Casper Stoner (or Steiner, b. 10/3/1793, d. 7/25/1872) is my original Stoner immigrant ancestor. His tombstone can be found in a small cemetery on the site of the Wesley Chapel -- the first Methodist Church in Lawrence Township of Marion County, Indiana. My uncle, Victor Stoner, apparently did not know the history of this cemetery, so he calls it in his writings about Casper, the "Tyce-Lynch Cemetery," so named because of the family names on prominent tombstones in it. Casper's tombstone is a white slab with chiseled image of an open bible. It is near the middle of the cemetery, and a few rows from the German Church Road side of the cemetery.
A brief history of this "Wesley Chapel" church appears in the History of Indianapolis and Marion County; the history does not mention Casper, but it mentions founders who were close neighbors of the Casper Stoner family in Brown County, Ohio, and says it was built of logs around 1840, shortly before the Stoners moved to Indiana from there, and abandoned soon after a newer Spring Valley Methodist Curch was constructed a few miles away. The latter church was on the site of Fort Benjamin Harrison, which still surrounds a cemetery once associated with that church. The old Stoner homestead was within two miles of both of those old churches, and there is little doubt that Casper Stoner attended both of them at the different times they had active congregations. As Victor Stoner emphasizes, Casper was an Methodist "exhorter" or lay preacher, as was Casper's oldest son, Daniel. It appears that Casper's tomb lies very nearly under the spot where the pulpit of the old Wesley Chapel would have been.
Bits and pieces of Casper Stoner's life before coming to Indiana are known from several sources. The Compendium of Biography, etc. contains information that appears to have come from an interview with his son, Daniel, when the latter was an old man. He shows up in Ohio census records for 1830 and 1840, and in Indiana census records for 1850 and 1860, and a certificate of his 1826 marriage to Sariah (Yates) Bolander, widow of Christian Bolander, still exists in the records of Brown County, Ohio. Victor Stoner wrote several short papers that contain family oral traditions about Casper's life.
This oral tradition, confirmed by census records, says that Casper was born in Switzerland in 1794. He left Switzerland with his father Johannes Steiner (or Hans) when Casper was sixteen years old. The book Passenger Arrivals at the Port of Philadelphia, etc. by M. H. Tepper and E. P. Bentley lists the names of owners of baggage that arrived in port prior to 1820 (the date when passenger lists were first required to be kept); this book shows that baggage belonging to Johannes and Carper (sic) Steiner arrived on the ship Babona from Amsterdam on September 17, 1817. Though Casper would have been 25, not 16, in 1817, that entry may well be the only record of Casper's arrival in the New World. (Possibly Casper and his father left Switzerland when he was 16, and spent several years somewhere else in Europe before embarking for America.) Casper's mother, Mary Steiner either stayed behand or had died before they left.
Family tradition has it that Hans and Casper were either robbed or cheated of their money for passage, possibly even by the ship's captain, that father Hans died and was buried at sea, and that Casper, arriving in America as a penniless orphan, had to bind himself as an induntured servant to pay for their passages. Death at sea, robbery, and indentured servitude were all common in those days.
There is a further tradition that Casper and father Hans were accompanied by one or more brothers, or that they came to join a brother already in America. In any case, Casper was required to bind himself to labor for as much as five or six years in order to pay both his own passage and that of his father. If a brother did come on the same ship, he was surely the Johannes Steiner (and family) whose baggage also arrived on the Babona in 1817 (see above). If so, the lost brother is probably the John Stoner who is listed in the 1820 U. S. Census living in Green Twp. of Wayne County, OH. Assuming that's true, Casper Stoner and his family must have been Swiss Anabaptists (Amish or Mennonites) from the Emmenthal region of the Bern Canton, as the evidence below will show.
Before stating as a fact that Casper was a Swiss Mennonite, though, I should report that the Librarian of the Menonite History Center at Bluffton College in Ohio, Ann Hilty (now deceased), herself of Steiner descent, argues that Casper could not have been part of the Menonite community because 1) the Steiner family tree has been exhaustively researched without other evidence that a Casper Steiner was part of it, and 2) that the Mennonites were a tight-knit community who would not have allowed one of their own to have become indentured. I believe neither of these arguments is persuasive. The passenger list of the Babona was not available to James O. Lehman, who compiled the Steiner family tree and admitted confusion about the origins of the John Steiner/Stoner in Wayne County, OH. Published descriptions of the typical process by which people became indentured in those times are quite consistent with the Stoner family tradition that Casper became separated from his brother with neither having either knowledge or ability to prevent or reverse the indenturing. I will leave it to the reader to decide after reading the evidence below.
