History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; their past and present, Part 5

Author: Nelson, S.B., Cincinnati
Publication date: 1894
Publisher: Cincinnati : S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1592

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The presence of these forces by no means overawed the watchful enemy of the forest, who lurked about the settlements like the invisible shadow of doom. Five or six persons were killed or captured at North Bend and Columbia before the year ended. but the savages confined themselves to the work of waylaying imprudent stragglers in the woods, and for a long time made no attempt to destroy a station.

Meanwhile Maj. Doughty's men were laboring at the fort on the bluff above the cabins of Losantiville. The structure was nearly finished by the middle of winter, and on the 29th of December, Gen. Josiah Harmar, commander of the forces of the Northwest, arrived with 320 regular troops, and established the head- quarters of the United States army within its walls. As it was the most important military work in the West, he gave it the immortal name of the most important officer of the government. Whatever transformations Cincinnati may undergo in the future, her people, if they remain Americans, will remember the spot at the north- west corner of Third and Lawrence streets, where the Stars and Stripes first floated in the winter winds from the lofty flagstaff of Fort Washington.

HAMILTON COUNTY FORMED-NEW SETTLEMENTS-INDIANS ATTACK DUNLAP'S STATION.

Three days after Gen. Harmar took up his quarters at Fort Washington, viz. on the 1st of January, 1790, Governor St. Clair was received with due ceremony by the troops and citizens of Losantiville. One of the principal objects of his journey

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

down the Ohio was to give the settlers of the Miami Country a constitutional gov- ernment. The whole of the tract which Stites had explored three years before, and which was still in almost the same condition of aboriginal wildness as then, was incorporated into one county, which St. Clair requested Judge Symmes to name. Symmes chose the name of Washington's great secretary, Hamilton, who was one of his stanch political friends; the governor himself. in establishing the seat of the county at Losantiville, changed the name of the hamlet to Cincinnati. He next created a court of common pleas, of three judges and a clerk, commissioned three justices of the peace, and appointed several citizens as officers to organize the able- bodied men of the settlements into a regiment of militia. The gentlemen honored with these offices were almost exclusively selected from Cincinnati and Columbia.

The organization of the county was proclaimed on the 2nd of January, and very shortly afterward the governor went on to Fort Vincennes, where he hoped to meet the chiefs of the several Indian tribes and offer them such terms as would bring peace to the harassed and weary settlers. But the hope was vain. About two months after he left, two more settlers were killed at Covalt Station, while at work in the woods near the fort making shingles. One of them was the brave Capt. Covalt himself.

Notwithstanding the steady presence of danger, a large number of the poorer class of settlers, who had been increasing at Cincinnati during the winter, deter- mined to push out farther into the forest, and begin the cultivation of their lands. Some of these people were so deficient in means, according to one of the most quoted of the early chroniclers, that the chances of massacre appeared to them no more desperate than their condition at Cincinnati, which threatened absolute starvation. They accordingly formed themselves into parties, and were led forth, apparently, by the proprietors who had granted them lands, Symmes himself lending some of them assistance.

Three new stations were thus established during the month of April, at widely sep- arated points in the lower portion of the extensive county. The most remote of these isolated settlements was established under the leadership of John Dunlap, one of Symmes' numerous surveyors, upon the eastern bank of the Great Miami, eighteen miles northwest of Cincinnati, in a position almost encircled by a turn in the river. Some thirty persons went with Dunlap to this spot, and constructed a stockade fort similar in plan to Covalt's, but much more carelessly and inefficiently finished. The area of the fort was one acre square. Dunlap, who was an immigrant from Cole- raine, Ireland, gave the name of his native town to the place; but the pioneers of the county, as was usual in the frontier districts of the West, knew the station by the name of its chief personage. The township in which the now empty site of the fort lies has inherited the Irish title. The names of some of Dunlap's settlers were Gibson, Larrison, Crum, Hahn and Birket.

The second of the three stations of 1790 arose under the direction of Col. Israel Ludlow, the partner of Denman and Patterson, six miles north of Fort Wash- ington, in the valley of Mill creek, within the present boundaries of Cincinnati.

