For settlers, churches and chapels were gathering places that anchored farming communities, sometimes called “open country” communities. The farmsteads making up an open country community lacked formal towns or villages, but shared bonds based initially on place of origin, kinship, or religion but ultimately on economic interests, usually farming.^[1]

Vestiges of southern Indiana’s nineteenth-century, open-country settlements lie hidden from view behind the forested hills and valleys not far from the state roads and interstates like the one you are traveling. A winding lane from State Road 45 leads to the Old Clifty Church, one-half mile from I-69 and one and one-quarter mile from the State Road 45 and I-69 interchange. Old Clifty Church, a log church built around the time of the Civil War, is a tangible remnant of those who made homes across a broad expanse of ridge land in Greene and Monroe Counties.

Accounts vary, but tradition holds that settlers to the “ridge” were led by Benjamin and Sarah Freeland, the “Freeland party,” in the early-nineteenth century from Calvert County, Maryland. The settlement became known as “Maryland Ridge.” The community is not well documented in local histories, though one historian in 1940 described the group as “a quiet, God-fearing, home loving people, who tilled their farms, raised their children right, and went to church as a duty and a pleasure too. . .”^[2]

Local tradition holds that the Freeland party included the family and the family’s own freed slaves, other free blacks, as well as a group of white abolitionist families. Judge John Sedwick, who helped scout the Ridge before settlement, has been identified as a member of the Maryland Ridge Community. His writings, however, contradict the notion that this was a strictly abolitionist settlement.^[3]

Sedwick recorded his journey from Maryland to Monroe County, Indiana, in the spring of 1820. By his own account, he traveled with a female slave named “Annica.” On April 3, 1820, as his party passed through Salem, Indiana, Sedwick lay sick in the back of his wagon. Hear as he continues the story:

“… Annica took advantage of me while I was in the wagon, and absconded and I did not miss her until we had traveled four or five miles. I was not able to return back in pursuit of her and thought if I could get any one of the Company to go, probable she might secret herself so that she could not be found for some time, so I concluded to leave her for the present time.”^[4]

Sedwick was reunited with Annica a few months later; records show that she indentured herself to John Sedwick for five years. The constitution of Indiana did not allow slavery, but some settlers arriving in the state simply “indentured” their slaves for a period of time upon entering the state.^[5] Life as an indentured servant was far from the life of a free person. Hoosier abolitionist John Badollet called the practice “a Qualified Species of Slavery.”^[6]

It is worth noting that some have questioned Sedwick’s connection to Maryland Ridge, as he eventually helped plat and settle the community of Ellettsville to the north.^[7]

Another wave of settlers arrived from Maryland in 1834 due to a schism within the Methodist Church between traditional Methodist Episcopals, a largely pro-slavery body that supported centralized control of local churches by the national conference, and the Methodist Protestants, who protested centralized control and were passionately anti-slavery. Upon arrival in Greene and Monroe Counties, the settlers began their own abolitionist religious group called the “Calvert Society” that generally practiced the Methodist faith.^[8] This point of origin migration, in this case from Maryland, with the ties of religion and kinship forged a community that spread across the ridge.

Members of the Maryland Ridge community farmed; some augmented their income and contributed to the economy through cottage industries. Eventually, laborers settled around these cottage industries forming small neighborhoods focused on that craft. Examples of those include Hendricksville (the home of a local potter—Frederick Hendricks) and Stanford (a small community based around a notorious whiskey shop).^[9]

At other times, the church remains as the symbol of the dispersed community. Within the Maryland Ridge community, the Old Clifty Church, a log church nestled within a valley, recalls that simpler time. In the twenty-first century, it remains a site of community gathering, no longer a religious structure. Community members come together for socials and have pitched in to raise funds and to repair the roof, floor, and pews, as well as perform general upkeep of the building.

Ronnie Wilcoxen has served on the board of the Old Clifty Church Association since the 1990s and has been the church caretaker since the 1970s. Wilcoxen recognizes the uniqueness of the church:

“And when I moved up there course, there was one big farm all around me basically and it’s now a development and so it just kind of amazes you all the stuff that’s changed except for right there in that little valley. That little church is still there and it hasn’t changed.”^[10]

Like so many other places—especially rural places—dirt or gravel roads have given way to paved roads, then state highways and interstates. Farm fields have been divided for housing. That development makes places like the “little valley” where Old Clifty Church still sits, in defiance of modernity, as an important reminder of an open-country settlement.

[1] John Mack Faragher, “Open-County Community, Sugar Creek, Illinois, 1820-1850,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, Eds.(Chapel Hill; 1985), 234; H. N. Morse & Edmund Brunner, The Town and Country Church in the United States, Second Edition, (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1925), 75, accessed January 3, 2020, https://books.google.com/books?id=Uvo9AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false; Conrad M. Arensberg, “American Communities,” American Anthropologist (Vol 57, No. 6, Dec. 1955), 1143-1162. accessed January 3, 2020, Available at JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/665960; Malcolm Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier.