USA > Ohio > Coshocton County > Centennial history of Coshocton County, Ohio, Vol. I > Part 6
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REASON BAKER
FRANCIS SMITH
RICHARD HAWK
W. R. CLARK
ISAAC SHAMBAUGH
BASIL BAKER
JAMES OGLESBY
SAMUEL BANKS
ELIJAH NEWCOMB
ELI O. H. SHYHOCK
PETER RAMBO
JAMES WILEY
ABRAHAM MARLATT
ROBERT CORBIT
JAMES BUTLER
JAMES BIGGS
JOSEPH SEVERNS
JOHN G. PIGMAN
SAMUEL REA
ANDREW WILSON
LAKEN WELLS
JAMES LAURIE
WILLIAM HUDSON
ROBERT PLATT
ROBERT HARBISON, SR.
JAMES McCUNE
At the outset a Coshocton County company had joined General Hull's forces that marched to defeat on the Maumee. Following Hull's surrender there to the British the Coshocton company was permitted to come home on parole.
A company that Isaac Evans organized had reported to General Harrison, and worked on the construction of Fort Meigs on the Maumee. There in 1813 the Americans were attacked by the British and Indians, and the result added one more victory to the chain of victories on land and water which finally vanquished the British. The Coshocton company at Fort Meigs had seen six months' service when it came home. Colonel Williams' command returned from Mansfield after serving a month. Again the ax of the pioneer rang through the forest.
In 1814 Colonel Williams was sent to the State Legislature from this county. To quote his original orthography: "I was elected to lagater and my elexon was countested and sent hom cam hom and was sent back."
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IHISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
There were about three hundred voters, and most of them ever ready to argue politics. Colonel Williams fervently led the partisans of Jefferson and stoutly upheld the simplicity of the sage of Mon- ticello who preferred pantaloons to knee breeches, hated even the title of Mister, and was opposed to taxing whisky. The declining Fed- eralist party, with its national leaders that stood aloof and made no attempt to gain the people's confidence, had its followers in Coshocton County who were of the elements that subsequently formed the Whig party. These congregated at a tavern conducted by the quietly per- suasive Wilson McGowan in Second Street, now the Farmers' Hotel. Here the talk was directed against the incipient doctrine of "State sovereignty," the thing which had been growing ever since men wanted each State to take care of its own war debt instead of being called upon to help pay other States. The company in McGowan's tavern listened approvingly to the argument that the colonies had not fought each for its own independence, but each for the independence of all, and that the sovereignty acquired in that struggle was a na- tional sovereignty raised by the common fight for liberty.
Colonel Williams, well aware of his limitations in statecraft and speechmaking, maintained his political prestige by giving picnics and dances, a practice which has its modern counterpart in Tammany Hall clambakes and free outings provided by metropolitan politicians. The colonel by this time rejoiced in the affectionate designation of "Old" Charley Williams, the usual mark of social esteem.
At times there were political discussions in which the argument of the fist altered some face if it didn't change any opinion. Although dueling was never in fashion here there were numerous fistic meetings by agreement to settle differences, or prove who was the "best" man by beating the other fellow to a palpitating pulp.
Election day, 1816, was stained with murder. John Markley was stabbed to death in Coshocton by George Arnold, who escaped.
After the war of 1812 the steady growth, which ever since has been a distinguishing feature of Coshocton, advanced the riverside hamlet to a fair-sized village. Abraham Wisecarver, hatter, was there. John Crowley, carpenter, came in 1815; for a while he ferried, and eight years later was elected sheriff. John Darnes, carpenter, and Richard Stafford, wagon-maker and later justice of the peace, arrived from Virginia. Albert Torry, blacksmith, came from Maine. James
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
Renfrew, Sr., started a new store here. Samuel Burns, hatter and justice of the peace, came from Philadelphia, 1816. More newcomers included Otho and Daniel Cresap, Hezekiah Robinson, William Car- hart, John McCullough, Sanford Madden, John Forrest, John Smeltzer, and members of the houses of Boyd, Gault, Thompson, Squires, Roderick, Slaughter, Neldon, Borden, Luke, Heslip, Powel- son, Ravenscraft, Winklepleck, McNabb, Lemert, Mulford -
But why extend the list when the pioneer story of our county is the story of all who came in the earliest decades of its first century ; and these are listed elsewhere as the honored grandsires in whose names their descendants today find ancestral pride-the colonists who blazed the path for civilization through this wilderness.
