History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio, Part 51

Author: Williams Brothers
Publication date: 1879
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 443

USA > Ohio > Lake County > History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio > Part 51
USA > Ohio > Geauga County > History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio > Part 51

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BURTON has the honor of being the first township settled within the limits of the old county of Geauga. To her also belongs the credit of having produced a Governor and Chief-Justice of the State, and both at the same time, both natives of the same county, birthplace, and nearly related. Her early history has some features of peculiar interest, and she should be treated with as much breadth as our limits will permit.

This township is No. 7 of the seventh range, and lies one tier east and two south of the county-seat, lying between Claridon on the north and Troy on the south, with Middlefield east and Newbury west of her.

STREAMS, SURFACE, SOIL, TIMBER.

The eastern and western branches of the Cuyahoga, one from the northeastern and the other from the northwestern quarter, unite in her southern central region, and flow southerly into Troy, the eastern with a direct course southwesterly, while the western, and much the most beautiful stream, makes many graceful bends and sweeps, and runs into the other and larger quite at right angles. The west receives one considerable affluent, Edson's Mill creek, and two or three smaller. In the southwest section are two considerable natural ponds, which discharge their waters in Bridge creek, in Troy. On lot 40 there is also another laid on the map. From the general elevation of the township, it is seen that these considerable branches of the Cuyahoga must give the surface an interesting and picturesque appearance. Each has high banks with narrow valleys, the eastern bordered with a marsh. Burton square and village, a little north of the actual centre, rests on the high table-land between the two, and has a commanding out- look of all the surrounding country.

In soil Burton is not greatly distinguished from the surrounding country ; has considerable variety. Her narrow valleys are quite fertile, with a sprinkling of sand in her loamy clay. There is some waste-land along the eastern Cuyahoga. Oak, chestnut, and whitewood prevailed in her timber on the more sandy portions, with a predominance of maple and beech elsewhere. In her early history Burton was noted for her orchard productions, annually furnishing apples to the newer settlements of Newbury, Munson, Claridon, Western, Troy, Huntsbury, and more remote sections.

INDIANS.

There was something like a permanent occupancy of the woods of Burton by the natives. They had their village or camp south of the square, on the lower and sheltered ground, where, it is said, they established themselves in 1799, or rather after an absence they returned to that point. Here, near the west end of the bridge over the eastern Cuyahoga, they had a burying-ground, indicative of perma- nency of occupation, at least by the dead, or a considerable mortality. No means seem to have been taken to learn anything of this now interesting people, not even to what tribe they belonged. Linus Brooks calls them Tonawandas, which would indicate they were from the neighborhood of Buffalo. No other authority gives them any name. They were fragments of some of the western tribes, shattered by the awful defeat by Wayne in 1794. " Big Deer" seems to have been a head man among them, and there was the noted George Vincent, of whom I used to hear from the Harmons, early settlers in the northeast part of Mantua. These must have been the same Indians who used to traverse Middlefield to and from their haunts in the swampy woods of Windsor .* A few Indians camping here and there would be known to the whole Reserve, and the uncertain accounts which reach us give a wrong impression of their numbers.

The venerable Elijah Hayes says that while attending the second school kept in Burton in 1803, down by the creek west of the square, the young Indians, with the instinctive hatred of savagery to civilization, doubtless, used to come about and throw stones and clubs against the school-house, and the plucky Charity Hopson, the mistrese, had to go out and drive the young heathen away. The people were too busy taming the wilderness getting food to think of attempting to educate these children of it. The pioneers from New England had only the traditions of the Pequot and Narragansett wars, the wars of King Philip, of Mount Hope, and brought with them no border animosities, and cultivated none but the most amicable relations with these comers and goers on their trails through the

woods. The same tale is told of their flight at the beginning of the war of 1812 by the Burton pioneers, as of other townships, of their being met in the British service by soldiers of the Reserve, of the return of a few of them and their destruction.t

PROPRIETORS' SETTLEMENT.

The township was owned by Titus Street, Turhand Kirtland, William Law, Benjamin Doolittle, and Mr. Barnes. These men seem to have undertaken the first settlement of their own property, and for this purpose they made up a party, numbering some fourteen or fifteen men .. They started carly in the season of 1798, rendezvoused at Schenectady, went up the Mohawk in boats, thence down East, Oneida lake, Oneida river, and the Genessee into Ontario, up this to Gee- round-about bay, where, with a reinforcement of men and a boat, they coasted up the Niagara ; up that, carried their boats around the falls, and so on by the river to Buffalo, where they found but one white man and his family, and where was but their one log house.

