Jackson County, Indiana: History
=== Geography and geology ===
The 1886 county history describes Jackson County as lying across a transition in the bedrock of southern Indiana. The oldest formation exposed in the county is a black shale, above which lies the Kinderhook group at the base of the carboniferous formation, made up of shales and sandstones with beds of geodes. The St. Louis oolitic limestone appears in the county and was quarried in large blocks for building purposes, while sandstones were quarried for foundations; nodular ironstone beds once prompted an unsuccessful attempt to mine iron, abandoned for lack of funds.
Jackson County was created by an act of the Indiana Territorial legislature and, after January 1, 1816, was "known and designated by the name and style of the County of Jackson," in honor of General Andrew Jackson. As first formed, the county was reduced when a tier of sections was transferred to Lawrence County and other land was taken on the organization of Jennings County later in 1816.
The associate judges of Jackson County—Joseph Kitchell and John Ketchum—first met at the town of Vallonia on the third Monday of January 1816, where John Millroy qualified as clerk and recorder and Wickliffe Kitchell as sheriff. The legislature's commissioners reported on May 15, 1816, that they had selected a 150-acre site in Section 14, Township 5, Range 4, purchased from John Ketchum at $8 an acre, and the county court ordered that the permanent seat of justice be called Brownstown, appointing Millroy agent to sell lots.
Among the county's earliest settlers were Captain John Berry, who arrived in 1808, along with Thomas Ewing, James Rogers, Michael Beem, Alexander Craig, and William Graham, all of whom came between 1808 and 1811. During the War of 1812 period, settlers in the southern part of the county clustered for protection at Fort Vallonia; the county history records that a settler named Vandover was killed by Native raiders while working a field in 1812, and that Robert Sturgeon was shot and scalped near Vallonia the same year.
Although the Northwest Ordinance and Indiana's 1816 constitution prohibited slavery, the institution was tested in the county's early courts. In August 1819, a jury empaneled at Brownstown in the case of a man named Lee White, who claimed an enslaved man called Bill, returned a verdict finding Bill to be White's property and authorizing White to take him to Kentucky. The county history notes that several later freedom suits brought by Black residents succeeded—except where the person was a fugitive from another state—and that earlier attempts to maintain slavery in the county through extended apprenticeship were struck down after the Indiana Supreme Court ruled the practice unlawful. …