One Township's Yesterdays Chapter I.  

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING

"God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform." -William Cowper

EVERYTHING MUST HAVE A BEGINNING. At any rate, so it has often been said. There are various species of beginnings, and countless things to have beginnings, including histories. Since this history of a township goes back one hundred years and more, it might as well go back to the beginning of beginnings. That is a mighty undertaking. And, to tell the truth, the undertaking can be no more than an attempt, perhaps a feeble one for all that. The Union Township region, together with others all about, is so old that one would contract a headache trying to figure it out.

So why try? Of course, this little patch of earth is as ancient as the great orb designated as the world, and the beginning of beginnings on this orb of ours is so obscured by the mists of the ages that all one can say here and now, or all of that any layman has ever said, is little better than hit-or-miss conjecture. Those mists are dense, impenetrable. A jab at them is about all that can be accomplish after all is said and done, we have but borrowed fragments here and there from the wisdom of the sages, to whom we apologize and say, "We take your word for it, gentlemen."

Once upon a time, so the story goes, there was no sign of life anywhere in this region, and all that could be seen was sea and sky. Even those could not be seen; there were no eyes to see. God, the Omnipotent alone was witness of His great works. We have been told that in that very ancient sea at length appeared fishes, strange denizens, differing greatly from those of today in Maxinuckee [Maxinkuckee] and in the in Yellow and Tippecanoe rivers.

Long ages rolled by. Countless myriads of these creatures lived and died, leaving their skeletal remains on the floor of that sea.

Time passed and there came a. great conspiracy, foreordained we prefer to believe, by the Will of God, to prepare the way far mankind. Sun, wind, rain and soil conspired together. Vegetation took root, became profuse. Mighty trees towered skyward. Marshland stretched far and wide. As yet, no birds inhabited the trees. But in the damp and foggy world of then, snakes slithered "and crept in the morasses, frogs dwelt on the brink of the waters that covered the greater part of the earth, and insects hummed and droned in the dank air above. And that was Union Township, long, long ago.

Covered by the Sea.
More ages passed. The sea again buried the land and all thereon. Once more, no life existed. So the cycles of change went on. In time, the polar cold crept down from the Northland. A river of ice followed, a mammoth glacier. It covered the land, scooped out valleys, leveled hills, churned and milled stones to powder, uprooted the new forests that had reared themselves, destroyed or drove southward the creatures of the wild, and brought down from the North giant boulders of granite, of gneiss and of other metamorphic nature, tokens that remain with us today, telling us of the Ice Age.

The ice melted, and dropped those boulders ... for farmers to fret over and labor with, trying to banish them from their fields. The ice even left whole moraines of them, but they were too much for the farmer.

So ended the Ice Age, with the melting and receding of that vast glacier, which buried this region and extended southward to the Ohio River, covering about three quarters of the area of the State. So, likewise came another beginning, introducing a phase of our story in which we find less to mystify', us regarding the why and wherefore of things, less conjecture and doubt, less to be left alone for want of what may be termed the truth, and less in the way of intangibles and obscurities. Evidences were left, remaining with us today in Union Township and pointing to what really could have been and might reasonably have happened. In these parts, we appear to possess tile most enlightenment on the glacial and post-glacial periods, through the geological formations extant, which tell their own stories. They speak of great cataclysms, stupendous changes. They convince the writer that this immediate region witnessed several remarkable eras from the Ice Age onward: an era of water and deluge, an era of great winds, an era in which aquatic and semi aquatic life predominated, and an era in which life on the land finally triumphed, aided and abetted by the living things of the water.