Builder of the Huddleston House Written by Samuel Brown Huddleston, 1911
The Huddleston house has prominence in Cambridge City Indiana and is an historical landmark. I decided to include information about this house and it’s builder, John Huddleston, son of Johnathan & Phebe Huddleston. Even though we are not direct descendants of John. He is uncle to Samuel, who wrote this article. It is important to have information about him and his family as this home is a living memory of our Huddleston heritage.
It seems to us that not many pioneers have lived in western Wayne County that have left more enduring and beneficial footprints behind them than John Huddleston; footprints that will reflect their sterling character far into the future to all lovers of local developments. He was born of Quaker parents, Johnathan and Phebe Huddleston. December 10, 1907 at Beard's Hatter Shop North Carolina and in 1815 his parents brought him to Union County Indiana. He was one of eight sons and five daughters, all of whom save one son, located in Dublin after their maturity. In the early days of no railroads and difficult means of travel families clung closer together than they do now.
On March 4th 1830 at the age of 22 years John Huddleston married Susan, daughter of Abram Moyer, in the home of her parents four miles east of Liberty. They kept house in this settlement until 1835, when they moved to the new town of Dublin, and that same year they bought a seventy acre farm on the south side of the National Road a half mile east of Dublin. Cambridge City had not been laid out until the year following. There had been but little clearing done on this farm and no building at all. The National Road had just been surveyed and travel did not follow the line of the survey in all places until the grading was done upon it. Lick-branch, the little creek on the north side of the road hugged the high land bank coming close up to the present homestead. A little lower down the creek crossed the roadway and passed through; what is now John Martin's garden and his front yard.
John Huddleston graded down the hill where he made his wagon and built his barn and filled up the bed of the creek ? its course to the north side of the road. He also graded the road from the top of the hill at the east end of the town of Dublin to the top of Limekiln Hill at the west end of Cambridge City. He used a homemade two-wheeled scraper for moving much of the dirt, with a heavy yoke of oxen at the wheels and a horse at the end of the tongue. Two of his sons, Levi and Henry drove the lead horse and helped drive the oxen. John, however, had to oversee the management of the oxen.
His first building was a little cabin scarcely high enough for a man to stand erect in, and it stood near the barn. There was a loft in the cabin for the children to sleep in and he used to “toss them up and help them down,” too and from their humble bed chamber. Later he built a hewed log house southwest of the present woodhouse, where the family lived only a few years; until he built his large brick house, which, after his death, became the house of his son Henry, and he in turn sold the farm to his son Charles, who occupies it at the present time (1911). When John Huddleston moved into his brick house he gave the hewed log house to
Jack Barns, a popular Negro, who tore it down and moved it to his lot on the south side of Cumberland Street at the east end of Dublin, where it stood a number of years and was displaced by a good frame house that is now owned by his daughter, Sarah.
In 1844 John Huddleston hired a brick molder and made the brick for his new house. He tempered the mud and wheeled it to the moulder, and Levi and Henry off bore the brick when they were only ten and eleven years old. The brick were ? and burned on the ground near the house. The front rooms of the building were three stories high, the basement room's being under ground except in front. The two stories above contained the living rooms, the backyard being level with the floor of the second story. There are stone stairways outside on the east and the west ends of the house, leading down to the road. There are fourteen rooms in the house, and it took one hundred perch of stone to lay the basement walls that were underground, and the foundations of the back rooms. There are one hundred and twenty-five thousand bricks in the walls. The stone was quarried on the Henley farm about one mile south of John Huddleston's. The quarry had been exhausted long ago. Aaron Burr Smith laid all the stone and brick walls in this house. Afterward Smith became a “tinsman” and ran a tin shop and stove store in the building now occupied by E.J. Huddleston's tin shop and residence.
William Perry of Cambridge City took the lumber from the saw mill and dressed it by hand and put it into the building with no help except that of his own half grown boy, and the little help John Huddleston gave him in handling the heavy joists. A man who's name we have lost plastered the entire house for a horse valued at one hundred and twenty five dollars.
###Original Furnishings of John & Susannah Huddleston
The barn was not a large one, but it was so conveniently arranged that it held a large quantity of feed above and twenty seven stalls for horses in the basement. Duets from the hay mow and corncrib brought the feed to the aisle between the two rows of stalls. There was ample room in the wagon yard and stable for the accommodation of the general travelers and movers, but the hundreds of emigrants that were pouring into western Indiana and Illinois from the time these building were erected until 1853 sometimes overtaxed, all the premises. Often more than one hundred moving families passed westward in a single day, besides the great number of freight wagoners, stages, horseback riders, and home teams that were upon the road. Often mover's would pass in a continuous train of wagons as much as a mile long. A few times from twenty to forty families stopped at Huddleston's overnight, filling the wagon yard and roadsides near by with their wagons. John Huddleston did not keep a tavern, but he sold feed for the horses and oxen that passed. He also sold food for families to prepare for themselves and he sometimes fed people at his table. In crowded times, and in bad weather the people were given sleeping rooms in the basement rooms, on the floor of the wide, long porch on the south side of the house and sometimes they were crowded to the barn floor. Many people who had good rain proof wagon covers slept in their own wagons from choice, even in bad weather.
