LIVING BY HAUN'S MILL

Narrator: Mrs. Zelma Filson, Hamilton, Mo.

Mrs. Filson is the widow of Thomas Filson and the step-daughter of John Owens who came west in the late sixties in the influx of New York families into what is now New York township and Fairview township.

Mr. Owens needed a woodlot, having no timber on his place. So by chance he bought a woody place which contained a site important in early Caldwell County history - Haun's Mill in Fairview Township. After he had purchased it, he heard its history from the older settlers. Jacob Haun was a Mormon settler and started a mill along Shoal Creek. Oct 30 1838, the Gentile Militia fell upon the Mormon settlers gathered at the mill and blacksmith shop and they killed eighteen. For lack of time to dig graves, the Mormons survivors placed their dead in an old well and covered them up. Among the Mormon dead was a Revolutionary Soldier Thomas McBride. Mrs. Filson said in her day the Well was marked by a round sunken place. She lived there about twelve years and said there was nothing to report that vegetation grew more densely over the grave because of the bodies there. She said that there was no way now of finding the spot accurately since it had been turned into corn and plowed level. However, in the summer of 1933 two elderly Saints from Salt Lake City told the Interviewer that it could be determined accurately by the depression and by bits of iron scattered from the old blacksmith shop.

Mrs. Filson says that in her day the Saints had already begun to make pilgrimages to the spot as a Scared place and they still do. The old Haun's Mill stones are set up in Breckenridge. The Haun's Mill site is on the farm of J.M. Hill.