USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 104
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Mr. Friend had now by hard earnings during the inter- regnum of 1834 and 1835, while away, collected together about fifty dollars, but he was yet to experience a loss
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
differing from the others yet endured. At Natches a helpless applicant for a passage up the river appealed to him for aid, and after fair promises to repay the favor about twenty dollars was given and he went aboard. Being a fellow companion he laid siege to his trunk, re- lieved him of the rest of his money and all his valuables, and then deboarded his vessel at the first opportunity.
Such were some of the friendly experiences of Mr. Friend before reaching Cincinnati on his trip to and from New Orleans, but nothing daunted by misfortune, he set himself to learn the carpenter trade after his return, and for one year drove nails and shoved the plane in Cincin- nati; but in 1836 he removed to Lockland and continued his business for eighteen years thereafter. In 1858 he and his brother, in company with a Mr. French, pur- chased from Messrs. Haldermann and Parker the first paper mill built at Lockland. In 1853 he built the dwelling house in which he now resides, but there imme- diately came a depression in his business, and owing to the facts of heavy indebtedness for property bought, and the failure of the business to support two families, Mr. Friend purchased the mill outright from Mr. French in 1862. Immediately after Mr. Friend taking the mill business revived, large demands for paper being made by the Government for war purposes, so that in a few years he found himself out of all indebtedness and mak- ing money rapidly.
. In 1871 he purchased two other mills at Carrollton, Ohio, but in five years afterwards, to the day, they were burned down, the loss being about forty thousand dol- lars. Mr. Friend immediately rebuilt, putting in ma- chinery, increasing their capacity, and making them the best of the kind in the west. His son, George Howard Friend, a young man of business tact, learned in the busi- ness, is now a partner of his father, and general mana- ger of the Carrollton mills.
In 1840-41, a little church incident occurred which will illustrate Mr. Friend's politics. He was at that time a member of the Methodist Episcopal church in Lockland, and in the course of time, a minister of the Wesleyan Methodists having been invited to preach (it being in the troublous times of the free soil discussions), took for his text: "God made all men of one blood," which was so suggestive-although no ill word, bestirring plolitical or partisan hatred, had been spoken-that the pro-slavery faction of the church took umbrage, and before the preacher got under headway with the sermon, pelted him severely with eggs, and upon taking a more violent course, Mr. Friend interceded to prevent further trouble, and
for this act was to be suspended from the church and reprimanded. The suspension hurt him not, and the reprimanding was not received, as he was and had been so staunch in his Union sentiments as not to allow those who fostered the free soil principles to engender his re- ligious convictions. The church, however, even before its separation into the two branches, failed to carry out its threat, and he was always considered one of its mem- bers.
On June 15, 1843, he was married to Miss Elizabeth Bradford, in Lockland, Ohio, and the fruits of this union were seven children: Mary Agnes Friend, married to Charles Howell; John B. Friend, died July 2, 1861, aged eighteen years; Charles W. Friend, married to Julia Jackson, died January 2, 1879, aged thirty years. They had three children: George, died January 1, 1873, Mel- vin, and Maynard; James Howard Friend, married to Flora Myers; they had two children: George Frederick, and Edith; E. Annie Friend, married to Samuel John- son; they had one child: Fannie E; Catharine Friend, and Edward Friend.
Mrs. Elizabeth Friend, nee Bradford, still lives in the enjoyment of health and comfort, after having carefully raised and trained her family. She was born in Wash- ington, Pennsylvania, July 22, 1818.
The antecedents of the Friend family are numer- ous. They date back to the time when the father of our subject went to Canada on a visit to see his brother George, and while there married a daughter of Leonard Scratch, and sister of his brother's wife. It should also be stated that three children of the Scratch family married three children of John Wendel and Juli- ana Wigle. The two brothers came to the States. Charles stopped at Cincinnati, his brother going down the river to Jeffersonville, Indiana, where they settled, and the descendants mostly reside. Charles, however, remained in Cincinnati, and finally died in Lockland on January 23, 1868, aged seventy-nine years.
