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Roots
Roland David Smith was born at home in Decatur, Indiana, on March 9, 1906. He was the first child of Golda Stoler and Harvey Martin Smith. Golda, twenty-three, tall and bone thin, was born in Portland, Indiana, about thirty-five miles south of Decatur. Harvey, twenty-four, known by family and friends as Harve, was a strapping six-footer, a true son of Decatur in his resourcefulness and ingenuity. They met in Decatur as teenagers and courted for five years before marrying on June 1, 1905. She became an elementary school teacher; he was a telephone lineman. They were a pious couple, hungry for respect in a proud and ambitious town. In 1881, with a population not yet 2,500 but brimming with entrepreneurial purpose, Decatur incorporated itself as a city. Its heroes were the gritty, indomitable pioneers who had formed it out of wilderness. Tales of frontier hardship and triumph and of tough, tireless, self-reliant men and women who had cut trees, dug wells, drained swamps, raised livestock, buried children and spouses lost to disease, and fought off wild animals haunted Smith’s childhood world.
Home was a two-story wood house with an attic on the corner of Jefferson and North Sixth Streets. Its location near the railroad tracks was respectable but not quite middle class. The house was spare, if not severe, with a small porch. The windows were narrowly vertical, almost Gothic. As throughout Decatur, primary heating came from coal stoves and woodstoves on the ground floor; kerosene stoves typically warmed the bedrooms.
Harve’s family was Decatur royalty. Smith would claim that he was the great-great-grandson of Samuel L. Rugg, who was considered the founder of Decatur. Rugg was, in fact, Smith’s great-great-step-grandfather, but he was still family and pretty much every family member for the next hundred years was eager to claim an ancestral relationship with him and through him partake in Decatur’s heroic formational story. Rugg was born in 1805 in Oneida County in upstate New York. After the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, he was part of a large westward migration. In Cincinnati, he worked in a cotton mill, married, and had a child. He was a blacksmith, one of several among Smith’s ancestry. By 1832, Rugg’s wife and child were dead, and he made his way by ox team to Indiana, which in 1816 had become the nineteenth state.
In 1835, after finding the land he was looking for beside the St. Mary’s River, he petitioned the state legislature to create a separate county. With Thomas Johnson, another Methodist, Rugg recorded the plat in 1836. He named the land Decatur, after Commodore Stephen Decatur (1779–1820), a hero in the War of 1812. An Adams County history book noted: “What to name the blamed thing might have been puzzled some. Not Samuel however … Was he not born in 1805, that gallant year when Stephen Decatur made his brilliant exploit in far off Tripoli?… Samuel was a Stephen Decatur enthusiast. Decatur to him was a magic word, that had power within itself.”1 It was Stephen Decatur who is credited with the toast “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be right; but our country, right or wrong!”
Rugg not only dreamed big but also made his dreams for Decatur and Adams County reality. By 1854, he was elected state senator. Four years later, he was elected state superintendent of public instruction and moved to the capital in Indianapolis, roughly 170 miles away. He gifted city lots to Decatur’s Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, and German Reformed churches. He donated the public square on which the courthouse was built. He built roads and promoted the Cincinnati, Richmond and Fort Wayne Railroad. His initiative made it possible for the plank road from St. Mary’s, Ohio, to Fort Wayne to pass through Decatur. Building the twenty-two-mile stretch from Decatur to Fort Wayne involved cutting and laying upward of a million strips of wood over swampy ground.
After fighting in the Civil War, Jay Rugg, Samuel’s son from an Indiana marriage, married Catherine Rowley, another of Decatur’s legendary pioneers. When Rowley died in 1923, the Decatur Democrat ran her obituary on the front page: “Mrs. Catherine Rugg, A Pioneer of County, Dies. Nearly 87 years old. Came to Adams County with Parents When Country Was Still Wilderness.”2 Rowley had eight children from a previous marriage, one of whom, William R. Smith, was Harve’s father.
One of Smith’s other paternal great-grandfathers was another local legend. In 1835, at age fifteen, William Pendleton Rice—a recent convert to Methodism—arrived in Indiana from Culpeper County, Virginia, with his older brother, Benjamin. “We built a log cabin, one story high, with puncheon floor, clapboard roof and an old-fashioned wooden chimney, with the back and jams of mud,” Rice wrote. He likened his and his brother’s “experience that first year … to that encountered by every pioneer. Nature had been on the ground a good long while, and when we, as the van guard of approaching civilization, undertook to take possession of the small territory which the government said was ours, Ben and I had to fight for it.”
The rest of Rice’s family followed, including his father, a soldier in the War of 1812. From splitting rails and chopping wood, Rice saved enough money to buy forty acres of land on which he “built a shanty in the year 1842,” where he lived with his wife, Frances Rabbit, also from Virginia.3 In 1865, he purchased a 280-acre farm near Decatur from the man for whom he had worked, eventually moving into town. The Rices had ten children, forty-one grandchildren, and nineteen great-grandchildren. Catherine Smith, David Smith’s sister, told Smith’s elder daughter, Rebecca, that the county was crawling with relatives. After Rice died at home in 1899, the Decatur Democrat published a photograph of him with his long white beard along with a description of his ailments: “He died of chronic dilatation of the heart, complicated with gall stones and chronic inflammation and the growing together of the liver, stomach and contents of the right side. Several years ago while lifting at some work about his farm he over strained himself which caused the terrible complications and which eventually caused his death.”4
Copyright © 2022 by Michael Brenson