TPAN Issues of interest

The next TPAN meeting will be held on Thursday, March 20, 2008, at the Traders Point Creamery, starting at 6:45 PM. This meeting will largely be a forum on the upcoming Pike School Board elections in the May primary election. The initial 15 minutes of the meeting will be used to update some local issues then the school board forum will begin at 7 PM. To date, three of the school board candidates have confirmed they will participate in the forum so please attend the TPAN meeting to learn about the candidates as well as mingle with your TP neighbors.

In other news of interest:
1. The Indianapolis Parks Department is conducting a series of meetings to discuss with the public the 2009 update to the Indianapolis Department of Parks and Recreation Comprehensive Plan and Greenways Master Plan. The Round 1 series of meetings is to discuss the planning process and gather public feed back. The meeting scheduled for the Pike Township locale will be held Tuesday, March 4, 2008, from 6:30 to 8 PM, at the Pike Freshman Center Conference Room, 6801 Zionsville Road. The attached pdf document is a flier distributed by the Parks Department and lists all meeting dates throughout the city-county.

2. As of the week of February 11th, the Indianapolis IndyGo bus system has begun operating some new and expanded routes in its service area. There is now an expanded route that comes from downtown Indianapolis north to the Traders Point Shopping Center and also services Park 100. This route may be useful for numerous occasions, including having a car undergoing service or to attend a Colts game or other downtown activity and avoiding paying for parking.
Check out the new route schedules at www.indygo.net/routes.htm.
Route 37 - Park 100: Extends service to Traders Point Center (W. 86th St.) and Intech Park (W. 71st St.). Operates Monday through Sunday. The Customer Service Center, located in the Indianapolis City Market, also has schedules. For more information, call the center at 635-3344.

3. For those of you (like most of us) who get confused by the terms and various steps undertaken to develop an historic district, such as we are underway to do with the Traders Point Rural Historic District, the January-February 2008 edition of the "Indiana Preservationist" magazine, published by the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, has a very helpful group of articles as the edition's Feature Topic, entitled "Tools of the Trade". You can find the magazine and these articles at: http://www.historiclandmarks.org/Resources/Publications/IndianaPreservationist/PreservationistArchive/Pages/PreservationistArchive2008.aspx

4. Do you have concerns about cosmetics and personal hygiene products? You may be interested in the following information:
Chemicals in Cosmetics and Personal Care Products.
The Environmental Working Group has developed Skin Deep, a database that pairs ingredients in more than 25,000 personal care products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory databases and generates a score based on the toxicity of those ingredients. It is easy to search by individual products and can also produce lists of products in different categories by score. www.cosmeticdatabase.com/ You can also check out www.safecosmetics.org/ for more information about the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a coalition of women’s, public health, labor, environmental health and consumer-rights groups whose goal is to protect the health of consumers and workers by requiring the health and beauty industry to phase out the use of chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects and other health problems, and replace them with safer alternatives.

A Backyard Grave (in West 86th Subdivision)

