labor that could be made lighter with many hands. Home was a sacred place, a place of Bible readings, meal time grace saying, births, deaths, wakes, and funerals. More than a few homesteads here come with little graveyards where the only commemoration is a flat creek stone and an annual decoration of daffodils.
I have a book titled The Indiana Home by Logan Esarey, published by the Indiana University Press. It is probably the best little book on the subject of the
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