USA > Ohio > Champaign County > History of Champaign County, Ohio, Its People, Industries and Institutions, Volume I > Part 32
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Among the early business enterprises of the village may be mentioned the general stores of T. H. Heston and A. F. Lichlider and the furniture store and general wood-working establishment of Joseph Hensler. James Huling erected a saw-mill in the village in 1867 and it was the only milling industry of any importance the place has ever had. Later, John L. Bodey had a general store and E. F. Terrell had a grocery. John Miller conducted a wagon shop and John O'Leary was the village blacksmith for many years. Hensler & Bodey were associated in the furniture and undertaking business in the eighties. S. M. Seeley was in the saddlery and harness business during the seventies and eighties, and one of his contemporaries in the leather business was F. B. Sturm, who was engaged in the making of boots and shoes. The village carpenters were William Scott, John Van Horn and Samuel Halterman. Dr. H. B. Hunt was the only physician in the vil- lage during the seventies and eighties.
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The business interests for 1917 include two general stores, one con- ducted by Martz Brothers and the other by L. F. Perk. A blacksmith shop is operated by George Poorman. Thomas Cain, a colored man, was the last postmaster of the village.
"TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO."
An incident has been handed down in the history of the village con- cerning a political meeting within its quiet precincts in the fall of 1840. This was the famous "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" campaign which will stand as the most spectacular the country has ever seen. The Whigs of Harrison township on this particular day had a buckeye cabin on a wagon and the display was the pride of the Whiggers of the township. It must have been a handsome piece of cabin architecture if we may judge of the envy it aroused it the hearts of the Democrats. On this day both parties were to have a rally in Carysville: one Hamilton was to set forth the glories of the Democratic party, while the principles of the Whigs were appropriately explained by one Hayes. The rival political camps gathered around their respective speakers and so intense became the feeling that it seemed some- thing would happen.
And it did. The handsome Whig cabin, for some Democratic reason, all at once slid from its foundation on the wagon bed. The something had happened. Within an incredibly short time there was a wonderful conglom- erate mixture of Whigs and Democrats around that cabin. It is needless to say that the cabin was soon a thing of the past, and the Democrats took a keen delight in using parts of it in belaboring the heads of their Whig neighbors. The Democratic warriors won the battle, the Whigs slowly re- treating, carrying off their wounded in as graceful a manner as possible. History does not record what happened to the Democrats at their next rally in Carysville.
RALLY ENDS IN TRAGEDY.
Another Carysville political story. In the heat of the 1863 campaign a Republican speaker came to Carysville and in the course of his speech roundly denounced the citizens who were not as patriotic as he thought they ought to be. The Democrats became violent and threatened dire things; numerous street encounters were staged and for several days it seemed that trouble would be sure to follow the speech; one man was shot and many more were threatened with their lives. The Democrats were ordered to
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hang a flag out of their windows, and the Republicans gave formal notice that all who did not decorate their homes with a flag would be destroyed by fire. A company of home guards were hurried out to the village from Urbana and were compelled to make several arrests. Long years after there was still a distinct remembrance of this bloody week in the minds of the old citizens of Carysville.
SOUNDING THE KNELL OF CARYSVILLE.
The village has never been incorporated for the reason that it could never get enough inhabitants at any one time to justify incorporation. This has placed the village under the control of the township authorities and has left the village itself in a measure unable to cope with petty misdemeanors committed in its midst. If the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton railroad had only passed through the village the latter might have grown to be of corporate size, but it is now only waiting for the day when its last store will hand out the last pound of sugar. For economic reasons its days are numbered. It is certain that Rosewood, located on the railroad, is bound to attract the trade of the community. He who writes the history of Adams township in 2017 will be compelled to say that a century ago, farther back than the oldest inhabitant can remember, there was a village of the name of Carys- ville in that township.
ROSEWOOD.
The village of Rosewood, located on sections 18 and 24, Adams town- ship. sprang into existence in 1893 when the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton rail- road was being built through this section of the county. What is now the village site was at that time a part of the farm of Miles Archer, who had sufficient foresight to see the probability of a thriving village at that point. Accordingly a village site was laid out and platted and given the name of Rosewood.
