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ATTENTION: BAR CODE IS LOCATED INSIDE OF BOOK
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02410 3274
Gc 977. 101 C82b v. 1 Bahmer, William Centennial history of Coshocton County, Ohio
Mr. Bahmen
CENTENNIAL HISTORY
OF
Coshocton County, Ohio
BY WILLIAM J. BAHMER
Illustrated
V.I
Vol. I
CHICAGO THE S. J. CLARKE PUBLISHING CO.
1909
Allen County Public Library 900 Webster Street PO Box 2270 Fort Wayne, IN 46801-2270
COSHOCTON 1480935
Life by life, and race by race, You pass through ages strange; Breath by breath, and death by death, You run the links of change. Your tribes have come, your tribes have gone, And those today will go; What Time may bring, as cycles swing, No man of us can know.
Your years are old, your work is old, Since Man first named you Home; His trail is o'er your glacial shore, And where the Mammoth roamed. He has left his bones in your icc-drift stones, And Mounds of ancient earth; While forests reared, and forests scared, Before the Red Man's birth.
He lived by blood, and right of might, And flaked his flint to slay; Through moonlit waste he howled his hate, And danced to crimson fray. Then shadows broke, new life awoke- Coshocton, Hearth of Men! Our Home and Sun, till we are done- O Lord of hosts, what then?
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FOREWORD
In apportioning the pages of Coshocton County history it has been necessary to keep ever in view a vital Present as well as a vivid Past; to dwell not unduly on the Old, and to treat justly of the New; to sketch the antiquity that was Moundbuilder and the barbarity that was Indian into the civilization which is Coshocton.
There are many books affording means for scientific study of this region and its antiquity. A heap of biology, paleontology, anthro- pology, archæology, geology, ethnology and other ologies could be piled higher than our mounds. Should this rough penciling take the reader to the library that will be better than bringing the library into these pages.
The county's most impressive development is in the last fifty years, particularly the last quarter century. For valuable informa- tion grateful acknowledgment is due the press and the citizens who have so fully contributed to the record. In touching upon the social, industrial, economic and political features the cardinal purpose has been to speak true, to judge tolerantly, and above all to keep in mind that wealth is no corollary of worth and success no evidence of character.
W. J. BAHMER.
Coshocton, February I, 1909.
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COSHOCTON COUNTY HISTORY
CHAPTER I.
RECENT ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES RELATING TO THE ANTIQUITY OF HUMAN LIFE IN THIS REGION.
The beginning of everything is the object of a deal of investiga- tion all over the world. Whole libraries are filled with opinions of many scholars in as many different languages giving as many vary- ing notions regarding the antiquity of human life. In such a discus- sion our particular spot on the earth cannot very well be overlooked. Much as we may be interested in the pioneer life and the modern Coshocton County there is something in the mystery of the ages that holds us in awe before these hills and valleys where a wonderful pro- cession of mankind issued from Cimmerian night and vanished into pathetic and fathomless silence.
As everyone knows from the pages of geology, there was once upon a time whirling through space a ball of fire whose surface in course of ages gradually crusted, cooling the air until moisture formed and the first rain washed our young world. The waters tore their way through. Explosions and earthquakes shook the new earth in frightful convulsion, while the wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of heaven's artillery swept across inky skies. Upheavals of rock clung into continents. Receding waters became seas. And to this. sublime dawn of the earth's creation the geologist has given a name- the Eozoic age-a million years ago, what matter if more or less, a time that no man knows.
The world turned on in the wheel of time and passed through its Palaeozoic age, when life appeared in a tadpole stage, and if you believe in evolution (which you can if you want to) we were those self-same tadpoles along this one-time seashore where
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip.
For it is written in geology that the sea covered what is now Coshocton County long enough to form the stratifications, including the shale with its fossil remains of the fish age, and eons later the coal and limestone imprinted with the plant tracery of the carbo- niferous age. Then the hot lands heaved amain and in Langdon Smith's lines on the Darwinian theory
We were Amphibians, scaled and tailed, And drab as a dead man's hand;
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees, Or trailed through the mud and sand, Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet, Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come.