At Buffalo the working-party numbered twenty-one, whence they coasted to the mouth of the Conneaut, which they reached the 28th of May, where they separated. Seven of them commenced at the Pennsylvania line to cut a road to the mouth of the Cuyahoga. Later, they went on to Burton to begin an im- provement. They brought two yokes of oxen and two or three cows, the stock being driven on the old Indian trail along the beach. The working-party reached Burton in the summer, and commenced immediately the destruction of the grand chestnut forest that covered the square. It is certain that Thomas Umberfield and his wife, a niece of Mr. Law, accompanied this party. Hickox says that three fami- lies came. He was a son-in-law of Umberfield; married in 1808. That they were Thomas Umberfield's, Isaac Fowler's, and Amariah Beard's, originally from New Haven, but last from the hills of Washington county, New York. As an induce- ment to this great enterprise, each of the stout-hearted women was promised fifty acres of land anywhere in the township. Peter Hitchcock and A. B. Carlton assure me that it was always said in Burton that Mrs. Umberfield was the first white woman who set her foot in the township, and that she received one hundred and sixty acres of land. This may be; and certain it is the others came the same season. These settlers came up Ontario, the Niagara, and Erie, also in open boats, freighted with their goods and implements, with their cattle driven by the working-party. They landed at the mouth of Grand river, on whose banks no tree had been cut, or cabin or tent of civilized man erected. Here a frail cabin of bark was con- structed, to shelter the women and children and store the goods. It is probable that some or all of the Burton working-party joined the settlers here. If they did not, some came with them. Hickox says that two men came from Buffalo to work the boat and return with it.§ Having provided a shelter for the families, the men blazed a road to Burton, underbrushed it on their return, and made it pass- able; constructed " mosquito sleds," a kind of " limber peter," on which they transported their goods and families to their intended homes in the houseless woods. Colgrove says that Umberfield and family were with the working-party, which accords with the Burton legend ; that they reached Burton the last of July, and commenced at once to clear the "town plat,"-square, probably ; that the work was divided into four parts: the northwest was assigned to Umberfield, the southwest to Mr. Law; Kirtland took the southeast, and Andrew Hull's party the southwest. Titus Street had a little over four acres cleared south of the square, and Colonel David Holbrook an equal quantity to the east. These clearings were sowed with wheat. The original seven men, as he says, were joined by others, and after sowing the wheat, they all returned to work on the road, leaving Umberfield sole monarch of the new wheat-field. He says that Um- berfield was joined by Beard. in the fall, who had spent part of the summer in Euclid, where he had a daughter born. He does not mention Fowler at all. That a man by the name of Edwards, who had settled in Mantua, came to Burton with his family and spent the winter, which may be. Captain Edwards was an early settler there. There could have been no wheat sowed that year. Nothing is clearer than that the square was not cleared, nor any considerable quantity of

t See Mrs. Pike's version of this story in the sketch of Troy.

See Colgrove in Geauga Democrat, August 30, written in 1854, and doubtless taken from some of the survivors.

¿ Hickox, Geauga Democrat, December 1, 1869, and following numbers.

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. See Middlefield.

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land. With the force and time it could not have been. We shall find men clearing the square years later, and way-worn women, on their first arrival, weeping at the desolate appearance of piled logs and dead trees that encumbered it. I think Hickox, who reached Burton in 1804, and four years later married a daughter of Thos. Umberfield, and spent the most of his life there, is the more reliable. He says these three families came together from the same place; that Mrs. Umberfield took her fifty acres adjoining the square on the west ; Mrs. Fow- ler hers where Gilmore's mills were subsequently built; and Mrs. Beard hers just west of the residence of Mrs. Governor Ford. He is probably mistaken as to their all going together. He says that the first clearing made in Burton was a small patch in the northwest corner of the township where the timber was thin. Here Fowler underbrushed and girdled a small plat, and sowed and planted a few vegetables, as he would not have done had the square, and eight acres besides, been already cleared. This small opening was afterwards known as the " Burton garden." He adds that "none of them were hunters, and they would have starved that winter but for the Indians, who fed them till the next fall, when their crops matured."