The third party went eastward, out of the Miami Purchase entirely, and built a strong blockhouse on the east side of the Little Miami, about a mile above Columbia, within the territory which Virginia reserved upon ceding her western claims to the Confederate Government in 1784. The spot occupied by the blockhouse is in Anderson township, at the foot of the hills opposite Flinn's Ford, one of the abandoned pioneer crossings of the Little Miami. This was Gerard's Station. Its principal inhabitants were the families of John Gerard, Joseph Martin, Capt. James Flinn, Stephen Betts, Joseph Williamson, Stephen Davis, Richard Hall and Jacob Bachhofen.

The increase in the number of settlements gave the Indians larger opportunities for theft and murder. Many horses were stolen, some of the families at Columbia

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HISTORY, OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

were robbed of household property almost before their eyes, and in October, after Gen. Harmar's main forces had left the county on their unfortunate expedition to the Indian towns of the Maumee, Jacob Wetzel, of Cincinnati, was attacked in the thickets of Millcreek Bottom by a savage, whom he managed to slay in a thrilling hand-to-hand combat, just in time to escape a band of his adversary's comrades, who were scouting near by.

The bloody defeat of Harmar encouraged the northern warriors to make a descent upon Hamilton county in full force. At daylight on Monday, January 10, 1791, the inmates of Dunlap's Station, the farthest outpost in the dreary wilderness, were startled from their slumbers by the dreaded Indian alarm, and sprang up to find the woods around their fort swarming with an army of redskins, commanded by the Shawnee chieftain, Blue Jacket, and the detested cutthroat renegade, Simon Girty. The garrison consisted only of a detachment of thirteen soldiers from Fort Wash- ington, under Lieut. Kingsbury, and ten able-bodied settlers, while the savages numbered several hundreds; but as the chiefs would give no satisfactory promise of quarter, the besieged naturally refused to surrender. A continuous fire was poured in upon the stockade; and firebrands shot upon the roofs of the cabins, till midnight of the first day, when the besiegers retired a little distance from the fort, and burned to death a prisoner named Abner Hunt, whom they had captured a day or two before their appearance at the station. The next morning a brave private soldier named Wiseman escaped from the station amid a shower of bullets, and carried the news of the attack to Fort Washington. He returned upon the third day with a party of Harmar's regulars and a company of mounted militia from Columbia; but the Indians had retreated about two hours before the reinforcement arrived, and were already beyond pursuit.

INDIAN WARFARE CONTINUED - FIRST TOWNSHIPS FORMED - MERCERSBURGH - WHITE'S STATION - RUNYAN'S STATION.

The attack upon Dunlap's Station, though unsuccessful, sent a thrill of alarm even through Kentucky; and the pioneers continued to suffer so heavily from small raiding parties during the year, that the greater part of the immigrants who ventured into the county stopped at Cincinnati, under the protecting guns of Fort Washington; improvement was held in restraint at the old stations, and no one dared open a new settlement at all.

Such settlers as were resolute enough to carry on their labors in wood and field, usually took the frontier precaution of working in bands, part of each band being posted so as to keep a sharp lookout for danger. If the enemy appeared in large force, sentinels and laborers fled pellmell for their fort, cabins, or other places of security. As an example of the activity required for this mode of business, it may be mentioned that in May two citizens of Cincinnati, named Scott and Shepherd, were chased from their cornfield, a mile out, almost into the streets of the village, not having time to bring off their plow-horses, which fell into the hands of the pursuers.

Some necessary household errands were discharged at the risk of life and liberty. One day in September, James Newell. a resident of Columbia, started to take a quantity of corn to the mill at Covalt Station. At a place about halfway between the two settlements he met Capt. Aaron Mercer and Capt. Ignatius Ross, two hardy veterans of his village, who were returning home from the mill to which he was going. The two Captains had seen Indian signs up the river, and earnestly advised Newell to postpone the trip, and turn back with them to Columbia. Newell determined to proceed. He had scarcely parted from his friends when they heard the report of a rifle in the direction which he had taken. No other sound followed. Wondering whether they had heard Newell's weapon, or an Indian's, Ross and Mercer hurried back. Newell lay dying by the horse-path; his assassin, who had been concealed in a tree near the trail, having made good his escape. The body of Newell was carried

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

back to Columbia by Ross and Mercer. The scene of his death, a dark and woody ravine crossing the Wooster pike, halfway between Plainville and Red Bank, is still known as Newell's Hollow.

