Henry Hinchman of Vernon, Indiana: A Quaker Abolitionist's Ninety Years of American History

In the town of Vernon, Indiana — a small county seat in Jennings County in the southeastern part of the state — there lived, at the dawn of the 20th century, a man who had witnessed nearly a century of American history firsthand. His name was Henry Hinchman, and he was born on September 22, 1838, in Columbiana County, Ohio, into the heart of the American Quaker abolitionist community.

He was, as a local newspaper profile written around 1930 described him, "an old ship at anchor after many voyages, resting now in seclusion at his little cottage down the shady street." He had seen the age of Andrew Jackson and lived into the time of Herbert Hoover. He was one of the last living links to a vanished America.

Columbiana County: The Quaker Abolitionist Heartland

Henry was the son of Allen Hinchman (born October 13, 1802, in Burlington County, New Jersey — the heart of the New Jersey Quaker community) and Sina Burson, born in Ohio. His father was a farmer and, significantly, an Abolitionist — one of the growing number of Quaker and non-Quaker Americans in the 1830s and 1840s who had come to believe that human slavery was incompatible with their religious and moral convictions.

The town of Salem, Ohio, in Columbiana County, was largely a Quaker community. It was home to the Western Anti-Slavery Society and the publication of The Anti-Slavery Bugle. Speakers at Salem's old Town Hall included some of the most famous names in American abolitionism: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Horace Mann, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry Hinchman grew up hearing these voices. The cause was not abstract to his family.

In a story that captures the spirit of the time, a community meeting at the Salem Quaker church was interrupted by the announcement that a Southern family traveling through town had a slave girl as a nursemaid on the incoming train. The congregation adjourned on the spot, went to the station, boarded the train, and rescued the girl — the Southern family "so frightened they offered no protest at all." The child was given a home, sent to school, and given a new name. Henry witnessed this world as a boy.

One of his neighbors, a farm boy named Edwin Coppock, took the abolitionist teachings so seriously that he marched behind John Brown to Harper's Ferry in 1859 — the slave revolt that sparked the final crisis before the Civil War. Coppock was tried and hanged. He was from Henry Hinchman's neighborhood.

Coming to Indiana: 1852

In 1852, when Henry was about fifteen years old, the Hinchman family moved from Ohio to Jennings County, Indiana, purchasing the old Prather farm near Ebenezer Church. The land had been within living memory the territory of Captain White Eyes and his tribe of Potawatomie and Delaware Indians, who had moved west from the Muscatatuck Creek in 1817. Jennings County was still new country — recently emptied of its Native inhabitants, filling with settlers from Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky.

Henry grew up in this Indiana community, watched the Civil War come and go, saw the railroads transform the region (Vernon, where he eventually settled, had been the site of the first stretch of railway west of the Alleghenies, built in 1829), and witnessed the entire arc of American westward expansion from his cottage on the highway that bisected the town.

He married, raised a family, and remained in Vernon for the rest of his long life. His son Ed. lived with him and helped maintain the family records — including the family Bible, which documented the births and deaths of the Hinchman line back through Ohio to Burlington County, New Jersey, and the Quaker roots of the American family.

Henry Hinchman's story is a thread that connects the earliest American Hinchman settlements in New Jersey to the Quaker abolitionist heartland of Ohio to the Indiana frontier — a single life spanning nearly the entire distance from John Adams to Franklin Roosevelt, from the first railway in the West to the first automobile, from slavery to emancipation to a world his grandfather's generation could not have imagined.

He survived to approximately 91 years old. Like another Henry Hinchman we know well — the pitcher who burned too bright on the mound in 1953 — the Hinchmans have always known how to endure.