Jonathan Lindley
Jonathan Lindley (1756–1828) was an 18th-century member of the North Carolina legislature, land speculator, and one of the original settlers of Orange County, Indiana.
Early years in North Carolina
Lindley was born in
The
Jonathan Lindley went into the lumbering and turpentine business, speculating in wilderness acreage in central North Carolina. He quickly became one of the leading men and merchants of the area. In 1786, Lindley served in the North Carolina General Assembly at Hillsborough, also participating in the state convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1788. Lindley was among the North Carolinians who insisted on amendments to the original Federal constitution, which resulted in the Bill of Rights. He also supported the creation of the University of North Carolina, the first public university in the United States. The school was built on a hill near a chapel not far from Lindley's own property, a spot later called Chapel Hill.[5]
As a Quaker with anti-slavery convictions, Lindley introduced several bills to curb slavery, one of which called for an end to the importation of slaves from Africa to North Carolina, a crucial first step toward abolition. The slave trade in North Carolina was outlawed in 1794, partly through Lindley's efforts, though slavery itself survived until the Civil War. Lindley left the General Assembly in 1805.
Settling in Indiana
As new land in the
Lindley and his son Zachariah traveled overland to Indiana Territory in 1808 to prospect for land. Lindley was mesmerized by Indiana's old-growth woodlands. He purchased large tracts of land along the
Zachariah Lindley had established a grist mill on Lick Creek, in the limestone uplands forty miles northwest of Louisville, near what became Paoli, Indiana. Jonathan Lindley returned from North Carolina in 1811 with around twenty families. At least eleven of these families were "free colored," descendants of Africans and Lumbee, a Native American tribe in southeastern North Carolina. (The Lumbee often married African Americans and thus came to be classified as "colored" by the state.) Increasingly stripped of their rights by the Black Codes in the antebellum South, free blacks had compelling reasons to leave and often resettled near Quakers when they moved to the Midwest.
Originally intending to settle in the Wabash Valley, Lindley's settlers (numbering 218 people) were turned back by the outbreak of conflict between Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederation and the Indiana militia led by Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison. Turned away from the Wabash Valley, Jonathan Lindley and his family lived first near Richmond, Indiana, then purchased land at Lick Creek in what was later christened Orange County, Indiana, after his North Carolina birthplace. (Lick Creek itself was apparently named for a tributary of the Haw River near the old Lindley Mill in Chatham County, North Carolina.
Lindley's Lick Creek settlement, four miles east of the later town of Paoli along the road to Chambersburg, was one of the earliest white settlements in southern Indiana. Many of the free black settlers who moved north with him settled farther back away from the Chambersburg Road, in a remote part of what became the Hoosier National Forest. This settlement is also often referred to as "Lick Creek" or "Little Africa" and was abandoned by the early 20th century.[6][7]
In 1814, Lindley became an Indiana territorial court judge. He was a member of Indiana House of Representatives from 1816 to 1817, where he served on a committee to locate a spot for a state university (at that time called Indiana Seminary) in Bloomington. Lindley thus played a role in founding both the University of North Carolina and Indiana University.
He died in Orange County on April 5, 1828. His interment was at Old Lick Creek Quaker Cemetery, along U.S. 150 in Chambersburg, Indiana.
The Thomas Elwood Lindley House in Paoli was owned by Jonathan Lindley's son and was built in 1869 on land deeded to him in 1812. In 1974, the house was given to the Orange County Historical Society and is often open to visitors.[8]
References
- ^ "Family of Thomas* LINDLEY". woodlin.net. Archived from the original on 2014-12-09.
- ^ "Family of Jonathan LINDLEY". woodlin.net. Archived from the original on 2014-12-09.
- ^ "Graham Flour Mill Remains as Revolutionary War Vestige". September 2010.
- ^ "Family of William LINDLEY". woodlin.net. Archived from the original on 2014-12-09.
- ^ "Lindley, Jonathan | NCpedia".
- ^ "Looking at History: Indiana's Hoosier National Forest Region, 1600 to 1950 (History of South Central Indiana)". www.foresthistory.org. Archived from the original on 2012-07-28.
- ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-12-19. Retrieved 2014-12-07.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ "The Lindley House - Orange County Indiana".