In time came the Mammoth. Remains of huge elephants and mastodons have been found in peat marshes of these valleys, accord- ing to C. H. Mitchener, of the New Philadelphia bar, thirty-three years ago in his history of our Coshocton valleys, a rare work even in this day.
As the eons came and the eons went more snow accumulated in the North than summer suns could melt. Then formed that vast mass of slowly moving ice which geologists have decided pressed down from the north pole toward this latitude, similar to the present ice-covered waste of Northern Greenland. In Europe the ancient glacial covering spread over Britain and the Scandinavian peninsula, Western Russia, Northern Germany and the whole valley of Switzer- land, and in America as far south as our region and thence south- westerly in a direction of some variableness.
The signs of this ice sheet are traced in glacial scratches on stones. The geologist reasons that the grinding ice leveled the land, and that boulders, drift and rocks carried from the North in the ice- sheet's freezing embrace were left here when the ice finally melted. There are some, however, who reject the ice evidence that persuades others, and who hold that a flood instead produced all the phenomena.
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
Coshocton County valleys are lined with gravel terraces, the drift deposit laid down by the swollen streams of the melting glacial years. Much of the city of Coshocton is built upon a glacial terrace. Granitic pebbles from Northern Canada are massed here with local pebbles. Verily, "sermons in stones," and cyclopedias in pebbles.
H. J. Lewis, of Pittsburg, and one-time president of the Society of Engineers of Western Pennsylvania, has an interesting theory regarding the gravel terrace or bench that lines the Tuscarawas val- ley. He has traced its entire length, and from pebbles found in it near his home town of West Lafayette he is convinced that the waters of the St. Lawrence River once followed this course. These pebbles, he avers, are seen nowhere else except along the shores of the St. Lawrence. According to Professor George Frederick Wright, of Oberlin, among America's eminent archæologists, there were no Niagara Falls and no Lake Erie before the glacial period, while north- ern rivers found new beds with the retreat of the ice.
It is in such gravel terraces as ours that archaeologists are searching today for evidence that man inhabited the earth during the glacial period ten thousand years ago or more, according to various estimates. The attention of the scientific world was drawn to the first discovery of human implements in the gravel terraces near Ab- beville, in Northern France, seventy years ago. Later, more imple- ments of a similar type were found in England. In recent years a most important archæological discovery made in America was the finding of paleolithic implements by Dr. C. C. Abbott at a depth of five to twenty feet in the gravel bluff overlooking the Delaware River at Trenton.
These hatchet-like implements and fish-spears are accepted as paleolithic because found in undisturbed deposits of the glacial age. They are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Indians fashioned similar objects of flint, but Dr. Abbott, who is well known as an investigator of Indian antiquities, describes the paleolithic implements as of argillite or slate, resembling closely what European archaeologists call stone axes of the Chellean type.
More recent discoveries of these paleolithic implements have been made in the gravel terraces at Madisonville and Loveland, show- ing that glacial man was in Ohio. Wherefore Professor Wright en- joins that wherever excavations are being made in these glacial
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
drifts someone should be on the lookout for paleoliths, the discovery of which would interest scientists the world over. Nor should the observer be too easily discouraged, says the professor, because hunt- ing a chipped stone in a great bank of pebbles and gravel is like look- ing for a needle in a haystack. The writer cheerfully attests to the difficulty after personally satisfying himself by a feverish scramble along the walls of Coshocton's gravel pit, with clawing hands and an archæological stare.
Having evidence that man existed as early as the glacial age, what manner of being was he? Dr. Abbott argues he was the an- cestor of the Eskimo, driven northward by the invading Indian, but the paleolithic man's implements no more resemble those of the Es- kimo than those of people in the later stone age. Some yet consider glacial man of the same blood as the ancient cave-dwellers of France.
If we accept the view of Henry W. Haynes of the Archaeological Institute of America, as set forth in the Narrative and Critical History of America, whatever primitive people may have occupied this region they were at least no mysterious, superior race, and they did not even reach a stage of culture that could properly be called civilization.
