Leavenworth, Indiana

Leavenworth, Indiana
—  Town  —
Location of Leavenworth in the state of Indiana
Coordinates: 38°11′57″N 86°20′32″W
Country	United States
State	Indiana
County	Crawford
Township	Jennings
Area
• Total	0.9 sq mi (2.3 km2)
• Land	0.8 sq mi (2.2 km2)
• Water	0.0 sq mi (0.1 km2)
Elevation	659 ft (201 m)
Population (2010)
• Total	238
• Density	423.3/sq mi (163.4/km2)
Time zone	Eastern (EST) (UTC-5)
• Summer (DST)	EDT (UTC-4)
ZIP code	47137
Area code(s)	812
FIPS code	18-42606
GNIS feature ID	0437716
Website	Official Site for Leavenworth, Indiana

Leavenworth is a town in Jennings Township, Crawford County, Indiana, along the Ohio River. The population was 238 at the 2010 census.

History

Foundation and early settlement

Leavenworth was laid out in 1818 in an oxbow of the Ohio River, directly under a large bluff called Mt. Eden. The bluff forms part of the Indiana Ridge and faces directly across the river toward Kentucky. A spectacular panoramic view of the valley can be seen from the top of the ridge. "Old Leavenworth" (the original town, now practically abandoned) was almost completely wiped out by the huge 1937 Ohio River flood, as it was built directly on the floodplain.

The town’s founders came from Connecticut. Born in 1792, Zebulon Leavenworth moved west to Cincinnati and studied law in Chillicothe, Ohio. He then taught for a year in Cincinnati before joining a government surveying expedition to the Illinois frontier. Returning to Ohio to enter into a business with his brother Seth, a printer and school teacher, Zebulon Leavenworth bought four hundred acres of public land in Indiana and laid out the town of Leavenworth in 1818-19 (he was then 26 years old.) He met his wife, an eighteen-year-old girl from Delaware named Margaret Patterson, in New Albany, Indiana and they were married in 1821. Zebulon was a well-educated man and an elegant writer. On his fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1871, a year before his death, he penned a poem to his wife Margaret, which he read aloud at a dinner party. In light of the town's later destruction by a flood and its historic relocation to the ridge top, one stanza reads prophetically:

From the hill of Spring we started,
and through all the Summer land,
and the fruitful Autumn country,
we have journeyed hand in hand.
We have borne the heat and burden,
willingly, painfully and slow,
we have gathered in our harvest,
with rejoicing long ago.
Leave the upland for our children,
they are strong to sow and reap;
through the quiet wintry lowlands,
we our level way will keep.

Margaret and Zebulon Leavenworth had nine children together. By 1825, Zebulon’s three older sisters back in Connecticut, Sarah, Rachel and Rebecca, had joined him in Indiana.

In 1824, a wood yard was established in the town to provide fuel to steamboats that were beginning to ply the Ohio River. Its proprietor, David Lyon, set up a boatbuilding industry in Leavenworth in 1830. Originally involved in the construction of flatboats for transporting farm products downstream as far as New Orleans, Lyon specialized in the building of handcrafted wooden rowing skiffs. Lyon’s business passed into the hands of his son and grandson, who built graceful wooden craft in Leavenworth well into the twentieth century.

A family of English immigrant brick makers passed through the town on their way west and stopped here, agreeing to make a large quantity of bricks for settlers who did not want to build with wood (brick was then a more prestigious building material). Leavenworth's Whitcomb brickyard later became a flourishing industry.

In 1820, Zebulon Leavenworth established a ferry across the Ohio River and built a schoolhouse. By the 1840s, Methodist, Universalist and Presbyterian congregations had taken root. The Crisis, Crawford County’s first newspaper, was begun in Leavenworth in 1839. (Seth Leavenworth had already started Indiana's first newspaper outside of Vincennes, the Western Eagle, in Madison in 1813.)

In 1835, Zebulon started a stage line from Leavenworth to the new state capitol in Indianapolis, a route intended primarily for students going to the new State College in Bloomington (later Indiana University) and for boatmen returning from downriver. Seth eventually became a trustee of Indiana University while serving in the state legislature. The brothers also located and opened many of the early roads linking Leavenworth to other important towns in pre-Civil War southern Indiana, including Paoli, Orleans, Bloomington, and Fredonia.

In 1827, Seth Leavenworth pushed the state legislature to establish a rail link between his town and the new state capitol (only recently relocated to Indianapolis from nearby Corydon), believing that railroads were more efficient and desirable than canals (though trains at this time moved not much faster than barges.) Crawford County residents, however, espoused a common concern of the time: that trains would run over their livestock and kill their children.^{[citation needed]} (This was a concern widespread throughout America and Europe during the decades that saw the coming of trains to agrarian economies ). As a result of his support of railways, Seth Leavenworth lost the 1828 state congressional election.

