USA > Ohio > Montgomery County > Dayton > History of Dayton, Ohio. With portraits and biographical sketches of some of its pioneer and prominent citizens Vol. 1 > Part 6
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In the spring of 1794 he went with Hugh Wilson, commissary, William Gahagan, and others down the Ohio to Fort Massac in charge of two contractors' boats, loaded with provisions and accompanied by a detachment of troops. There were twelve boats in their fleet. They were constantly apprehending attacks from the Indians. He describes himself on this voyage as dressed in hunting frock, breech cloth, leggings, and moccasins, and carrying a gun, and tomahawk, and a knife eighteen inches long suspended from his belt.
In the fall of 1795 he accompanied Captain Dunlap's party to make the survey for the Dayton settlement. When not surveying, he wrote in the recorder's office.
April 10, 1796, he arrived in Dayton with the first party of settlers that came. This year he raised a good crop of corn at Dayton and sold out his possessions in Cincinnati, but sirnk the price of his lots. Most of his corn was destroyed and he was about $40.00 in debt. He gave "$80.00 for a yoke of oxen and one of them was shot, and $20.00 for a cow and she died."
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SETTLEMENT OF DAYTON.
In the fall of the year he went with Israel Ludlow and William C. Schenck to survey the United States military lands between the Scioto and Muskingum Rivers. "We had deep snow," he says, "covered with crust; the weather was cold and still, so that we could kill but little game and were twenty-nine days without bread and nearly all that time without salt and sometimes very little to eat. We were five days, seven in company, on four meals, and they, except the last, scanty. They consisted of a turkey, two young raccoons, and the last day some rabbits and venison, which we got from some Indians."
From this time until 1802 he farmed in summer, and in winter went out surveying, kept books, wrote in the recorder's office at Cincinnati, where one winter he also studied surveying; or assisted the clerk of the Ohio legislature, or made out the list of taxable persons and their property. August 28, 1800, he married Mary Whitten, daughter of John and Phebe Whitten, who lived in Wayne township. This year he was appointed surveyor of Dayton township. He had been forced to sell his preemption rights to out-lots, but in 1801, when land offices were opened and commissioners to examine claims were appointed, he succeeded in getting certificates for 160 acres and for some lots in Dayton, which he afterwards got patented. He built a cabin on his quarter section, and as far as his health would permit, devoted himself to farming. This quarter section is now included within the corporation of Dayton and has proved a valuable property to his descendants.
Benjamin Van Cleve, though self-educated, was a man of much information and became a prominent and influential citizen. In the winter of 1799-1800 he taught in the block house, the first school opened in Dayton. From the organization of Montgomery County in 1803 till his death in 1821 he was clerk of the court. He was the first postmaster of Dayton and served from 1804 till 1821. In 1805 he was one of the incorporators of the Dayton Library. In 1809 he was appointed by the legislature a member of the first board of trustees of Miami University. He was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church.
Benjamin Van Cleve's valuable and interesting journal, only a small part of which has been printed, contains almost all the early documentary history of Dayton that is now in existence. The files of Dayton news- papers 1808-1821, fortunately, preserved by him and presented to the Public Library by his son, John W. Van Cleve, furnish the largest part of the material for that period in the history of the town now obtainable.
Mr. Van Cleve's graphie description in his journal of St. Clair's 1 defeat is considered the best account of that terrible rout and massacre ever written and has been published many times. His manuscript journal,
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HISTORY OF DAYTON.
written for the "instruction and entertainment of his children," is now in the possession of his great grandson, Mr. R. Fay Dover, of Dayton. It is written in a beautiful hand, as legible as copper-plate, and is adorned with a neatly executed plan of Fort Defiance, drawn and colored by the author. He had five children, one of whom died young. John Whitten Van Cleve, his eldest child, was born June 27, 1801, and died at Dayton, September 6, 1858. IIe had three daughters. Henrietta Maria married first Samuel B. Dover, and after his death Joseph Bond. Mary Cornelia married James Andrews. Sarah Sophia married David C. Baker. Mary Van Cleve, their mother, died December 28, 1810. Benjamin Van Cleve died November 29, 1821.
Captain William Van Cleve, brother of Benjamin, was born near Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1777. He was married twice, and by his first wife, Effie Westfall, had several children.
