USA > Michigan > Lenawee County > History and biographical record of Lenawee County, Michigan, Volume I > Part 4
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How the name of "Tecumseh" came to be applied to the village by its first proprietors, is thus graphically told in an address prepared for the Raisiu Valley Historical Society, by the late Dr. M. A. Patterson, and for the use of the MSS. copy of which I am indebted to his family. He says :
.
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OF LENAWEE COUNTY, MICHIGAN.
" When Musgrove Evans, Austin E. Wing, and others, were partaking of a rural dinner, in quite a primitive way,. under the branches of a spreading oak, that grew near the center of the village ground-then without a name or a permanent white inhabitant-the question arose: 'What shall we call this embryo village?' Evans remarked, after objecting to several other names as too romantic, far-fetched or meaningless : ' Why not call it Tecumseh ?': 'That will not answer,' replied one of the party, "'Tecumseh fought for the British and was a British Indian.' 'Thee is mistaken,' quietly answered Friend Musgrove, 'Tecumseh fought on his own account and for his own people. Tecumseh was Nature's Indian.' 'That's a fact,' exclaimed Wing, 'and one of Nature's noblest specimens of a Red Man.' This emphatic remark decided the question, and before rising from their rural repast, our village had a name."
Such is the story of the first naming of the village, as told by the Doctor, and as undoubtedly told to him by some of the parties concerned, as he well knew them all-being the first physician who came to settle permanently in the north part of the county, as Dr. Ormsby, who had previously come to Tecumseh, removed to Adrian in 1827; and Dr. Patterson was long the leading physician in Tecumseh and vicinity, having continued the practice of his profession for nearly fifty years, and until about a year prior to his decease, in April last.
In the address there is much of interest, well and eloquently told, and many passages that I had intended to copy or condense, had time and space permitted ; particularly his vivid, picture-like sketch of the pursuit and capture, by the Tecumseh posse under deputy sheriff William McNair, of some of the Ohio commissioners and surveyors, who were running in the spring of 1835, the line as claimed by that state, along the south part of Lenawee county, and which the Doctor called the first scene in the drama of the Toledo war. But I must forbear, and I do so with the less regret, because I have ascertained since I came into possession of his manuscript, that the address was read before the R. V. Historical Society, in June, 1868, and was published in one or both of the Tecumseh papers at the time.
Notwithstanding the Doctor's learned and able argument to prove : and show the importance of collecting the data for history whilst the actors and witnesses of the events recorded, were still alive, and his evident desire and wish to have the facts correctly stated in regard to the early settlement of the county or of the Raisin Valley, yet I find that by some means or other, he made one or two slips or mistakes in his address. In the latter portion of his remarks on the boundary dispute with Ohio, he speaks of Ohio, with her twelve votes in Congress being politically strong, and in this he is followed, I see, by A. L. Millard, Esq., in his centennial address of July 4, 1876. How. they should both have fallen into the same error, I cannot well conceive, as Ohio never had, at any one time, an exact " twelve votes in Congress." From the time of her admission as a State in 1802,
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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD
until 1812, when the apportionment under the census of 1810, took effect, she had one member of the House, giving her three electoral votes. In 1812 she had seven electoral votes; in 1816 and 1820, she had eight electoral votes ; in 1824 and 1828 she had sixteen electoral votes ; and in 1832, 1836, and 1840, she had twenty-one electoral votes, being nineteen for her members in the House and two for her members in the Senate. From that time until 1864, she had twenty- three electoral votes; and for 1864 and 1868, twenty-one votes, and for 1872 and 1876, twenty-two votes.
The error as to the number of her votes in Congress in 1835-6, may be deemed of minor importance, for whether she is spoken of as having " twelve votes," or as having " nineteen," as she, in reality, had at the time of the action on our boundary question, she was compara- tively strong and powerful, as compared with Michigan with only a single delegate, and no vote in either branch of Congress. Still when allusion is made to the relative political strength of the great and powerful State of Ohio, and the then voteless and almost voiceless Territory of Michigan, it is best to state the facts correctly. Governor Lucas' boast of being backed by a " million of freemen," if by that he meant to include the whole population of the State, was no idle boast, as Ohio, in 1830, had over 937,000 inhabitants, and in 1835 must have had considerably over a million, whilst Michigan, in 1834, by the territorial census had less than 100,000.