To John M. Birkhokl is given the credit of erecting the first building of any kind on the village site. He was visionary enough to see that a store at this point would be a paying proposition. It occurred to him that since the roads crossed at this place and the farming community was of the very best that no better location could be secured. At that time he was living on his farm, a short distance from the crossroads and had never had any experience in the mercantile business. However, he had faith in his own judgment and set about to buy a lot for the purpose of erecting a store
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building. He succeeded in purchasing lot 1, which at the time was a potato patch, and for which he paid the sum of fifty dollars. Immediately he began the erection of the building that is now standing on the lot, and which he rented to Charles Espy until in December, 1894. Birkhold then took charge of the store and with the assistance of his sons has continued in the business ever since. The second storekeeper in the village was James Pick- ering, but his place of business has changed ownership many times. The village has grown until there are about three hundred inhabitants, all of whom are law abiding and industrious citizens. The village has more than a local reputation as a stock market and the statement is made upon good authority that Rosewood is the best shipping point on the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton between Lima and Springfield. The business interests are those characteristic of the average village and include the following: Birkhold Brothers, general store; Bowers & Slagel, saw-mill; Buroker Brothers, gen- eral store; Bowers & Clark, garage; Clyde Blackford, meat market and general store; Covault & Coval, blacksmith shop; Daniel Clark, barber; C. F. Houseman, blacksmith shop; John Huffman, tiling, fencing, etc .; Mrs. Mary Lichlider, milliner; John Nichol, barber: Proctor & Sturgeon, implements ; Rosewood Grain Company, grain; A. M. Wooley & Son. restaurant and store, and Dr. W. A. Yinger, physician.
POSTOFFICE, SCHOOLS AND CHURCHES.
After the village gave every assurance of becoming a local commer- cial center, application for a postoffice was made by John M. Birkhold. Although living in another township he was appointed postmaster in April, 1894. However, he was forced to become a resident of the village in order to hold the position, which he filled for four years. He was succeeded by J. M. Buroker who held the office for a term of four years, and was fol- lowed by James W. Pickering. C. F. Houseman was the next postmaster and he was succeeded by M. R. Geyer who was appointed on January 1, 1909, and who served until March 13, 1913, when O. F. Birkhold, the present incumbent, received the appointment. In 1910 the rural commu- nity was given the advantages of a rural route from this office.
The first religious services in the village were held in the school house and were conducted by Reverend Yeisley, of the Reformed church at St. Paris. The building was crowded to its capacity and the minister was so pleased that he stated it was his intention to conduct services with regu- larity and ultimately form a Reformed church at this point. However, in
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the meantime, members of the United Brethren churches at Carysville and Antioch were active in forming a union of the two societies and finally located a church at Rosewood in 1899. Realizing that the village and the community could not support two churches, the idea of organizing a Re- formed church was finally abandoned by the man who has the distinction and honor of having conducted the first religious service in the village.
The village has always been fortunate in having a township school almost within its limits. The school house that was used when the village was laid out is now used for storage purposes. As the village grew larger a new school house was erected, the same now being used as a garage. This building was occupied until the erection of the present building, which is a model of its kind and a tribute to the untiring and successful efforts of its present superintendent. A startling incident occurred in Rosewood in 1913, when an explosion of an acetyline-gas plant in the house of J. M. Buroker com- pletely destroyed that house. Happily no one was killed.
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CHAPTER XIX.
AGRICULTURE.
The history of agriculture as it concerns Champaign county is very little different from that of most of the counties in the state. One hundred years ago the farmer did not have a single one of the labor-saving devices which may be found on every well-managed farm in Champaign county today. With his single-shovel plow and hoe, his sickle and scythe, his flail and fanning-mill, his homemade harness and handmade wagon, he was but poorly equipped to combat the forest. There was no such a thing as a stump-puller or dynamite in those days to get rid of stumps or boulders; the ditching machine was not to be seen in the county for a hundred years after it was settled. In short, the meager equipment of farming implements possessed by the sturdy pioneers who first attempted to wrest a living from the soil of this county would not be considered worthy of the poorest farmer of 1917.