Coshocton was yet the only town in the county, but in its early stage there was much the same color which after villages took on. There was Benjamin Ricketts' store in Second Street, nearly a hun- dred years ago, and the store of Robert Hay and James Renfrew, with the atmosphere of tobacco, groceries, powder, lead, crockery, scythes, china, tinware, chains, bridles, whips, hats, flints, knives. cambric, bombazet and iron. The goods came by boat from Pittsburg down the Ohio and up the Muskingum to Coshocton.
Daybook and ledger accounts of Benjamin Ricketts have been preserved and are in the possession of W. S. Hutchinson, whose wife is a granddaughter of Coshocton's early storekeeper. From the books comes a story of prices. The farmer's wife bringing eggs to the store got eight cents a dozen, and for her butter twelve and a half cents a pound. She paid for coffee fifty cents a pound, sugar twelve and a half cents, calico fifty cents a yard, a paper of pins twenty-five cents. Tea cost two dollars a pound.
Wheat in 1818 sold at seventy-five cents a bushel in this county, dropped to fifty cents in the next few years, and in 1823 fell as low as thirty cents. At the same time corn went from thirty-three cents down to twenty. Oats was thirty-three a bushel.
Whisky cost thirty-seven cents a gallon. One hundred cigars, thirty-seven and a half cents-the book calls them cigars. What local- tanned leather could do toward cheapening footwear is shown in the price of shoes, ranging from a dollar and a quarter to two dollars thirty-seven and a half cents a pair.
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
Accounts were settled frequently in grain, maple sugar and live- stock. Occasionally there was an entry of ferriage for wagon, twenty- five cents-not an inconsiderable item of expense which stared the shopper in the face every time he would cross the river to trade within our gates.
There is an entry of "a half-gallon of whisky when fishing," which indicates that a fisherman in those days went into action with what Grover Cleveland has since called a properly stimulated mental equipment.
A farmer on the Tuscarawas-"up the Skarwas," as some styled it-came to town on a December day in 1821 with a drove of eleven hogs for which he got $3.75 a head.
Mail came by horseback. A letter from Philadelphia was twenty- five days on the road; postage, twenty-five cents.
While riding through the woods on the road to Coshocton the postboy, William Cartwell, was shot, and the mailbag rifled. Farmer Johnson happened near and caught a glimpse of the murderer. When Johnson reported the crime at New Philadelphia, the law held the witness until three hundred men had been summoned and lined up in the street. Johnson looked searchingly into the faces. Suddenly he pointed an accusing finger at John Funston, with "That's the man!" Funston, white to the lips, retorted "You're a liar !" but he was jailed, and afterward he confessed. In the close of 1825, four months after the murder, people from Coshocton County joined a throng of thousands in Tuscarawas that saw the murderer swing from the gallows.
Wild beasts were killing so many sheep, hogs and calves that the State put a premium of $2.40 on every wolf scalp, and $1.50 on panther and wildcat scalps, which resulted in some lessening of the forest terrors.
Travel in the north was saved the dangerous fording of the Killbuck by Adam Johnston building a toll-bridge in 1818. A toll- bridge was thrown across Wills Creek by Thomas Johnston, asso- ciated with others.
There was scheming to draw new county boundary lines. A county seat was elaborately laid out on paper by Jonathan Clark in the southwestern corner of Coshocton County. Clarksville had two lots for a courthouse, one for a stone market house, two for an
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
academy, and ninety-five private lots-all on paper. Wide avenues rejoiced in such names as Main, Pearl, Walnut, Market, Cedar and Broad.
Another lost town was Millsville, mapped out by John Mills on the banks of the Tuscarawas "at the great bend" near the present Orange. It also had its public square and Main and Walnut streets- on paper.
While the county still included part of Holmes, there was agita- tion to locate the capital where Keene now is because it was more central. The separation of the Holmes portion from the county ended courthouse expectations at Keene.
Those who know the average American farm of today may have some faint conception of the pioneer life and its struggles to clear the way through the wilderness here, to cut down forests, to "grub" over hills of tangled brush, and to heave out great heaps of rocks. Pioneers worked hard-too hard. Theirs was the hardship and privation of the farm, theirs the years of struggle, toiling from sunrise to sunset. Dreary enough had been the trip into the forest, but drearier and more appalling still was the prospect which faced the pioneer's family upon reaching the lone spot in the wilderness that was to be their home. The nearest neighbor was miles away. The dismal silence of night was broken only by the hoot of an owl or the howl of a wolf.