Another error occurs in the Doctor's address, which I was rather more surprised to see, because it related to a matter more at home, and as to which I should have supposed that every old settler in the county would have known the correct state of affairs. Speaking of the first period of seven years from the commencement of the settlement of the county, he says: "Within this period, two towns only were organized in Lenawee county, under the names of Tecumseh and Logan." Now under the same territorial enactment, which provided for the organization of those two towns, the organiza- tion of the township of Blissfield was authorized, and as will be seen by the historical sketch of that town, prepared by James T. Kedzie, and read by him at the semi-centennial gathering at the old Bliss homestead, some two years ago, and which is being published among the papers of your society, the township of Blissfield was organized in May, 1827, at the same time as the other two town meetings were to be held, Mr. Harvey Bliss, at whose house the town meeting was held, and twelve other voters, officiating as the political fathers of the township, all of whose names are given by Mr. Kedzie.
In the same address the Doctor spoke of Thomas Goodrich, of the Newburg portion of the old town of Tecumseh, as having been elected Justice of the Peace by his own vote. This must have been told of him as a joke, if he held such a commission. There were no "elections " of justices of the peace in the Territory of Michigan ; all such offices were under the Ordinance of 1787, and acts of Congress, in reference to the Territory, appointed by the Governor, As late as
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OF LENAWEE COUNTY, MICHIGAN.
February, 1825, Congress, in passing an act providing for the election of certain township and county officers by the voters of the Territory, expressly inserted a proviso that the electors should not be authorized to elect any judge, or clerk, or sheriff, or justice of the peace.
The first time that justices were elected by the people in Michigan, was in April, 1836, in pursuance of an act of the State Legislature, approved March 14, of that year, which provided for the election of four justices in each township, and their classification for one, two, three and four years, respectively.
Such mistakes as those above noted, having occurred in elaborately prepared addresses, and many others of a like or worse kind which I have heard made in casual conversations, led me to the conclusion that in a sketch of the early history of the county, the best way, and the most reliable, would be to have recourse, as far as practicable, to the published laws and official documents of the time. And I have accordingly done so, more especially as respects the territorial legislation.
As I have been led to turn critic or reviewer of other addresses, as well as sketch writer of one of my own, I beg leave to allude to another slip, to which my attention was called by General Brown. In Mr. Millard's centennial address, in speaking of the split granite rock, or boulder, out of which the mill-stones for the first grist mill at Tecumseh were made, he says: " The smaller fragment serving as the upper stone, and the larger as the lower," whereas the fact was just the reverse, the larger piece being used for the upper stone, as any practical mill-wright would have told him that it should be. As to the splitting of the rock, the General thinks that it was not caused by the weight of the tree in falling, but by fire, the tree having been found burned off over the top of the boulder.
Whilst noting some slips in prior addresses as published in regard to the early settlement of the county, I thought that it might be well to notice some which occur in the "Historical Atlas of Lenawee County," a work got up three or four years ago by a Philadelphia firm, and purporting to be published in Chicago. The same error substantially, heretofore noted, as occurring in Dr. Patterson's address, takes place in this "Atlas,"-speaking about the first organization of Lenawee county, and its being detached from Monroe county, it is stated that the county was divided into two towns, Tecumseh and Logan,-whereas the fact was that the township of Blissfield was organized at the same time as the other two towns. Another error occurs in the "Atlas," where it states that the county seat was removed to Adrian in 1835 ; the act for the purpose was not passed until March 1836 ; and the removal not to take place until November, 1838. In another paragraph the "Atlas" says that "In 1828 the first school house in the county was built, in Adrian." From the best information that I can obtain in reference to this matter the fact is, that the first school house in the county was a private one, built by Messrs. Evans & Brown, in 1825, mainly for the accommodation of their own
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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD
children-there being five in each family. The school was taught by Mrs. George Spafford, then living with the two families in the original log house. The school-house, twelve feet square, was built of tamarack logs, and was afterwards used by Evans & Brown as an office. In the fall of 1825, a frame public school-house was built on a lot a little west of the old "Park Square," so called, in the original village plat of Tecumseh, where the new East Branch and Intermediate school is now located. In that frame school-house the first term of public school was taught in the winter of 1825-6, by George Taylor, and was the one in which Miss Blackmar was teaching prior to her marriage to Mr. Ezra F. Blood. Thus, besides the private school-house in Brownville, erected by Messrs. Evans and Brown, there was a regular public school in Tecumseh before the village of Adrian was even platted.
