In 1847, Richard Fulkerson died at the age of 81. Richard's death must have played some important factor in the decision-making process that prompted William and Eliza Jane Fulkerson, to move from Greene County, Ohio, to the area of Dunkirk, Indiana. Who knows how long they had been contemplating the move? Perhaps they felt a need to remain in Greene County as long as his father was alive. William and Eliza Jane Fulkerson and their three children, Hannah Caroline, 7, Amos Newton, 6, and William Lee, 1, traveled by wagon from Greene County, Ohio, to Jackson Township near Dunkirk to become among the small number of early settlers of that area and of the county which is now Blackford, created from a portion of Jay County. They settled "in wild surroundings" on a heavily timbered farm and would here raise the rest of their family.
It truly was a wild area at the time, overpopulated by menacing wolves. In 1840, Blackford County paid $1 a head bounty for wolves and raised the bounty to $4 in 1845. The size of this bounty becomes meaningful when one learns that the price of land was $1.25 per acre.
William G. Sutton, the oldest son of Dunkirk founder Isaiah Sutton, wrote a booklet of his recollections of those early years. It is interesting how he, as a 14-year-old boy, dressed in the 1840s: "I wore deerskin moccasins, homespun trousers, a homespun red flannel 'wamus' with the corners tied in front, a tall, pointed red flannel cap with a tassel at the peak." Our Fulkersons who were living there at that time surely dressed much the same.
About the time that William and Eliza Jane Fulkerson arrived in the Dunkirk area, the first log schoolhouse was erected by the men of the town in just three days. Its crude facilities included split-slab seats and greased paper windows. William G. Sutton, mentioned above, became a schoolmaster in 1847 and taught for 13 consecutive winters. It likely that he taught some, if not all, the Fulkerson children, as he was the only schoolmaster in the area at the time. Equipment in the log schoolhouse was crude, being devoid of blackboards, maps, globes and was severely lacking in books. The youngest students had nothing to do during the two daily sessions of four hours each but sit on backless benches and study the alphabet, while older students brought whatever books they could find at home, including almanacs and bibles. The average number of pupils was 35, and ages ranged from four years to 23 years.
"At that time for some reason, the children of my neighborhood attended that school which was distant about two miles," Sutton wrote in his Recollections."We all walked together to and from school and I was expected to beguile the tedium of the way by telling stories. It was my custom to begin a story at a certain fence and continue the relation till we reached a spot twenty rods from the schoolhouse. At night I took up the story at this spot and continued it until we reached the before-mentioned fence. In this serial fashion, I told many stories, mostly from the Arabian Nights."