At the first call for troops in 1812, he raised a company of riflemen in Dayton, which was ordered to the front in June. From the close of the war until his death, in 1828, he kept a tavern at the junction of War- ren and Jefferson streets. Mary Van Cleve, the sister of Benjamin and William, lived in Dayton from her eleventh year till her death, March 3, 1882, at the age of ninety-five years. Many valuable facts in regard to early times were obtained from her in 1882 by Captain Ashley Brown, from whose gleanings all later historians of Dayton are obliged to borrow. She described the trip on the pirogue from Cincinnati, remem- bered, in 1799 and 1800, attending the school taught by her brother in the block house on the Main Street bank of the Miami, and was familiar with events happening in every stage in the progress of the town during the first eighty-five years of its history. She was married twice-in 1804 to John McCain, by whom she had ten children, and in 1826 to Robert Swaynie. She had no children by her second marriage.
William Gahagan was a native of Pennsylvania, but of Irish parent- age. He was a soldier in Wayne's legion, and came West in 1793, serving with the army till the peace in 1795. Benjamin Van Cleve and he were friends and comrades, and in the summer of 1794 made a trip together to Fort Massac, with contractors' goods. They were also both of the party who went, under the command of Captain Dunlap, to survey the Mad River lands. He removed in 1804 or 1805 to a tract of land south of Troy, called Gahagan's Prairie, which he owned. Here his wife died, and he married Mrs. Tennery. He died about 1845 in Troy.
The McClures, after living in Dayton four or five years, removed to HIoney Creek, Miami County. Of Solomon Goss, Thomas Davis, William Chenowith, James Morris, and Daniel Ferrell little is known.
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SETTLEMENT OF DAYTON.
Abraham Grassmire was a German and unmarried. He was a very useful member of the little community, helping to make the first looms owned in Dayton, and showing much ingenuity in contriving conveniences not easily obtained by pioneer housekeepers.
John Dorough was the owner of a mill on Mad River, five miles northeast of Dayton, afterward known as the Kneisly mills.
Colonel George Newcom was born in Ireland, but emigrated to Delaware with his father and mother in 1775. He moved to Cincinnati about 1794, and, as before stated, to Dayton in 1796. Jane, daughter of George and Mary Newcom, was born at Dayton April 14, 1800, at her father's tavern, on the corner of Main Street and Monument Avenue. She was married in 1819 to Nathaniel Wilson. Colonel Newcom, as he was usually called, served as a soldier in Wayne's campaign against the Indians, and also in the war of 1812. He was sheriff of the county, State senator, member of the assembly, and was highly esteemed by the whole community. His first wife died in 1834, and in 1836 he married Elizabeth Bowen, who died in 1850. Colonel Newcom died February 25, 1853.
William Newcom, younger brother of George, was born about 1776. He died at Dayton from the effects of hardships and exposure during the war of 1812, in which he served as a soldier.
William Hamer was a native of Maryland, and was born about 1750. Mr. Hamer was a Methodist local preacher. He was the first minister who preached in the settlement, and as soon as his cabin was finished, began to hold services there.
As Jerome Holt, D. C. Cooper, and Robert Edgar arrived in the summer of 1796, they may be properly numbered among the original settlers of Dayton.
Jerome Holt was a brother-in-law of Benjamin Van Cleve, and they had been partners in Cincinnati. When John Van Cleve was killed, he assisted Benjamin in his first efforts to provide for the family. His wife, Ann Van Cleve, was born in Monmouth County, New Jersey, July 30, 1775, and died in 1858, in Van Buren Township, where the Holts settled in 1797. He was appointed constable of Dayton Township in 1800, and was elected sheriff of Montgomery County in 1809. From 1810-1812 he was Colonel of the Fifth Regiment of militia. The following order was issued in 1812 by R. J. Meigs, governor of Ohio:
"HEADQUARTERS, DAYTON, May 26, 1812.
"Captain Van Cleve's company of riflemen will march to the frontier of the State west of the Miami under the direction and charge of Colonel Holt. Colonel Ilolt will assist the frontier inhabitants in erecting block
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HISTORY OF DAYTON.
houses in suitable places and adopt any mode he may think best for the protection of the frontier and the continuance of the settlements."
The men were encamped at Adams' prairie, near Hole's Creek.
Daniel C. Cooper was born in Morris County, New Jersey, November 20, 1773. He and one brother constituted the whole family. Mr. Cooper came to Cincinnati about 1793, as agent for Jonathan Dayton, of New Jersey, who was interested in the Symmes purchase. He obtained employment as a surveyor, and his business gave him an opportunity to examine lands and select valuable tracts for himself. Little is known of his history for the first year or two after he came to Ohio.