It would transcend the limits of this chapter to go into detail con- cerning the vicissitudes of the early farmer. He managed in some way or another to clear the forests with the aid of ax and fire and to raise sufficient produce to make a comfortable living for his family. Wants were so few and the few were so simple that the two cents he received for a pound of pork and ten cents for a bushel of corn loomed as big in his eyes as fourteen- cent pork and two-dollar corn in the summer of 1917. The times have changed. people have changed; and although we sometimes think that "the good old days" were the best and that our grandfathers and grandmothers were happier than we are today, yet we would not exchange our manner of living with all of its conveniences for the life they had to live with all of its inconveniences.
NATURE INDULGENT TO CHAMPAIGN COUNTY.
The soil of the county has been discussed in the chapter relating to the geology and topography of the county. The same chapter discussed climatic conditions, the drainage systems and allied subjects. It is sufficient to state
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in this connection that nature has effected such a harmonious combination of the sunshine, the rainfall and the soil that the farmer of Champaign county can raise as fine crops of corn and wheat and oats and potatoes as any farmer in the United States, and for the same reason he can produce just as fat hogs, as sleek cattle, as fine horses and as well-bred sheep. An acre of Champaign county land has produced a hundred bushels of corn and half that many bushels of wheat; it has produced four hundred bushels of potatoes and as many bushels of onions; it will produce two tons of timoth. hay and six tons of alfalfa. In other words the Champaign county farmer has every reason to congratulate himself. It is small wonder that the farm which cost his grandfather one hundred and twenty-five cents an acre is now worth as many dollars per acre-and usually more than that.
A LOOK INTO THE DAYS THAT ARE GONE.
Let us turn back the pages of history; let us put on the old cowhide boots, our old coon-skin hat, our "wamus," our galluses; let us get our corn-cob pipe, our old shucking peg and saunter down through the lane to the old farm. Let us follow our grandfather awhile and see how he man- aged to make a living.
The barn was always of logs, the corn crib was made of rails, the fences of the same material, the hay (if there was any) was stacked out. The few farming implements were homemade and consisted of an axe, a hoe, a shovel-plow and a scythe. It is safe to say that few farmers in Champaign county during the first quarter of a century ( 1805-1830) had more tools than these just enumerated. Fortunately the virgin soil was very fertile and grain had only to be planted in order to make a fairly good crop, while with a little attention it yielded abundantly. Corn was always dropped by hand and in the "new ground" was invariably cultivated the same way. The ground was first plowed with oxen and a curious sort of a plow which is hard to describe. It was a wooden implement, the only iron about it being the sole and point. It was what would now be called a varia- tion of the single-shovel plow. The modern breaking plow, which is dis- tinguished from its predecessor by having a mould board, did not come into use until a few years prior to the Civil War. They were first called "bar- sher" plows and were considered a wonderful invention when they first appeared in the county. The earliest plowmaker recorded in the county was one Wesley Hughes of Salem township, who was a blacksmith by trade and a plow manufacturer by virtue of the fact that he was able to bolt a
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piece of iron on the end of a stick. In the course of years some Yankee conceived the idea of making a plow with two shovels and thus came about the "double-shovel," truly a wonderful invention. In the seventies another man invented a cultivator, a plow for cultivating corn, which had six shovels, truly a still more wonderful invention, and then some other man put twelve shovels on a wheeled contrivance. But still the man who used it had to walk. Time went on and finally some Yankee startled the American farm- er by producing a plow which combined the pleasures of a buggy and plow -the modern riding sulky. Now the farmer may be seen plowing corn and sitting on a seat, under a canopy, and doing a better job of plowing than his grandfather did with his old single-shovel. Truly the times have changed.
