Indiana Spirit Quest #307: You Are Not Forgotten Multi-Cache

The Indiana Spirit Quest series of geocaches will take you to a number of historic cemeteries built by Hoosier Pioneers. In just over a year and a half, the quest has grown to over three hundred forty caches hidden in thirty-four Indiana counties, and two Ohio counties, and the hiders have grown to seventeen cacher teams, most of which of which are comprised of Dogs and their Humans. Over 700 cacher teams have logged over 8,000 finds. One cache machine found 102 ISQ caches in a single day (daylight hours only).

(Photos by LEAD DOG)

Welcome to Owen, aka Old Quaker, aka Friends cemetery, in Lagro Twp., Wabash County, established in 1842. We missed this one due to several errors on the Wabash County Cemeteries list. First, It was listed as a duplicate listing as the other Quaker cemetery in Wabash City, and secondly, the address was wrong and it was listed in the wrong township.. We had been by here before and never noticed a cemetery here as it is quite hidden, tucked away in the Magic Forest. We only discovered this by chance, noticing it on our Topo Map program one day. It really should be called "Patrick's Secret Cemetery." It is on a hill overlooking Back Creek's Ravine. There are 117 known burials here, of which 19 are members of the Owens Family. Last bural was in 1910.

Burials in this special place date to the 1840's - This is the marker for Elijah Sparr, son of J. & S., died Febr. 2,1842, aged 1 year.

The coordinates listed above will take you to a spot near where Otto's Finger points to the Huge Tree at the base of which the cache is hidden. Otto E. Bogue was the adopted son of B.E. and D. B., son of Wm O. Bogue. He died 1/10/1870, aged 14yrs, 9 months, 26 days.

John Whitehead (1792 - 1860) defended our country against the only invasion of our homeland we've ever suffered at the hands of a foreign power...This veteran of the War of 1812 deserves a new headstone...

Entrance to the Enchanted Forest-Veterans are not forgotten here...Including a veteran of the Civil War who died at age 16 in 1866--George B. Heston of the 153rd Indiana Volunteer Infntry Regiment.

Followers of British religious reformer George Fox, called Quakers, Children of Light or Friends in Truth, were known among themselves as the Society of Friends. His followers were reformers who sought equality and care for all of mankind regardless of their race; peace and social justice for all regardless of class or economic situation.

It was this spirit of justice and reform that brought the first Friends to the Territory of Indiana. After a delegation of Miami and Potawatomis visited with President Jefferson in 1802, a delegation from the Baltimore Yearly Meeting also conferred with them regarding their plight in the territory. The Meeting officially protested to Congress as to the unjust practices of the governments’ "Indian Policy" and then sent farm equipment to the Miami living near Fort Wayne. The spring of 1804 found a group of Friends in the area setting up a demonstration farm for the Native Americans. This act of caring and generosity ultimately failed due to the power struggles of the two Indian Agents in Ft. Wayne and the Friends returned to Baltimore in 1810

At about the same time, some in the Society were urging Friends in North and South Carolina and Virginia to leave the slave south and move to the newly established, free Northwest Territory. Land here was cheap, fertile, and abundant. In 1806, the son of a North Carolina Quaker traveled just west into the Indiana Territory. He recorded in his Memoirs that he had "…found the country we had been in search of. Spring water, timber and building-rock appeared to be abundant, and the face of the country looked delightful." David Hoover convinced his father, Andrew, as well as fellow Quakers Jeremiah Cox and John Smith to move their families into what is now Wayne County, Indiana. Because all three men were looked upon as leaders by fellow Friends and because Friends tended to settle together in order to limit their contact with "outsiders", there was suddenly a great rush to the valley of the Whitewater. David Hoover, made a wise choice in moving to Indiana. He prospered in his adopted state. He laid out the city of Richmond and later became the judge of the Wayne County Circuit Court.

What kind of people were these new citizens of Indiana? Most were poor farmers with nothing more than what could be crammed into a single wagon. Quaker migration to the area was spirited and, by 1807, the Friends had a log meeting house and by 1809 they were organized as the Whitewater Monthly Meeting, with over 200 members. This was the first official Meeting of Friends in Indiana. Through the years of 1809 to 1812 more than 800 Friends were admitted into the meeting. North Carolina Friends, under the leadership of William Hobbs, settled at the headwaters of the Blue River, near present day Salem in 1812, while another group settled at Lick Creek in present day Orange County.

Through the years of the War of 1812, Quaker migration to the Indiana Territory slowed to a trickle. But at the cessation of hostilities, southern Quakers now came straight to the Quaker settlements of Indiana. Most traveled from the south, as Elijiah Coffin did, in groups to 30 – 40 made up of family members and friends. The wagon trip from the Carolinas took about a month, traveling through the Cumberland Gap on the Wilderness Road, blazed nearly 50 years earlier for the earliest western settlers. New Friends settlements sprang up in other areas of the state. A meeting was established on the Wabash River, south of Terre Haute in 1820. That same year, when central Indiana was opened to settlement, Friends established meetings in Morgan and Jackson Counties. Within a decade The Society of Friends had also established meetings in Randolph, Henry, Marion, Boone, Hendricks and Parke Counties.

During the mid1820s significant numbers of Friends began to move into southern Hamilton County. In 1821, when the Indiana Friends were finally authorized to establish a Yearly Meeting, it was headquartered in Richmond. The construction of a meeting house to hold this great annual gathering was huge by standards of the day – 100 feet by 60 feet with 25 foot high walls. Built of brick, between 1822 and 1829, the huge meeting house was considered by many to be a wonder.

The cache container was a small plastic spice jar; now it's a match safe . BYOP. .The cache is not located near a grave... If you find a fallen US flag, please stick it back in the ground. As always, please be respectful, and cache in, trash out. xxxxxxx!

None genuine without this official SixDogTeam seal. Digital photographs taken by Lead Dog, (C) 2005 by RikSu Outfitters with Kodak equipment, unless otherwise noted.

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