Altogether, over a score of persons were killed or borne away into captivity during the months of summer and autumn. Among the captives was Oliver Spencer, a lad of thirteen, son of a prominent Columbian settler. More happily favored by fortune than some of his comrades in distress, he was recovered by his father before he had time to develop into an Indian, and eventually became one of the most esteemed citizens of the county.

There is a vague tradition in the Little Miami valley, surviving as far north as Xenia, of a fierce onslaught made upon Gerard's Station during the fall of this year, but the particulars of the combat have faded utterly from legendary recollection. It is only known that the assailants, whether few or many, were beaten off. The sound of the conflict probably attracted relief from Columbia.

The life of the American frontier was essentially a struggle between two different orders of society, one of which was thousands of years in advance of the other. The bloody incidents of personal encounter between the two races represent the force of barbarism on one side of the picture; the bare forms of civil custom which the colonists strove to maintain, when the great machinery of civilization was utterly wanting to fill them, illustrate the force of progress upon the other. In the midst of the appalling attacks of the natives, the court of general quarter sessions of the peace, inaugurated by the governor the year before, divided the lower part of the great county of Hamilton into three long townships, running back side by side from the three settlements on the Ohio to a terminus beyond the present line of Butler county. The most eastern of these woodland bailiwicks was called Columbia township, the middle one, Cincinnati, the most western, Miami.

The expedition undertaken by Governor St. Clair, with the object of doing what Harmar had failed to do, for a time deprived the outer settlements of their inhabitants. After their guard of regulars, and some of the fighting men of their families, had gone to join the northward march of St. Clair. the remaining people of Covalt's Station grew fearful, left their fort to the gloomy silence of the forest, and went down the river to Gerard's. Dunlap's settlers remained at their post until they heard the news of the terrible carnage and rout of the army, then, knowing by experience what consequences to expect, they hastily retreated to Cincinnati. But the enemy, foiled of his surest prey by this timely flight, kept aloof from the stronger stations, the winter passed quietly, and the soft and balmy spring of 1792, which started the buds of the forest, and filled the valleys with the warble of the birds, much earlier than their usual time, allured the fugitives back to their clearings before the end of February.

Their encouraging example called several new settlements into existence, the most important of which was Mercersburgh. Capt. Aaron Mercer, its founder, was a rel- ative of Gen. Hugh Mercer, the long-lamented hero of the battle of Princeton; like him, of Irish birth, and like him, a Virginian by adoption. Capt. Mercer was of that large class of Revolutionary heroes who sacrificed their worldly fortunes upon the altar of patriotism. He left Winchester, Virginia, with his family, in 1790, reach - ing Columbia just as the troops belonging to that station returned from the scene of Harmar's defeat. There he resided, a leader in the community, until the rare season of 1792 invited him forth, at the head of a number of his Virginian neighbors, to begin the settlement of Mercersburgh. The tract which he bought for this purpose was on the east side of the Little Miami, three miles above Gerard Station, on the first elevated land of the valley. The position seemed secure from the average back- waters of the vast lower bottoms, and there, where several cold and crystal springs gushed abundantly forth from a nook at the foot of the hills, Mercer laid out a con-

A. D.1807.

& Burnet

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

siderable subdivision, made a clearing, and erected a " garrison," as a log fortress, or even a single blockhouse, was corruptly called by the Virginian borderers.

The garrison was a rendezvous for parties of militia engaging in scouting exped- itions till the close of the Indian war. Mercer was largely aided in his enterprise by his two sons-in-law, one of whom was Ichabod B. Miller, a surveyor, and the other, Thomas Brown, a merchant. Brown was a son of the Thomas Brown who, some years later than this date, expanded Red Stone, Penn., into the borough of Brownsville.

Mercersburgh became Newtown in the early part of this century.

Capt. Jacob White, an immigrant from Red Stone, with several associates named Winans, Flinn, Goble and Pryor, opened the next settlement on Mill creek, at a point about five miles farther up than Ludlow's. This settlement comprised a block- house and several cabins, the blockhouse being built upon the southern bank, with two of the cabins, and the others just across the stream. The town of Carthage is the nearest representative of White's Station.