In the year 1870 some of the Canadian members of this large family, while on a visit to the States, proposed a reunion, to take place in Canada, which finally occurred in Gosfield, Canada, September 24, 1872. The meeting was held in a beautiful grove belonging to Theodore Wigle. Eighteen visitors from the South were present, and about eight hundred of the home relatives, making the affair, with its bounteous repasts of the day, and the cordial greetings of the numerous descendants, an occa- sion long to be remembered.
SYCAMORE.
FORMATION AND GEOGRAPHY.
The original Sycamore township was a new creation of the general reorganization of the townships of Hamilton county, after the erection of Ohio as a State and the set- ting off of Butler and other counties from the territory of Hamilton county. It was defined as comprising "all that fractional township No. 5, in the first entire range, and four tiers of sections on the eastern side of town four, same range; also, so much of the second entire range as lies north of the same." These tracts include the whole of what is now Symmes township, and all of the present Sycamore township, except the two westernmost tiers of sections. The township was but little larger then than it is now, having thirty-nine full and twelve fractional sections, the latter lying altogether on the west bank of the Little Miami river.
Sycamore township is now bounded on the east by Symmes, on the south by Columbia, and on the west by Springfield townships. Butler county bounds it for about two and a half miles on the north, and Warren county for three and a half miles. It is an approximately exact parallelogram of seven sections long by six broad, thus containing forty-two sections. Some unevenness is mani- fest in the original running of the section lines, and the section corners on the east line of the township are considerable north of the northwest corners of the same sections in Sycamore. This breaks up the north line of the township badly at the northeast corner; it otherwise is pretty nearly a right line. The present township com- prises the whole of town four, in the first entire range, and the southernmost tier of sections in town three, of the second entire range. Sections numbered only seven, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-five, and thirty-one, are thus, as in Springfield, duplicated in the township. It is the largest township in the county, having a total of twenty- nine thousand two hundred and ninety-one acres, or nearly a square mile more than forty-two exact sections contain. Springfield, which is the next township in size, and contains just as many sections, has but twenty-five thousand eight hundred and ninety-six acres-one thou- sand five hundred and fifty-five less than Sycamore, and nine hundred and eighty-four, or more than one and a half square miles, less than it would have were all its sec- tions full and exact. The irregularity of surveys in the purchase could hardly be better illustrated.
The Miami canal leaves the township at the north- west corner of section thirty-two, in Lockland, having flowed through all the westernmost tier of sections north of that, in a course of nearly six miles. The Cincinnati & Springfield railroad,-otherwise the Cleveland, Colum-
bus, Cincinnati & Indianapolis, or Dayton Short Line railroad-comes into the township at the south part of Lockland, half a mile south of the canal, and runs diag- onally across the two western tiers of sections and part of the third, leaving Sycamore about two and one-third miles from the northwest corner, after traversing the township a length of a little more than six miles. The Marietta & Cincinnati railroad has only about half a mile of track in Sycamore, crossing the extreme south- west corner, between Madiera station, in Columbia town- ship, and Allandale, in Symmes. The Miami valley, or Cincinnati & Northern railway, spans the entire town- ship with nearly eight miles of track, crossing the Mont- gomery pike and entering Sycamore exactly at the centre of the south township line, and making gradually north- eastward until it leaves the township precisely one mile west of the northeast corner, or two miles east of the point of entrance. The Montgomery, Lebanon & Day- ton turnpikes, with an abundance of admirable wagon- roads and otherwise, intersect the township in all direc- tions. No stream of large size touches the township. The East fork of Mill creek, with one of its larger tribu- taries, heads in the counties to the northward, and flows through the northern and western townships to a junc- tion with the West fork a little way beyond the township line, near Hartwell. Carpenter's run flows toward the East fork from the direction of Montgomery. Three or four small affluents of the Little Miami, on the eastern side of Sycamore, penetrate the township to the breadth of one to three miles. The southernmost tier of sections is almost altogether devoid of water courses. The gen- eral character of the surface of the township resembles that of Springfield and the Hamilton county plateau. On the west, however, the Mill Creek valley in which lie the Miami canal and the Short Line railway, is broad and flat; and parts of the southeastern and eastern districts are on the low ground of the Little Miami country. The rest of the township is emphatically hill country, though not of a description unfitting it for the production of large and valuable crops and for stock-raising. Most of the township is given up to farming, not much of it, away from Reading, being devoted to suburban residences, and this place, with Montgomery and Shawn, being the only villages of account in the entire township.
