Copied from a letter from Mabel Amack Dimmick dated July 24^th, 1931 NOTE: ( I have corrected spelling and punctuation where needed)

Amacks:-

I haven’t a very clear history of the Amack family. There were 5 or 6 of the Amack boys who came with their parents to Ind. when my grandfather was 18 years of age. They came from New Jersey to Ripley Co., Indiana. My Mother said my grandfather often longed to go back to New Jersey to the “clam bakes” of his early youth, even talked of them in his last sickness.

Teunis Amack was married to Nancy Ann Rader Dec. 26^th 1830. To their union 8 children were born – 6 girls and 2 boys. Their 4^th child was their first son – 1841 – my father, Samuel Amack, who grew to manhood near Greenfield Ind. (where he was born). He married Narcissa Ray daughter of James A. Ray of Indianapolis, in 1868.

When my grandparents were married they went to housekeeping in a one room cabin, having no floor – except the earth. The Amack’s were a proud old Scotch family and opposed bitterly my grandfather’s marriage to a Rader, a fact my grandmother (Nancy) always resented, and set out to make her branch of the Amack family the wealthiest and most influential – and succeeded.

At her death there was a large farm near Greenfield, Ind., a fine home in Greenfield, and several thousand dollars on interest. They had raised a large family and all had done well. Grandfather at the earliest opportunity had hewn and laid a puncheon floor in the little cabin, and my grandmother often talked of those early days to my mother telling of her pride in the new floor, how she kept it scrubbed to snowy whiteness and often stopped her work outside to peep in at the new floor; her washtub was a log hollowed out like a trough. After there was a fine 2-story house and barns, she still spent her rest moments in the cabin, confessing the new house had not brought her the happiness she had known in the cabin.

Grandfather Amack’s brothers were all preachers. He (Teunis) was an elder in the Methodist Church and often talked in the meetings when there was no regular preacher. His children were brought up in “the faith” but my father – Samuel Amack – never joined church or confessed religion until his 47^th year when he united with the Quaker Church of Bethel, Liberty Township, Grant Co., Indiana.

Samuel Amack and Philip Matter were life long friends. They bought and shipped horses together for many years, until Mr. Matter became interested in the streetcar business as a greater money making possibility. Time proved his judgment correct. The one great passion of my father’s life was fine horses; he loved them so well he could scarcely stand to work them and kept them “rolling fat.” The measles, which father contracted in his 49th year left him a nervous and almost mental wreck, he sold the Amack farm in Liberty Township, near Marion, Ind. in 1898, and began an endless quest for health which he never regained, dying March 17, 1915, age 74; my mother lived 12 years after his death, passing on Dec. 22, 1927.

Samuel Amack had lived in Van Buren Township a number of years before he moved to the old home known as the Amack farm near Marion which he purchased of Willis Cammack. This is where the letter ends – apparently the ending was destroyed over the years. The text of this letter was provided to me by Les and Lois Amack, who got the copy from Les’s Aunt Gwen Amack Leaming, daughter of Darcie Arthur Amack (Mabel’s brother) and his first wife, Cora Moulton.