Many other errors occur in the historical part of the "Atlas," such as saying that Michigan was, admitted into the Union in 1836, -: whereas the act of Congress providing for her admission, as a State; was not passed until January, 1837. The farm of Mr. Blood they locate on section 24, instead of section 34. These and some other such mistakes may be the results, in part, of misprints. On the whole,: the Atlas may, perhaps, be considered about as correct as could be expected of a work got up as that was. Many of the lithographs of residences contained in the work may be what the owners contemplated that they should ultimately be, but can hardly be said to be correct representations of the buildings or grounds at the time of the publication of the work.
Besides the well known pioneer of the county, General Joseph W. Brown, who, notwithstanding his advanced age is still with us, we have also another of the veteran pioneers of 1824,-Ezra F. Blood,- who came in with Messrs. Evans and Brown and the first party of settlers in the spring of that year, and who almost immediately after arrival, took up the same quarter section of land, on which he then settled, and where he has continued to live ever since. He was born' in New Hampshire, October 28, 1797, and had moved to the State of New York in 1819, soon after he became of age. He came here in 1824, still a young unmarried man, and remained a bachelor for fully; five years after his arrival,-some of the other settlers who had families, in the meantime keeping house for him.
On the 12th of January, 1830, he was united in marriage to Miss Alzina Blackmar, who had come to Michigan with her father and his family the year previous, her father becoming then the first settler in that part of the township of Tecumseh, now embraced in the township of Cambridge. Miss Blackmar, then about nineteen years of age, had for six months previous to her marriage been engaged in teaching school in the village of Tecumseh. She was boarding at the residence. of General Brown, where the ceremony was performed by the Rev. Alanson Darwin, the first, settled minister in Tecumseh, Miss Betsey. Robertson (now the widow of the late Colonel William McNair)
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officiating as bridesmaid, and the late Dr. M. A. Patterson as grooms- man. The family of Mr. and Mrs. Blood has consisted of two: daughters and four sons. One of the daughters died in infancy ; the other is married and living in Mt. Morris, N. Y. The oldest son lives. on a farm adjoining the old homestead, and the youngest is still at. home with his parents. One son, William A., died in the army during the late civil war, and the other, Leroy C., is now in mercantile business in Lansing. Mr. Blood, in October last, celebrated the eightieth anniversary of his birthday, having invited to his home on the occasion, a few of the older settlers of Tecumseh and vicinity.
One of the first families to arrive as settlers in Tecumseh or vicinity after the Evans and Brown party of May, 1824, was that of Abner Spofford, consisting of himself and wife and seven children, who arrived in July, six weeks after the first pioneer party, and being the sixth family to settle in the county. Mrs. Pitman, however, one of the daughters, did not come to Michigan until the spring of 1825, when she came on with her husband, Daniel Pitman, who then settled down. here as the first regular merchant in the county, to keep a general stock of goods for the white settlers, as well as for the Indians, from whom he bought venison, turkeys, maple sugar and cranberries. The youngest member of the family, Miss Cynthia M. Spofford, was married May 16th, 1827, on the seventeenth anniversary of her' birthday, to Mr. Theodore Bissell, a young man from Livingston county, N. Y., who had come in with Horace Wolcott, in 1824, and: taken up some land in 1825, but returned for a short time to the State of New York, in that year, and came back in 1827, as a permanent: settler, and took up some more land adjoining Tecumseh, The ceremony was performed by Dr. C. N. Ormsby, as a Justice of the Peace,-there being then no settled clergyman in the territory nearer; than Monroe or Detroit; and this was supposed to be the first: marriage in the county, amongst the white settlers. Mr. and Mrs. Bissell, in about a year afterwards, went to western New York, settling at Lockport, from whence they came to Toledo, where Mr. B. embarked in business, remaining there some years, until they finally went to Texas, where Mr. B. died. Mrs. B., now Mrs. W. W. Tilton, returned several years ago to her first home in Michigan, to which: she had come with her parents when she was a young Miss of fourteen years of age. She and an elder sister are still living, and are both residents of Tecumseh, and have a brother who came in with them in 1824, now residing in Des Moines, Iowa.