Theirs was the courage, the strength, the faith and the will that filled hearts in the making of the country. While they were not readers of Shakespeare, they had the soul to appreciate the beautiful in nature, hanging finer landscapes before their eyes than any paint- ings on palace walls, but they were also conscious of other things than poetry. This was usually at such God-forsaken season when the heel of winter stuck in muddy hills and bottoms, and spring was nowhere except in the green-covered almanac hanging on the wall.
There was no poetry in being routed out of a warm feather-bed before daylight on a raw, chilly morning to go out into the cold world and a colder kitchen. Many a winter morning the pioneer cracked the ice in the water bucket to fill the washpan and went outdoors to do his spluttering. It seemed warmer there with the faint dawn just streaking the darkness over the hills.
Not the least pinch in those pinching times was the kind of morn- ing when the frost was just out of the ground, and he reckoned while
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
grinding his face with the towel that he'd plow the clearing that day soon as they were through milking, though there was snow on the ground and he would walk in a cold, wet furrow and in a mighty hard row of stumps.
He could see his wife coaxing the flint spark to light the kindling, and then hover over the feebly burning flicker, the while she wrapped her cold hands in her apron, and pranced a queer little warming-up prance, and tried to smile while her teeth chattered.
There is a cherished picture of the pioneer's pretty daughter at her spinning wheel which we would a deal rather hang on memory's wall than the one painted here, but simple candor compels closer in- spection. Those candlestick, tallow-dip days appear decorative only when drawn by an artist. Grim reality saw them as part of a life that was a bare existence, deprived of reasonable comforts and con- veniences, and reduced to the elemental necessities of food and shelter. The wife and the daughter often worked in the field.
Nor did such days pass with the passing of the pioneer. They came to succeeding generations, and much of the hardness has never yet quite left the farm, even in the comforts of later times, bought with years of rigorous self-denial. Those who know farming know the farmer's story. Dreamers never can; they dream the dream of independence on the farm; they sing the song of statistical prosperity ; their pet theory is that all the farmer needs is the scientific wisdom handed down by the silk-hat agriculturists who compose crop reports.
Aye, give the farmer the scientific wisdom to harness the clouds and hold back floods; scientific wisdom to sprinkle gentle, growing showers in time of parching drought; scientific wisdom to compre- hend the joyous independence of those years when he has gotten less for his grain than it cost to raise. Not to digress too far, but talking with Thad Haight about book farming :
"Those fellows make me mad sometimes," the "Granger" said. "A paper farmer tells how to take care of hay when it's cut, saying not to leave it lay in the field but go around with a fork and turn it over and over to get it nice and dry and have a pretty crop of hay. He never thinks when a thundering big rain's coming a man's got to hurry in his hay almighty sudden. But every fellow thinks he knows how to make a farm pay. A fellow bangs out agricultural ideas on a
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
typewriter and makes more money selling them to the papers than I can carrying out his farm hints."
As our pioneers gradually chopped out a destiny in the forest, and figuratively as well as literally were able to come out of the woods, the log church was built. Besides the regular religious services there were camp meetings attended by the whole countryside.
Chalfant's meeting-house, built by the Methodists in Washington Township, 1811, is recorded as the oldest in the county. The Meth- odist church at West Bedford was organized several years later. Presbyterian ministers preached in Coshocton as early as 1812. The Elliotts and others in Millcreek Township, 1821, "deeply sensible of the importance and necessity of true religion, and earnestly desirous of promoting its influence," organized the congregation of St. Mark's parish in communion with the Protestant Episcopal church. Baptist preachers were heard in the county in its earliest years, and in 1825 a Baptist congregation met in homes and schoolhouses in Oxford and Lafayette townships. These were the forerunners of organized re- ligious work in the county. What grew from them and what crowned the labors of denominations that came afterward will be considered in a separate chapter.
After James Calder went to the wall in Coshocton he crossed the river to start a new town, 1816, and called it Caldersburg. Later it was named Roscoe, after an English author. There was a tavern, a long, rambling log structure, and mine host was William Barcus. Occasionally a traveling preacher would hold a meeting in the dining room of this roadhouse. The hymn, prayer and sermon heard here offered a new feature in tavern life by way of contrast to that at the other end of the ferry where "King Charley's" roadhouse reveled in dance, court and election.
With the capital acquired by making salt at three dollars a bushel James LeRetilley started a store in Roscoe in 1825 in partnership with William Wood and afterward George Bagnall. At this time a new era dawned in pioneer life-the building of the Ohio Canal.