And the story which is true of the farmer and the plow may be dupli- cated in a dozen other implements. From the days of the sickle, to the days of the scythe, from the days of the scythe to the days of the cradle, from the days of the cradle to the days when McCormick invented a ma- chine that would cut the grain, from that day until we have our modern self-binder-through all these days has the farmer of Champaign county passed since 1805. His old trusty flail has given way to the threshing- machine ; his corn knife and shucking peg have given way to the corn har- vester and shredder; and he may turn on his gasoline-engine and shell his corn and even grind it; pump his water and force it over the barn or even over his farm; shear his sheep, clip his horses, and even milk his cows. It is not necessary to go into detail to follow the successive changes which have come about in all the branches of farming since the first farmer of Champaign county made his appearance. There are more inventions and more tools being invented year by year than could possibly have been dreamed of a hundred years ago.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE CROPS.
Another interesting point to be considered is concerned with many new grains, forage and ensilage plants and divers kinds of vegetables which have been introduced within the past few years. The word alfalfa would have been as mysterious to a farmer of seventy-five years ago as the word aeroplane : a navy bean would have been as much of a curiosity as a sub- mersible boat ; egg plant would have been regarded with as much suspicion as a powder plant. Our grandmothers raised a few tomatoes in their back yard because they were nice to look at, but they would as soon have eaten
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a handful of shelled buckeyes as a dish of sliced tomatoes. In those days tomatoes were considered poisonous and were raised for ornament, being, for some unexplainable reason affectionately known as "love apples" -- maybe this name follows because of their supposed toxic qualities. There is not a man or woman in the county fifty years old who does not remember when celery was regarded as something to be eaten very cautiously. And the tale might be continued indefinitely. By actual count there are as many as forty-six different vegetables grown in the gardens of Champaign county in 1917, whereas there was not one-fourth of that number grown a hundred years ago.
If a sample of the corn and wheat and oats raised by the farmers of the forties could be exhibited at the county fair in the fall of 1917, they would make an interesting display. The corn of those days was known as Harness corn, but why this name it is not known. Then there was a dent corn, eight rows to the ear, as was the 'Harness variety, which bore the dis- tinctive title of "hackleberry," the name being suggestive of the rough exterior of the ear. Still a third variety was distinguished by its color, being a handsome mixture of white. yellow, red and blue, and appropriately described as "calico" corn. The problem of cross pollination was not very well understood in the early days and the result was usually a very much mixed variety of corn.
An effort has been made by the present historian to find out the number of bushels of corn raised to the acre in ante-bellum days. Evidence has been submitted to show that crops of from fifty to seventy-five acres were not uncommon. In 1917 there are several farmers in the county who have raised as much as one hundred bushels to an acre, and any number of farm- ers who will average seventy-five bushels an acre with a fair season. The old eight-rowed corn of five to six hundred grains is replaced by a sixteen- rowed corn with twelve to fifteen hundred grains. Among the varieties in 1917 are the following: White Cap, McGinnis, Yellow Dent, Clarage, Blue ( Rotten Clarage) and Yellow Leaming.
Corn has been the staple product of the county since the earliest begin- ning. Fifty years ago the county was producing more than a million bush- els, the average yield being about thirty-eight bushels to the acre. In 1916 the corn crop was practically double what it was in 1866. the yield being 2,111,215 bushels from an acreage of 60,441, the average per acre being only about thirty-four bushels.
In addition to the usual crop of what is commonly known as "field (22)
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corn," the county produces sugar corn, broom corn and ensilage corn, the latter for silage. In the seventies there were hundreds of acres of broom corn raised in the county and for probably a quarter of a century farmers continued raising it. But this has practically disappeared, although the assessors' report for 1916 shows thirteen acres in the county, most of it in small patches. Sugar corn is used for human consumption largely, although some farmers grow it for silage. There were two hundred and sixty-six acres of sugar corn in 1916, with a total tonnage of 2,032. Much of this was used by the canning factories of Urbana. Ensilage corn was given an acreage of five hundred and eighty-five, according to the last report and all of this was used to fill the hundred and forty-four silos in the county. In the early history of the county a considerable amount of it was used by the distilleries of the county. Distilleries were located at Urbana; in the south- ern part of Goshen township: at St. Paris; in Mad River township, at Steinberger's mill, at the Arrowsmith mill on the west bank of Mad river just north of the Urbana-Westville pike. and at the Mason mill west of Cable, in Wayne township.