Mr. W. W. Tilton was also himself, one of the early pioneers of the county, having come to the territory early in the second year of the first white settlement of the county. He and Curtis Page, both of them carpenters and joiners, came to Tecumseh as settlers in June, 1825, and were just of the class of men then most needed in the settlement. Soon after their arrival they were engaged in building a store for Mr. Pitman ; and early in the summer Mr. Tilton cut the first two small fields of wheat raised in Lenawee county. In the spring of
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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD
1826 he was engaged in the erection of a house for Mr. Evans on the north-east corner of Ottawa and Chicago streets, now the residence of P. R. Adams, Esq. Mr. Tilton was also one of the commissioners to lay out the ridge road, along the route of the natural ridge supposed to have been formerly the shore of Lake Erie, running from the north- east corner of the county, in the town of Macon, to what was called Leroy, at the crossing of the River Raisin, east of Adrian. It crossed the road from Monroe to Tecumseh at the point where the village of Ridgeway afterwards grew up. In 1828, Mr. Tilton settled on a farm in the town of Raisin, a little south of Tecumseh, where he lived until he retired from active business. He has resided, for a few years past, in this village, and retains, with remarkable distinctness, recollections of incidents and events connected with the first settlement of this part of the county.
I feel as though I ought not to conclude this hastily prepared and rambling sketch of the early days of the white settlement of Lenawee county, without some acknowledgment of the valuable services of F. A. Dewey as President of the County Pioneer Society, and of W. A. Whitney as Secretary, in getting together many important contributions towards the history of that period, not only at the regular annual meetings of the society, but by awakening an increased interest in the collection of materials for the future historians of the county or State, by holding, during the last year, a series of special meetings, where well prepared addresses were read, and many important incidents of local interest were brought out, and many of them afterwards published.
Having been present at most of these meetings, and having preserved copies of the several proceedings, as published, I found, upon being requested to prepare a paper for the State Pioneer Society, my embarrassment to consist, not in a lack of material, but in making any proper selection and arrangement of what could consistently be brought within the limits of such an address, and also in avoiding a repetition of what had already been embraced in papers previously furnished to your society.
The fifth and last of these special meetings held since the annual meeting at Adrian in March last, was held at Ridgeway, January 15, 1878, and was the most largely attended of any previously held. There were many present, not only from all parts of the township of Ridgeway, but from all adjoining towns in the county, including, from Tecumseh, the two old veterans, General J. W. Brown and Ezra F. Blood, of the first party of 1824. An invitation to a free public dinner had been extended to all comers, and ample and superabundant provision for that purpose had been made by the ladies and other residents of the village and vicinity. The audience room of the large Methodist church building, which will seat 700 or 800 people, was filled to overflowing, and many chairs had to be furnished along the side aisles, and in other parts of the room. The dinner tables in the basement, seating some two hundred or more, at a time, were reset
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OF LENAWEE COUNTY, MICHIGAN.
several times ; and when all wishing dinner were waited upon, enough for hundreds more was left. A very able and interesting paper on the first settlement of Ridgeway and vicinity was read by Justus Lowe, and many incidents of the period were afterwards related by some of the older settlers. Of those present about eighty joined the society, including an old lady of ninety-eight.
At all the previous special meetings visitors from a distance were either welcomed to a free public dinner, as at East Raisin, or invited to individual homes, as at Clinton and Hudson ; and in every instance the residents of the places where the meetings were held seemed pleased to extend their hospitalities to all the old settlers who came to attend the proceedings. But I must forbear further detail, in hopes that the president or secretary of the county society may now or on some future occasion, furnish some data on that subject.
