The Town of Antioch
It’s First Hundred Years
1837 – 1937
By: Roberta Selter Knirsch
Published by the Trustees of the Antioch Township Library
in observance of The Town Sesquicentennial 1987
Part Two.
In February 1838, Thomas Warner returned, bringing with him his wife and at least seven of his ten children. They, too, moved in with the Gages until their own home was ready for habitation. This cabin was probably typical of most of the region’s early homes. It “contained no windows or doors, blankets being hung up over openings) to shut out the outer world.”
Robert Pollock and Robert Slrang staked claims near Mill Creek in 1838. They were among the many who preempted land before it had been surveyed. The usual method of insuring rights to such claims was to erect “a habitation, no matter how small, or by the fencing or ‘breaking up’ of land. If the settler could not …do either of these he would mark or cut down trees in various places on the land he wished to hold. “ Such evidence usually was respected for at least a season.
In 1839 Seven year old Alexander Trotter accompanied his parents to Gages’ Settlement. They had journeyed through the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes to Kenosha, then know as South Port. This was the route taken by most of the early settlers, varied only by landings at Milwaukee or Chicago, neither of which found favor in the eyes of the newcomers. Chicago, in particular, was scorned. Sarah Emmons, who landed there as a four year old in 1842, recalled that “it was nothing but a marshland.” Harrison Jones claimed it had signs with the inscription “No Bottom Here.”
Travel conditions were extremely primitive. Newcomers told harrowing tales of their journeys from the East. Lewis Paddock put his wife on a sailing vessel in Buffalo and then started out to cover the long miles on foot, “a rifle upon his back.” He arrived in Chicago before she did. “Forty-two days had elapsed before she reached her destination.”
Some of the pioneers came through Canada, traveling for some time through the forest without a road and camping in the open. Others came comparatively short distances. Melissa Drom and her husband, William Ring, came from LaPort County, Indiana, in 1843. The 115 mile journey took two weeks as “no bridges had been built … and the roads were made almost impassible by the spring rains. At one time the wagon became mired in mud and it required eleven yoke of oxen to extricate it.”