Poet, novelist, businessman. Noah J. Clodfelter was unsuited for the farming life he was born into and instead studied history, biography, and literature. He married Cinderella Clark, with whom he had three children (Byron, Mabel, and Hazel). Though he became an insurance assessor professionally, he had been writing original poems since he was a teenager. These verses filled some 300 pages in his 1886 book "Early Vanities," which he published under the name N. J. Clodfelter. The collection proved successful, particularly in the area, and he earned the nickname "The Wabash Poet" after a local valley and river. His next book was "Snatched from the Poorhouse," a novel which reportedly sold 160,000 copies. Profits from these two books allowed him to build an estate in Crawfordsville which he named Knoll Cottage. His next book was "In Stony Places: A Story of the Mines in the Great Coal-Mining Region of Pennsylvania." In the 1870s, however, he had purchased land from a man named Henry C. Hulett, whom he sued in the 1880s. The embarrassing case was eventually heard by the Indiana Supreme Court. He became a member of the Western Association of Writers, a group that included James Whitcomb Riley, but he soon quit, disappointed by the "doggerel" poetry from some of its members. The death of his wife in 1889 left him depressed, though he later wed Hannah Hough as his second wife. He began to invest heavily in an electric interurban railroad to connect Marion to Fairmount, which locals thought worthless. Clodfelter began losing his substantial wealth, and he had to sell his home. He lashed out against his town by publishing a biting satire, "The Gotham of Yasmar" (1897), dedicated to the "Tailed, Untailed, and Detailed Devils" of Crawfordsville and poking fun at the members of the Western Association of Writers. Clodfelter was institutionalized in an Indianapolis asylum in 1899. His previous fame collapsed into infamy and newspapers reported on his "diseased mind" at his death.