USA > Ohio > Defiance County > History of Defiance County, Ohio. Containing a history of the county; its townships, towns, etc.; military record; portraits of early settlers and prominent men; farm views, personal reminiscences, etc > Part 4
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HISTORY OF DEFIANCE COUNTY.
President of the council, in place of Henry Vandenburg.
The House of Representatives at the third ses- sion of the Territorial Legislature was composed of the following gentlemen:
Ephraim Cutler, of Washington County. William Rufus Putnam, Washington County.
Moses Miller, Hamilton County.
Francis Dunlavy, Hamilton County. Jeremiah Morrow, Hamilton County. John Ludlow, Hamilton County. John Smith, Hamilton County. Jacob White, Hamilton County.
Daniel Reeder, Hamilton County. Joseph Darlington, Adams County. Nathaniel Massie, Adams County. Zenas Kimberly, Jefferson County. John Milligan, Jefferson County. Thomas McCune, Jefferson County. Edward Tiffin, Ross County. Elias Langham, Ross County. Thomas Worthington, Ross County.
Francois Chabert de Joncaire , Wayne County. George McDougal, Wayne County.
Jonathan Schieffelin, Wayne County.
Edward Paine, Trumbull County.
The officers of the House during its third session were as follows:
Speaker of the House-Edward Tiffin. Clerk-John Reily.
Door-keeper-Edward Sherlock.
The third session of the Legislature continued from the 24th of November, 1801, until the 23d of January, 1802, when it adjourned to meet at Cincin- nati on the fourth Monday of November following, but that fourth session was never held, for reasons made obvious by subsequent events.
Congress, on the 30th of April, 1802, had passed an " act to enable the people of the eastern division of the territory northwest of the River Ohio to form a constitution and State Government, and for the ad- mission of such State into the Union on an equal footing with the original States, and for other pur- poses." In pursuance of the aforesaid enactment, an election had been ordered and held throughout the eastern portion of the territory, and members of a Constitutional Convention chosen, who met at Chilli- cothe on the 1st day of November, 1802, to perform the duty assigned them. Edward Tiffin, Esq., of Ross County, was chosen as President, and on taking his seat in the chair delivered the following address: " GENTLEMEN: I beg you to be assured that I duly appreciate the honor you have conferred in selecting me to preside over your deliberations on this im- portant occasion; the duties of the chair will, I pre- sume, be pleasing and easy, for, from the known
character of the gentlemen who compose this conven- tion, there can be no doubt but that the utmost pro- priety and decorum will be observed, without the aid of interference from the chair. Whatever rules you may adopt for the government of the convention, shall be strictly observed; and in every decision which may be required from the chair the utmost impartiality shall be evinced."
Thomas Scott, Esq., was chosen as Secretary and William McFarland Assistant Secretary.
The convention continued in session twenty-nine days, adjourning on the 29th of November, 1802, having formed the first constitution of the State, which met with the approbation of the people, and under which they lived and prospered till A. D. 1851, when the new constitution was adopted.
When the time had arrived for commencing the fourth session of the Territorial Legislature, the aforesaid Constitutional Convention was in session, and had evidently nearly completed its labors, as it adjourned on the 29th of said month. The members of the Legislature (eight of whom being also members of the Convention), therefore, seeing that a speedy termination of the Territorial Government was in- evitable, deemed it inexpedient and unnecessary to hold the proposed session.
The Territorial Government was ended by the or- ganization of the State Government, March 3, 1803, pursuant to the provisions of a constitution formed at Chillicothe, November 29, 1802, by the following- named gentlemen: Joseph Darlinton, Israel Don- alson and Thomas Kirker, of Adams County; James Caldwell and Elijah Woods, of Belmont County; Philip Gatch and James Sargent, of Clermont Coun- ty; Henry Abrams and Emanuel Carpenter, of Fair- field County; John W. Browne, Charles Willing Byrd, Francis Dunlavy, William Goforth, John Kit- chel, Jeremiah Morrow, John Paul, John Reily, John Smith and John Wilson, of Hamilton County; Ru- dolph Bair, George Humphrey, John Milligan, Na- than Updegraff, and Bazaliel Wells, Jefferson Coun- ty; Michael Baldwin, Edward Tiffin, James Grubb, Thomas Worthington, and Nathaniel Massie, of Ross County; David Abbot and Samuel Huntington, of Trumbull County; Ephraim Cutler, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Rufus Putnam, and John McIntire, of Washington County.
