Among them is a disturbing transcript from 1846 of George Earle's interrogation, as a justice of the peace, of a 27-year-old woman named Rachel Campbell. Rachel had brought a complaint of bastardy against William Merrill (one of the brothers who in 1848 gave Merrillville its name). That is to say, of course, that she accused him of fathering her illegitimate child. As we get into the transcript, we find that her testimony brings up an even more serious accusation.
William Merrill, born in Vermont in 1808, came to Lake County with his younger brother, Dudley, in 1836,[1] settling in the area that eventually became Merrillville. In 1842, he married the 20-year-old Caroline Campbell.[2] That is the earliest vital record I have been able to find for Caroline. From later censuses, we know she was born in Pennsylvania.
Rachel Campbell was also born in Pennsylvania, circa 1817. Her family left Pennsylvania sometime after 1839, and was living in Indiana by about 1846 (or perhaps earlier), as we see by the 1850 Census recording them in Portage Township, Porter County:
(Click on image to enlarge)
The reason I believe this to be the Rachel Campbell in question is because the trial testimony states that she had a brother named Stephen; also, Rachel's age in 1850 agrees roughly with the age she gives in her 1846 testimony.
The two families are linked in other ways. Another brother listed on the 1850 census, Henry, turns up in Caroline Campbell Merrill's household in 1870. According to A Pictorial History of Merrillville, Caroline eventually sold her farm to Venila, listed as 11 years old in the 1850 census (and who in 1855 married Samuel White).
While it's impossible to establish with certainty the family relationship between Rachel and Caroline, since I can't trace either of them back any further than the early to mid-1840s, I believe they were sisters.
The transcript of the questioning is a little spotty, but it establishes that the trial is taking place in August of 1846. Rachel starts her testimony with September 1845.
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Image from the Calumet Regional Archives (via Michael White).
At that time, Caroline Campbell Merrill was about six months' pregnant[3] and ill, though not bedridden.[4] Rachel was on an extended visit in Merrill house, probably to help Caroline with her two-year-old daughter and housework. The Merrill house, as Rachel describes it, sounds like a settler's cabin that had been added on to over the years: two sections, east and west (perhaps just two ground-floor rooms), with an upstairs room reached by a staircase in the east room. There was no interior door: to go from one room to the other, you had to walk outside.
One night around the middle of September 1845, Rachel testifies, she had gone to bed alone in the west room around 8 o'clock. (William and Caroline Merrill slept in the east room, and Orrin Pierce,[5] also staying there, slept in the upstairs room.) About an hour later, just as Rachel was drifting off to sleep, William Merrill came into her room, and to her bed. That night, she said, he had sex with her three times over the course of about two hours. Here are Rachel's responses to George Earle's questions:
Question Had you and he made any previous bargain that he was to come there?In her laconic way, she is saying he raped her.
[Answer] No.
Question Did you make any noise?
[Answer] Not a great deal.
Question Did he ask you if he might have connection with you?
[Answer] I told him no.
There is nothing in the testimony indicating that Rachel told Caroline about this incident. At some point she did tell her mother that William had had sex with her.
Rachel remained in the Merrill house for several more weeks, then apparently left, but returned in the latter part of October. Around the 18th or 20th of October, she says, William came to her in the middle of the night, this time in the east room, and woke her out of sleep to have sex with her again. That was the last time.
She later gave birth to a baby girl, whom she said had been fathered by William.
In another part of her testimony, we learn something interesting about Rachel.
Question Are you married?She had already had one child out of wedlock, at a time when this carried significant social stigma. Rachel was already bearing a social and emotional burden before September 1845. I do wonder how George Earle knew to pursue this line of questioning. Had William Merrill given him information that Caroline had told him privately? Or was Rachel's past indiscretion known among the locals?
[Answer] I am not.
Question Were you ever married?
[Answer] Never.
Question Did you ever have any children before?
[Answer] One.
At one point in the transcript, the writer notes that it is William ("the defendant") asking Rachel a question ("How old are you?"). I think it is possible that William is asking questions at other times that are not noted. If George Earle is the one asking the questions, evidently he is already familiar with William's defense to the charge of bastardy: namely, that someone else was the baby's father. William may have counted on Rachel's precarious social status to support his implication that she was sexually promiscuous. The questioning introduces two mysterious figures, Mr. Vandermark and Mr. Rowdabaum.
Question Do you know a person by the name of Vandermark?No doubt these two men existed, since Rachel says so herself, but I have searched in history books, censuses, and other records, using these names and variations I could think of (e.g., Van der Mark, Raudebaum) and failed to find the slightest bit of information about them.
[Answer] I do.
. . .
Question Did you and Mr. Vandermark stay in a house alone during any time between the 15 of September and the 20th of October last?
[Answer] No, at no time.
Question Did you or did you [not?] stay alone with Mr. Vandermark in a house alone between the 15th day of September and 20th of October last?
[Answer] I did not.
Question Did you or did you not go with Mr. Vandermark up to his house about the 25th day of October last?
[Answer] I went but don't know the time.
. . .
Question Who went with you that night?
[Answer] My brother Stephen.
Question Was Vandermark['s] wife at home?
[Answer] She was not home that night.
Question Who slept in the room that night?
[Answer] Vandermark, Stephen and Rowdabaum & wife.
Question Who slept with you?
[Answer] No body.
Question Did Mr. Vandermark lay on the foot of your bed that night?
[Answer] He did not.
Question Had you connection with Mr. Rowdabaum that night?
[Answer] I had not.