The engineers brought the $5,000,000 waterway along the west shore of the Muskingum to reduce the expense. This was Coshocton's disadvantage and Roscoe's opportunity. Much of the enormous wheat crop from the cleared forest land that was shipped by canal was loaded
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
at Roscoe, and the town bounded to the front, one of the leading ship- ping points along the whole canal from Portsmouth to Cleveland.
It had been a brave undertaking to dig the waterway of com- merce through the wilderness and around towering hills. Those were the times when the country had no outlet for its produce except by few river floats and jolting, corkscrew mires called wagon roads. With the coming of the canal, wheat climbed to a dollar a bushel, and potatoes for the first time began to have a price-forty cents a bushel. There were farmers who had opposed giving right of way through the land-the usual opposition to progress ; but canal prosperity converted them.
Crops were finding markets and dollars. The peopling of the wilderness began in earnest. The canal was making Ohio famous. The country was awakened to new commercial importance, and Roscoe was a booming center.
The town stirred with shipping life and scenes. There were the fleets of freighters that moved commerce between the Ohio River and Lake Erie. There was the passenger packet, the sight of which in- volved uneasy speculations concerning the disposal of passengers in the fiddle-case cabin. There was the confusion of the towpath, the tangle of long ropes, the teams-and their drivers, puffy-faced with mule talk, picturesque profanity, how-de-do and whistling the balance. Here, too, the barefoot Garfield drove the towpath mule, the canal-boy stage of that historic life which ended in the White House.
Roscoe doors opened as near to the water's edge as they could, in hospitable welcome to canal travelers. A center of grain traffic was LeRetilley's big warehouse towering above the canal boats. At night the tavern lights beamed cheerfully upon the scene.
"The Renfrew," one of the first boats on the canal, was built in the Roscoe yard. There were half a dozen stores, several mills, and the famous distillery begun by William Renfrew and Robert Hay and continued by Love & Hay; this was lost by fire and afterward established in Coshocton where its product attained such reputation that forty thousand gallons once went in a single shipment to California.
The water power of the rivers harnessed at Roscoe turned the wheels of her mills. Altogether the outlook for a flourishing town seemed propitious. Early investors in Roscoe's real estate future
THE WALHONDING-OLD HUNTING GROUNDS OF THE INDIAN CHIEF, CAPTAIN PIPE.
٠٠
一生 一
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
were Leander Ransom, engineer on the canal construction, and Noah H. Swayne, then practicing law in Coshocton and afterward justice in the supreme court of the United States.
The Walhonding Canal, feeding the main waterway at Roscoe with enormous wheat shipments from the Walhonding valley and adjacent territory, was building a busy town in Tiverton Township- Rochester. The roads leading to the canal terminal were covered for miles with wagons bringing wheat from as far as Mt. Vernon. But with the passing of canal transportation Rochester vanished-and to- day has risen again in Cavallo on the Mohican.
Looking back upon the picture of our county in the canal era the landscape for the most part was just emerging from forest solitude with signs of civilization. At lengthened intervals the log cabin, with its space of cleared land about it, sending its thread of blue smoke curling up into the sky ; stumps everywhere : sometimes the felled trees lying yet upon the soil; saw mills and corn-crackers along the creeks, with little whisky mills grinding corn ; and pigs in all directions.
Townships had then begun their story of early settlers, and sev- eral towns had their first doctors, teachers, preachers, storekeepers, blacksmiths, wagonmakers, shoemakers, postmasters-a marvelous transformation from the wilderness which "Old Charley" Williams could remember. He lived to see the canal era and the dawn of "the roaring forties."
"As I remember." he commented, and the spelling is his, "wee was the hapest pepel in the world ontill our countery was fild with spahlen davels-thay get between the pepel-then it was a grat thout to get every man what hee could-oppose one another-geten werse- tha plarsh thar fais with religen now makes them werse." He died in 1840 and was laid beside his wife, the first grave to the left as you enter Oak Ridge Cemetery.
In the picture of those days was the mail coach with puffy sides of shining red, rolling joyfully past corn fields and fields of wheat and stumps, past rail fences and through woods, stopping to water at the sign of "The Blue Ball" or "The Black Horse," and rattling gaily into town scattering pigs before it.
The press had arrived in Coshocton, where Dr. William Max- well began in 1827 the publication of "The Republican" at uncertain
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
intervals. This sheet of handbill size and others that came later have their story in the newspaper chapter.