On page 64 of the book Arise Wild Land by Lindsey Williams (a history of Milton Twp. of Wayne County, OH) there is a 1980 photograph of the remains of a two-story log house. Part of the caption reads "Oldest house in Milton Twp. -- believed to have been built by John and Elizabeth Steiner (Stoner) in 1822-23. They were married Dec. 8, 1814, in Switzerland and came to America before 1822. Deed of Oct. 28, 1822, records purchase of NW quarter, section 27, by John Steiner of Green Twp. for $400 -- Daniel Steiner, first Mennonite bishop in Milton, lived here with the Steiners for a short while after his arrival from Alsace in 1825. John Steiner sold the land after only 3 1/2 years..."
John Stoner is listed in the US Census of 1820 and 1830 in Wayne County as a non-citizen born in Switzerland; Casper is listed the same way in the 1830 Census in Brown County. Other Steiners in Wayne County are listed as U. S. citizens in the same Census. The reason is unclear, but it may be that the arrival of John and Casper in Philadelphia was so chaotic that they had no chance to be sworn as citizens. Long afterwards, Casper was became a naturalized U. S. citizen in Marion County, IN.
One of the descendants of the above Bishop Daniel Steiner has written a Steiner Family History containing the following passage: "Bishop Daniel ... arrived in New York on July 9, 1825 ... they set out for Ohio, arriving at 'the home of his brother-in-law, John Steiner, who was living in Milton Twp.' (Wayne Co., OH). It is not certain who this John Steiner was." Bishop Daniel Steiner had two wives -- Anna Gerber, who died in France in 1817, and Fannie Staufer; it may be that John's wife, Elizabeth, was a sister of one of them.
The ancestry of the above Bishop Daniel Steiner is traced in the book Steiner, Amstutz, and Zuercher Families from Switzerland to Sonnenberg by Clayton Steiner (1976). The succession goes Hans (or John) Steiner (1720-1812) - Daniel Steiner (1747-1811) - Bishop Daniel Steiner(1787 - 1851). Daniel Steiner (1747-1811) is listed as having an older brother Hans (or John) Steiner (1750-1814), who might well be the grandfather of our Casper and of his brother John with whom Bishop Daniel stayed on his arrival in Wayne County, OH. If so, in addition to being his brother-in-law, John Stoner would also have been his second cousin. This is, of course, all speculation, made more plausible by several facts: 1) The names Daniel and John that Casper gave his two first-born sons; 2) Both Casper and his son Daniel became lay ministers, which seems to have been a family tradition among the Steiners, including the following: Hans (1720-1812), John (1746-1806), the latter John's son Christian (1774-1846), Daniel (1747-1811), Daniel (1787-1851).
Bishop Daniel, and putatively Casper Stoner, father Hans and brother John, were part of the Bernese Swiss Mennonites whose history is detailed in the 1969 book Sonnenberg -- A Haven and a Heritage by James O. Lehman. These were German-speaking Anabaptists who prospered in the Emmenthal Valley region NE of Berne as tenant farmers, weavers, dairymen and cheese makers. They faced religious persecution in Lutheran Switzerland, so in the late 18th century, many moved to the Jura Mountains to the north, then across those mountains into nearby southern Alsace where they were tolerated by their Catholic landlords because they were well behaved, peaceful, and paid their rent promptly. Bishop Daniel's grandfather was Johannes (Hans) Steiner, a Bishop in the Normanvillars Mennonite church near Belmont, Alsace. The given names Johannes, Daniel, Christian and Peter were most popular among these Mennonite Steiners, more or less in that order, so the fact that Casper named his first two sons John and Daniel is further evidence he was closely related to this family. Other evidence is that other passengers who arrived with Casper and Johannes Steiner on the Babona had surnames common to the Bernes Mennonites from the Emmenthal region -- Aman, Baumgartner and Kaufman are examples.
