In some springs, the White River filled the streets with enough water to launch boats carrying young men and goods toward New Orleans. Others, the Bean Blossom Creek watershed was enough.
Each year, men prepared temporary wooden, rectangular boats called flatboats for the trip. They spent two to three months on the White, Wabash, Ohio and Mississippi rivers and rode keelboats back to New Albany, Indiana, before walking over 100 miles home to Mount Tabor.
“The (flatboats) were made of hewn logs from poplar trees with trunks as long as could be found,” reported Edna Moore in the July 19, 1929, edition of the Bloomington Telephone. “These logs were fastened together side by side, then covered over the bottom with two-inch lumber. The top was filled with cork to prevent leaking. These boats were leashed to trees along the banks of Bean Blossom Creek to await the spring rise.”
Such was the life of the village from its platting with 66 lots in April 1828 until its demise during the first half of the 1860s.
John Burton established the first business in what would later become Mount Tabor in 1820 when he built a saw and grist mill at Bean Blossom Creek. James Turner and Jefferson Wampler opened blacksmith shops in 1825. Soon after, the village became the commercial center of the county, with mercantiles, gunsmiths, barrel-makers, packing plants and more setting up shop during the late 1820s and 1830s.
“Here, large amounts of grain and stock were sold; here, tens of thousands of feet of hard wood lumber were cut; here, the hum of the saw and flouring mill was heard day in and day out, year ’round,” reported “History of Lawrence and Monroe Counties, Indiana: Their People, Industries, and Institutions,” published in 1914 by Indianapolis-based R.F. Bowen & Co.
Though none of the buildings or houses remain, Mount Tabor was the setting for as many as 350 people’s lives. It was where they worked, played, learned, forgot, quarreled and made up. It was where people like Judge Eckles fell in love and got married.
“The well-known Judge Eckles was married at Mt. Tabor, and, of course, the citizens gave him an old-fashioned charivari, or ‘belling.'”
“A great number of tin pans, cans with rocks in them and all kinds of bells from sleigh, cow and sheep bells, to the big old ‘dinner’ bells were fastened to the machinery in the old saw mill, the water was then turned on, thus giving the Judge and his bride a charivari by machinery,” according to a story recounted in Forest M. Hall’s 1922 work “Historic Treasures: True Tales of Deeds With Interesting Data in the Life of Bloomington, Indiana University and Monroe County – Written in a Simple Language and About Real People, With Other Important Things and Illustrations.”
Beginning in 1853, the steam train ushered in a new era for the transportation of goods for Monroe County, including its vaunted limestone. The development of the railroad went through Ellettsville and Bloomington, bypassing Mount Tabor and marking the beginning of the village’s decline. By 1860, Mount Tabor’s post office was decommissioned and moved to the new town of Stinesville, which had developed around the railroad.
The Civil War contributed further damage to the town when 132 men left to join the war effort. It was not long after that the last store, run by Levi Kean, closed its doors.
“Though Mt. Tabor had all the advantages of transportation, good business well established, and a fair foundation to build a metropolis from, she gradually died – died because she did not constantly add to her population,” observed Justice William L. Baily, of Bloomington, in 1922.
Nearly 150 years after its status was changed to defunct by Monroe County, the village of Mount Tabor shows up on Google Maps and Wikipedia lists it as an active unincorporated community. But all that’s left is regional memory and two roads that bear the village’s name: Mt. Tabor Road and Tabor Hill Road.
Originally published in Ellettsville Journal, 2016. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.