how table rock got its name
Table Rock is named after a rock shaped like a table. Surprise! However, it is probably not the rock you've seen or even were told about, as it has been gone almost 150 years. Here are sources of information about it.
primary source information
a contemporaneous account of what it looked like
oral history collected from elderly people who had seen the table rock
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Another "primary source" is the memory of persons who witnessed something. In 1933, Bessie Sutton and friends found and interviewed every person then still alive who had actually seen the table rock. As you can see from the varying accounts, the distance of time lessens reliability. One must consider and judge which accounts are more reliable, by detail, by comparison to other more reliable source material (like the 1859 account), and so on. History is rarely black and white but rather involves thought.
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other information
In 1895, William Henry Harrison wrote a history of "the" Table Rock. This account is set forth in a trade publication called The Sugar Beet Era, the August 1, 1895 edition. Lifetime Historical Society member David Kracman found this as he was researching the Harrison family. The article is on page 2, but the picture it references is on page 1. That photograph is not "the" Table Rock but rather Mushroom Rock, as assessed in the article "Not the Table Rock."
From the editor: Harrison was not born until 1860 and his family did not come to Table Rock until the 1870s. According to the first-person accounts collected by Elsie Sutton in 1933, "the" rock was gone by 1870, prior to the arrival of the Harrison family. Harrison's account is thus a secondary source based on identified other sources. Still, it is of interest, and has some facets (whether true or false) not mentioned in other accounts, most notably that there was a small table with 18" legs (built?) on top of the rock.
From the editor: Harrison was not born until 1860 and his family did not come to Table Rock until the 1870s. According to the first-person accounts collected by Elsie Sutton in 1933, "the" rock was gone by 1870, prior to the arrival of the Harrison family. Harrison's account is thus a secondary source based on identified other sources. Still, it is of interest, and has some facets (whether true or false) not mentioned in other accounts, most notably that there was a small table with 18" legs (built?) on top of the rock.
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The story of John Brown's graffiti has been mentioned before, but this is the first that gives a date, 1856, which seems feasible. There is no evidence that Brown was here, nor any evidence he was not. If there was such an item of graffiti, and if it existed 20 years before the article, Harrison might conceivably have seen it himself as a teenager. That John Brown stopped here was an assertion touted in the late 1800s to the point that it was an accepted fact. See a discussion in the story of the Underground Railroad here in Table Rock, which is a site recognized by the National Park Service as on the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
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