JUSTICES OF THE PEACE.
In the creative act of the county authorities in 1803, the electors of the new township were directed to meet at the house or John Ayres, in the village of Montgom- ery, and choose three justices of the peace.
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
The following memoranda of Sycamore justices in later years have been preserved:
1819-Peter Bell, Benajah Ayres, Hezekiah Price, Jonathan Pittman.
1825-James J. Whalon, Nicholas Schoonmaker, James Rosebrough.
1829-Schoonmaker, Ayres, Matthew Terwilliger, Henry Morse.
1863-9-James Aydelotte, Daniel B. Myers, Michael Williams.
1870-Myers, Azdelotte, L. Melendy.
1872-Same, with William A. Aydelotte.
1873-4-Melendy, the Aydelottes, John Todd.
1875-Melendy, Todd, W. A. Aydelotte, Okey Van Hise.
1876-Aydelotte, Van Hise, Todd, Jacob Voorhees.
1877-Voorhees, Todd, Van Hise, F. Mosteller.
1878-9-Mosteller, Voorhees, Todd.
1880-Todd, Voorhees, Thomas W. Myers.
THE FIRST IMMIGRANT
to the territory now covered by Sycamore township was James Cunningham. He was born in Lancaster coun- ty, Pennsylvania, and emigrated to Kentucky while still a comparative youth, about 1785, there engaging, with four others, in building cabins for settlers, about four miles back of the present site of Covington. They were presently assailed by the Indians and one killed, when Cunningham and the remaining three decided to aban- don their business in that quarter and settle upon the Beargrass creek, near where Louisville was afterwards founded. He was there married to Miss Janette Park, of another Pennsylvania family, in 1787, and in the second year thereafter, the first year of Cincinnati or Lo- santiville, and on the twenty-sixth of May, 1789, he en- tered a land-warrant which entitled him to locate on a half-section of land, which he chose on the west half of section twenty-eight in what is now this township, in the valley of the East fork. He soon began improvements upon his place, assisted by Arthur, Andrew, and Culbert- son, his brothers-in-law and three of the first settlers of Reading village. They were the first to make a clear- ing in Sycamore township. It is supposed, as there was then comparative peace between the white settlers and the Indians, that Cunningham moved his family to the place and resided there until the Indian troubles of the next winter, when he removed to Cincinnati, where he is known to have bought a lot and built a cabin near the corner of Walnut and Second streets. He afterwards entered the Government service for a year or so as a teamster, and in the fall of 1793 removed finally to his farm, where the rest of his life was passed. He built and ran the first saw- and grist-mills in this part of the county, and about 1808 had a distillery in connection with the grist-mill. Among his surviving descendants are: a son, Francis Cunningham, lately living north of Sharon, on the old place, near the county line; two grandsons, Elmore W. Cunningham, of Cincinnati, and James F. Cunningham, of Glendale; and a granddaughter, the wife of Mr. Andrew Erkenbrecker, of Cincinnati.
James Carpenter was also a very early comer to the sections embraced in Sycamore township. He located on section fifteen, west of Montgomery, probably in the autumn of 1793, or the spring of the next year, and removed thither from Columbia. Adjoining him on the west was Price Thompson, a soldier of the Revolution, who located a land warrant on the northeast quarter of section twenty-one, November 26, 1792. Other pioneers here were David and Abner Denman, whose sisters mar- ried Thompson and Benjamin Willis. Another of this party, Elihu Crain, a distant relative of Thompson's; and Richard and Samuel Ayres. For the sake of company and mutual protection they put up their cabins near each other, where the sections fifteen and sixteen corner with sections twenty-one and twenty-two, or about where the Plainfield school-house is. Others who came to the set- tlement after Indian hostilities ceased are mentioned by Mr. Olden in his Historical Sketches, as James and John Mathers, Daniel and Nathaniel Reeder, Joseph Mc- Knight, Morris Osborn, Moses Hutelings, Matthias Crow, Henry, Benjamin, and Isaac Devie, Nathaniel Jarrard, and Samuel Knott, all of whom date by resi- dence here back of 1797. He adds that "the settlement was never annoyed hy Indians, and there was nothing to encounter but the wild animals and the almost intermin- able forest."