Riverboat men returning from New Orleans were thought to be carriers of the yellow fever and cholera epidemics that often devastated the Ohio Valley frontier. Seth Leavenworth advocated the construction of a marine hospital for the purpose of quarantine and medical treatment, which he hoped to build somewhere near the town of Leavenworth. The bill he put before the Indiana legislature was never enacted.

The Leavenworth brothers sought to improve the navigation of the Big Blue River and established a mill twenty miles upstream at a place called Milltown around 1830. They constructed three stores here, a carding mill, a grist mill, and a saw mill. When the J.B. Speed lime kilns came to Milltown in the 1880s, that town began to surpass Leavenworth in population.

In 1843, Leavenworth had become so important that it supplanted Fredonia as the county seat. Leavenworth remained the county seat until 1896, when the county records were stolen by a mob in a notorious armed “courthouse war" against the town of English.

Seth Leavenworth eventually left Indiana and moved to Missouri, where he died in 1854. His son Zebulon, named after the boy's uncle in Indiana, became a famous riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River and was a friend of Mark Twain before Twain became a writer. Together, they piloted the steamboat Nebraska past Memphis at the outbreak of the Civil War, receiving gunshots across their bow as a warning to halt.

The Fields Murder and Execution

On June 7, 1846, a Crawford County man named James Fields fell under the influence of alcohol. Straggling back to his cabin, he ordered his mother to make dinner for him. When she didn’t respond quickly enough, he picked up a gun and shot her in the leg. She died four days later. Fields was charged with first degree murder and taken to the county jail at Leavenworth. Although he pleaded not guilty, the murderer was condemned to hang.

On December 18, the prisoner, sitting on his own coffin, was taken under armed guard by wagon to a makeshift gallows next to the town carding mill. A crowd of several hundred people from all over the county had come to be spectators at his death. The sheriff was so nervous that he missed the rope the first time he struck at the trap door. When he struck again, Fields took a plunge but the rope snapped. Several men underneath the gallows had to hold him high in the air until another rope was brought in. On the third attempt, Fields finally fell to his doom. His body was buried in unhallowed ground along the road to Corydon. This was the second and last execution in Crawford County’s history.

The Hines Raid, 1863

Another dramatic event occurred during the Civil War, on Little Blue Island, about a mile from Leavenworth.

In June 1863, a 25-year-old Confederate spy from Kentucky, Thomas Hines, was dispatched by General John Hunt Morgan to ride north into Indiana and reconnoiter with Southern sympathizers there, whose dedication to the Southern cause Morgan drastically overestimated. Hines and his party of nearly a hundred men stole uniforms from a Union supply depot in Brownsville, Kentucky, then robbed a train in Elizabethtown to acquire Union currency. Dressed as Federal troops, they crossed the Ohio River on horseback a few miles downstream from Leavenworth, then struck out for Paoli, pretending to be in pursuit of Union deserters.

In French Lick, they met with the local Copperhead leader, Doctor William A. Bowles, who headed the Confederate-leaning Democratic party in southern Indiana and was a supporter of slavery. Bowles told the raiders he was unable to help them. Indiana Home Guards were then in pursuit of the Confederates. At Valeene, Hines' men burned down a house whose occupants refused to give them food. Hines was now trying hard to get out of Indiana. He hired what he thought was a Southern sympathizer, a local man named Bryant Breeden, to guide them to a safe ford across the river and help them escape to Kentucky. Breeden, who was actually a strong Union supporter, guided them to Little Blue Island near Leavenworth, where the river was too deep to ford safely. According to local memory, residents of Leavenworth carried ammunition to Union troops, who fired upon the horsemen as they struggled to get across the river. At least three Confederate soldiers were killed and a large number were taken prisoner.

Since the county jail was not large enough to hold them all, Hines' men were imprisoned inside the Methodist Church in Leavenworth. Hines himself escaped.

Leavenworth Between the Civil War and the 1937 Ohio River Flood

At the end of the Civil War, Leavenworth was a thriving town, a regular stop for all of the steamboats that plied the Ohio River downstream from Cincinnati.

One of the primary industries was button-making. According to the 1910 census, when nearly 700 people lived in the town, three button factories employed twenty-four families. While men worked as button cutters, housewives sewed the finished product onto cards for distribution and sale to stores. One of the factories in Leavenworth was housed in an attractive two-story Greek Revival building that had once been City Hall. A photograph from around the turn of the century shows a long chute extending from its upper-story windows, allowing the finished buttons to be poured directly into wheelbarrows waiting below. The buttons themselves were made out of mussel shells dredged from the Ohio River and had a pearly sheen. The discarded shells were then burned to produce lime. When the shell banks were exhausted in the 1920s, however, the Leavenworth button industry came to an abrupt end.

