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Image courtesy of Alice Flora Smedstad.
My transcription:
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Milo had come out from New York City in November of 1835 to join Solon in Indiana.[2] In the winter of 1836-7, the brothers opened a store — the first in Lake County — in the settlement that would be the future Crown Point. According to Solon, during that first winter,
we … sold about $3000 worth of goods [over $100,000 in today's money] out of that little old log cabin adjoining the one now [in 1847] used as a Court House.When Milo died two years later, he was about 38 years of age, and unmarried (so far as I have been able to determine).
The best of our customers were the Pottawattomies, who then dwelt here in considerable numbers. (With them commenced my first efforts of a temperance reformation.) Of them we obtained great quantities of furs and cranberries, in pay for goods, (while those calling themselves far superior to the poor Indians in all the moral attributes, gave us promises to pay, some which are promises to this day.)
The administrator of Milo's estate, Oscar Robinson, may have been another brother, born in 1809 and christened Jacob Oscar. It's odd that Solon doesn't mention him in his history, nor does T.H. Ball. An Oscar Robinson shows up in a Hobart merchant's records in October 1836 (buying ague syrup):
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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.
And a Jacob Robbinson is recorded in the Porter County 1840 census. Then the trail goes cold.[3]
Another character in this episode is likewise mysterious: Wilson L.[4] Harrison, of whom Solon Robinson has this to say:
During the same winter [of 1836-7], the first mill in the county was put in operation by Wilson L. Harrison, so that we were able to get a little oak lumber in the spring of '37 for $15 a thousand.Beyond that, neither Solon Robinson nor T.H. Ball says anything. The 1840 Census shows a Wilson Harrison heading up a household of four in Porter County, but his age is given as 15 to 20, meaning that if this is the person who put into operation the first sawmill in Lake County in 1837, he was between 13 and 17 at the time![5]
The merchants' records at the Hobart Historical Society museum that I have indexed so far turn up a couple of references to Wilson L. Harrison. This one is from June 4, 1837:
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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.
And this one is from January 13, 1841:
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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.
After 1841 I cannot find any record of him. Where he came from and where he went remain a mystery.
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[1] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 63. The location of Milo's grave seems to be unknown.
[2] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 34.
[3] Some people on Ancestry.com seem to think he was the Oscar L. Robinson who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, then moved to Chicago, where he died in 1878 or 1880. By the way, Solon Robinson had a son, Solon Oscar, born in 1831; not that that proves anything.
[4] Lake County 1834 - 1872 at 50 gives his middle initial as S, but no other source does, and in the writing above, the middle initial resembles the L in "Lake County."
[5] Wild hypothesis: the guy in the census is Wilson L. Harrison, Jr., whose father, the mill-builder, had just died. (But none of the history books mentions his death.)