Henry Runyan, one of Virginia's daring natives, scorning the protection of num- bers, ventured still farther into the howling wilderness, and erected his solitary cabin beyond the site of Reading. It seems remarkable that his retreat escaped the eyes of the savages, for they were constantly on the watch. Three of Covalt's settlers were captured during the summer, within a few hundred yards of the fort, and in the fall, Maj. Riggs, of the same station, was shot.

WHITE'S STATION ATTACKED - INCREASE OF SETTLEMENTS AND TOWNSHIPS - CLOSE OF THE FRONTIER PERIOD.

The county enjoyed a tolerable repose during the spring and summer of 1793, while Gen. Wayne was drilling his legionaries at Cincinnati, for the third attempt to subdue the exultant foe, but shortly after he removed northward, in the autumn, the danger cloud again cast its shadow on the clearings. One morning in the latter part of October, a courier from Gen. Wayne galloped up to Capt. White's station on Mill creek, informed the settlers that a small detachment of the army, under Lieut. Lowry, had been destroyed near Fort St. Clair, the government post northwest of Hamilton county; cautioned them against surprise, and passed on with his warn- ing to other settlements. Late that afternoon some of the dogs belonging about the cabins scampered away into the woods for a hunt; soon afterward a vociferous bark- ing was heard from the hill above the station. One of the men, Andrew Goble, went out, in foolhardy contempt of Capt. White's protest, to see what mysterious quarry had been brought to bay. He had advanced only a little way when the hillside rang with a heavy discharge of firearms and the wild war whoop arose. Goble fell dead with eight bullets in his body, and thirty Indians rushed down upon the blockhouse. A widow named Pryor, with her three small children, was in one of the cabins on the northern bank of the stream; one child was killed by the fire of the savages. She escaped across to the blockhouse with another; the third, an infant which sheleft lying in its cradle, was soon brained against a stump. The assailants. having lost their chief and several other warriors in a desperate attempt to take the blockhouse by storm, disappeared at night- fall.

The settlers of Hamilton county suffered but slightly from predatory incursions after this attack, for the bulk of the warriors were employed through the spring and summer of 1794 in watching Wayne's slow and cautious approach toward their homes; and after their united bands had been scattered by him at the decisive battle of Fallen Timbers, in August of that year, the tribes were too deeply crushed in spirit to undertake formidable expeditions. Some of their greatest chiefs, con- scious that fate had irrevocably declared against them, renounced war forever, and spent the remainder of their lives in peaceful residence with the race which had wrought the downfall of their own. A few cowardly vagabonds, who had stolen

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

away from the council-fires of their people to avoid the risks of open battle, flitted about the stations before and after the great victory, but they were more successful as thieves and scavengers than as murderers.

It is interesting to note how much of that social and civil progress, for the sake of which the pioneers suffered all the horrors of savage warfare, had been accom- plished when the struggle ceased. At the time of the treaty at Greenville, August 3, 1795, where the Indians of the Northwest surrendered the lands of their fore- fathers forever, there were at least sixteen different settlements in Hamilton county, where, six years earlier, there were but four. Griffin's Station had risen on Mill creek, almost within rifle-shot of White's; Tucker's Station on the west fork of the same creek, below the site of Glendale; Pleasant Valley Station, a short distance east of Tucker's; Voorhees' Station in the valley of East Mill creek, on the site of Lock- land; McFarland's Station several miles east of Voorhees, on the summit of Pleasant Ridge; and Campbell's Station far to the west, upon the bank of the Great Miami, several miles below Dunlap's.

Cincinnati numbered about one hundred habitations, most of them log cabins; Columbia consisted of about fifty such houses; North Bend, South Bend and Sugar Camp, Judge Symmes' three villages, were each somewhat smaller than Columbia. The whole number of inhabitants in the settlements considerably exceeded two thou- sand, of whom five hundred dwelt in Cincinnati. About the same time the three lank and empty townships of 1791 were filled sufficiently to be divided into six, Columbia, Cincinnati, Miami, Colerain, Springfield and South Bend, while the region east of the Little Miami, colonized by the people of Mercersburgh and Gerard's Station, had been brought under the government of the county as the township of Anderson. Roads had been opened from settlement to settlement, churches and schools had begun to flourish, some of the trades were introduced, and, in short, the foundation was laid for the vast social and political interests of succeeding generations.