Over the western hills where Eli Nichols owned much of New Castle Township the hamlet of New Castle, planned by Robert Giffen, advanced from its solitary log-cabin and tavern state into a merger with its rival, West Liberty, affluent with half a dozen houses in- cluding one of brick. A few miles away, on the old site of Captain Pipe's Indian village, Walhonding was just springing up with the canal, and coming so fast that a bill was introduced into the legis- lature to form a new county, making Walhonding the seat, but the bill lost by one vote. Mount Airy was on a ridge with some cabins, a blacksmith forge and a log school with a schoolmarm, wife of Parson Alsach; but the place rose only to vanish with other lost towns of the county.
Southward, in Pike Township, there was the flourishing village of West Carlisle with its two churches, three stores, tavern, tannery and the shops of blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, shoemakers, tailor and hatter. There also was the home of William Brown who kept store, served as postmaster under Monroe, J. Q. Adams, Jackson and Van Buren, was a sure shot, a good horseman, and a Christian gentleman.
In Perry Township rose Dr. E. G. Lee's New Guilford, and nearby John Conway's Claysville, afterward consolidating as East Union, with two-score houses and several shops where the sound of hammer and saw and anvil swelled the chorus of peace.
West Bedford, or Heaton's Town in those days, had grown from a road house of 1817 to log-house stores, blacksmith shop and tannery. Washington Township was clearing her fine farms. In Virginia the Scotts, of good old stock and well esteemed, were developing much land; a store was beginning the future New Moscow.
Franklin Township had Frew's Mill, now Wills Creek. Linton Township, when it couldn't ford the creek, ferried at Jacobsport, now Plainfield, then the home of a tannery. A toll bridge succeeded the ferry. There was a ferry at Linton Mills. A mill was the beginning of Bacon Run. Maysville flickered about a blacksmith's forge, then flickered out. Folks in that section were digging deep wells, and from every sixty gallons of water pumped up they extracted a bushel of salt.
In the north Monroe Township went to the tavern and store
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HISTORY OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
called Van Buren, which has grown since into Spring Mountain. Millcreek Township, then as now, had no town lot, and was farming; likewise Bethlehem, rafting logs of oak, walnut, poplar and sycamore down the Killbuck to Roscoe and Coshocton.
In Clark Township Eli Fox's mill was grinding at Helmick. Blissfield was unknown yet, and where Bloomfield stands today, partly in this county and partly in Holmes, there were in the forties a few log cabins with the county line running between them.
A tavern and straggling cabins in the wilderness started New Bedford in Crawford Township, with Chili growing later out of a blacksmith shop.
In Adams Township Bakersville was in a grist-mill stage; in White Eyes William M. Boyd's mill was the forerunner of Jacktown, afterward Avondale, now Fresno.
Keene had emerged from Jesse Beal's forest as a little leaky log- cabin school, and advanced to tavern and stores. West Lafayette was in its roadhouse cradle. On the Walhonding Canal Warsaw grew into a flourishing grain center where shortly before only a tavern had stood. Along the Ohio Canal the immense grain shipping started Canal Lewisville with three warehouses, while struggling young New- port, nearby was lost. Evansburg, afterward Orange, flourished as a canal port with warehouse, tannery, tavern and store.
PIONEERS OF COSHOCTON COUNTY
THE COLONISTS OF THE EARLIEST DECADES IN THE COUNTY'S FIRST CENTURY, INCLUDING THOSE WHO CUT THE PATH FOR CIVILIZATION THROUGH THE WILDERNESS, WHO HEARD THE HISS OF THE SNAKE ON THE CABIN FLOOR, AND THE HOWL OF THE WOLF AT THE DOOR; THEIR'S WAS THE COUR- AGE, THE STRENGTH, THE FAITH, AND THE WILL THAT FILLED HEARTS IN THE MAKING OF THE COUNTRY.
Ackline, Alexander Adams, Beall
Adams, Calvin
Adams, Seth
Adams, William
Ashcraft, Daniel Ashcraft, Jonathan Ault, Peter
Addy, Hugh Addy, James
Addy, Robert
Babcock, Labina
Babcock, Richard
Babcock, Ruannah
Babcock, Zebina
Albert, John Allison, William
Bagnall, George
Ammon, Jacob Amory, Elizabeth Amory, George
Bailey, George
Baker, Basil
Baker, Benjamin
Anderson, William Andrews, John
Baker, Charles
Baker, Edward
Anspaugh, George Arbuckle, John Archer, William
Baker, James
Baker, Esaias
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