The following is a reprint of a story that appeared in the July 2008 issue of Steuben Times, a short-lived newsletter dedicated to preserving Steuben County history. Since the defunct Times and the Voice of Angola blogsite share similar goals, and since Lou Ann Homan---my friend and neighbor----keeps bugging me to post something, it seems only right that I should share this. Plus, by pulling out something old, I don't have to write something new. Enjoy!Lee P. SauerStagecoach Trail in Steuben County Runs Cold Stories about old stagecoach trails running across Steuben County are easy to find. The trails themselves are not.
Nor is documentation of stage lines simple to harness. The problem? The sturdy carriages pulled by horses and so commonly connected with the wild west operated very early in Steuben county’s history – and for a relatively short period of time. The coaches probably began their run within a decade of construction of the first road between Angola and Fremont in late 1836 and pulled to a stop about thirty years later.
Since serious efforts to preserve county history didn’t begin until 1880, only tidbits of stagecoach documentation remain. The county atlas of that year provides thumbnail historical sketches of each township. But no mention of stagecoaches or their way stations appear.
The earliest surviving county newspaper – the Steuben Republican – is dated Jan. 2, 1860. A front page ad for the Eldorado House inn includes the line “Squire & Anderson’s Stage Office at this House.”
But even by this early date, livery stables (which rented horses and carriages by the hour, day or week) and hack lines (lighter, horse-drawn descendants of the stagecoach built for better roads) were assuming the bulk of the county’s transportation needs.
And, most importantly, the arrival of the Fort Wayne, Jackson & Saginaw Railroad was just 10 years around the corner.
Still, in their relatively short reign, stagecoaches cut a deep trail in the county’s folklore consciousness. So deep, in fact, that 130 years have yet to erase it.
* * *
Art Eberhardt of Angola clearly remembers walking and riding along the length of a Steuben County stagecoach trail long ago.
Earlier this year, Eberhardt, compass in hand, tried to retrace his steps. “There was no question it was a trail,” said Eberhardt as he walked through the Charles McClue Reserve (on County Road 400-N). “It was so clear, so easy to see.” At one time a historical marker – now missing – pointed the trail out to McClue visitors, according to Eberhardt.
That was in the mid 1960s. Art and his wife, Marion, had joined a group who decided to make a day of walking along the old trail. Maurice McClue (sometimes spelled McClew), the Angola lawyer who donated his father’s farm to create the nature reserve (see box), had passed down stories he’d heard about the trail. It cut diagonally across the family property, McClue had said, until emerging at an inn near the corner of today’s CR 400-N and 100-E. From there, it continued on to Fremont.
When he first saw the trail, said Eberhardt, it began just north of Angola as a winding, dusty ribbon that cut through fields of long grass.
But even 30 years ago, the trail was fading. “After it entered the McClue property, it wasn’t clear anymore,” Eberhardt said. “We would have guessed to follow it.”
On another occasion, Eberhardt and a few others enamored with the stagecoach legend jumped into a jeep and took up pursuit, this time northeast of the McClue Reserve. They found fragments of the trail, especially in the Marsh Lake area, said Eberhardt.
But the intervening decades have replaced grass fields with trees and new development. This year, after a couple of hours in the McClue Reserve, Eberhardt called off the search for the trail he’d seen so many years ago.
* * *
Sure, said Lloyd Hanson, part of an old stagecoach trail cuts across his property.
“I’ve walked it,” he said.
Hanson has lived on CR 300-N, south of the McClue Reserve, since 1965. He said the trail came straight north out of Angola, parallel but east of State Road 127.
For years, a windmill of the neighboring farm to the west marked the spot just north of CR 300-N where the trail split. One branch headed northeast to Fremont, the other northwest to Orland (see map).
“You could see where the shack (for stagecoach customers) used to stand,” Hanson claimed. The trail itself was so clear, according to Hanson, that wagon wheel ruts could be seen.
He confirmed that, after leaving his property, the Fremont trail cut across the McClue property.
As for the Orland route, it still exists, said Hanson. Today it’s used as a snowmobile trail (which cuts across CR 300-N 4/10 of a mile east of SR 127). Once far enough north, that trail met what was once an Indian trail, but is now known as State Road 120, said Hanson.
In his 33 years on CR 300-N, Hanson has picked up remaining shards of the stagecoach trail legend.
A late neighbor, Conway Garn, lived on a farm that his family had owned since at least 1898 (the property is now Klink Concrete, Inc.). Garn used to tell this story:
Around Civil War time, thieves stole some gold and supposedly buried it along the trail near where Hanson now lives. Folks looked for the gold for years, but never found anything.
