KOSCIUSKO, INDIANA, IN PRINT
This article first appeared in the POST EAGLE, April 23, 2003 issue, pages 4, 15
Polish place names in the United
States don't appear in the news as
often as Polish surnames. Shortly
after President George W. Bush
sent American troops to Iraq, two
Polish place names popped up in
the news with the death of 26-year-old Lance Corporal David K.
Fribley, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine
Regiment, 2nd Marine
Expeditionary Brigade. The city of
Nassiriyah, Iraq, near which he was
killed in an ambush March 23,
2003, is nothing like Warsaw, the
county seat of Kosciusko County,
Indiana, where the Marine graduated from high school and generations of the Fribley family paid
their taxes, or Cape Coral, Florida,
where he was activities director of
a retirement community until he
joined the Marines in 2001. Both
communities mourned his loss in
Iraq.
Mourning war heroes in their
communities is not a strange phenomenon in the United States.
What is part of American history
and especially interesting is the
way the people who built Warsaw,
about 40 miles west of Fort Wayne,
and Kosciusko County in the northern part of Indiana kept the two
Polish place names in print since
the 1830s. It required no help from
the Polish population. In fact, in
1930, when Kosciusko County had
a population of 27,501 persons,
5,735 of them in Warsaw, not one
was Polish.
Over the years, items in the local
newspapers have perpetuated the
names of the capital of Pulund and
General Thaddeus Kosciuszko.
Among the headlines were the
elections of public officials, county
fairs, snow blizzards, train wrecks,
and visits of famous people. For
example, the Warsaw Daily Times
had a number of stories on one of
the first women in aviation, Marvel
Crosson, who was born in Warsaw,
April 27, 1904, and learned to fly
in 1923 in San Diego, California,
to which the family moved earlier.
During the Woman's Air Derby
from Santa Monica to Cleveland,
her plane went down in the desert
at Welton, Arizona, on August 20,
1929, and her body was found 200
feet from the wreckage. Her parachute had failed to open. The
adventures of her brother, Joseph
Crosson, with whom she learned to
fly, were also covered in Warsaw,
with pictures of his expedition to
the South Pole in the 1920s with
Sir Hubert Wilkins.
Kosciusko Guards
Nothing compared with the
headlines in 1861 when the merchants, farmers, mechanics,
veterans of the Mexican War, and others
of the Indiana county left their
desks, plows, shops, or whatever,
and organized Company E, 12th
Indiana Regiment of Volunteers.
Before leaving Warsaw, where it
met from day to day for drill, the
company adopted a song,
Kosciusko Guard's Farewell, and
gave three cheers to the volunteer
who wrote it. The opening three
stanzas read:
Adieu to Peace and all her in
charm
Our country's Standards high
unfurled
Will Kosciusko's Sons allow
Stories of the Kosciusko Guards
abound. Relief through rhyme ballooned in popularity at the time.
During the year the Kosciusko
Guards were in military service,
mostly on guard duty along the
Potomac River because for half of
its period of active duty it lacked
adequate arms to face the enemy,
the people of Kosciusko County
read about it in the newspapers.
The company was not equipped
with Springfield rifles until
November 15, 1861. Occasionally
someone from the company
returned to Warsaw to recruit more
men for it. No person under five
feet six inches in height was sworn
in. Of the first 135 volunteers,
fifty-five were turned down
because they were not tall enough.
It didn't matter about age. The
drummer of the company, Tommy
Hubler, was nine years old, and the
youngest person in the Union
Army.
Imagine the gleam in President
Lincoln's eyes when the drummer
boy showed up in a dress parade at
the White House on May 6, 1S62,
with the Kosciusko Guards, part of
two Indiana regiments that were
invited, and even more surprising,
for the first time in the history of
the country, the sight of the company's banner, having "Kosciusko
Guards" embroidered in gold letters in the center of an American
Flag. The company marched to the
White House from 7th Street and
Pennsylvania Avenue to the music
of its fifer, Thompson Holt, whose
age I don't know, and the drum
beats of young Hubler.