This may restrain any ardent local archaeologist from assert- ing this to be the seat of the vanished empire of Atlantis, though several writers have declared their belief it was somewhere in Am- erica as an offset to learned commentators who have variously and wildly supported the claims of Sweden, Africa, Spitzbergen, and Palestine.
At any rate it is an interesting tale of Plato's, whether or not we endorse the conservative opinion of Longinus as expressed to his pupils in Alexandria that Plato designed the tradition merely as a literary ornament. As Plato's story runs, when Solon was in Egypt an aged priest said to him, "Solon, you Greeks are all children. You know of but one deluge, whereas there have been many destructions of mankind, both by flood and fire; in Egypt alone is ancient history recorded." And the dialogue goes on to describe the island of At- lantis somewhere off the Spanish coast where a mighty power held sway about as many thousand years ago as when glacial man hunted the mammoth in Coshocton valleys. This power pressed hard upon other nations of the known world to subjugate them all. "Then came
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
a day and night of great floods and earthquakes; Atlantis disap- peared, swallowed by the waves."
So much for the visions of poets and the theories of philosophers in their ancient guessing at the possibility of such a land, as some today imagine an antarctic continent or an open polar sea. Enough that archaeologists generally have settled it in books if not by the spade that glacial man perished before a foreign invasion from Asia or the Pacific islands. How far this theory of an Oriental invasion has gone and to what extent it has fostered the belief that from such early Asiatics were descended the tribes which for ages dwelt in Co- shocton County, we will now look into, even if we don't sanction.
YESTERDAY'S MOUNDBUILDER-TODAY'S MOTORIST: THE MEETING OF THE CENTURIES IN COSHOCTON LIFE.
CHAPTER II
NEW DISCOVERIES TOUCHING THE MOUNDBUILDERS, THE VANISHED RACE VIEW, THE INDIAN THEORY, THE INCA, TOLTEC, ASIATIC, EGYP- TIAN, IRISH, WELSH AND "LOST TRIBE" SPECU- LATIONS.
Like a God-created, fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the inane, haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again into the inane. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last rear of the host will read traces of the earliest van. But whence? O heaven, whither? Sense knows not. faith knows not, only that it is through mystery to mystery, from God to God. -Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."
All the wisdom of the Orient, of Egypt, of Greece and Rome tells us naught of our land or its people in those dim and shadowy ages when the Chinese, Chaldeans, Egyptians and Persians com- prised the known population of the world. The secret of those thou- sands of years is locked in the breast of Nature. Forest after forest has come and gone, rivers have left their ancient shores, plains have come and bottom lands. Against the blue dusk of summer skies and the gray cold of winter clouds, the eyes of Unknown Man lifted to the same old rolling line of hills, those heights eternal, dumb watches of fathomless time looking down on human ages in storm- ful passage to oblivion.
The vast rivers of melting ice spreading from hillside to hillside in glacial man's day slowly receded in course of ages to their present beds, leaving exposed broad plains and valleys for the use of that Other Man who has baffled our understanding. In his earthworks and stoneworks lies hidden the mystery of ages. What story of human activity, of weird ceremonies, perhaps sacrificial terrors, may belong to these mute symbols of a voiceless past. Weed-grown and brush-covered, some today are but faintly traced in brier-tangled field and wood, while the plow has worn down others until there is left only a dim outline where not many years ago there circled in bold relief a breast-high wall of earth.
From the variety and extent of these earthworks within our county's borders, ranging from circles and huge enclosures to mounds large and small, and from the vast labor necessarily involved, whether
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
the earth was carried in baskets or otherwise, we have sufficient evi- dence that this was a populous center of that ancient race engaging the attention of the archaeological world. Whether or not it was a mighty power that held sway in the primeval forest, a people skilled in arts of peace as well as war, we can only conjecture from the inscrutable character of the ruins that mark the passing of this lost race.
