No more reliable account

Dr. John H. Rerick signed four chapters of the county history published in 1882: the county's physical features, its organisation, its roads and churches and schools, and its part in the war. No other man in the volume signed more.

He also owned the LaGrange Standard, and had owned it, with one interruption, since 1867.

Two years before the county history came out he had written another book.

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The regiment

The Forty-fourth Indiana held a reunion in 1879 and asked him to write its history. He printed it in LaGrange the following year, three hundred pages of roster, marches and losses by company, and he opened it by saying what he had to work with.

Although the writer was with the Regiment during every day of its service except when absent a few weeks on sick furlough, he finds that time has dimmed in his memory many incidents of a personal character, that might be of interest.

So he used his own wartime letters, the official records, and soldiers' letters that had been published at the time.

He had been there. He was commissioned assistant surgeon on the twelfth of September, 1861, promoted surgeon, and mustered out a major. At Shiloh the regiment's casualty return lists him among the wounded, hit in the chest.

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What he does at the battles

The book reaches Fort Donelson in February 1862. He describes the snow, the coffee, the hard-tack, the order to fall in. Then he stops.

I could give no more reliable account of the part performed by the Forty-fourth Indiana, in this battle, than to copy Colonel Reed's official report.

Four pages of Colonel Reed follow.

At Chickamauga he does it again, and the seam is easier to see because the march is his and the battle is not. He gives the division breaking camp on the third of September, the crossing of the Cumberlands, Rossville, Ringgold, the skirmish at John Henderson's plantation on the thirteenth, the clouds of dust to the east on the sixteenth and seventeenth, and two regiments ordered out late on the afternoon of the eighteenth. The next paragraph is this one.

For the part performed by the Forty-fourth on the bloody field of Chickamauga, we subjoin the official report of Lieutenant-Colonel Aldrich, the brave and intrepid officer in command.

Aldrich covers both days of the battle, Saturday the nineteenth and Sunday the twentieth, and reports three killed, fifty-one wounded and ten missing. He also reports this.

The ever faithful Surgeon Rerick followed us from point to point, assisted by Dr. Carr; and I am pleased to say that no regiment has had better care for their wounded than the 44th Indiana, in this army. He succeeded also in getting all of our wounded from the hospital which was captured on Sunday evening by the enemy.

Then Rerick's own voice returns, and the first thing it does is defend the document.

The report of Lieutenant-Colonel Aldrich might seem somewhat colored to some, but the above facts obtained by Chaplain Van Horne from official reports of his superior officers, fully vindicate the Colonel's plain statement of the part performed by the Forty-fourth Indiana.

He does not mention that the report he is vindicating names him.

At Stone River he writes the fighting himself, seven months earlier and two battles back. That account ends: Having been an eye-witness of nearly all its movements, I can testify as to its honorable conduct.

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The paper

The Standard began in December 1856, when John K. Morrow came in from Bryan, Ohio, with a Washington hand press and printing material covered with a chattel mortgage. It was the first Republican paper established in the county.

Rerick bought the office on the twenty-second of November, 1867. He sold it to John D. Devor in May 1869, on his election as clerk of the circuit court, and bought it back on the eighteenth of July, 1872.

In between, Devor put twenty-five hundred dollars into it: a new Washington hand press, two job presses, a large quantity of type. So the office Rerick returned to was not the office he had left. In October 1874 he added the first power press ever brought into the county, and steam to turn it.

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The book about the county

F. A. Battey and Company of Chicago worked the two counties through 1881, calling on upward of three thousand people, and published the volume the next year. Different men wrote different chapters. Weston A. Goodspeed signed five of the township chapters. John Paul Jones signed two. Five more are signed R. H. Rerick. Ford's history gives R. H. Rerick an entry of his own in 1920, naming him the author of the Eden Township chapter, and he took the Standard in 1914. Nothing in either volume establishes how the two were related, or whether they were.

The four that carry Dr. J. H. Rerick, M. D. are the county-wide ones, and three of them have him in them.

He wrote the chapter that lists the county's physicians, and his own entry is in the third person: came to the place in 1859, entered the service in 1861, promoted surgeon, still proprietor of the Standard, and devoting his attention exclusively to the printing business.

That entry says he was elected clerk of the circuit court in 1860 and in 1864, serving eight years.

The table of county officers, a hundred lines further into the same chapter, reads: John H. Rerick, 1869-77.

Both are his. The volume does not reconcile them and neither does this.

He wrote the chapter recording that on the ninth of January, 1858, a meeting at Wright's Corners passed resolutions signed by a hundred and thirty citizens and ordered them published in the Standard, accusing a tavern keeper of harbouring what the resolutions called these infernal banditti. That was nine years before he bought the paper. The same chapter, two hundred lines later, records that he owns it. It does not put the two together.

And he wrote the chapter listing what went into the courthouse cornerstone in 1878, read out by Samuel P. Bradford as the box was closed. The 1832 act organising the county. The April bar docket. Six Confederate postage stamps found in a rebel camp in Virginia. The names of the Lima Silver Band. A coin dated 1771 and a silver coin dated 1774. A Swiss medal. And, third on the list, a copy of the La Grange Standard, Centennial issue, and issue of the day.

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He was still the proprietor when the book went to press.

He died on the twenty-first of January, 1911, still holding the paper. It was leased to Carl H. Rerick, and from 1914 it belonged to Rowland H. Rerick.