John Campbell, who built a fortified station on the Great Miami, opposite Miamitown, also made a settle- ment in Sycamore, probably in the summer or fall of 1793, on the forfeiture part of section twenty, southwest of Cunningham's. But few settlers clustered around him for years; he did not consider it necessary to fortify his cabins; and the history of his improvement here is wholly uneventful.
Some other early settlers of Sycamore were John Gold- trap, on section twenty-two, where now is the Jacob Shuff place; James and John Wallace, on section twenty- one, now the Cooper farm; the Park brothers, with or near Cunningham, on section twenty-eight; and near Montgomery Ely Duskey, Moses and Joseph Crist, Jo- seph Tallman, and Andrew Lacky.
William R. Morris was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sep- tember 12, 1836. His father is of Scotch extraction, and his mother of Irish descent. William R. Morris, sr., married Sarah Lydia Powers, sister of Hiram Powers, the sculptor. William R. Morris, jr., was one out of a family of nine, three sons only surviving to maturity. In May, 1865, he married Hattie, daughter of Captain Charles Ross, of Cincinnati, one of the old pioneers. Mr. Morris is the father of three sons and four daughters. Education- ally, he attended St. Xavier college, Cincinnati, and Ox- ford college, for three years each, preparing himself for the bar. For several years Morris engaged in the whole- sale grocery business at Toledo, though he is now a gen- tleman of rest, enjoying the fruits of his industry, resid- ing at Carthage, Ohio.
FORTIFIED STATIONS.
The only pioneer outpost in this direction which seems to have been occupied as a regular station-house was
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
Henry Runyan's, about a mile and a half north of Read- ing. Mr. Olden says: "Near the spring, east of the Dayton turnpike, stood the old station-house." Mr. Run- yan was a Virginian, but emigrated from Kentucky, where he had lived since 1784, and had there been married to Mrs. Mary Bush, of Bourbon county. Upon two land warrants, May 9, 1790, he located the west half of sec- tion nineteen, the northernmost section of that number in the township, being fourteen miles from the Ohio, and then a long way back in the wilderness. It is believed that he did not move upon the tract within the period re- quired by Symmes' contracts, and that he consequently forfeited a little over fifty-three acres in the northeast cor- ner of it. He soon, however, put up his cabin and made a clearing, and in 1792, according to his son Isaac, who is still surviving at a very advanced age, he removed per- manently to the place. Mr. Olden thus presents some of the recollections of Isaac Runyan:
Mr. Runyan remembers the first school-house in the neighborhood. It was built of buckeye logs, and stood in the field south of Mr. John Rick's present residence. It was a rude cabin, with the ground for a floor. The benches were made of slabs, with wooden pins for legs. A few openings were left in the sides of the cabin, which, being covered with greased paper, served for windows. There Mr. Runyan took his first lesson in Dilworth's speller and reader.
The first religious meetings were held in the woods, where the peo- ple seated themselves on logs or on the ground, as they found most con- venient. The first preacher that came to the settlement was a Mr. Cobb. The men dressed in the hunting-shirt and knee-breeches, and the women wore the petticoat and short gown, all made of linsey-woolsey, or homespun cloth.
