Goldsmith, Ben-Hur and Mrs. Dempsie’s Roadhouse
From Time to Thyme
By Paula Dunn
It’s a reader feedback week!
After I wrote about Ben Goldsmith, one of Hamilton County’s earliest Jewish residents, Larry Cloud wondered if there was any connection to the tiny Tipton County village of Goldsmith.
That’s a natural question, given how close Goldsmith is to Hamilton County, but I couldn’t find any link between Ben Goldsmith and the village. I can’t even tell you if Ben Goldsmith ever visited there.
The village was originally called Green Station. When a post office opened there in 1876, the name had to be changed because a Green Station post office already existed in Indiana.
Supposedly, the name, “Goldsmith,” came from a contractor who helped build the Lafayette, Muncie and Bloomington Railroad. The railroad ran right through Goldsmith on its route between Muncie and Bloomington, Illinois.
Michael Kobrowski wondered if the roadhouse in the column about the missing bridegroom, Eugene Woodmansee, had a name.
If it did, I never ran across it.
In colonial America, taverns often had neat names like “Bunch of Grapes” or “Green Dragon, ” but taverns, inns, roadhouses, etc. during this county’s early days seem to have generally been referred to by the owner’s name.
In this case, the roadhouse was owned by a woman named Dempsie. What little information I found about her indicates she had a less than sterling reputation. In 1911, some older Noblesville residents remembered children calling her “Witch.”
The roadhouse itself was described by one local farmer as a “hell hole.” He said that when he’d happened to pass by there once around 3 a.m.,“the whole house was lighted from top to bottom and there was singing and clinking of bottles to be heard.”
When additional skeletons turned up after Woodmansee’s remains were discovered, the farmer recalled that another man who’d lived near Noblesville had also mysteriously disappeared in 1868. That man was a known card player.
We’ll probably never know all the details of what happened to Eugene Woodmansee, but it seems likely he was murdered for his money, whether a card game was involved or not. He was said to have been carrying over $500 in cash on that trip. Why he felt the need to bring that much money with him was never explained. (In 2026, that amount would be around $11,700!)
No one suggested that Mrs. Dempsie had had anything to do with Woodmansee’s murder. However, the 1911 Indianapolis Star article noted that she later told someone that she’d made “lots of money” from her roadhouse.
While researching Camp Beechwood, the day camp John Wharton attended in the 1960s, I found an interesting article in the April 21, 1960 Indianapolis News about Ben-Hur Park, which had once occupied the same site as Camp Beechwood.
The article noted that in 1960, the bus stop at Allisonville Road and 116th Street was still called the Ben-Hur stop because of the park, even though the park had been gone for decades and the restaurant/filling station at that corner had stopped using the name long before.
According to the article, Van Eller, the grandson of James Eller, who founded Ben-Hur Park, had no idea why his grandfather named the park “Ben-Hur.”
My Anonymous Friend happens to be acquainted with Larry Paarlberg, Director of the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum in Crawfordsville, so he asked the director if Lew Wallace had any connection to Hamilton County that would explain why Eller chose that name for his park.
The answer my AF passed on to me from Paarlberg was that although Wallace visited Noblesville occasionally, he knew of no particular reason for the park to be called Ben-Hur, other than the popularity of Lew Wallace’s novel during that time period.
(By the way, apparently it should be “Ben-Hur,” not “Ben Hur” as I wrote in the previous column.)
Paula Dunn’s From Time to Thyme column appears on Wednesdays in The Times. Contact her at younggardenerfriend@gmail.com