Joseph Darlinton, of Adams County; Francis Dunlavy, Jeremiah Morrow and John Smith, of Ham ilton County; John Milligan, of Jefferson County; Edward Tiffin and Thomas Worthington, of Ross County; and Ephraim Cutler, of Washington Coun- ty, were the eight gentlemen of the last Territorial Legislature that were also elected members of the Constitutional Convention.
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HISTORY OF DEFIANCE COUNTY.
CHAPTER II.
GEOLOGY.
CONTRIBUTED BY II. N. PRENTICE.
TN preparing this paper for the history of Defiance County, it is beyond my hopes, as it is above and beyond my ability, to enrich the literature of our geology, or add much of interest or value to the his- tory of Defiance County. Moreover, the task seems the less necessary and the less encouraging, as our fields of geology have already been passed over by an able corps of engineers sent out by the State, made up of gentlemen of known ability, educated and trained expressly for the work, and of whom it may in truth be said discharged their responsible and im- portant duties with the ability and fidelity commen- surate with the trust, conferring honor upon them- selves and rendering a lasting and important service to the State; and I might be excused for mentioning, in this connection, that in view of the value of their reports, with their accompanying maps and charts, it is to be regretted that so few of them are to be found in neat and conveniently arranged libraries, while so many are left to gather dust and mold in the book room in the basement of the State capitol.
OUR SEDIMENTARY ROCKS.
Of this class of rocks our geologists give us but a meager complement on our side of the anticlinal arch. It seems that one corner of the State has lost, by erosion, all our carboniferous rocks, if, indeed, we ever possessed any. Therefore, we have no coal meas- ures, no carboniferous limestones or conglomerates. With these and the Waverly group, and the Erie shales gone, we are brought down to the Huron shales, on which our drift beds rest. Below the Huron shales, in a descending order, we have the Hamilton group, the carboniferous limestones, the Oriskany sandstones, the water lime, the Niagara, the Clinton and the Cincinnati groups, which ends the Upper Silurian system, and carries us down upon the metamorphosed rocks-the Laurentian and Huronian -of the Eozoic age. But as our sedimentary rocks are so ably and so thoroughly written up elsewhere, it seems like a waste of space and a misapplica- tion of time again to go over the ground with them here. Not so, however, with
OUR DRIFT GEOLOGY.
Every well that is bored, every railroad cutting, every cellar that is excavated-in fact, almost every
furrow that is turned by the farmer's plow, develops some new phase in our surface geology. Hence, our drift groups present a feature in our geology that is deserving of more than a passing notice. Indeed, from the fact of these groups being immediately iden- tified with the history of Defiance County, and be- cause they form one of the most eventful and impor- tant chapters in the geological history of our globe, they are deserving a far better mention than my limited knowledge of our geology will allow me to bestow upon them. As is well known, Defiance County is embraced within the so-called drift dis- tricts of the Maumee Valley. The coating of earth that serves to conceal and to level up and smooth over the uneven surfaces of the older and deeply eroded underlining rocks of our valley, has, un- doubtedly, an ice origin, and made up-in part, at least-of material foreign to this locality, and trans- ported-drifted-hundreds of miles, from Northern New York the highlands of Canada and the LakeSuper- ior regions. Among our drift material we find sands, gravels-coarse and fine-stones of all shapes and sizes, bowlders of red and gray granites, quartz, gneiss, together with black granite bowlders and cop- per- bearing rocks from Lake Superior. While these, for the most part, may be considered as foreign repre- sentatives, we may safely conclude that our own rocks, severally and collectively, have been drawn upon for drift material, and, judging from the char- acter and preponderance of blue clay in their com- position, one would suppose that the Huron shales had furnished their full quota. The general appear. ance of these groups would indicate that they have been ground up, stirred together and worked into a mass of mud, and dumped from some immense trans- port into a " higgledy -piggledy, pell-mell mass." as Mr. Geikie is pleased to term it, with but little reference to order or arrangement; and, if the stony record be not deceptive, at different times, and at periods wide- ly separated from each other. Hence. these drift groups have ever been an enigma to the geologist wherever found-not only confounding the novice. but a puzzle even to old veterans in the field. Dr. Newberry says of the drift: " While it is true of other groups that a few words may suffice to convey a clear idea of them, or, at least, the few things we have learned of them, the drift phenomena are too com-
22
HISTORY OF DEFIANCE COUNTY.
plicated. too little known, to be so summarily dis- missed." In truth, it may be said of the drift, that in many respects it is even yet an unsolved problem- strange and intricate. Now, the mode of laying down the sedimentary rocks that form the frame-work of our globe, is simple and easily comprehended; the mechanical assorting of the materials, the manner of their deposition and the order of their superposition, are all in keeping with the known principles of cos- mical law, and in harmony with the geological idea, yet the drift presents a wide and strange departure. Here the chain of sequence of events seems to be broken-the order and harmony destroyed.
