One evening in late July of 1884, Jane Hyland stepped out of her farmhouse west of Eaton to milk a cow and encountered a river monster.
Hyland and her husband, Michael, in addition to raising cattle and ducks, also operated a flour and woolen mill on their farm. The property ran along the south bank of the Mississinewa River, north of Union Cemetery.
The Hylands’ mill drew power from river water channeled into a wheel by a dam that stretched across the stream. As the sun set, Jane milked her cow on the bank near the dam. The farm’s ducks splashed merrily in the water just a few feet away.
Then all of a sudden, according to the Muncie Morning News, a monstrous creature “raised above the surface of the water” and lunged for the ducks.
The cow freaked and bolted. The birds fled in quacking terror. Jane looked frantically out across the river and saw nothing but ripples. The “aquatic monster” had slipped beneath the surface.
Something similar happened two days later. A man from Eaton was fishing at the Hyland Dam and claimed he saw “the monster swimming and avers that its head protruded from the water nearly three feet.”
The Morning News had a field day with these tales. One writer mused that the deep water behind the dam was an ideal habitat for monstrous growth. Another reporter suggested that the creature went ashore “to appease its appetite on ducks and other fowl.”
Although the paper embellished the facts, the story was fundamentally true: Monstrous fish did terrorize those living along the Mississinewa River near Eaton in the decades around 1900.
To begin with, the Hylands were real people who once farmed and ran a mill along the river.
Michael was born in Ireland in 1815 and emigrated to the United States, most likely during the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. He eventually settled in Madison County, Indiana. There he met and married Jane Pruitt, a former resident of Tennessee. The Hylands had two sons, John and Edward.
In 1863, they bought a Delaware County linseed oil and woolen (textile) mill from George Younce, along with the surrounding farm. The property sat about a mile west of Eaton on the Mississinewa River. David Studebaker built the first mill there in 1845. The Hylands expanded the operation and added a second story.
Thomas Helm wrote in his ponderous 1881 “History of Delaware County” that the Hylands manufactured large quantities of “blankets, yarns, cassimeres, jeans and other woolen goods.” Most of it was sold locally. In 1887, the family added a third mill to process wheat. The Muncie Daily Times reported in December that Hyland Mill “is now turning out as good flour as was ever made.”
Sadly, the woolen mill was destroyed by fire in 1891. Michael, then 77, chose not to rebuild. The flour mill continued operating well into the 20th century.
As for the river monsters, they occasionally resurfaced in local records. In early July of 1890, for instance, a huge fish swimming in Carter Mill Pond upriver was mistaken for “the great sea serpent that had escaped from Hyland’s Mill dam.”
Then two years later, three Munsonians named John Nixon, Joe Torrey and Billy Morgan claimed to have caught a 40-pound carp in the river east of Eaton. The Muncie Morning News dismissed it as “one of John’s huge jokes,” but the fishermen swore to it.
The river ran low in the summer of 1894. As a result, pollution from the new Paragon Paper Mill in Eaton killed off most fish immediately downstream in the Mississinewa. That September, Michael Hyland filed a complaint in court accusing the company of destroying the river, rendering it “noxious, impure, poisonous, offensive, unwholesome, discolored, and stinking for man and beast … hundreds of fish have been killed” and were rotting along the banks.
Only carp and a few bass survived.
By 1897, local fishermen complained that enormous carp were devouring what little remained of the bass population. A Muncie Daily Herald article from mid-August hinted at their source: “The river is full of carp which found their way from the fish ponds that many deluded farmers maintained several years ago.”
Those farmers were likely deluded by the federal government. Beginning in 1877, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries launched a program promoting carp farming as a source of cheap protein. The feds imported thousands of common carp from Germany and distributed them widely to farmers across the Midwest. By the 1890s, the species had escaped from containment ponds and were spreading rapidly across the Ohio and Mississippi river watersheds. Some grew to monstrous sizes.
Despite the overabundance of these foreign fish, the Mississinewa’s ecosystem recovered some in the early 1900s. Hyland’s Dam remained a popular fishing spot for decades. Sometime around the First World War, the property was bought by John Hance. In the early 1920s, part of his farm was managed by his son and daughter-in-law, Ben and Mary Hance.
In summer of 1924, the couple rented their farmhouse out to two men, one of whom said his name was Tom Miller. The tenants spent most of their time fishing on the Mississinewa and shooting guns.
Later that year, Ben realized that “Tom Miller” was actually the notorious and wanted gangster, Gerald Chapman. The bandit and his partner George “Dutch” Anderson had escaped from federal prison in Atlanta and were hiding out in Indiana.
The two eventually left the Hance Farm and made their way to Connecticut, where they murdered a policeman during a robbery. Evidence left at the scene was traced back to Muncie, and local police began investigating. Ben provided info that led to Chapman’s arrest in Muncie on Jan. 18, 1925.
Hance later testified at the murder trial that April. Chapman was found guilty and sentenced to death. In August of 1925, however, Ben and Mary Hance were murdered in retaliation by members of Chapman’s gang.
The Hyland Mill river monster lived on in lore for at least another decade. By 1935, one of the creatures had moved upriver and was known as “Beelzebub, the belligerent black bass of Granville.” The Muncie Evening Press wrote that “the Mississinewa monster occasionally sallies forth from his lair near the Granville bridge and spreads terror and destruction up and down the river banks.”
As to its origins, the Press wrote: “Around Eaton, they say that the carp in Mississinewa trace their ancestry to fish planted in a pond at the Hance place.” Supposedly, “many years ago, the river overflowed and a bank of the pond broke and the carp spread up and down the stream.”
Such fish, it seems, have haunted the river ever since.
Chris Flook is a Delaware County Historical Society historian and senior lecturer of Media at Ball State University.
This article originally appeared on Muncie Star Press: Monsters on the Mississinewa | ByGone Muncie
Reporting by Chris Flook / Muncie Star Press
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