Lou’s View – April 2, 2015

The Turtle

by Lou Bernard

Quite a few years ago, when I wanted to borrow Memorial Park for an event, the city made me sign a paper saying that I wouldn’t kill, injure, main, destroy, or deface any of the plants and wildlife down there. I wondered, at the time, just what was involved in defacing the wildlife. Was the city legally preventing me from spray-painting my initials on a rabbit?

Now, with the recent discovery of an 1895 newspaper article, I understand. There’s apparently a precedent for the defacing of wildlife, and it goes back almost two hundred years.
It began with Ernest Moran, in 1895. Actually it began way before Ernest Moran, but this story is probably best not told in chronological order.

Ernest Moran was a farmer who lived out in the Dunnstown area. He was a farmer, but he was a scientific sort of farmer. He grew tobacco and potatoes, but he did it with a lot of thought and study. His obituary, in 1936, said,”He had read extensively and studied deeply the problems of soil fertility and erosion, and carried out his own program of soil erosion prevention on his hillside farm. The program was regarded as outstanding by farmers and Mr. Moran took great pride in it.”

In 1932, Moran won the title of Grand Champion Potato Grower at the State Farm Show, and he was the secretary and treasurer of the Tobacco Growers Association.
This was no ordinary hayseed, is what I’m saying here.

In 1895, he was twenty-three years old. He was walking through the fields near his house, looking over his crops, when he spotted something slightly unusual.
He saw a turtle.

Nothing too shocking there. If you’re walking around outdoors, you might see a turtle occasionally. Especially if you’re not far from the river. I’ve seen a few myself. But this turtle was different. It had something carved on its back.

Moran caught the turtle, presumably without a whole hell of a lot of difficulty, and looked at it. He saw the inscription that was carved on the turtle’s back.
It said,”William Dunn, 1830.”

William Dunn was the name of the man who founded Dunnstown in 1792. Dunnstown is the oldest remaining community in Clinton County. Local lore has it that he traded the Native Americans for it, acquiring all of present-day Dunnstown and Great Island for some whiskey, beads, and a rifle. Dunn’s community, originally named Dunnsburg, was intended to be the county seat of Lycoming County, but lost out to Williamsport. Later on, it was considered as the county seat for Clinton County, too, but lost to Lock Haven. Dunn’s community just couldn’t catch a break.

Now, as William Dunn, the founder, was buried in Dunnstown Cemetery in 1809, it’s pretty safe to say that he was dead by 1830. The guy who defaced the turtle—And I seriously hope nobody from PETA is reading this column—Had to have been his son, also named William Dunn. So, as the father was a busy guy, founding a town and fighting the Revolutionary War and all, his son apparently found the time to go and vandalize an animal.

Turtles have some of the longest lifespans of any animals. Commonly, they can live for over a century. I looked it up. This one had to be fairly old—It was sixty-five years between Dunn covering it with graffiti and Moran finding it.

There is no indication what happened to the turtle afterward. Moran’s obit does say, however, that he was friends with Thomas Brown Stewart, who was an expert in local history and archaeology. He would often find artifacts in his fields and give them to Stewart. So, who knows, maybe Stewart got a new pet turtle, too, with an easily-identifiable mark on it.

Stewart passed away, too, in 1954. I’ve seen his will. There is no indication of “vandalized turtle” mentioned in it. I mean, I wasn’t checking for that phrase specifically at the time, but I think I’d probably have remembered that. So its hard to say what happened to the turtle—Maybe Moran kept it, maybe he gave it to Stewart, maybe they both passed it on.

Turtles living the lifespans they do, you never know. Maybe it’s still out there somewhere. Everyone keep your eyes open—If you see a turtle trying to cross the street, stop and check on it. It may be an antique.

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