The James O. Lehman book explains that the Mennonites become overpopulated in the Jura mountains in the early 1800s. Rental land was scarce, and Napoleon's armies expropriated much of what their scarce provisions. The last straw was 1816 when there was a "summerless year" and "crops failed," probably becuase of the volcanic eruption of Mt. Timbore in the East Indies. Richard Hofstadter's book America at 1750 notes that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German and Swiss immigrants were often convinced to emigrate by "Neulanders" or "soul sellers", who traveled up and down the Rhine River telling tales of cheap land and fortunes to be made in America. It appears that Casper Steiner's family was at the leading edge of a migration of the Bernese Swiss Mennonites to America that started in 1816 and intensified thereafter into the 1820s.
There is not much record of Casper from his arrival in America until his marriage, at age 32, to Sariah Yates Bolander. The following quote from Compendium of Biography is all we have: "Daniel Stoner .... is a son of Jasper and Sarah (Yates) Stoner, the former of German nativity and the latter of English extraction. Jasper Stoner, at age of sixteen years, started from Germany in company with his father for America, but the father was taken ill and died. Jasper, however, reached the shores of the new world, as the people of his fatherland still term it, and at once came west through Pennsylvania, finally reaching Brown County, Ohio. There he found employment in a distillery, but did not find the Buckeye state a straight and sure road to fortune; he consequently sought the first opportunity to hire himself out as a farm hand. Having succeeded in this endeavor, he he labored as such until he was twenty one years old, when he began farming on his own account."
The above, flowery account has a few obvious inaccuracies, but the name Jasper is probably accurate -- Jasper is a common nickname for Casper, like Bob is for Robert. The spelling Sarah is alright, too, since the Sariah spelling was probably a rendition of the phonetic "Sarrie" nickname for Sarah.
Exactly how Casper "at once came west" as an indentured servant isn't known. Hofstadter says "Buyers came on shipboard to take their pick of healthy immigrants ... Philadelphia buyers might be trying to find Germans, and eschew the Scots-Irish, who were reputed to be contumacious ... Some buyers were 'soul drivers' who bought packs of immigrants and brutally herded them on foot into the interior where they were offered along the way to ready buyers ... All bonded servants were chattels of their masters ... For many thousands of servants, their term of indentured servitude was a period of enforced celebacy." Since the term of servitude at that time was about four years, and since Casper is said to have been required to work off the passages for both himself and Hans, he probably came to Ohio as a servant, and was reassigned to farm labor while still indentured.
Victor Stoner, a devout Methodist minister, never mentions that Casper worked in a distillery. He may have thought of that as something to be ashamed of, but it was neither uncommon nor shameful at the early 19th century to work in a distillery. Distilled spirits sometimes served as a form of money when currency was scarce. For example, the History of Centre County Pennsylvania says of a community of German-American farmers around 1800: "Much of the grain was converted into whiskey, which reduced the bulk of the commodity, and that portion which the people did not drink themselves was taken to market ... Whiskey was considered indispensable in the harvest field, and, indeed, it was considered one of the necessities of life ... in 1803 there were eight distilleries (in a community about ten miles long by one mile wide) ... besides grain, wagonloads of apples and peaches were hauled to the distilleries to be made into liquor." Whiskey often served as money; the 1794 "Whiskey Rebellion" of western Pennsylvania was fought because the government expected payment of taxes in hard currency, of which the farmers had virtually none. Drinking whiskey was not considered a sin during the time Casper worked in a distillery. Stephen Bolander, father-in-law of Casper's eventual wife, Sariah Yates Bolender, came to Ohio from the part of Centre County, PA, referred to in the above passage (see more below); since he was the wealthiest landowner in that part of Brown County where Casper settled, it seems likely that Casper was worked for him during his time of indenture.
From his son Daniel Stoner's account (as set down inCompendium of Biography), Casper must have been an indentured servant from the time he arrived in Philadelphia until he shows up farming his own land in Brown County; masters of indentured servants were supposed to set them up to earn a minmal living at the end of the servitude, so maybe Casper was set up on a farm at age about 31. The Daniel Stoner account, goes on to say: "Jasper Stoner was united in marriage with Miss Yates, a native of Brown County, Ohio, and a daughter of Thomas Yates, who was born in England." The marriage actually took place October 10, 1826, one week after Caspar's thirty third birthday and it was to Sariah (Yates) Bolender, 32-year old widow of Christian Bolender. Sariah had two young sons from the previous marriage. The marriage certificate lists William Yates as a witness, spells Casper's surname "Storrer", and says the marriage was performed by Rev. John Everhart, then pastor of Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Church. It isn't clear where Sariah Yates was born -- though Thomas Yates may have been born in England, he was listed as a taxpayer across the river in Bracken County, KY, in 1797, when Sariah would have been about three.