Although I have already spun out my narrative to a somewhat greater length than I had anticipated, and longer perhaps than I ought to have done, notwithstanding my endeavors to avoid, as far as possible, all repetition of facts known to be in possession of the state society, or readily accessible to them, yet I hope to be pardoned for adding a few items of my own personal experience as a pioneer. When I left the borough of Wilkesbarre, in Wyoming valley, Pa., in the fall of 1831, to come to Michigan, my expectation rather was that I should go to the county of St. Joseph or of Cass, towards which the tide of emigration seemed then to be most strongly tending; but after my arrival at Detroit I was advised to look around in the vicinity of Tecumseh or Clinton, as the northern part of Lenawee county was then being rapidly settled. I accordingly took passage by stage only as far as Clinton ; but I had never before in my travels in Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or New York, seen such staging or such stage roads as we had until we came bear to Ypsilanti, which place it took us all day to reach. Next morning we found better roads and a comfortable post-coach, driven by Samuel Evans, a son of the postmaster and first settler of Tecumseh, and nephew of J. W. Brown, the principal mail contractor west of Detroit by way of the Chicago road. On arriving at Clinton, I found an embryo village of some ten or a dozen houses, or thereabouts, with two taverns, one of them a hewn log house and the other a two-story frame house, and one or two small stores, and a few small dwelling houses. There was then, and for some time afterwards, no post-office there-letters for settlers there and in the vicinity were returned from Tecumseh in care of H. N. Baldwin, who was afterwards appointed the first postmaster at Clinton.
On going west from Clinton to look at lands in the surveyed town next west and to see Thos. Nelson, jr., to whom I had a reference as one of the first five or six to take up lands and settle in that town, I found on the Chicago road about three miles west of Clinton, three men from Massachusetts, who had come on in June previous, and were beginning to clear up some land, to build houses, a blacksmith shop,
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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD
etc. Two of the three, Captain Ebenezer Davis and Job Graves, still live in their then locations. The other one, David Wells, afterwards bought out the lands of Thomas Nelson, and sold the same in 1835, to the late Deacon William Bradley, with some timbered land on an adjacent section, and moved to Illinois, where he died some two years ago. I then selected some lands east of Mr. Nelson's, on which, with some additions to it, I lived until I became connected with the M. S. railroad, and moved to the village of Tecumseh in 1853, where I have since resided.
All that I could do towards farming that fall was to clear off a few acres of the most open part of my land, which I engaged a Mr. Arnold, living near Tecumseh village, to break up for me-he being the only one. I heard of who followed the business of breaking up prairie land or openings for a living. This he did with a large, strong plow, drawn by five or six yoke of cattle. On the 30th of November, 1831, while he was at work for me, there came a cold snap with about four inches of snow, and he had to take his teams and plow home, as he could do no more breaking up until the ground settled next spring. When I went after him then, I found him breaking up on the Wright farm, north-west of the village of Tecumseh, where the hazel brush, in places, was so tall and thick that the boy driving the teams had to go on the off side of the cattle. They cut a strip about twenty inches or more in width and six to eight inches deep, turning the brush under and covering it just about as an ordinary plow would turn under cornstalks or weeds.
Some of the settlers who took up lands of the more sandy or easily tilled kind, got along by using smaller plows and less powerful teams ; but the thorough deep plowing on most of the openings was then considered the best. A Pennsylvania settler, John J. Schnall, who took up some land about a mile west of Clinton, in 1826, and was living there when I came to Michigan, had made out a breaking-up team by joining with a Mr. Allen, of Allen's prairie, in Hillsdale county, each of them putting in two or three yoke of cattle. Though living about forty miles or more apart, they were considered in those days as neighbors near enough to exchange such work with one another. Mr. Schnall soon after I came, sold out and moved farther west, whether because he was getting too crowded, or because of an innate propensity such as some frontiersmen seem to have, of constantly moving on, I did not learn.
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