The settlement of the Northwest Territory was the second great act in the history of the United States, of which the settlement of Hamilton county formed a single brief but vivid scene. It has been the business of this chapter to review the more important, or the more eventful incidents of that scene, and to recall the personages who enacted its characteristic parts. The story loses distinct and peculiar interest in the great crowd of similar events which have transpired in this country since the sail of the "Mayflower" cast its shadow on the coast of the Wampanoags, but it pre- sents abundant examples of personal heroism, perseverance and endurance, and abounds in characters of a kind from which no human being is averse to claiming descent.

The moral disposition of those early adventurers is equally a subject for local pride and admiration. The settlements were almost free from the lawless and dissolute class, the usual desperadoes of the frontier, the overwhelming moral sentiment of the community expelling or absorbing them. In most of the settlers was strongly reflected the devout religious ideas, and the sturdy and manly virtues of the old Col- onial time.

In blood and lineage the first settlers were such that all elements of the modern population can recall their work with pleasure, and are honored alike by their mem- ory. Some were of the old stock of New England and the other Atlantic States; many were of the Scotch-Irish strain; not a few were genuine Hibernians; others were Pennsylvania-Germans, and most of these men, so diverse in origin, had fought in the war which won them a common national name, dearer and grander than the fondest lingering memories of their European sires.

The pioneers of Ohio were actuated to perform their part by homely motives; they braved the perils and the hardships of the wilderness rather in duty to them- selves than as the conscious benefactors of posterity, yet their successors and descend- ants, looking back upon their achievements through the mellow vista of time, can see

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

the full extent of their services, not only to local society, but to the whole American nation of to-day. As they were foremost in the movement which gave their country freedom, so they were first in the movement which has given it power. Some of them lived to see another generation end the westward march which they began, and to marvel at the rapidity with which it had been accomplished. One of the blockhouses of their period was still standing near North Bend when Fremont carried the flag of the Union to the Pacific coast.

CHAPTER IV.

STORY OF THE LOG CABIN.

THE PIONEER IN SEARCH OF A HOME AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY-HOW HE APPEARED-THIE INDIAN READS THE DESTINY OF HIS RACE IN THE CURLING SMOKE-THE BRUSH HABITA- TION AND THE REAL LOG CABIN-HOW IT APPEARED-MIGHTY CHANGES WROUGHT IN A HUNDRED YEARS.

T HE log cabin of the pioneer was the avant-courier of civilization -- the power- ful lever which pressed the aborigines of the Atlantic coast back toward the Alleghanies, then over that mountain chain to the valley of the Ohio and on to other western lands. The Indian viewed the cabin of the pioneer with alarm. The smoke, as it gracefully ascended from the rude chimney and was borne away by the breeze, was to him an evil omen. In its graceful curves he read his destiny -- the rapid decline and extirpation of his race.

An able writer has very beautifully and forcibly said that "the Indian's supreme impulse was that of absolute freedom-liberty in the fullest extent -- where there was no law other than that of physical strength and courage. Might was right, and from that the weak had no appeal save that of the stoic's divine right of death. The Indian's death was therefore a part of his deep-seated philosophy, and no mat- ter how he might be hemmed in, slowly starved to death, slain in battle, or died of disease, his last and supreme act was to chant his death song. Death, then, was not his one dreaded, invisible foe. When he could fight and kill no more, then it was his friend-the angel with outstretched wings in his extremity, tenderly carry- ing him away from his enemy and his pain. His ideal was that animal life typified in the screaming eagle of the crags, or the spring of the panther, whose soft foot had carried it in reach of the unsuspecting prey."

When the log cabin appeared in the Miami Bottoms and on the mesas of Losan- tiville, at Ludlow and North Bend, the Indian read his destiny in the curling smoke. He watched it from the rugged hill tops which encircled the site of the infant settle- ment-now covered with palatial homes-and with saddened feelings divined his fate. In hostile bands he swooped down the then wild and romantic valley of the Mah-ka-te-wa, bent on spreading death and desolation among the pale-faced occu- pants of the log cabin. It was in one of these forays that poor Filson fell and was heard of no more.

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History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; their past and present, Part 5

Author: Nelson, S.B., Cincinnati Publication date: 1894 Publisher: Cincinnati : S. B. Nelson Number of Pages: 1592

Author: Nelson, S.B., Cincinnati
Publication date: 1894
Publisher: Cincinnati : S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1592