But, after all, as our geologists would have us be- lieve, these seemingly incongruous appearances pre- sented by the drift beds have much of reality abont them. Their confusion becomes less and less confused the more they are studied and the better we become acquainted with them; so that these seeming- ly disordered groups are, in reality, not so disorderly as a first sight would indicate. Our geologists grant them distinct groupings in a manner as other rocks. The first, or principal, division separates them into two groups, denominated the upper and lower drift. The lower drift goes by the name of tile or bowlder clay, and is characterized as the unmodified drift, and presents itself as a tough, waxy blue clay, inter- spersed, more or less, with belts and heaps of sand, gravels and bowlders-for travelers -- with traces of coal, traces of wood, and occasionally bits of bone. The bowlders being more or less rounded and polished and sometimes scratched and grooved, in- dicating the rough usage they have been subjected to as graving tools in graving the rock over which they were forced, while being firmly held in the folds of the great ice raft that transported them hither. When these clays form the surface soil -- as in the absence of the upper drift-although possessing all the elements of fertility, they are not in high favor with the farmer, as they yield a reluctant submission to the plow and cultivation, and are not disposed to accept kindly the genial influences of sunshine and rain, and, withal, require a deal of labor and much skillful handling to convert them into acceptable seed beds for farm crops. The lowest of the drift beds rest immediately upon the stratified rocks, some- times, however, with a layer of gravel beneath them. These gravel beds, wherever they occur, are an accept- able find to the well digger, as they are ever water- bearers.
Typical of the upper, or modified drift, is a belt or layer of fine sand, resting on the bowlder clay. These sands, so far as they extend, constitute the res- ervoirs for wells in common use for families, and, when not too much water-worn, and consequently
are rough and angular, serve a useful purpose for mor- tar for plastering houses and for stone and brick work. But often they occur as quicksands, and much too often, and much too quick, at times, for the con- venience or safety of the laborer; and so fine, some- times, are they, and so runney, that some well-diggers say of them that they will run through a crevice where water would hardly make the attempt.
Above, and resting on this belt of sand, is a heavy coating of brown or yellow clay, denominated brick- clay, more or less interspersed with sand and gravel, and not unfrequently a scattering of bowlders, some of which are chiseled and scratched as those in the lower beds. This description proximately, or in a general way, covers the whole ground of the drift beds, wherever found, for they are characteristically alike the world over. Prof. Geikie, a Scotch geolo- gist, who, probably, has given more time and a closer attention to the phenomena of the drift than any man living, says, "After reading a description of the drift beds of New England, I was struck with their close resemblance to those of my own country."
If, however, we go into a minute description, or an ultimate analysis of the arrangement of the sur- face deposits of our Maumee Valley, we will hardly find any one description that will hold good even for the next farm. The borings of one well may differ materially from the borings of the next well, although in close proximity. Indeed, I have observed in De- fiance City a marked difference in two sides of the same cellar; on one side occurred belts of sand, and wedge-shaped beds of gravel that were entirely want- ing on the other side. No wonder, then, that our geologists give these changes and alterations in won- derful profusion and variety. On the whole, the phenomena of the drift are exceedingly interesting, and our drift groups become more and more interest- ing to us the more we learn of them; not alone be- cause of their peculiar characteristics, or because they form our farms and fields-lands whereon we grow our crops, plant our orchards and build our homes-but they become interesting to us because of their antecedents and associations; because they are involved in, and are identified with, the great world- change of which the rocks bear testimony everywhere. It is from their records we read the story of the great ice age, when our summers had shortened and our winters had increased in length and severity, and our hemisphere placed under an Erebus of perpetual winter and ice and snow had swathed the ground as with a winding-sheet of death. Then it was that great glaciers, snow-fed monsters, who make their homes in the bleak regions of the north-grown to continental dimensions by the snow-accumulations of ages-came coursing down the frost-bound slopes and
23
HISTORY OF DEFIANCE COUNTY.
careered over our continent. Slowly but persistently pushing their way onward-pausing for no obstacle -they rasped down the summits of high mountains, and scraped out the basins of great lakes, and with the gathered fragments, chips and rubbish, they in - vaded our valley and further on, till the warmth of the returning summer of the great year ended their career, and they were forced to lay down their rich accumulation of earth and stones they could no longer hold, and retire forever from our valley, and our rocks became clothed with a wealth of soil, from the fertility of whose elements we, at the present day, are gathering the harvest of a profitable agriculture.