WHEAT.
The story of wheat for a hundred years is more interesting probably than that of corn. From the days when it was all sown broadcast, cut with a sickle and scythe, threshed with a flail, cleaned on the top of a hill by being winnowed with a bed sheet, ground in a crude water-powered buhr- mill and made into lard biscuit-from those days down to the present time may be traced one of the agricultural miracles of the century. It is a long step from the simple hand-sickle of a hundred years ago to the complicated machine used in the West which not only cuts the wheat but threshes it and rolls the sacks off on the ground just as the binder rolls off the sheaves of wheat.
The first wheat in Champaign county was sown broadcast and was covered by dragging a well-arranged pile of brush over the fields. The wheat usually grown in the early days was known as "red chaff." The wheat acreage in the county has varied considerably, but the acreage sown does not by any means bear a uniform proportion to the amount actually harvested. The increase in the yield is due to, the fact that wheat has been improved by careful breeding, producing new varieties by cross fertiliza- tion, first known as hybrids. By careful cultivation these hybrid varieties have been standardized, thereby enabling the farmers to produce larger
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yields. It has often happened that twice as much grain would be produced on the same acreage in two successive seasons. The earliest report found on the wheat crop shows that the county raised 393,145 bushels in 1864, and the report for 1916 showed a crop of 432,219 bushels. The acreage in 1915 was 27,454, which, in 1916, decreased to 18,766 acres. From the best evidence obtainable it appeared that the banner wheat year of the county was 1879 when a total of 792,546 bushels was raised, the average that year being 21.18 bushels per acre. There is no spring wheat grown in the county.
OATS, RYE AND BUCKWHEAT.
Oats has been a good crop in the county for seventy-five years, its acreage usually being about the same as that of wheat. In 1864 there were 160,196 bushels raised and in 1916 there were 587,272 bushels. There were 17,371 acres sown to oats in 1915 and 24,208 in 1916. Rye has never been a large crop in the county although there is more grown now than there has ever been. In 1864 there were 2.381 bushels grown; in 1879 there were only 603: but in 1916 the rye crop amounted to 29,623 bushels, from a total of 2,274 acres. Buckwheat reported forty-two bushels in 1864; 1,224 in 1879 and' 315 bushels in 1915, from nine acres. Buckwheat cakes of the home grown variety have practically disappeared from the breakfast table.
POTATOES AND MINOR CROPS.
Irish potatoes have been one of the most important food products of the people of the county, despite the charge that they have little nutritive value. Potatoes are a peculiar crop; some years they seem to flourish like the bay tree and bear as prolifically as the wild crab apple; other years the bugs, or the rot, or the blight or wet weather or dry weather, or some other cause, cuts the crop in two. The study of the potato record in the county bears out this statement. In 1864 it was 33,537 bushels; in 1879 it was 68,957 : in 1916 it was 21,047 bushels, with a reported acreage of 352. This does not include the hundreds of small patches of potatoes ranging from a dozen to a hundred hills. Onions cast their odor over three acres in 1915 and 632 bushels of the odoriferous vegetable were produced. The tomato crop was evidently incorrectly reported in 1915. Salem township with four- teen acres, and a crop of 11.760 bushels being the only township to return any tomatoes at all. There are two canning factories at Urbana and one at Woodstock. According to the best reports there have been eighty acres
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of tomatoes promised for the cannery in the vicinity of Woodstock and about sixty in the immediate vicinity of Urbana for the season of 1917. Other townships have promised to contribute of their output to one or the other of the factories. The pea crop in 1915 amounted to ninety-nine acres and this seemingly large acreage for the succulent legume was due to the canning factories. One of the local canning factories put up ten acres of spinach in 1917.
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