For most of us the vanished race view is still the more plausible despite the weight of testimony adduced by archaeological authority in support of the Indian theory of our Moundbuilders' origin. All local knowledge which has come down to us regarding the red men who existed here absolves them readily from the suspicion of undertak- ing anything so nearly approaching real work as the building of these mounds. Whatever else may be charged to our noble red men during their residence in this region, we hesitate about accusing them of overcoming their haughty disdain for labor to the extent of digging up tons and tons of earth and heaping it into walls and mounds. The Coshocton Indian's popular idea of a wall was a tepee skin or bark of a tree, and for a fortification it was far less troublesome and vastly more to his liking to simply dodge behind a rock.
Of course, any discussion of the Moundbuilder problem is ex- pected to be characterized by reserve. We can only approach the sub- ject by cautiously venturing to inquire without presuming to decide, especially where eminent authorities in the scientific world have so hopelessly disagreed. There are those, we are told, who have written much but added little to real knowledge of the subject; more who have only borrowed from others; some who have made sober observa- tions ; some far from sober ; and some who have compiled descriptions with worthless comment.
In this region, doubly important among American localities as a prehistoric and historic center, the student has the advantage of personal contact with such evidence as remains. To that extent at least what views are formed may deal with facts, not surmise.
Special attention is drawn to the extensive earthwork on a pre- cipitous ridge of the Winfield Miller estate along the Walhonding near Coshocton. A circle swings around the whole summit of the hill. Through the fringe of woods the view sweeps the valley of the Walhonding. Down the steep hillside is a drop of two hundred feet
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IHISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
to the road. There are only a few of these high hilltop enclosures reported in Ohio.
W. K. Moorehead, curator of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, reporting a visit to the circle on this hill a dozen years ago, described it as "some two acres in extent, the embankment low and broad; where preserved by woods it appears to have origin- ally been five feet high."
Continuing the description of the circle the report refers to "a long passage way from the valley leading up to it, and in this respect the place is peculiar. The passage is some fifteen feet wide on the average and walled on either side by natural ledges. We think the enclosure merits future investigation."
Subsequent examination of the road or passage way from the valley leading up to the earthwork convinced local investigators that this rock-walled path is a split in the huge boulders, the split widen- ing to several feet with the slipping of the detached rock from the bulk imbedded in the hillside.
The State survey mentions the hilltop circle as a fortification, and the statement is made that "many citizens of Coshocton claim it to be a French fort, but we would call it decidedly Indian in form." What local supposition may have existed ascribing this earthwork to Frenchmen it is difficult to discern. Certain it is that history is silent regarding the erection of any French fortification in this locality. There has been discussion relating to the Miller hill as the site of Colonel Bouquet's camp when the Indian treaty was made, though the most recent investigation attaches the older and much greater importance to the hilltop circle as the work of more ancient hands than British soldiers. On the spot chosen for their camp the troops threw up four redoubts, according to Colonel Bouquet's own account of it, and between such angular embankments and the circle on the Miller hill there can be no analogy.
On the plowed ground within the circle are many flint chips, while local arrowhead collections include numerous specimens from this hilltop. The presence of Indian relics is a matter of course in a region so long occupied by the red men, but that the hand which drew yesterday's arrow is related to the earthwork any more than the hand on today's plow is not viewed as probable in the light of local evidence.
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
The earliest accounts speak of our mounds being regarded even in the Indian's day as structures of remote antiquity. The mission- ary, Zeisberger, noted a hundred and thirty-three years ago the nu- merous signs of an ancient race here. He referred particularly to the cemetery containing thousands of graves near the mound three miles south of Coshocton.
The skeletons, reduced to chalky ashes, were three feet to four and a half feet long, smaller than Indian or mound skeletons. These pygmies have led to much conjecture. Thus far no definite conclu- sion is recorded in any of the notices of this ancient city of the dead. The bibliography of Ohio earthworks, prepared for the Smithsonian Institution, includes the notice in Howe's Historical Collections, quoted from Dr. Hildreth's description in Silliman's Journal, 1835. This also mentions an ancient cemetery of pygmies near St. Louis. There the skeletons were found in stone sepulchres, while those here seemed to have been in wooden coffins. A discovery of pygmy graves on the Keene-Bethlehem township line is credited to J. C. Milligan.