GLACIATION.
During the last glacial period, according to Prof. Agassiz, our continent was glaciated from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the extreme north to the lati- tudes of Cincinnati and New York. Moreover, ac- cording to statements, this ice-sheet must have been of enormous dimensions, as were the glaciers that is- sned from it. The great mer de glace that occupied the divide between the St. Lawrence and Hudson's Bay, says Prof. Dana, was 12,000 feet, or more than two and a quarter miles in thickness; while the glacier that passed over the New England States is estimated to have been from 6,000 to 8,000 feet thick. Just how thick or how broad those glaciers were that performed the drift work of our valley, our geologists have failed to give us any very definite idea. Judg- ing from indications, however, they were no pig- mies, even of their kind; and when we come to consider the fact that a sheet of ice 8,000 feet in thickness exerts a pressure of more than two hundred tons upon every square foot of surface, we need not be surprised to learn that the granite summits of the Laurentian Hills were reduced 1,500 feet by the eroding processses practiced upon them by the glacial ice, nor need we be astonished to find huge blocks-rounded and grooved-with lesser stones mixed up in the clays that form the drift groups of our valley; so that if the student finds small stones protruding from the sides of some rail- road cutting, or a bowlder poised on the steeps of a river bank, or perched on some lofty summit, he is not to infer that they are growths, in situ, or that they were dropped from some passing iceberg, but rather that they were carried there by glaciers. For, as Mr. Croll says, "If a glacier can pass over the tops of mountains more than two thousand feet high, it can carry stones and bowlders along with it."
Besides the deep, broad, rock excavations that hold the waters of our great lakes, the tear and wear of our underlying rocks, the deep-wrought channels and depressions they present, together with the piles of
rubbish and heaps of debris with which our valley has evidently been strewn, are but the legitimate re- sults of glacier action. For the reader is not to in- fer from the smooth and even appearance our valley presents, with hardly a hill or hollow to relieve the eye or break the monotony, that its features were never roughened, or its surface never disturbed by moraine inundations, or thrown into hills and de- pressions by moving masses of glacier ice.
EROSION.
Now, as the forces of nature are never idle, ero- sion, or waste of surface, becomes a part of our geol-" ogy, and as our valley has lost eighteen feet of her surface since the close of the last glacial period, and Lake Erie has gained a hundred feet of sediment, it is not hard to anticipate the time when our valley will be carried into the lake, and that basin will be filled to its rim with sedimentary deposits; introducing to the coming hammer-bearer a new feature in our geol- ogy. The principal agents employed in these level- ing processes are frosts, rains, streams and currents, and although ages have been consumed by these leveling agents, yet every day witnesses the altered outline or the eroded surface of some bluff or river bank, caused by the last hard freeze and subsequent thaw, or the last storm that broke against its brow or coursed down its sides. While the tiny stream, as well as the swollen flood, is ever busy with the loosened materials, assorting and arranging them in the order of their several specific gravities, and hurry- ing them away to lower levels, to fill some river chan- nel, or lake basin, or other depression, carrying far- thest the finer clays-held longest in suspension; leaving behind the coarser sorts-sands and gravels; while the grosser kinds-stones and bowlders-may scarcely be moved at all-rolled over, perhaps, or made to occupy lower positions by the removal of the loose earth that served to hold them in position. Thus, for example, the Lower Maumee receives the fine sedi- ment of clay brought down by the upper branches of the stream; at Defiance rests the sands and gravels; while the Upper Maumee, and the higher stretches of the Auglaize, are largely montanic in many locali- ties.
MODIFICATIONS.
