Kokomo Tribune
Kokomo, Howard County, Indiana
Wednesday, August 5, 1931

Interesting Article Tells of Harness, Oden Families

An interesting article entitled Ninety years on the same farm by A. E. Andrews appears in the August issue of the Indiana Farmer’s Guide. The article outlines a brief history of the Harness and Oden families who have resided along the Howard-Cass county line for many years. The article in brief is as follows:
Wilderness and wild beasts had no terrors for George Harness and instead of frightening George W. Harness, his son, they stimulated him 3 square miles of ownership. The wilderness was no terror for Schuyler C. Oden, the grandson of George W., who on his maiden deer hunt, was dumped off a logging train in 9 inches of snow, at night, in the Wisconsin woods; and the present day lakes and streams attract Austin Oden, who, as this is written, is planning a vacation on wheels somewhere in Indiana or Michigan.
Wherever the Harness family has gone, its members have been competent to face conditions and do their part, and the present Oden farm has been in the same family for three generations, is now farmed by the forth generation, and there is young Warren Oden, a lively and interested school boy, to take up the task of his forefathers.
George Harness, who located the family along the Cass-Howard county line, was himself a man of self-reliance. Possessing Irish impulsiveness and English perseverance, he adapted these to the frontier, and always asserted his philosophy of life. When more than 100 years old, he was mounting a horse at the present Oden farm for a long ride, and was told he ought to buy a buggy.
“Yes, buy a buggy and starve,” he called with vehemence and at the same time swung on his mount, just to show them that a man who had lived more than a century was not going to be ruined by any new fangled expensive contraptions like a buggy. He had gold in his chests to buy as many buggies as he might wish, but it was against his principles and philosophy to coddle himself or his children.
That kind of determination he not only gave to his family, but he impressed it on them by placing them face to face with pioneer reality. Taking his son, George W. Harness, to the site of the present Oden farm, he left him there in the wilderness. The land was there, the animals were there, the giant trees covered future fields; but here, in the mind of George, the elder, was a future, and here his son, George W. should make his way.
He became a friend of chief Kokomo, for whom the city of Kokomo was named; he was well known to chief Godfroy, of the Fort Wayne region, and he spoke their language as a college doctor speaks English. If he had possessed the pen of a Cooper or an Irvin, what a story he could have told. As it is, all that comes down to us today is the following from a public address he once made at Kokomo;
“He (Kokomo) was a good Indian. The fact is the Indians were fearfully misused by the whites and the government. I have lived among them and slept in their wigwams and am their friend. They never misused anyone who treated them right. I never had the least fear of them and they treated me better than most white people.”
George W. did his own “rooting.” He needed no gold from his father’s chests and he could travel horseback or on foot. He acquired more than 1800 acres of good land entering the first of it in 1840. When he died, February 26, 1909, he was 89 years old, the father of 17 children, and his estate was said to be worth $150,000. Yes, he could “root” for himself. He was of the same stock and temperament as Judge Harness of the Howard circuit court, was as an octogenarian, set out to journey around the world and did.
George W. was born in Carroll county. He was left by his father in what is now Deer Creek township, Cass county and there he acquired his lands.
In that day there was no commerce. But that did not bother George W. He went east from the site of his cabin to a spot that is now across a good gravel road from the Oden home, and there excavated and burned the clay to build his house. And for 65 years that house stood.
A daughter of George W. Harness married George W. Oden, a young man of the neighborhood who had 100 acres near the Harness farms. Schuyler C. Oden is the son of that marriage and is now 63 years old. He has farmed 100 acres on both sides of the gravel road, owes nothing and is not afraid of modern methods if he approves them.
“I heard a Purdue professor give a talk years ago and he was telling how to plant corn. Toward the end he said: If I were doing it, I would put in a little commercial fertilizer. It won’t hurt any and it might give the corn a better start. I decided to try it and am still using it. They’ve been taking fertilizer out of our fields since the Indians were here and I believe in putting something back.”
Schuyler C. has quit the more strenuous parts of farming. Though he still has a mounted bucks head on his front porch, and he no longer goes to the north woods. Instead he and Mrs. Oden have spent some of their winters in New Mexico, and the active farm work is in the charge of Austin Oden, representing the fourth generation, while Warren Oden, age 7, carries the water jug to the harvest hands.