The Strahls ~ by Jim Eagleman
On Brown County State Park’ s Trail 6, down a prominent ridge from the Nature Center, you will negotiate a wooden stairway and meandering path through a clearing as you approach Strahl Lake. Young timber stands on this hillside hinting of early days.
Strahl Lake was named after Jimmy Strahl, a hard-working Brown County farmer. Like his neighbors in this valley, he came to make a home and make it work.
In the early 1800s, a chance to homestead in the wilderness Indiana Territory brought explorers, surveyors, and hopeful farmers. By 1890, cutting quantities of timber and dragging trees with work teams was daily work in this little valley. When a field was ready to plant, they moved on to another hill.
Strahl Lake today.
54 Our Brown County Sept./ Oct. 2017
Louie and Lawrence Strahl in 1985 with their family photo.
By the early 1900s, worn out and abandoned farmland in southern Indiana was too remote and foreboding to attract new arrivals. Even though the sloped fields were nearly cleared and free of trees, residents tired of hard work and moved on. Farming rough hill country was difficult and often unprofitable. Folks heard talk of better land— rich, black, topsoil two feet thick on the flat, Illinois prairie and beyond. Most packed up and headed out.
A young Louie Strahl, and his older brother Lawrence, had labored alongside their father. All through their young years and as teens, they worked the farm every day. They had little schooling but learned about determination, life, and love from parents, relatives, and neighbors.
As men in their eighties, I talked with them as they reminisced at the Abe Martin Lodge in October of 1985.
“ Dad had the team hitched up and ready to go by daybreak,” said Louie.“ I walked behind them horses all day’ til I thought my legs would fall off. In the beginning, we plowed up and down the hills,’ til we saw it all wash away when the rains came. Then we started across the hill. I guess this was about 1920 or so.”
The Strahls heard stories about a state project of some kind for Brown County right about the time they had timbered and tilled nearly all of their land.
Timing is everything in the real estate business. It was the perfect opportunity for Lee Bright, a Nashville businessman, to propose his park idea. Bright’ s“ bright idea,” his friends called it, took some convincing.
An insurance salesman, Bright had little or no luck in selling policies to the county’ s poor. Barely able to make ends meet, farmers struggled to keep their eroded, worn out lands in some kind of production. They didn’ t have money for improvements, roads, or schools, and certainly none to insure buildings and equipment.