Then, again, as, according to theory, during the cold seasons of the glacial period our valley had be- come, to some extent, submerged, and the strong cur- rent set in motion by the increased strength of the northern trades, would, in a like manner, serve to assort the sands from the clays as they were washed from the surface of our soils, dropping the sands ' first, in accordance with their gravities, reserving the fine clay-held longest in suspension-as an outer or
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HISTORY OF DEFIANCE COUNTY. .
upper covering. Thus we can see, or think we can see, just how the broad sheet of sand, with its cover- ing of clay, was laid down over a large surface of Defiance County, stretching, as it does in some direc- tions, far over the territory of our neighbors. But it is not alone with these surface changes that the geolo- gist is chiefly concerned, for these changes and modi- fying processes are going on in all depths of our drift formations. Intercalated beds of sand and gravel become more and more pronounced year by year and day by day, while gravel beds are continually form- ing and increasing in thickness in the channels and depressions of the underlying rocks. These occur- rences are due to the action of water. Rains that fall upon the surface of the ground find their way, by percolation, into these beds, carrying away the lighter clay sediment and fine sands, leaving the clean washed, coarser gravel to accumulate and in- crease at the expense of the beds of clay. "The trouble with our soils is," said a neighboring farmer to me one day, as he was trying to stir up his stub- born clay, "they were not properly stirred and thoroughly mixed." A hint for a more liberal use of long manure and other mechanical appliances for light- ening the soils. Beds of coarse and fine gravels are frequently found in a kind of pocket repositories, deep in the beds of clay, as in and about Bryan, forming excellent repositories for water for wells, as do those gravel beds that lie deep down in the depres- sions of our rocks. Experienced well-diggers tell us that the farther down the bore is extended without striking the rock, the greater the chances for a deep and permanent reservoir of pure water.
THE GREAT SCANDINAVIAN GLACIER.
The wanderings of this great glacier-thanks to the enduring rocks, whose hardened surfaces have been able to hold the imprint of its graving-tools- has been traced by British geologists, from the Scan- dinavian mountains, south over Norway and Sweden, thence in a curve to the right, sweeping westward over Denmark and the British Islands, to its final plunge into the deep waters of the northern Atlantic. Prof. Geikie estimates this glacier to have been 2,000 feet thick, with a breadth of eighty miles, and, when coalesced with the Scottish glacier, its dimensions was such as, in passing over the bed of the German Ocean, to have displaced the entire waters of that sea. Besides, the work performed by the glacier would seem to have been commensurate with its di- mensions; for it is said to have forced its way up the rugged steeps and over the tops of the Scottish hills, that were more than 2,000 feet high, and, in the meantime, performing for that country just what the North American glacier did for us, filled their valleys
and glens with drift material precisely in character- - only differing in constituent material-with our own valley drifts. But how far these glaciers are able to travel is not definitely known. as their wanderings can never be very great in any direction till cut off by the heat of the sun, or broken in pieces by the waters of some deep sea. Those geologists, however, who have given the subject of these glaciers their greatest attention, are of the opinion that they would go on indefinitely, if backed by material aid, however rough or uneven the grounds might be over which they had to travel. Mr. Geikie is of the opinion that the waters of the German Ocean, with an average depth of 160 feet, offered no obstacle to the move- ment of the great Scandinavian glacier, although it was effectually broken to pieces in the deep waters of the Atlantic. Mr. Croll says that " if the waters of Baffin's Bay and Davis Strait were as shallow as the North Sea, those Greenland glaciers would cross upon and over the American continent."
Now, the presence of these glaciers upon our con- tinent would have the effect, as no one need be told, to reduce the temperature of our climate to that of Greenland, and condemn our valley to Arctic steril- ity.
These things being true, then-anomalous as it may appear-we are indebted for the geniality of our climate, and the productiveness of soils, to that great ocean current that flows down from the polar regions, and sweeps its way through Baffin's Bay and Davis Strait into the North Atlantic, and which we are ac. customed to associate in our minds with nothing bet- ter than fleets of icebergs and frozen seas. For when we take into consideration the vast amount of rubbish brought down by the Greenland glaciers and cast into these basins, we can hardly resist the con- clusion that long ago, had not this channel been kept clear by the powerful and persistent efforts of this cur- rent, these basins would have been filled up, permit- ting these glaciers, fed by the thirty-foot annual snows that fall upon Greenland, " to pass upon and over the American continent." Mr. Geikie has this to say of Greenland and its glaciers: " The superfi- cial area of Greenland cannot be less than 750,000 square miles, so that the country is almost continental in its dimensions. Of this great region, only a little strip, extending to 74' north latitude, along the west- ern shore, is sparsely colonized-all the rest is a bleak wilderness of snow and ice. The coasts are deeply indented with numerous bays and fiords or firths, which, when traced inland, are almost invari- ably found to terminate against glaciers. Thick ice frequently appears, too, crowning the exposed sea cliffs, from the edges of which it droops in thick, tongue-like and stalactitic projections, until its own
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