We have nothing directly from William Merrill's side of the case. I do not know if he entirely denied ever having sex with Rachel, or rather said that it would be unfair to deem him the father when, as he seemingly argued, there were at least two other candidates.
Nor do we know the verdict in this case.
The original handwritten transcript, courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives (via Michael White): click here
My transcription, with some punctuation and spelling altered for clarity: click here
I am inclined to believe Rachel — maybe because I tend to root for the underdog. William Merrill was 38 years old, a family man, an established businessman, a justice of the peace,[6] among the most prominent citizens in his small town. Rachel was a 27-year-old single woman with skeletons in her closet, from an obscure farming family.
I do not know if this Campbell family was related to the more prominent Campbells of Porter County, some of whom also came from New York, like Rachel's father, Henry.
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Image from Ancestry.com.
That is to say — I assume Henry is her father. I should learn not to make assumptions, though. When I first started researching the case and found this family, I assumed that this census listing, like so many others I've seen, recorded a father and his six children. And I wondered what had become of Rachel's children! Now I realize they are probably hiding in plain sight, right there. Semira is four years old, just the age to have been born in 1846 to Rachel. And Venila, 11 years old, was born back in Pennsylvania when Rachel was about 22 years old: it is certainly possible that Venila was Rachel's first child.
As I've said, there were some Campbells in Porter County whose lives and deaths are recorded. These Campbells are not among them. These Campbells seem to have come out of nowhere and, for the most part, slipped away into the unknown: for example, Rachel's mother — I don't even know her name — who evidently was living in the 1840s, when Rachel told her of the incident with William, but who is nowhere to be found in the 1850 census. I cannot find any recorded death notice or grave for her.[7] Likewise, Henry Campbell (the elder), after the 1850 census, simply vanishes.
As for Rachel's brother, Stephen — well, I can find numerous Stephen Campbells after 1850, including some in Indiana, but none that I can positively connect with this family. The same goes for "Lou," the 22-year-old sister noted in the margin of the 1850 census — never positively identified again.
Rachel's brother Henry (and Rachel herself) may be at the Porter County Poor Farm in the 1860 census.[8] By 1870, Henry was in the household of Caroline Campbell Merrill. As you may know, William Merrill had died in 1860.
In 1875, Caroline married William's brother, Dudley (3 months after the death of his third wife). Their cozy household in 1880 does not include Henry Campbell. He, I believe, was in the Lake County "Asylum," aka the Poor Farm, which lists a 46-year-old native of Pennsylvania by that name among its inmates in the 1880 census. I can't trace Henry further than that. He may be lying in an unmarked grave on the former poor-farm grounds. Caroline, on the other hand, lived another nine comfortable years, dying in 1889.
While trying to trace little Semira Campbell of the 1850 census, I was surprised to find another young woman of about the same age, with the same unusual name; but the other Semira Campbell was born in Vermont, not Indiana. So the story of our little four-year-old is uncertain.
Rachel herself can be traced as far as 1860. If she was indeed in the Porter County Poor Farm in June 1860, when that census was taken, by the time the Lake County census was taken in July, we find her in Venila Campbell White's household, in Center Township, Lake County:
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Image from Ancestry.com.
After that, I cannot find her living or dead.
Aside from Caroline, Venila is the only one whose life story I can follow to the end. In 1855, when she was about 16, she and Samuel White slipped over the border to Berrien County, Michigan, to be married. As we just saw above in the 1860 census, they came back to Center Township to farm and begin a family. I expect they were somewhere local in the 1870 census, though the search function on Ancestry.com can't find them. In 1880 they were farming in Ross Township. By 1900, they were living in the Merrillville area, no longer farming, but well fixed enough for Samuel to describe himself as a "capitalist." In 1908, Samuel died. The 1910 census shows Venila in Merrillville, living alone on her own income. In the spring of 1915, she decided to move to Cozad, Nebraska[9] to join her daughter, Sarah — her only surviving child — who in 1877 had married Byron Dutton. The following year, Venila died, and was brought home to Merrillville for burial.
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Cozad Local (Cozad, Dawson County, Nebr.), 25 Feb. 1916.
In all the censuses that asked for parents' birthplaces, Venila gave, as both her father's and her mother's birthplace, Pennsylvania — not New York, as she should have said if Henry Campbell, Sr., was her father. Now, this may reflect the inability of a stressed family to pass along its own history, or confusion in Venila's memory … but maybe she was right.
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[1] Lake County 1834-1872 at 38.
[2] Indiana Marriage Collection. She was his second wife, according to a family genealogy on Ancestry.com, his first having died circa 1836 after bearing two children. One of those children, George, is listed in the household of William and Caroline in the 1850 census.
[3] Caroline and William's son, John, was born December 30, 1845 (Cook County, Illinois, Deaths Index).
[4] I am drawing this and the following information from the transcript, which I will append in full below. The questioning is hard to follow — it jumps from topic to topic, including topics that have no seeming relevance — so I have to piece together the various incidents as best I can.
[5] Orrin Pierce (1813-1895) came to Lake County from New York sometime in the early to mid-1840s; in June 1845 he married Ruth Vincent in Lake County.
[6] This we know from a document relating to another (less sensational) 1846 case involving William Merrill.
[7] There is one interesting stone in the Hebron Cemetery that is just legible enough to make out the surname Campbell and the death date in August 1850 (the census was taken in October).
[8] There is a listing in Center Township, Porter County, of a Henry Campbell who is approximately the right age, and a pauper at the Porter County Poor Farm, along with a Rachel Campbell, who is not the right age — but then whoever gave the enumerator his information did not even know where the two Campbells were born.
[9] "Merrillville," Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 17 Mar. 1915.