In addition to button manufacturers, a river boatman, druggist, tinner, telephone operator, fruit distiller, bank clerk, butcher, hotel proprietor, hotel cook, dress maker, cabinet maker, blacksmith, attorney, Methodist minister, commercial fisherman, dentist, music teacher, ship's carpenter, and freight agent were all listed on the 1910 census as resident in Leavenworth. Even after railroads came to the area, local wine and corn whiskey were shipped downriver on locally-built boats. Apple brandy was a sought-after product made in the area. Cooper shops were set up in Leavenworth that produced apple barrels.

Quarries opened up in the 1880s and lime was shipped out on flatboats. In 1888, silver began to be smelted nearby. In October 1890, a fire destroyed about a third of Leavenworth. The population at this time was over five hundred.

The 1896 Courthouse War

By an act of the Indiana General Assembly in 1852, any county could change its seat if two-thirds of its residents signed a petition and put forward a fifty-dollar deposit for an architect to design a new courthouse. Although there were not even any brick buildings in the town yet, in 1896 the town of English, located well back from the Ohio River in inland Crawford County, successfully petitioned to have the county seat moved there.

Leavenworth resisted and refused to hand over the county records. On April 26, an armed procession set out from English. A.J. Goodman, a prominent resident of the town, vowed to take control of the county records by force if necessary. Farmers in the area supplied ninety-six wagons, while sledge hammers were provided to break open the courthouse doors in Leavenworth. Derricks to lift the records and dynamite to break open the safes were brought along. Eight-two mounted militiamen accompanied by 482 armed pedestrians set out at 12:30 A.M. Around seven in the morning, they reached Leavenworth. Though no shots were fired, the county records were loaded onto the wagons and carried off to English before nightfall.

The 1937 Ohio River Flood

On January 5, 1937, the Ohio River's waters began to rise. A severe winter storm that had begun on January 10 had turned into record rainfalls by late January. On January 25, waters reached eighty feet in Cincinnati, sixty feet in Paducah, and covered seventy percent of Louisville. The flood was the most destructive in the valley’s history. Not until February 5 did waters finally fall below flood stage for the first time in three weeks.

Of 145 houses in Leavenworth, twenty floated away and sixty-five were lifted off their foundations. A hundred cellars and 125 wells were flooded. The Presbyterian church was the only church left standing. The Methodist church was damaged beyond repair. Unable to build anew afterwards, the two congregations simply merged. Four-hundred of the town’s population of 418 were forced to evacuate.

Braving cold water and violent winter weather, laborers enlisted by Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) salvaged whatever possible from the submerged town. When the waters finally receded, it was not clear if Leavenworth would be occupied again. Under the direction of Indiana Work Relief Administrator John K. Jennings, the town's citizens decided to build a new town on top of Mt. Eden. The rebuilding of Leavenworth was complete by December 1938. Leavenworth was then the only completely rebuilt community in Indiana, though in the 1950s, English would be ravaged by floods from the Blue River and eventually relocated to higher ground, the second largest relocation of a town in U.S. history.

A WPA writer who praised the efforts of Roosevelt's administration and the Red Cross was quick to note that the new Leavenworth had concrete streets and sidewalks, a waterworks and sewer, and a "fine new $67,000 fire-proof joint high school." At the official dedication of the new town, state WPA director Jennings remarked that in 1937 "it would have taken an extravagant sense of optimism to imagine the scene which lies before us here today... Now that it is all over... I believe we may paradoxically say Leavenworth is rich for having experienced the greatest disaster in her existence."

Geography

Leavenworth is located at 38°11′57″N 86°20′32″W (38.199061, -86.342334).

According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 0.9 square miles (2.3 km²), of which, 0.8 square miles (2.1 km²) of it is land and 0.1 square miles (0.26 km²) of it (5.68%) is water.

Demographics

As of the census of 2000, there were 353 people, 123 households, and 86 families residing in the town. The population density was 423.3 people per square mile (164.2/km²). There were 187 housing units at an average density of 224.2 per square mile (87.0/km²). The racial makeup of the town was 97.73% White, 1.70% African American, 0.28% from other races, and 0.28% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.57% of the population.

There were 123 households out of which 28.5% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 48.8% were married couples living together, 19.5% had a female householder with no husband present, and 29.3% were non-families. 28.5% of all households were made up of individuals and 15.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.25 and the average family size was 2.70.

In the town the population was spread out with 17.6% under the age of 18, 6.8% from 18 to 24, 20.4% from 25 to 44, 22.9% from 45 to 64, and 32.3% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 48 years. For every 100 females there were 90.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 84.2 males.

The median income for a household in the town was $24,375, and the median income for a family was $36,250. Males had a median income of $26,250 versus $20,000 for females. The per capita income for the town was $15,717. About 14.5% of families and 18.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 29.7% of those under age 18 and 6.9% of those age 65 or over.

See also

• List of cities and towns along the Ohio River