He was mistaken about the Indians, for it is said, on good authority, that they came the next fall after, 1799. Umberfield built his cabin down by the spring, near the cheese-factory. We are not told where the others stood, nor of the life lived in them,-the sorrows and solitude of the winter, the howling of the wolves, and the screeching of panthers, nor of the return of spring. No one has told of the social feuds,-how Mrs. Beard invited Mrs. Fowler to drink sassafras tea, and omitted Mrs. Umberfield and Mrs. Edwards, who retorted by holding a " real bohea" seance of their own, nor what was said about it. Of course the highest society of the hill had its " they says." The cabins were sheltered by the forest, clothes were worn with care, bones were picked clean, broken, and the marrow extracted-we can imagine; that the woods were explored for roots, and perhaps bark, for nuts and wild plums in their season, we know. That any word or echo of the far-away world reached the forest recesses which they haunted rather than lived in, has not been verified to us .. Colgrove says that Jonathan Brooks and the two Ponds came that winter, and cut a road in the north part of the township, which is possible. His son, Linus, does not mention it. He says Brooks left Connecticut for the Reserve, April 1, 1798, in company with Pond, and that he understood they went into the service of Atwater, engaged in surveying, in which he mastered all woodcraft. He was in Mantua in 1800, and went to Burton to live in 1801. Colgrove says that during the winter Beard went with oxen to Mentor, where wheat had been raised, and procured some, and Edwards invented a hand-mill and ground it. There was a heavy fall of snow in October, and sap would not run till April, so it was dreary enough.

This must have been the winter that Beard paid twenty-five cents a pound for bear-meat, and I am inclined to think that Jonathan Brooks and Phineas Pond made their excursion out of Egypt for corn, this winter. They could not have carried the corn from Burton, for there was none there; nor would they have gone to Youngstown to get it ground the next winter, for the Beard mill was built the summer and fall of 1799.

Brooks, whose training with the surveyors had developed a natural aptitude for woodcraft,-a slight, wiry, well-made man of twenty-two, clear-headed, alert, and full of expedients,-at the darkest hour volunteered with Pond to go to Poland, some sixty miles, buy what corn they could pack, return to Youngstown, where it could be ground, and bring it to the famishing women and children wasting and waiting in the woods of Burton hill. No youth of to-day would dream of the exploit, no one could have achieved the enterprise. Following the surveyors' lines, they reached Poland, secured the corn, returned to Youngstown, had it ground, and took the trail for Burton. Night came on in the savage, gloomy woods. Even Brooks was at fault. The less hardy, less-hearted Pond, overcome, sank in the snow, unwilling and unable to make further effort. Brooks, brave and lithe, cleared away the snow, with ready flint, steel, and tinder lit a fire, for which he found dry twigs, brush, and broken limbs of fallen trees, and soon its cheerful flame dispelled the night from the charm of its warm circle. His ready hatchet chipped a broad piece of wood from the body of a small tree, and with the water of melted snow he mixed a quantity of the meal, which he baked on that chip, and presented it, hot, to his famishing, fainting comrade. Hope and courage came back to him. They passed the night in that camp, and the next day carried meal and joy to the cabins on the hill. We are to hear a good deal of this brave youth. Later, as his son Linus says, he backed a hand-mill from Cleveland, which weighed forty-five pounds,-the first, he says, in Burton .*

Mr. Colgrove says that Brooks and Pond killed two deer during the winter, which was quite all the meat they had. The Indian hunters had not then returned to their old camp.

. Letter of L. B., Geauga Leader, July 7, 1876, further quoted.

The Fowlers, from Guilford, New Haven county, Connecticut, came to Ohio with the surveying-party which went to Burton. Mr. Fowler remained a year or more, and returned to Connecticut and married Aseneth Hopson, and returned to Burton, arriving there, it is believed, in May, 1799. He located first and opened a boarding-house a little south of Burton Square, near a spring some rods south of W. J. Ford's present residence. Mrs. Fowler was given twenty acres of land, in consideration of labor performed in boarding the workmen of this party. This was situated across from the fair-ground ; they resided on this for a time, and sold their interest to Peter Hitchcock, Sen. He next purchased one hundred and sixty acres on the west side of the road, opposite the residence of Colonel Henry Ford. He exchanged this with Jonathan Brooks for the same number of acres of land in lot No. 3, and upon which he settled in the fall of 1802. His oldest son, Hiram, who was born March 11, 1800, informs us that he remembers well the circumstance of the family's moving out to this place. Here the father died July 14, 1811. The mother married Israel Coe in the fall of 1812, and removed to Rootstown, Portage county, soon after. Of the children of Mr. Fow- ler we find that the eldest married Minerva Stone, and located in Munson about January 1, 1831. The next child, Milo, was born January 13, 1802. He went in company with the above brother, and built a house near the present one of Hiram Fowler. (See Munson.)

