The Worland Family in America and Beyond

I began my life in the Puget Sound area of Washington State, on an island filled with forests and wild rhododendrons. I was separated from my Worland family there at an early age. Recently, I was reunited with my family and learned of my heritage. And so, this journey to know my ancestors began. The Worlands, Gideons, Newtons, Conards... they were the colonists, the settlers, the pioneers. They fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War. This is their story, and the story of a nation. -Deci Worland MacKinnon

Sunday, June 28, 2009

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."

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