1820 Indiana

Early settler's description of Shelby County (about 1820.)

"...without the assistance which money brings, they had come here to make war upon nature in one of her most forbidding forms. Where now we may see broad fields and wide pastures of open wildland, then thickly stood the great oak, the poplar, the beech, the maple, and the ash, their limbs and branches so closely intertwined that, when clothed in their summer verdure, a shade so deep and dark was produced as to shut out the sun from May to October. The forests were checkered over with the trunks of prostrate trees, some sunk half their diameter in the oozy soil...rich as it was and is in organic matter mixing chemically with the watery element, rendered the paths and woods almost untraversable for man or beast."