When their term of enlistment
was over, the members of the
Kosciusko Guards returned to
Warsaw, Indiana, and most of them
joined other Union regiments for
the rest of the conflict. Reuben
Williams, a native of Tiffin, Ohio,
who was promoted to captain of
the Kosciusko Guards on August 7,
1861, was taken prisoner shortly
afterwards with six enlisted men to
Libby Prison in Richmond,
Virginia. When they returned to the
company on March 24, 1862, nothing but skin and bones, Dr. David
Hazzard, whose son was one of the
human scarecrows, left his medical
practice in Warsaw, Indiana, to help
the former p.o.w.'s get back on
their feet. Later Williams, still in
his early 30s, became an intrepid
Union general and a hero of
Chicamauga. Several veterans of
the Kosciusko Guards won elections for various county offices, as
did George W. Scott, who was a
sheriff of Kosciusko County before
the war. During his term in office
as county auditor, Joseph S. Baker
acquired enough experience in
building the Kosciusko County
Court House that he became a contractor for similar buildings in
Indiana. William S. Hemphill,
author of Journal of the Kosciusko
Guards, which he kept in 1861 and
1862, ran the Northern Indianian,
beginning in 1877, and filled his
pages with a lot of good historical
material.
by Edward Pinkowski
Our Country calls, To arms!
To arms!
Arouse! To arms!
Ye patriots true
And meet the Southern
traitor Crew.
The pride, the wonder of the
world!
That honored Standard bids
us go
To meet the Southern
traitorous foe.
The Stars and Stripes to
trail below
While the "Rattle Snake"
shall wave on high
And give to Liberty the lie?
![[COURTHOUSE PICTURE]](KosciuszkoCourthouse.JPG)
Kosciusko County Courthouse
Origin of Kosciusko County
No matter what their family names were, either Kosciusko or Warsaw, where they came from, was always in print. After a new county was named after a Polish hero of the American Revolution, many persons could not pronounce Kosciuszko, which they spelled without the letter "z", and wanted to change it. Had a lawyer named John B. Chapman not laid the groundwork, or pulled a fast one as is often said, most likely the foes of Kosciusko would have changed the name.
Chapman was in love with the Polish name for a long time. "When I was a boy in the army in Norfolk, Virginia," he wrote in the Northern Indianian. "I heard some old veterans of the revolutionary war speaking of the noble traits of character of Koscius(z)ko. I always thought he had been neglected by the American people as a patriot of the revolution."
Chapman found himself in what became Kosciusko County in the early 1830s when the federal government let him have a post office and an Indian Agency in his log cabin. He was elected to the State Legislature in 1834. On 7 February 1835, when the body approved fifteen new counties for Indiana, Chapman grabbed his chance to name one for General Kosciuszko, just as others selected Steuben, De Kalb, and Pulaski for other counties, and the majority of the legislators approved his choice with cheers and clapping of hands.
Unfinished Work
The first settlers of the county, scarcely more than fifty when it was formed, but growing rapidly like a volcano, were more opposed to a railroad project from New York to the Mississippi River, because it would cut up their farms and kill their animals, than to their new place name. As the hostility to railroads in Indiana grew, office seekers focused on Chapman, who favored railroads over canal digging, and each one declared that if he were elected he would change the name of Kosciusko. They said that Kosciusko was a hard name to spell.
Chapman said to them, "when you reach the legislature you may be able to blot out the sun, and sink the earth in oblivion, but never can you change the name of Kosciusko."
His secret "modus operandi," as he called his unfinished work, was to hold a sham sale of land in the center of the county, name the area Warsaw, and sell part of it to the county commissioners on which to build a court house. The quarter section of land he bought was nothing more than a swamp with denuded tamarack trees, each one slim and straight as a mast of a small vessel. Then he hired an old surveyor, William Lightfoot, to divide the water-logged land into lots and put up building stakes. He sold the lots to ficticious buyers with a lot of fanfare. On the day he carved this on the trunk of a tree, "courthouse of Warsaw," his audience, to whom he said that it was the beginning of the capital of Kosciusko County, included his five little boys and the old surveyor.
As soon as the deal was closed to buld the court house, Chapman had the last laugh. Lightfoot laughed, too. Nearly everybody thought they could not build a town in the middle of a swamp. As Chapman described his enemies, "They had tried the bounds but could not alter them; and now fixing the court house at Warsaw, clinched the whole fabric together."
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