A Backyard Grave in
Traders Point, Indiana

By Ross Reller


Armed with a piece of paper showing the approximate site of the Cotton Cemetery, I knocked on the door. “Excuse me sir, but do you mind if I walk through your backyard? I believe it leads to an old cemetery up on the hill.”
Now before I tell you how he responded, at the time I thought it was entirely possible that he did not know a cemetery was there. Or if he knew it was there, he certainly did not want his world to suddenly change by how he answered some stranger’s question. Please pause and reflect upon how you might react if confronted with the same question.
The neighborhood is spectacular. The homes are above average in every respect. The lots are well-landscaped and over a hundred of them feature the finest building materials. The developer took advantage of the mature wooded terrain. A creek meanders alongside numerous lots. Some of these lots overlook a large pond created by a long-gone quarry operation. It is a desirable setting for a peaceful residential community. Built by a prominent Indianapolis developer, Sol C. Miller, in the 1990s, the West 86th Street subdivision is one of the more prestigious communities in the township and is home to some very important people in Indianapolis.
The community is deemed far superior to the outdoor amphitheatre that almost located here when the property became available in the mid 1980s. After a long battle with neighbors and the city, music mogul Dave Lucas of Sunshine Promotions knew he was not welcome on this site in Pike Township. But this could have been the site for the Verizon Music Center (formerly Deer Creek), if the neighbors had not been so vocal in their opposition. The nearby Eagle Creek valley would have been ideal for pitching a tent in anticipation of a Grateful Concert the next day. The music might have wafted for miles. But Sol Miller had few remonstrators for his development.
A community like this is home to a variety of successful people. Doctors, lawyers, business owners, accountants and even scientists choose communities like this. I would learn months later that the man facing me had such renowned that his words could be found on the internet, “Beyond target discovery, we expect that proteins will reveal novel biomarkers, which will be important for new strategies to get a drug in the clinic and could be used in future diagnostics.”
And as I faced him and noticed the backdrop of his formal living room and the Sunday paper spread by a chair, I realized that a wall of windows overlooked the wooded area that was my area of interest. Before he could answer I unfolded the copy of the topo map and tried to show him where I thought the cemetery might be. As quickly as he could say I’m not sure, uh, sure I guess so, I wondered if he regretted it. There was a certain look on his face of “here goes the neighborhood, the secret’s out.”
In the hour preceding this encounter with the scientist, my wife and our dog and I had been doing etchings of grave markers at another area cemetery, the Hopewell Cemetery. Armed with rolls of paper, crayons, a notebook and a camera we were attempting to get a better understanding of our neighborhood and those buried in it. We had been on hands and knees etching the relief of the headstones with paper and crayon. I was filthy. So my attire was not going to get me an invitation to come in and discuss the matter further. The door closed and I went to my car on the cul-de-sac to get my wife and dog and our supplies.
After crossing a carefully manicured lawn we were in the heavy woods. Just beyond the yard the topography changed. We walked ten or fifteen feet down a steep embankment, over a now dry Cotton Creek and then back up a similar slope to a flat area in a grove of tall trees where the grave markers were immediately evident. Most of these were broken and were slightly hidden, laying flat under layers of leaves. A couple of stones were still upright. We were approximately two to three hundred feet from the wall of windows in his living room. We realized that it was very possible from this vantage point that the cemetery might not be visible from the house.
“Harmon’s buried here!” I shouted to my wife. I had just learned a few weeks earlier some of the names of the township’s earliest settlers. Why I would have expected her to have remembered these names I do not know. Hesitantly she said, “Who was Harmon?” as if she was about to be scolded for not knowing. “I think he was the first settler in the township,” I said with all the authority of someone who doesn’t have a clue. “But the graveyard isn’t even marked, isn’t that odd if he’s so important to the township?” Gwen said. “John Harmon, Born 1767 Died 1825”, she read aloud, “James Harmon, Born Feb. 7 1797, and Died April 11, 1847.
We quietly went about our business of etching Then we went home. The property owner and his unmarked cemetery would be left alone for another day.
The earliest land records from the National Land Office record that on November 9, 1822: John B. Harmon bought 160 acres, NE ¼, sec 15. This site is where the Traders Point Creamery in northwestern Pike Township, Marion County is today. His son, James Harmon, on October 3, 1823 purchased the W ½ NW ¼, sec 14, 80 acres, a site just east of his father’s land on the east side of Eagle Creek. James Harmon only enjoyed two years of his father’s company on their adjacent farms. But James showed his respect for his father by donating a portion of his smaller farm for a cemetery where his father could be buried. A cemetery that today is anonymous.
Father and Son were two of the earliest settlers in Pike Township. They moved to the area together, settled on it, bought adjacent farms, worked here, died here, and remain here, in a quiet unmarked cemetery in someone’s backyard, in Sol Miller’s West 86th..




Among the earliest (Pike Township) settlers and perhaps the first thereof was James Harmon who came to the township in 1820, settling on the east side of Eagle Creek near the North county Line. Source: Pike Township Historical Society.


Author’s Note The approximate location of the Cotton Cemetery is shown on the USGS 1953 Quadrangle map that was folded in my pocket. An earlier article, “Conner’s Choice”, explores Pike township’s first property owner, a land speculator by the name of William Conner, who chose an 80 acre parcel where Eagle Creek crosses Lafayette Road. As most Indiana 4th graders know, William Conner chose to settle in Hamilton County and built the county’s first brick house.