In 1847 or near that time, many Mormons were moving westward, and one evening about twenty five families drove into the Huddleston wagon yard and put in for the night. When John and his boys came in from their work he presented his bill for the accommodations. The leader of the Mormons told him that the “Lord would pay him.” “Yes, said John Huddleston, “but you are the treasurer, and I do business for cash.” He received the “cash.”
John Huddleston did teaming between Dublin and Cincinnati, hauling produce down and bringing merchandise back, but he would not haul intoxicating liquors, tobacco, nor goods that had been made by slave labor. At one time he hauled several thousand pounds of salted pork from the Dublin Market House that stood in the middle of Dublin Street in front of where the Methodist Parsonage now stands, to Cincinnati.
There were some deer, wild turkeys, and an occasional bear in these parts after John Huddleston settled here. One time Johan and his wife were feeding their hogs in a lot a little way south of their cabin, and a large brown bear came suddenly upon them and threatened to attack them paying little attention, at first tot their large and savage dog that hesitated to engage in the battle, but he came to the defense of this master and mistress and soon drove the beast to seek refuge in a retreat. When he endeavored to climb over the high rail fence the dog caught his hind legs and by the rolling off of the top rail, the bear was pulled back a few times but he finally escaped for the present but a stranger shot him a few miles away.
Before John Huddleston commenced to build he dug a well forty-eight feet deep, about twenty feet south of the house. It gave satisfaction for a short time, but being a deep well it became foul. Then he undertook to dig one after another closer to the house and failed on three of them each one being forty-eight feet deep and abandoned on account of caving. He had just reached the surface when the last one caved in. Then he commenced his fifth well near the door west of the kitchen. When he was down sixty three feet in this effort he was in hard-span and the digging was so hard he came out and welded a two inch auger onto a six foot shank and the next morning he bored three feet with it when the auger dropped through into water. By quick and hard work he was successful in driving a plug, wrapped with old cloths, into the hole and thus he stopped the flow of water until he walled the well up a little more than half way before night. Then he drew the plug, and the next morning the water was three feet above the top of the wall. They drew the water with their windless bucket until they could resume walling. When it was completed the water raised until they could dip it out with tin cups. He now dug a ditch and laid a wooden pump-log from the well to the road side and had a continuous flow of water from a standpipe into a trough where thousands of horses quenched their thirst when passing by; and a tin cup hung upon the standpipe for passing people to drink. He had risked his life, and came near loosing it in his long, hard, and discouraging toil in digging these five wells agrigating two hundred and fifty eight feet, but now his jeopardy and toil was forgotten in the joy the splendid reward, but this bounteous flow of water did not continue always, for about 1853, when the Indiana Central Railroad cut was made through the farm a few rods south of the well it must have tapped the fountain head, when water flowed out there.
John Huddleston helped to push forward many public enterprises, but he was not always successful in reaping personal benefits in cash profits. He took stock in the Whitewater Canal and the stock soon became worthless. When the Wayne County turnpike Company was granted the ownership of that portion of the National Road that lays within the county he became a stock holder in that Company, and helped gravel it in 1850. About the same time he took tow thousand dollars worth of stock in the Indiana Central Railroad Company and helped make the grade between Cambridge City and Dublin. Both of these investments proved to be profitable. Some years later he sold his sock in both of these companies on purpose to help promote the Connersville and New Castle Junction Railroad which was graded and most of the bridges were built passed only a few rods in front of his house, but the company became insolvent and he lost all of his investment.
As before noted, John Huddleston was born a Quaker, but he became more liberal than his Church and attended other Church services and finally he sang in the Methodist meetings in Dublin, for which he was
dis-owned by the Quaker Church. This act so offended his sense of justice- and his understanding of true religion that he became an adherent of the then new craze of Spiritualism, and he became so enured in it that he commenced to write a new Bible, with what he termed “more liberal, and up to date doctrines.” He retained as much of the old Bible as he endorsed and revised, changed, left out, and added too, as his imaginary spirit tutors inspired him. But his after- thought showed that he had acted with immature consideration, for by the time he had studied the old Bible well enough to make the changes he had desired to make, and when he had almost completed his new Bible, in a volume of foolscap paper nearly a foot thick he and his noble wife came under conviction. The hand of god rested upon them for a few weeks until their friends and neighbors not understanding the meaning of the spell; had grave apprehensions of the seriousness of their affliction. But John and his wife were fighting their battles without the help of man, and when; at last they had enjoyed their modest shouts of victory together their friends recognized them as new creatures with perfectly balanced mental powers. They were baptized and joined the United Brethren Church, and in time he became a local preacher. They were both loved by the Church and were highly respected by all that knew them. John Huddleston's children say that their father's new bible was never seen, nor heard of after he was converted.
In August 1877, John Huddleston was attending the horses in the stable just after two strange mules had been led past and old and perfectly gentle family hose when it kicked him so severely that he had to be helped to the house where he laid in severe pain until he died.