On May 18, 1916, however, most of the land that now makes up
Turkey Run, also known as Bloomingdale Glens, seemed under threat. For years
the land, which had been originally settled in 1826 by Captain Salmon Lusk and
passed on to his son, John, had been open for Hoosiers to visit and enjoy.
After John died in 1915, however, his heirs planned to auction off the land.
A
parks committee of the Indiana Historical Commission (created by the state
legislature to commemorate the nineteenth state’s centennial) made a valiant
effort to buy the land and save it for future generations to enjoy, but the
Hoosier Veneer Company of Indianapolis outbid the committee by the slim margin
of $100, purchasing the property at auction for $30,200. The firm intended to
cut down a vast number of magnificent beech, walnut, oak, sycamore, maple, and
poplar trees that dotted the landscape.
On assignment covering the auction for the Indianapolis News that day was its ace
reporter William Herschell. To Herschell, who had been one of more than 2,000
people that attended the auction, it seemed as though Turkey Run had “passed
into the hands of those who, for the dollars of today, would wreck a State’s
happiness tomorrow.”
Walking along a path skirting Sugar Creek, which meanders
its way through the area, and reflecting on the day’s events, the reporter met
by chance a member of the delegation brought by the parks committee to save the
land from the woodsman’s ax—a local woman who had often played in Turkey Run’s
woods as a child, whose own children had followed in her footsteps, and who had
been among the first to call for the area to be conserved. “I am sick of soul,”
the tear-stained woman told Herschell. “Who would have dreamed that a few men’s
dollars could step in and destroy all this, the most beautiful spot in all
Indiana, one that all the money in the world could not restore once it is gone.”
Herschell realized that the woman’s tears were not those of
resignation at a lost cause, but “fighting tears, the kind that the bravest
warrior sheds when he is going into battle.” The journalist’s assessment proved
to be true; the fight to save Turkey Run from destruction was far from over.
Six months after the initial auction, the parks committee—bolstered by
financial contributions from the public and the owners of the Indianapolis
Motor Speedway—finally reached a settlement with the Indianapolis timber
company, which accepted a $40,200 offer for the site. Eventually, Turkey Run
became Indiana’s second-ever state park (McCormick’s Creek in Owen County had
earned the honor of being the first state park while negotiations over Turkey
Run were still going on.)
The tears that had so moved Herschell had come from Juliet
Virginia Strauss, well-known to the citizens of her hometown, Rockville,
Indiana, and to readers nationwide under her nom de plum, “The Country
Contributor.” This homemaker who struggled so hard to save the forests of her
youth wrote a steady stream of common-sense, down-to-earth observations on life
for Indiana readers of her weekly “Country Contributor” column in the Indianapolis News and for the
approximately one million Ladies’ Home Journal subscribers who read her column “The Ideas of a Plain Country
Woman.”
During Strauss’s childhood in Rockville, her family, who had
roots in the South, was excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church for
supposedly being Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War. Following the
death of her carpenter father, who had nicknamed the young Juliet “Gypsy”
(later shortened to Gyp) because of her constant wanderings in Parke County’s
lush forests, Strauss and her family had been looked down upon for their
poverty by the upper ranks of Rockville society. Pretty, poor, talented, and
fatherless girls, noted Strauss, always made a “fine target for village gossips
and for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as dealt out by more fortunate
girls who have fathers and big brothers and money and ‘social position.’”
Although no scholar, Juliet excelled in one area: writing.
Discovering her talent, fellow classmates, especially boys, often used her
skills to improve upon their writing assignments. Her teacher, familiar with
Juliet’s style, soon discovered the ploy and marked entire paragraphs with a
blue pencil with the word “Gyp” in parenthesis beside them. Her writing talent
caught the eye of John H. Beadle, a roving correspondent for the Associated
Press and editor of the Rockville Tribune.
Beadle convinced her mother to let her daughter write for the newspaper and
started the young woman on her newspaper career.
After a short stint teaching, she was married at a young age
to a boy from the “wrong side of the tracks.” Juliet and her husband, Isaac,
who struggled to earn a living as operators of the small-town weekly newspaper
they bought from Beadle, were excluded from the literary and other social clubs
that sprang up in the community in the 1900s. Although she claimed that these
experiences failed to embitter her, Strauss emphasized in her writings the
overwhelming importance of a woman finding her place at home, and the dignity
and worth of such a life as opposed to the doings of fashionable and elegant
society ladies. “Being a plain home woman,” she argued, “is one of the greatest
successes in life, if to plainness you add kindness, tolerance, and interest,
real interest in simple things.”
Strauss’s writing found—in addition to frequent hardships
and struggles—joy, beauty, and art in a homemaker’s daily life. “I know what it
is to be poor and to be held down seemingly to a level beneath my natural
abilities,” Strauss wrote. “I know what it means to be tired of the dishrag and
sick of the coal-scuttle, but I have learned . . . that there is a way of
accepting these things which lift them to the level of the brush and the pen
and the strings of the harp or the violin.” Her efforts to glorify homemaking
struck a chord with her female readers across the country who grew, through
long association, to consider the Rockville housewife “as friend and
counselor,” the News commented upon
Strauss’s death on May 22, 1918.
Her readers recognized Strauss as one of their own.
Homemakers continually turned to her for the homespun advice and encouragement
she offered and mourned her passing with poems and letters praising her work
printed in newspapers throughout the state. In 1922 the Woman’s Press Club ofIndiana erected a more concrete tribute to Strauss, dedicating a statue titled Subjugation in her memory at Turkey Run.
Sculpted by Myra R. Richards of Indianapolis, the monument, the Press Club
claimed, captured the true spirit of Strauss’s writing—the subjugation of the
material to the spiritual. The work also honored the Rockville native’s role in
saving the lush forests of her youth from destruction.
Reflecting on her life after her children had grown up and
moved away from home, Strauss expressed pride at never following anyone’s lead.
“I lived my own life,” she proudly stated. “If I wished to ride a horse, or to
play a game of cards, or to go wading in the creek with the children, I always
did it. I never strained my eyesight or racked my nerves trying to arrive at
small perfections. I avoided rivalries and emulations. In short, I lived.”