In 1794 and 1795 he accompanied the surveying parties led by Colonel Israel Ludlow through the Miami valley. As a preparation for the settlement of Dayton, he, by the direction of the proprietors, in Sep- tember, 1795, marked out a road from Fort Hamilton to the mouth of Mad River, cutting a narrow track through the brush, so that horses and wagons could pass over it. During the fall and winter he located one thousand acres of fine land near and in Dayton. In the summer of 1796 he settled here, building a cabin at' the southeast corner of Monument Avenue and Jefferson Street.
About 1798 he moved out to his cabin, on his farm south of Dayton. Here, in the fall of 1799, he built a distillery, "corn cracker" mill, and a saw mill, and made other improvements.
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He married about 1803 Mrs. Sophia Greene Burnet, a young and very beautiful woman. She was born in Rhode Island in 1780. Her father, Charles Greene, was a member of the Ohio Company, and emigrated with his family to Marietta in 1788. G. W. Burnet, Mrs. Cooper's first husband, was a young Cincinnati lawyer, a brother of Judge Jacob Burnet, who died suddenly in 1801 by the roadside, of consumption, while traveling on horseback to Marietta, with his wife and Thomas Ewing, afterwards United States Senator and Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. and Mrs. D. C. Cooper had several children, but all died young, except David Zeigler, born November 8, 1812. He died December 4, 1836, leaving a widow, but no children.
St. Clair, Dayton, Wilkinson, and Ludlow, on account of Symmes' inability to complete his purchase from the United States, and the high price charged by the government for land, were obliged to relinquish their Mad River purchase. Soon after the original proprietors retired, Mr. Cooper purchased preemption rights, and made satisfactory arrangements with land owners. Many interests were involved, and the transfer was a work of time. He was intelligent and public spirited, and to his enlarged views, generosity, integrity, and business capacity much of the present
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SETTLEMENT OF DAYTON.
prosperity of the city is due. He induced settlers to come to Dayton by. donations of lots, gave lots and money to schools and churches, provided ground for county buildings, graveyard, and a public common, now known as Library Park, and built the only mills erected in Dayton during the first ten years of its history.
He sold his mills and farm south of town to Colonel Robert Patterson in 1804, and from that date till his death lived in his "elegant mansion of hewn logs," on the southwest corner of First and Ludlow streets.
Mr. Cooper was a very prominent and influential man in the State. In 1804, and again in 1807 and 1813, he was elected a member of the lower house of the legislature. In 1808, 1809, 1815, and 1816, he was elected State senator.
He was appointed justice of the peace for Dayton Township October 4, 1799, and served till May 1, 1803, the date of the formation of the county. In 1810 and 1812 he was president of the select council of Dayton. After he sold his farm'and mills to Colonel Patterson, he built, in 1805, a saw mill on First Street, near Sears, and flour and fulling mills at the head of Mill Street in 1805 and 1809. In 1812 he built a saw mill on Fifth Street, which stood till 1847. In 1806 he built one of the first two brick stores erected in Dayton, and opened a stock of goods there in partnership with John Compton.
When he died his affairs were somewhat involved, but by prudent and conscientious management of his property, the executors, II. G. Phillips and James Steele, relieved the estate from embarrassment, and it henceforth steadily increased in value. Every improvement of this large property benefited the city.
Mr. Cooper died July 13, 1818. His death is said to have been the result of an accident. A large bell, ordered for the Presbyterian Church on the corner of Second and Ludlow streets, in which he was much inter- ested, having arrived at his store, on the corner of Main and First streets, he put it in a barrow and wheeled it himself to the newly-erected building. The exertion was too much for his strength, and he ruptured a blood vessel.
A few years after Mr. Cooper's death, his widow married General Fielding Loury, of Dayton. They had one son, named for his father, who served as a major in the army during the rebellion and was afterwards postmaster of Dayton. Mrs. General Loury died May 17, 1826.
Robert Edgar was born at Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia, February 8, 1770. He settled in Dayton in 1796, a few weeks after the founders of the town arrived. September 17, 1798, he married Mrs. Margaret Gillespie Kirkwood. She was a native of Philadelphia and was born April 6, 1772.
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HISTORY OF DAYTON.
Mr. Edgar located eighty acres of land in section 33, now the southwest corner of Mad River township. Part of it is now within the corporation, at the south end of Wayne Street. He went to housekeeping in a cabin on the southwest corner of Monument Avenue and Mill Street, but after a year or two moved on his farm. Though he engaged in farming, as he had a good deal of mechanical ingenuity he often obtained profitable employment at the Cooper and Robinson mills. In 1805 he moved to town and built a grist mill for D. C. Cooper at the head of Mill Street. He ran it for a few months, but returned to his farm at the close of the winter of 1806.