Years later, the property which reportedly held the gold came into the possession of a Williams family. People whispered that “old man Williams” had found the gold.
For in the 1930’s, a neighbor sold Williams a piece of equipment. After they shook hands on the deal , Williams walked into the woods.
In five minutes he returned and paid his bill with a handful of gold coins.
Hanson smiles but doesn’t laugh when asked if the story has credit. Somebody believes it, he said. Within the last 10 years, folks armed with metal detectors have tried to find that cold gold trail.
The Air Force veteran and retired Tri-State University electrical engineering teacher admits to being quite an adventurer in his day – as a young man Hanson hiked for five days through rough Central American terrain.
But he now avoids the area where the stagecoach trail crosses his property. It’s guarded by some serious sink holes.
“I once pushed a branch 17 feet into one,” he said.
* * *
Dr. J. Glenn Radcliffe bought his home at the corner of CR 400-N and 100-E, the property just west of today’s McClue Reserve, in 1950.
Recently he walked a few steps to the southwest of his home. This, he said sweeping with his arm, is where the old stagecoach inn used to stand.
The simple rectangular log cabin stood east-west, said Radcliffe, and by the time he met it, it was in extremely poor condition. The previous owner had used the building as a catch-all garbage can and it contained a variety of refuse – everything from tin cans to human feces. Soon after his move, Radcliffe razed the building.
Yes, Radcliffe said, he’d heard the legend of the stagecoaches. But the only information he received came from old neighbors. And many of them were only repeating what their parents had told them.
The stories said that after its stop at the inn, the stagecoach headed northeast through those woods, cut across what was then the Trout Farm (today ‘s Eaton Creek Golf Club) and on to Fremont.
Then Radcliffe asked: Would you like to see what’s left of the trail?
The retired Tri-State University administrator drove four tenths of a mile north of his home and parked along CR 100-E. This area, he said, was part of the farm he bought 48 years ago.
He used the wooded lot for recreation. Sometimes he chopped wood. Other times he visited for inspiration. “Many a time when I was feeling blue, I’d come back here, sit on a stump and talk to the Lord,” said Radcliffe (he currently serves as TSU chaplain).
A few years back, his son took possession of the property. It had just been recently logged, Radcliffe said. Evidence of the loggers littered the area. All trees of size had been reduced to stumps. Their large leafy tops lay scattered about. Deep furrows made by the logging trucks cut into the mud.
The search for the trail seemed to be losing ground. When walking on a fairly steep incline, Radcliffe stopped to catch his breath. But he didn’t apologize. “You should hope you can do this when you’re 92,” he said.
He went on. But the damage wrought by the loggers seemed to have destroyed his grasp of the land. “It should be right around here,” said Radcliffe.
Forty years ago, he said, the trail had cut a precise path through this land. It was bound on both sides by mounds of earth, as if the repeated pounding of the stages had packed the earth into a valley.
Even though the trail laid unused for years, trees had never gotten a foothold between the mounds; Radcliffe took that as a further sign that the trail had been used hard.
Nor were there any stumps in the pathway– a fact Radcliffe attributed to extreme old age.
As he talked, Radcliffe came to a stop.
“This is it,” he said. And he turned north.
At first he seemed to possess an extra sense. The trail didn’t look any different in this area than the other paths gouged out of mud by big truck tires.
But slowly the clues Radcliffe had provided made themselves apparent. There were no tree trunks in this path. And mounds on either side appeared.
At the north end of the woods, the logging trucks’ damage ended. And there it was.
Bounded by round shoulders, the old trail had the faint hint of thin ruts on either edge. Then it disappeared in land now developed into new homes.
Radcliffe said he’d been told this portion of the trail had been especially steep more than a century ago. So, at it’s inn stop, the stagecoach line added an extra team to provide more horsepower for this last leg.
Could something like this be confirmed? No. Just as other parts of the Steuben County stagecoach remain covered in decades of dust.
Radcliffe realized the legend-like quality of the vignette and chuckled.
“It makes a good story anyway,” he said.
Cutline with map:
(Due to technical difficulties, the map could not be transferred to the blog. Editor.)PROJECTED PATHS – According to the few surviving clues, at least three stage routes operated in Steuben County. The main route north-south connected Fort Wayne with Coldwater, Mich., according to DeKalb County historian John Martin Smith Sources quoted in the story say a second route veered northeast to Fremont, and a western route curved around the lakes to Orland. Projected paths of the trails are superimposed above on an 1880 map of the county.