We are told by Colgrove that two children were born in Burton in the spring of 1799, one to the Umberfields and one to Mrs. Hunnis, who only finds this scant mention.

This was true of Mrs. Umberfield and Lottie, Mrs. Howard was the child re- ferred to. Mr. Colgrove says, also, that Eli Fowler was at Burton in the summer of 1798, returned east in the autumn with three or four men, and that they brought a load of provisions for the colonists the next spring, which they landed at Grand River; that when they reached Burton they found eighteen persons there, which is very probable, and that other accessions were made that summer. Their coming was like a special providence. "The 4th" of that summer was patrioti- cally celebrated among the logs, stumps, and girdled trees on the square. It seems that in the fall of that year Eli Fowler, with a cart and oxen, accompanied by his brother Isaac, and Mr. Umberfield, pushed off into Pennsylvania for sup- plies. At Griersburg they secured four sugar-kettles, some oats and flax-seed, and a few sheep and swine. It is also said that cats were secured from somewhere, and sold readily at a dollar each.t Dogs were plenty and useful, as in all new communities where they are trained and cared for.

The spring of 1799 was signalized by the arrival of Ephraim Clark, a mill- wright, and his family, with his son Isaac and family ; also Nathan Parks, Henry Parks, Benjamin Babcock, Eli Hayes, and Edmund Hubbell. Some of these came to assist Clark in erecting what came to be known as Beard's mills, on the west branch of the Cuyahoga. Seth Hayes must have come the same year. Colonel Jedediah Beard about the same time, 1799, must have reached Burton. There was then a small mill at Youngstown and a little corn-cracker somewhere south of Cleveland, and when the mill on the Cuyahoga started it was the third on the Reserve. The land company contributed five hundred dollars in land, and the iron gearings, towards it. Seth Hayes bought the irons at the new iron-works at Pitts- burg, boated them up the " Big Beaver" to a point where a Mr. Moore met him with an ox-cart. The grist-mill was a log structure, as were the others mentioned. A saw-mill was erected later, and framed.

The winter of 1799-1800 the colonists were short of provisions, and Col- grove says they were relieved by the meat of Seth Hayes' bear, which I refer to the fall or early winter of 1800. It is said that they drew provisions from Pitts- burg the summer preceding, notwithstanding those large wheat-fields, of which we do not hear again.

Mr. Clark and his party came to Burton by way of Pittsburg, as several did later. Between Pittsburg and Burton they camped ten nights in the woods. Those who estimate the number and size of the swamps and streams to be passed by what meets the eye now, will have no conception of the difficulty of this transit from those causes alone. The Cuyahoga and all the streams were three times as large then as now, the smaller ones more than three times as numerous, and many fair fields now waving with corn or spread out in wide meadows were then impassable swamps.

Eli Hayes came to Burton in the season of 1799, and purchased one hundred and sixty acres of land, over in the northwest corner, and moved his family there the next summer, going by way of Pittsburg. He traveled by the usual aid of an ox-team. With him came his wife, Lucy, and three children,-Polly, who became the wife of Jacob Burton, Elijah, born in 1796, and now living, and one younger. Elijah says that the Beard mill was built in 1800, and Colonel Jede-

t Oze Blakeslee told in a public address, a broad story of the propagation of cats in Burton, in which Mrs. Umberfield was interested, as a specimen of woman's ingenuity.

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diah Beard, Seth Hayes, and a man by the name of Babcock came that year. Babcock went on to Cleveland.