In 1812 Robert Edgar served as a soldier in a Montgomery County company of mounted rangers. His sword, now in the possession of his son, John F. Edgar, is an interesting relic of the war. During his absence, the whole burden and responsibilty of the management of the farm and their four children rested on his wife, who had the industry, resolution, and hopeful courage of the typical pioneer woman. Mr. and Mrs. Edgar were, from its inauguration in 1800, which he was active in promoting, members of the First Presbyterian Church.
He had a large family, but only five lived beyond childhood. Jane Ellen Edgar married Augustus George; Robert Andrew married Cath- : arine Iddings; Samuel D. married Minerva Jones; John F. married Effie A. Rogers.
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CHAPTER IV.
The Pioneer's Faculty of Adapting Himself to Unaccustomed Surroundings-Temporary Protection-Log Cabins-Trees Cut Down-Scanty Furniture-Pioneer Housekeeping- Illness from Exposure-Scarcity of Cooking Utensils-Wooden, Pewter and Horn Dishes and Spoons-No Lamps-Light and Heat from the Open Fire-Cheerful Winter Evenings-Scarcity of Food-Venison, Game, Wild Birds' Eggs and Wild Honey-Corn . the Principal Article of Food-Varieties of Corn Bread-Difficulty of Making Meal- Substitutes for Mills-Dearness of Provisions Brought from Cincinnati-Flour Four- teen Dollars Per Barrel-Clothes, Moccasins and Harness Made of Deer Skin-Caps of Raccoon and Rabbit Skin-Settlers Often Made Their Own Leather-The Pioneer's Dress - Home-made Linen, Flannel and Linseys-The "Faculty " of the Pioneer Women-Pioneers Wholly Dependent on Each Other for Society and Assistance -- The Latch-String Always Out-Sports, House Raisings, Corn Shuckings, and Log Rollings -Quiltings-Weddings-Early Marriages -- The Axe and Rifle Equally Indispensable- Wolves-Hunting, Trapping and Fishing-Settlers on the Town Plat-Names of Streets -Boundaries of the Town-Gullies and Ravines-Hazel Thickets Spread Over Nearly All the Town-The Country Thickly Wooded-Three Cabins on Monument Avenue Constituted Dayton in 1796-Houses Built Near the River Because It Was Supposed to be Navigable-People Usually Drank River Water-Prairies Within the Town-The Communal Corn Field West of Wilkinson Street-First Winter Mild and Pleasant --- Out of Door Work-Dayton the Rallying Place in Case of Danger from Indians- Jerome Holt, D. C. Cooper, and Robert Edgar Arrive-A Good Crop Gathered in 1797- The Growth of New Vegetables Eagerly Watched-Contented with Their Situation, Poor as It Was.
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"THE pioneers had the happy faculty of quickly and cheerfully adapting 1 themselves to new and uncomfortable surroundings. They were skilled in the occupations peculiar to each sex, and soon supplied themselves with dwellings and with the bare necessaries of life, though they had few tools and little material to work with.
As a temporary protection from the weather, the men, as soon as they arrived at the mouth of Mad River, built with poles against a log or bank, three-sided huts or shanties, roofed with skins or bark and open towards the fire, which was made outside. Then they began at once to fell timber for their log cabins, which were usually a story and a half high and contained one room and a loft. A ladder led to the loft, which was floored with loose clap-boards. They had clap-board roofs, held down by weight-poles, swinging doors on wooden hinges, and wooden latches, which were rarely fastened.
The chimneys were made of sticks and mud. Wooden pins took the place of nails or spikes, which could not be obtained. Often there was no floor but the ground, but sometimes puncheons were put down. A
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HISTORY OF DAYTON ..
piece of greased paper, fastened over an opening cut between the logs, served as a window, for they had no glass. The chinks between the logs and the interior of the chimneys, to prevent their catching fire, were daubed with clay; a few wooden pegs and shelves were put up, and the house was finished. The paper windows were not fastened in, nor the cabins daubed and chinked till winter. Sometimes the cabins remained doorless, and windowless, and without being chinked the year round, and yet the inmates survived and were healthy.
After or before the cabin was built, the trees for some distance around were girdled and left to die a slow death, as they interfered with the cultivation of the soil and also concealed skulking Indians. Then a few acres were grubbed for a corn and potato patch.
