Morse Reservoir, World War II Aviation and a Popular Strawtown Restaurant

More reader responses this week!

The column on Morse Reservoir’s beginnings sparked a couple of comments from  Diane Nevitt, the former director of the Hamilton County Historical Society Museum.

Diane noted that Sheriff Mark Passwater once told her that a number of Native Americans had worked on clearing the land for Morse. One of those men was Silas Badgun.

I did a little research and discovered Badgun, who was also known as John Burbank, originally came from North Dakota and was a member of the Sioux tribe.

I’m not sure how he and the other Native Americans came to be working for the company that built the dam, Tousley Construction of Indianapolis, but Badgun/Burbank ended up spending the rest of his life here. A World War II veteran, he belonged to the VFW and the American Legion.

Diane also brought up how “dam sliding” on the Morse spillway was popular with members of her high school class. That was still the case during my high school days —until 1973, when Morse Park opened. At that time the water company took steps to cut off access to the dam. After that, if you were caught dam sliding, you got prosecuted.

It’s just as well. That really was a hazardous pastime with the broken glass that collected at the bottom of the spillway.

Pam (Gibbs) Ferber mentioned that her father had been a World War II bombardier like Larry Cloud’s uncle, Sgt. William Cloud. Richard Gibbs flew 25 missions over Germany.

According to Pam, the U.S. lost a lot of planes and men during the early years of the war because missions were flown without escort planes. Fortunately, by the time her father took to the air, escort planes were around to protect the bombers.

Although her dad’s plane was never shot down, they did lose one or two crew members because of malfunctioning air masks.

Lisa Hayner mentioned that her brother, Ed Snyder, and his wife, Claire, had recently been reminiscing about a popular Strawtown restaurant that used to occupy the building that’s now Strawtown Pottery.

I’ve run across many ads for that restaurant in the old newspapers. It was called the Trading Post and was owned by Kenneth and Donna Spannuth.

The Trading Post had a rather unique drawing card. From time to time they’d hold a “turtle fry” where you could order a plate of pan fried turtle or a turtle sandwich.

I can’t provide the exact date the Trading Post opened, but the first ad appeared in the Ledger in 1963. After the restaurant closed in 1967, the building was occupied by a short-lived teenage nightclub called “Guys and Dolls.”

Finally, I feel a need to clear up some information about John Hoard/Hord/Horde, the first African American to hold an elected office in this county.

His headstone in Riverside Cemetery reads: “Jno. Hoard, Co. D, 54th Mass. Inf.”

I didn’t want to get into this in the earlier column because I was really writing about his son, Fred, but the only inscription on that headstone that’s indisputable is the “Co. D.”

As I said before, there’s no consistent spelling for his name. He appears in the old newspapers and government documents as both “Hoard” and “Hord,” and he shows up in the 1860 census as “Horde.” (I’d go with “Hord,” though, since the family prefers that.)

The “54th Mass. Inf.” is just plain wrong. You won’t find him on the roster of the 54th Massachusetts infantry. According to his enlistment papers, he was a private in Company D of the 8th Regiment USCT (United States Colored Infantry.)

He joined the regiment in early 1865, just in time to take part in the campaign that led to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. 

Paula Dunn’s From Time to Thyme column appears on Wednesdays in The Times. Contact her at [email protected]