Debbie Blank
“The history of Laurel is actually a passion of mine,” Donna Murray told about 45 other Franklin County Historical Society members at a dinner meeting at the Laurel Hotel.
“At one time it was absolutely a social center of Franklin County,” she maintained. “To look at Laurel today, you would never know.”But nice antique homes and historic structures give away its past.
With slides of people and buildings long gone emphasizing her words, Murray hoped “to paint a vivid picture of what a prestigious and booming town Laurel used to be – and still can be today.”
In 1811 Benjamin Maple traveled from Kentucky to the Indiana Territory, the first pioneer to construct a log cabin, then a log church in the beautiful area along the Whitewater River now known as Laurel.
Soon buildings made of native limestone, including a tiny jail, appeared.
The town was close to a Delaware Indian boundary line. Stipps Hill Road originally was part of an Indian trail called the Shawnee Trace. In fact, many current roads used to be Indian trails.
“There were a lot of Indians causing distress to the settlers," who built blockhouses, which were heavy structures used for military defense, sometimes with projecting upper stories for observation, the historian reported. Brison's Blockhouse was located near Garrison Creek, Martin's Blockhouse along Seines Creek and Hawkins’ Blockhouse near Salt Creek. By 1820, most Indians were gone from this section of the state.
Laurel was annexed from an older town called Somerset, a well-known trading center. The settlement was laid out by Edward Toner in 1816, then real immigration took place.
“The Conwells were very enterprising. With their arrival, things really began to hum for the community,” she observed. Trader James Conwell, instrumental in planning and constructing the Whitewater Canal, became Somerset’s postmaster in 1831 and changed its name to Conwell Mills. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1834. Two years later the town plat was laid out. Conwell wanted to call it New Baltimore, but another Hoosier town claimed that name, so it became Laurel after his old hometown.
The canal, approved from Lawrenceburg to Hagerstown, was completed in 1842. An old stone barn that sat just off Washington Street at one time held 80 horses used for canal work. The project brought an influx of people and work. “That must have been a massive job to dig out 76 miles using crude tools,” Murray said. About 1,000 men each earned $18.50 monthly. Laurel stone, now being shipped worldwide, was used to build the canal locks and support walls.
Primary exports from the valley were agricultural products. The canal was so damaged by floods in the late 1850s that residents petitioned the state to sell the right of way to make a railroad line along the towpath.
Yet the canal was still needed for water to power flour, carding and woolen mills.
There was another prominent industry as well. “A person could stand on the mound (Laurel’s high point) and see the stacks of 13 distilleries up and down the river from Laurel,” the speaker said.
Two homesteads of famous natives were erected in the town. Murray House, the birthplace of Charles Murray (no relation to her), is located at Washington and Baltimore streets. People without money could pay admission with pins and needles to his shows staged in the barn until he was 12. Murray (1872-1941) was a widely known stage and screen comedian of the 1920s and 1930s who appeared in over 100 Hollywood movies.
Colter House, built by James Conwell in 1830 on the southwest corner of Conwell and LaFayette streets, was the birthplace of poet Elizabeth Conwell Smith Willson (1842-1864). She married another poet, Byron Forceythe Willson, and died one year later.
Two years of devastating fires destroyed many of Laurel’s early structures. In 1872 a blaze started in a tavern. A bucket brigade extinguished it, but when exploding oil ignited it again, 23 mostly uninsured buildings estimated at the time to be worth $110,000 were ruined. 1886 fires in January and May (suspicious because dynamite was used at the latter one) caused further damage.
One of Murray’s favorite historical nuggets is the story of Aunt Nell, whose plain white gravestone in Laurel Cemetery stated she died at 115 years of age in July 1852. “Aunt Nell was liberated from slavery in 1812 by James Conwell” in Delaware before he came to Franklin County. He brought her with him and she continued to assist the family. The faithful worker first was buried on the Conwell farm (not in the family burial plot), then her remains were moved to the cemetery.
Debbie Blank can be contacted at 812-934-4343, Ext. 113; or debbie.blank@ batesvilleheraldtribune.com.
