A sundial unearthed: Montezuma's French connection

Sep. 24—French pioneers wandering North America in the 1700s didn't carry cellphones in their pockets.

Instead, they might have carried small pocket sundials. Those ancient devices used the direction and length of shadows cast by the sun to calculate the time of day. Some pocket sundials also contained a compass, and even a plumb bob to chart a vertical line.

Some were made in the late 1600s in France inside the workshop of a clock-maker named Bourgaud in the town Nantes.

And somehow one of Bourgard's sundials wound up in the earth of farm near Montezuma, Indiana. That's where Dr. Elisha Cannon apparently found a Bourgard sundial in 1860 while plowing a field. A century later, the Smithsonian Institution purchased the sundial as part of its collection in the National Museum of American History. A book on the sundials, planned in the 1970s, never happened. Decades passed.

Then during the past year, Peggy Kidwell started looked through those sundials. The elegance of one stood out.

"This one came across my eye," Kidwell recalled by phone last month. She's the curator of mathematics at its National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and is in her 30th year with the Smithsonian.

Kidwell's research into the sundial's backstory started with a review of the paperwork attached to it. The notes explained that a "Dr. Elisia Cannon" had found the sundial as he plowed a field in Montezuma, Indiana, in 1860. That information alone piqued Kidwell's curiosity. She continued researching and enlisted the help of Sara J. Schechner, a sundial expert and curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.

They published their findings in an Aug. 23 article in Smithsonian Voices titled "How did a 17th-century French sundial end up buried in a field in Indiana?"

Was it dropped there by a French pioneer or explorer, on his way to the nearby settlement of Terre Haute (French for "highland")? Kidwell, along with Schechner, probed for answers to the mystery.

Kidwell's background with Indiana involved a college-days trip to a Notre Dame football game, touring a games and puzzles collection at Indiana University and passing through en route to visits with family members. "I never really thought of Indiana as a former French territory," Kidwell said. She delved into the state's history. Indeed, France claimed Indiana as its territory in 1679, when French explorer Robert de LaSalle arrived here, until 1763, when the British gained control.

French fur traders gave Terre Haute its name, and other Hoosier communities, including Vincennes, have similar influences.

"So, I thought it was not unreasonable that if a French sundial was dug up somewhere in the United States, that it would be in Indiana," Kidwell said. That's not a certainty, though.

"It's perfectly possible that somebody else [besides a French explorer] bought this in France and brought it back to Indiana — an antiques store, maybe. We don't know," Kidwell said. "But it's a good story."

And, as Kidwell and Schechner explain in their Smithsonian Voices article, sundials were used in ancient Egypt, Babylon and China as far back as 1500 B.C. They became more precise through time. Because the length of daylight varies by a location's latitude, the Smithsonian's Bourgard sundial contains a gnomon (a shadow-casting element) that adjusts according to the locale's latitude.

Given the sundial's attributes and markings, Kidwell and Schechner estimated that it was made by Bourgard in Nantes, France, between 1660 and 1675.

But what about its finder, Dr. Elisia Cannon?

His name, they found, was actually Elisha Cannon, best known in history as the brother of Joseph Cannon — an abolitionist, Abe Lincoln follower, one-time Terre Haute lawyer and the U.S. Speaker of the House (1903-1911), for whom the Cannon House Office Building on Washington's Capitol is named. Elisha Bates "E.B." Cannon was Joseph's older brother, said Cannon historian Tim Smith of Danville, Ill.

E.B. was 11 years old in 1840, when his parents, Dr. Horace and Gulielma, moved their Quaker family from New Garden, North Carolina, no longer willing to tolerate the Southern practice of slavery, which the Cannons abhorred, according to Smith's research. The Cannons settled in Parke County two years later. E.B. followed his father's career path and left Parke County to earn his medical degree. He was away when his father drowned in 1851, while trying to cross a storm-swollen Sugar Creek to visit a sick patient, according to an historical account for the city of Tuscola, Illinois, where House Speaker Joseph Cannon eventually settled.

E.B. wound up becoming a respected physician, who practiced medicine in Montezuma from the early 1850s until he, too, moved in late 1867 or early 1868 to Tuscola — a city founded by a trio Parke County natives. He and his wife Ann — a Parke County native — raised a family of three sons and a daughter.

However, E.B. grew separated from his birth family for many years. "He was a spendthrift," Smith said. His brothers became bankers, "but they never cut their brother [E.B.] in — that tells you something," Smith added. E.B. also dealt with a drinking problem while living in Parke County, Smith said

Most likely, E.B. uncovered the French sundial while plowing a Montezuma field owned by his mother. Nearly seven years later, he and his family moved to Tuscola for a fresh start, a few years before his brother Joseph won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1873. "[E.B. got his act together just about the time Joe went to Congress," Smith said.

E.B. continued to live and practice medicine in Tuscola, moved to Wyoming in hopes the dry air would ease his tuberculosis, and then returned to Montezuma, where he died in 1883.

One small piece of his history lives on in the Smithsonian sundial collection, as does a bit of mystery as to its path there. "It was and is an elegant and noteworthy European timekeeping device," Kidwell and Schechner wrote.

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.