Hildreth relates that in one of the Coshocton graves was found a skeleton five and a half feet long, with decayed pieces of oak and iron nails. The skull was triangular in shape, much flattened at the sides and back, though not with the slant-brow of flat-head Indians seen in the West. A hole pierced the back of the skull. The bones were displaced, the skull being found with the pelvis, from which it is in- ferred that the body was dismembered before burial. In the St. Louis cemetery was found among the pygmies one skeleton of rather large development though not taller than the rest. The legs were cut off at the knees and placed alongside the thigh bones.
Mitchener tells of the Nanticoke Indians in Maryland drying the bones of their dead and carrying them in wrappings from place to place as generation after generation sought new hunting grounds, and that eventually these ancestral bones found a final resting place in the valley at Coshocton when the last of the tribe became too weak- ened by war to move farther. This tradition is credited to a Nanti- coke convert who was with Zeisberger, but it meets with that skepti- cism which has observed the uncertainty of Indian memory and how commonly Indian traditions die out, as for instance those southern tribes who retained no recollection whatever of De Soto's expedi- tion. In this connection also we are reminded of the Coshocton In-
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
dian tradition related to John Heckewelder, the other Moravian mis- sionary here with Zeisberger. The Delawares, accounting for the ancient earthworks in this region, professed to him that their ances- tors once occupied the country, but as Justin Winsor, librarian of Harvard University, said, it has been suspected that the worthy mis- sionary was imposed upon.
The long rows of graves of the pygmy race at Coshocton were regularly arranged with heads to the west, a circumstance which has given rise to the theory that these people were sun-worshippers, facing the daily approach of the sun god over the eastern hills. In this re- spect, however, there is no resemblance to the various positions of skeletons found in our mounds. Acceptance of the sun-worship sur- mise does not necessarily imply a deduction that this pygmy race may have descended from the river-people of Hindostan or Egypt. Prim- eval man, wherever found, seems to have been a sun-worshiper.
The iron nails mentioned by Hildreth as found in this ancient cemetery take on added interest in view of the discovery in a mound near Cincinnati, reported by Frederick W. Putnam, curator of the Peabody Museum. Masses of meteoric iron were found on an altar, with bars of iron and other objects made from the metal.
A statement appears in Graham's History of Coshocton County that a Moravian minister from Pennsylvania visited the ancient cem- etery here and remarked a custom among Moravians of burying the old in separate rows from the young. While this would explain the uniform smallness of some Moravian graves, it does not explain the absence from the missionaries' records of any considerable mortality among the younger or even for that matter the elder members of the Moravian mission. Moreover, the mission in this valley comprised but eight families, and they dwelt here only a few years. And finally. the Moravians themselves first spoke of the discovery here of the many pygmy graves.
The plow has long since turned these acres of mystery into corn- fields, and obliterated this last vestige of a human population that once flourished within our borders. According to the view form- ulated from the missionary observations, unfortunately not accom- panied by details covering excavations, this primitive people under- stood the use of the stone ax, the making of pottery, and the division of land areas into squares. Nothing has been found to show whether
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
it was their labor or that of others that erected the chain of earth- works within our county. The thousands of graves point only to the conclusion that the country around was the seat of a large popula- tion. The activities of that strange race which peopled the wilder- ness, the story of elemental life in the shadows of the forest and along the shores of the rivers, until the end in that valley of eternal rest, remains untold.
Near the ancient cemetery is a small mound less than a quarter of a mile from the large one, on the Porteus farm. At one time this sand heap was eight feet high, with a base of thirty-five feet. A few years ago it was less than five feet in height, and the base had spread to fifty feet. The excavation by the State archaeologists in 1896 re- vealed seven skeletons of modern size and lying in various directions. Several arrowheads, many flint chips, and three bear teeth were found. It is recorded that Indians sometimes buried their dead in the monuments of their mysterious predecessors whom they held appar- ently in awe and reverence. The presence of flaked flints in mounds has also furnished the theory that the Moundbuilder knew the use of the arrowhead, and that the Indian learned it from him.
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