General Lew Wallace, whose varied achievements have contributed so largely to the town’s fame, was not born at Crawfordsville, but at Brookville, in Franklin County, April 10, 1827. His father, David Wallace, had resigned from the regular army soon after his graduation from West Point in 1821. He studied law at Brookville, and soon began an interesting public career. He was one of the political giants of the State in his day, holding many offices and positions of honor. His first wife, General Wallace’s mother, was the daughter of John Test, of a family long prominent in the State. General Wallace was an adventurous boy, impatient of all restraint, and fond of wandering, and he therefore received little systematic education; but his father owned an excellent library, and, as has happened with other boys who have refused to submit to the schoolmaster, he found his own way to the book shelves. He was for a time a student at Hoshour’s school at Centerville; and he once ran away to join an older brother at Wabash; but he was either unwilling or unable to break his nomadic habits, and continued to roam the woods until, at sixteen, his school bills were audited for the last time. He was beset by several ambitions; literature, art, and a military career invited him. He had some skill at sketching, and painted a portrait of Black Hawk, the Indian chief, drawing on the family medicine chest for castor oil to use in mixing his colors. He also completed a novel, “The Man at Arms: A Tale of the Tenth Century,” of which he remembers little; but Sulgrove in one of his chronicles darkly hints that it was of the school of G. P. R. James. Robert Duncan, clerk of Marion County, in which Indianapolis is situated, employed him as copyist, and he varied this prosaic occupation by reading law in his father’s office. The Mexican War now broke upon the country, and as Lewis--the second syllable disappeared during the Civil War--had painted a picture and written a romance, he now turned naturally to his third ambition. He organized a company and went south with the First Indiana Infantry. The regiment saw little of the war, but the campaign and his personal experience in military matters confirmed young Wallace’s purpose to write a novel of Mexico, for which, by a kind of prevision and the inspiration of Prescott, he had already made tentative sketches. On his return to Indiana he again took up the law, and practised at Covington until 1852, when he removed to Crawfordsville, which has ever since been his home. He presently organized a military company, known as the “Montgomery Guards,” and equipped it with the Zouave uniform. This furnished an outlet for his ceaseless energy, and also for his pocket-book, as the State contributed nothing to the company’s support. He brought it to a high standard of efficiency, and at the outbreak of the Civil War it was one of the best-drilled military organizations in the country. Governor Morton appointed Mr.