April Fool’s Day approaches this week, and though it doesn’t carry the pranks it used to, it’s worth noting that tall tales were nothing unusual in the earlier days of LaPorte County journalism.

fern   So it was reported in the LaPorte Daily Argus in 1898 that a petrified woman was unearthed in Wanatah. A “Maunschausen newspaper scribe spun” the tale of fiction.

   But what was the real story, and why was it written?

   The story is attributed to Harry B. Darling, who followed newspaper work almost all of his workaday life. He was also a gifted public speaker. His journalistic career began when he was only 16 and he was editor and publisher of a Sunday morning newspaper called the News-Item. He was best known in LaPorte County as editor of the LaPorte Argus, a job he commanded for 20 years before its purchase in 1924 by the Herald.

   One of Harry Darling’s newspaper jobs was in Valparaiso. It was at that time he wrote a story about a petrified girl found in a marsh near Wanatah by men digging a ditch to drain some lowland. He wrote that the girl had gone out to pick berries and never came back. Her father thought she had run away with a fellow he did not like. He said they found berry stains on her hands; she had fallen into the mud and died, and her body had turned to stone.

   People took the train to Wanatah to see her body. When they arrived there, they found it was just one of Harry’s stories — told so well that people believed it.

   Some time later, Wanatah again landed in the news when the following story appeared in the Wanatah Times:

   “Section men working between Winslow and Wanatah on the Pennsylvania Railroad reported an exceedingly peculiar occurance Saturday evening. They say that after the heavy downpour of rain in the morning, fully 10,000 mud turtles appeared on the right-of-way of the company. They were led by a huge snapping turtle which was considerably in advance of his followers. The little fellows were divided into twenty detachments of 500 each, and proceeded at a rapid rate eastward. After they had made half a mile of their journey, a freight train overtook them, killing over 150.

turtles   “Their companions surrounded the victims and buried them in the sand, rolled stones over the graves and formed a large sized mound. The leader then gave a shrill whistle and the turtles left the Pennsylvania lines through the fields and underbrush for the Nickle Plate tracks, seemingly intent on abandoning a road which had caused such a great loss of life to their comrades. One of the men followed them and asserts that they left behind them a track one yard wide and three inches deep, cut as clean as though it had been made by a road scraper. The leader of the turtles had a date June 6, 1580, carved on his back in crude letters,  leaving the impression that he was at least 318 years old.”

   It would appear that over 100 years ago in LaPorte County, people got tired of hearing about the fish that got away and decided to indulge in new twists on some very tall tales.

   Or … do you believe that turtles invaded Wanatah?

FERN EDDY SCHULTZ is LaPorte County’s official Historian. Visit the LaPorte County Historical Society Museum, 2405 Indiana Ave., and its website, www.laportecountyhistory.org, to learn much more about LaPorte County’s history.