A History of Brown County, Ohio, says this Mount Zion M. E. church was "organized as a class at the home of Benjamin Sells, about 1820," with founding members Jeremiah Plummer & wife, Jeremiah Joslin & wife, Thomas Yates & wife, Mrs. Molly Tatman, Namon Chapman & wife, William Plummer & wife, John Jackson & wife , and a few others. "About 1825 the membership gained sufficient strength to build a church, and a brick structure was reared about 75 yards south of the present (i.e. 1890) church building. It was not entirely completed until 1835." The Thomas Yates & wife listed were the parents of Casper's wife Sariah. This church, now defunct, was located in Brown County, OH, very close to its eastern border with Clermont County, northeast of Georgetown and near Feesburg. It isn't clear when Casper became associated with the church, but it's very probable he became an exhorter in it. Victor Stoner says of him: "Casper was also a 'Local Preacher' in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Evidently he was licensed before coming to Indiana."
Sariah Yates (b. 3/10/1794, d. 5/5/1848) had previously (on 4/1/1817) married Christian Bolender (b. 4/12/1798). Christian was the 9th son of Steven Bolender, a well-to-do farmer/blacksmith/entrepreneur of Brown and Clermont Counties. The Bolenders had moved to the area around 1800 from Brush Valley, Centre County, PA, purchasing an Ohio River ferry (Boude's Ferry) that still operates there today -- one of the very few still operating on the Ohio River. Steven Bolender had two wives and sixteen children, among whom his will divides about 2000 acres. Christian Bolender probably received his share, farmed it, then died before his second son, Christian Jr., was born. Casper must have had high regard for the Bolender's, since his second son (my great grandfather) was named John Bolender Stoner(the first name John might have been for Casper's father, Johannes or his brother).
After his marriage, the next record of Casper is as the head of his household at the top of page 459 of the 1830 U. S. Census for Lewis Twsp., Brown Co., OH. The Casper Stoner household is listed as the following (my identification in parentheses): 1 male less than 5 (Chris Bolander or Daniel Stoner b. 10/30/1829), 1 male 5-9 (Elijah Bolander), 1 male 50-59 (?), 2 females <5 (Elizabeth b. 8/19/1827 & Mary Stoner b. 8/22/1828), 1 female 30-39 (Sariah), and 1 foreigner not naturalized (Casper). (It may be significant that the 1830 Census for Milton Twp. of Wayne Co., OH, lists the whole family of his putative brother John Steiner also as non-naturalized foreigners.) It is possible that the male 50-59 was Sariah's father, Thomas Yates. The family grew at a rate of one per year for the next few years, and appears again in the 1840 census records. They moved to Indiana in 1841, joining other families from their neighborhood who had already moved there by that time -- the Days, Reddicks, Plummers, Bolanders, Shinkles and others.
By that time (1840) Elijah and Chris Bolander had reached majority. Chris Bolander remained in Brown County, OH, married Melinda Raper in 1842, and died in 1849. US Land Records show that Casper Stoner, in 1837, bought a large farm in northwest Shelby County, IN, but never lived there. However, Elijah Bolander and family are recorded in the 1840 Census as living in Shelby County, apparently on that farm, which probably was Elijah's inheritance. Elijah married Mary Donley and had a large family. He didn't stay in Shelby County, though, but eventually moved with inlaws to more eastern Indiana counties. In the 1880 Census he is working in the logging industry in Missouri.
Victor Stoner says the Casper Stoner Indiana homestead was near the eastern boundary of Ft. Benjamin Harrison, on the first east-west road intersecting Sunnyside Road north of SR 67. Casper is buried two miles south of the intersection of Sunnyside Road with SR 67. Caspar bought this 100-acre farm for $500. My great grandfather, John Bolander Stoner, was ten years old when they came, probably in late summer of 1841.