The cabins were scantily furnished with tables, shelves, benches, and three-legged stools made of split slabs, supported by round legs, and usually manufactured by the master of the house. The editor of the American Pioneer says that "it was absolutely necessary to have three- legged stools, as four legs of anything could not all touch the floor at the same time." Puncheons were not as level and smooth as modern hard wood floors. Buckeye and beechwood were often used for furniture and other household articles. In eight or ten years these huts, as they would be called at the present day, gave place to comfortable frame or brick houses.
The pioneer women endured many hardships, but the housekeeping, sewing, and washing and ironing must have been light. Their ward- robes were scanty, and there were no carpets to sweep, no books or ornaments to dust, no paint or windows to wash in the small cabin with its one room and loft. But they suffered from lack of what we regard as the necessaries and comforts of life, and exposure and miasma, caused by the cultivation of the rich, new soil, produced the dreaded ague, which made many of them old before their time. But a majority of the pioneers lived to an advanced age in the enjoyment of good health.
Often there were but one or two cooking utensils in the house, but these were sufficient to cook the meat and corn bread, and occasional dish of fresh vegetables which constituted their meals. Doddridge, in his "Notes on Virginia," gives the following enumeration of a pioneer's table furniture: "Some old pewter dishes and plates; the rest wooden bowls or trenchers, or gourds and hard shelled squashes. A few pewter spoons much battered about the edges were to be seen at some tables. The rest were made of horn. If knives were scarce, the deficiency was made up by the scalping knives, which were carried in sheathes suspended from the belt of the hunting shirt."
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PIONEER LIFE.
Bear skins spread on the floor were comfortable substitutes in the western cabins for rugs, mattresses and blankets. They had no lamps, but the hickory log fires lighted, as well as comfortably warmed, the small cabins. The open wood fire, with its huge back log, front log and central mass of lighter and more combustible fuel, was a work of art, which only skillful and experienced hands could properly construct.
The family made a pleasant picture gathered around the glowing fire-place in the long winter evenings. The women occupied themselves with sewing, knitting, spinning, preparing fruit for drying or cooking, and platting straw for hats. An early Dayton paper commends the straw bonnets made by a neighboring farmer's wife. The men busied them- selves, we are told by pioneers who wrote of these early times in Ohio, stemming or twisting tobacco, shelling corn for the hand-mills, making or mending articles for the house or farm, and cleaning guns and running bullets. They had plenty of nuts gathered from neighboring trees to regale themselves with when they rested from their work. No doubt Benjamin Van Cleve and other intelligent Dayton settlers, as is recorded of Mr. Williams, of Belmont County, or Mr. Dunham, the Ames pioneer, when so fortunate as to obtain a "nourishing book," read aloud far into the night to their industrious families, the fingers flying all the faster because the mind was pleasantly occupied and entertained.
The frontiersman often tired of his steady, though varied diet of venison, bear's meat, rabbits, squirrels, wild turkeys, ducks, geese, quails and pheasants, the dainties of the city epicure, but it was a difficult matter to procure anything else to eat. Sometimes, when too busy in their fields and gardens to hunt, they had a limited supply of even game. They had in the season all the wild turkey, goose and duck eggs, gathered from nests in the woods, that they needed, and wild honey was found in hollow trunks of trees or in the ground at their roots.
Corn was the principal article of food and from it many delicious dishes and varieties of bread now seldom seen were made. The making of hoe-cake, ash-cake, johnny-cake, dodgers and pone is a lost art since the open fire-place gave way to the cooking stove and range, and many another wild, woodland flavor vanished with it. Mush caten with gravy, or with bear's oil, or with maple molasses, or mush and milk, was one of the regular articles of diet. Benjamin Van Cleve speaks of the relish with which the big pot of mush and milk was eaten, which was all the surveyors of Dayton found at Cunningham's on their arrival there, after thirty-four hours of fasting, traveling and surveying.
It was not easy to get the corn ground into meal in a country where no mills had been built. Probably the Daytonians, like the Marietta peo-
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HISTORY OF DAYTON.
ple, sometimes parched it and ground it in large coffee mills. But it was usually pounded in a hominy block and then sifted through a sieve. The coarse portion was used for hominy and the finer as meal. Sometimes it was grated by hand; or it was pounded by a stone pestle attached to a spring pole in a stump mortar, which was made by burning a round hole in the top of a stump. A welcome invention was the hand mill made of two stones, twenty inches in diameter. It was worked by a pole in a socket, one end of the pole being attached to the floor overhead and the other to the edge of the upper stone. One person turned the stone, while another fed corn into the "eye." It took four or five hours to grind enough meal to supply a small family for one day. These mills were afterwards arranged to run by horse power, and wheat was sometimes ground in them. The next improvement was small water mills.
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