I find it impossible to reconcile some of these conflicting statements. Seth Hayes had much to do with the Beard mill, and his nephew, Elijah, should know when he came. If he is right, the mill was built in 1800. Joseph Hayes must have come the same year. All the Hayeses settled together, over in the north- west corner of the township, where the seniors lived and died, Seth in 1816, Eli in 1864. The incident of the capture of a wolf by Eli Fowler and Mr. Clark occurred this summer. Eli Fowler became a great hunter. A man by the name of Woodruff visited the colony that season, and saw the wolf. Of him Colgrove tells a story in connection with Judge Kirtland. The judge invited Woodruff to dine and served a rattlesnake to his guest, and Colgrove leaves the impression that these reptiles were excellent and not rare food. In my childhood a similar story was told of Mr. Thorndyke, proprietor of the township of that name in Portage county, and was more likely to be true of him. It is apocry- phal at the best.

SETH HAYES' BEAR STORY.

The winter of 1800-1 was of much severity, and an apprehension of scarcity was realized. Seth Hayes had evinced the qualities which rapidly developed him into a hunter. His weapon was the imperfect flint-lock rifie of that day, with a covering over the lock to protect the priming-powder in the pan. " He was a still-hunter," a " stalker," like John Johnson and others, and unlike Horace Pomeroy and Bartley Johnson. He stole upon the game or awaited its approach, under cover. Luck had not attended him this season. Several days of ineffective hunting followed. His ammunition was quite exhausted, and winter was already on; the Hayeses and their neighbors were scantily supplied. Finally, on a good hunting snow, the foiled hunter went forth determined to win meat. The story has been told with a variety of detail. I follow Elijah Hayes substantially. The scene was in the edge of Claridon, near the Cuyahoga, at what was called the falls. A little stream makes in there over rocks, in which are small cave- fissures and crevices, offering retreats for the larger beasts of prey. Into one of these, on this day, Seth Hayes tracked in this snow a large bear. An examina- tion satisfied him that he had probably here made his winter den, and that he was now at home. Carefully closing up other apertures from which he might escape, alone, and miles from possible succor, with the gloom of the wintry day about him, he, with a small opening for his own entrance and exit, prepared some strong stakes and drove about the mouth of the den, laid by his rifle, and, hatchet in hand, and his knife ready, on hands and knees he crawled into the retreat and assailed the grim old warrior in his den. Many blows were there ex- changed ; the hunter withdrawing with his face to his foe, fighting as he retired; when he gained the mouth, with two or three more prepared stakes, driven by his hatchet, he hastily closed the entrance on the foiled bear, whose well-known tactics are not to make a charge, and who seldom, when wounded, as now, retreats. Hayes now had it all his own way. He had no bullets. He loaded his rifle with a beech- slug. His flint had become useless. He struck a spark from another, prepared for that purpose, but unfitted to the rifle-lock, and with the fire thus produced discharged his gun, which, at the near range and careful direction, converted the imprisoned brute into food for his babies and neighbors. The bear was large and fat, and Hayes finished the day and famine by drawing his slain foe over the snow to his cabin. The exploit marks alike the desperation of the times and the dar- ing of the man. His neighbors hailed him as a benefactor. To us he is a hero. To them the greatness of the relief threw into shadow the means by which it was accomplished. We cannot comprehend the strait they were in, and see only the coolness and daring of the hunter. However estimated, it stands with the first of pioneer exploits-with the rescue of his dog by McConoughey, a few years later, in Bainbridge.

However much of the time Jonathan Brooks was in Burton in 1799 and 1800, according to his son's account, he did not settle there till the autumn of 1801. A favorite he must have been in his native Cheshire, and the winter ere he left it his young boy-and-girl associates saved for him the seeds of the apples they ate, and he bore them to the western woods in his pack of forty pounds. In 1800 he took up land in Mantua, below the station, on the river, where he built a hut, cleared a bit of land, and planted some of these seeds. For some reason, possibly because he learned that relatives and friends from dear old Cheshire in- tended to migrate to Burton, he abandoned his Mantua cabin and sprouting seeds and went to Burton. Here he purchased two lots north of the square, three- quarters of a mile on the west side of the Chardon road, known as Cheshire street, from the natives of that town, who made their homes on it afterwards, cleared some land, and planted the residue of the mementos of his Cheshire friends, the produce of which made the beautiful orchard across the road from his Uncle Dea- con Cook's, and were distributed among the other of the early settlers. A tanner and shoemaker was he by trade, and by the side of a little brushy pond, north and

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History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio, Part 51

Author: Williams Brothers Publication date: 1879 Publisher: Number of Pages: 443

Author: Williams Brothers
Publication date: 1879
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 443