The principal sports or recreation among the men were had at the log-rollings and cabin and barn-raisings, and consisted chiefly in wrest- ling, jumping, pitching quoits and target-shooting. Spinning and sewing-parties, apple-bees and corn-huskings, after the country had been settled a few years, were frequent, where not only the young of both sexes, but often the old and middle-aged, were brought together, when, after completing the work which the company had been invited to perform and partaking of a bountiful supper, they all joined and spent the remainder of the evening, and often the entire night, in plays and dances that formed the social glee. The dance consisted of
"Nae cotillion brent new frae France,"
but the genuine old Virginia reel. And those who joined in the dance paid the fiddler, whose charges were fixed and well established at a fi'penny bit, or six and one-fourth cents, a reel.
No trouble is known to have occurred with the savages at Runyan's station.
Voorhees' station was situated upon section thirty- three, near the present towns of Lockland and Reading. It was not a block-house, or even stockade, but a large, strong log cabin, which answered for both residence and defence, and was frequently mentioned in the early times, in speech and print, as Voorhees' station. This cabin is said by Mr. Olden to have been situated on the west side of the East fork of Mill creek, several hundred yards east of Mr. Breck's residence in Lockland. He further says: "This old house was torn away in 1817 by Thomas Shepherd, who then owned the place, and the logs sold to Adrian Hageman, who used a portion of them in the erection of a house on lot No. 49, next south of where the new Catholic church stands in Reading. This house is still standing; it was weatherboarded many years ago, and is now occupied by John O'Neal, the constable.
It was a strong family which made this improvement
-almost enough in itself to make an effective garrison. Abraham Voorhees was the head and front of it; and with him were his sons-in-law, Thomas Higgins and John Rynearson, with their families, and his five sons, Abra- ham, Miney, Garret, John and Jacob. They began their improvements in the spring of 1794, and in the fall of the same year moved their families to the station. They were soon after joined by another and still larger family, nearly all of them adult persons. The parents were Henry and Margaret Redinbo, of the Pennsylvania Ger- man stock, who removed from Reading, in that State, in the spring of 1795; their eight sons were Solomon - (drowned on the journey westward), Frederick, John, Phillip, Samuel, Andrew, Henry and Adam; and the daughters were Ann, Barbara and Margaret. In August of the same year they obtained a deed fron Judge Symmes of the south half of section twenty-seven, west of the Voorhees tract, built a cabin and log barn on the property since owned by Dr. Thomas Wright, and there settled. The parents both lived to the age of ninety-four years, and died in the same year, 1828 or 1829.
The younger Abraham Voorhees was a blacksmith; and as soon as the progress of settlement, or the near prospect of it, would justify, he built a shop near his cabin, on the east side of the new road running from White's to Runyan's station. Mr. Olden says this shop was "at a point where now stands the dwelling and store- house of James Browne, on the northeast corner of Main and Columbia streets, in Reading. There he carried on his business for several years, using a hickory stump as an anvil." He also, in partnership with his brother Miney, built and ran a pioneer saw-mill on the west bank of Mill creek, in what is now Conklin's addition to Lockland. The elder Voorhees laid out upon his land the adjacent village of Reading about 1798, and had it called at first Voorhees- town, but allowed it afterward to be named Reading, at the suggestion of the senior Redinbo, from the latter's birthplace in the Keystone State.
Another incident of this period, occurring south of the present site of Reading, is thus related by Mr. Olden :
During the autumn of 1794, William Moore, who was a great hunter, and who made his home at Covalt's station, on the Little Miami river, while out on one of his hunting excursions, wandered to the Great Lick, as it was then called, about a mile and a half east of White's station, and on the lands now owned by John Hamel, in the southeast quarter of section thirty-two. He there killed a deer, which he skinned, and had prepared the saddle for packing, and while in the act of wash- ing his hands in the brook, and at the same time amusing himself by singing an Indian song he had learned while a captive among the Shawnees, he was suddenly alarmed by a voice joining in the song in the Indian tongue. He instantly sprang to his feet and ran for the thick wood on the west, closely pursued by several Indians. As they did not fire, they evidently intended capturing him. The foremost in the pursuit was quite a small Indian, but very fleet on foot. He was gaining rapidly on Moore, when, fortunately, they came to a large fallen tree, the body of which was some four feet in diameter. Moore placed his hand upon the log and leaped it at one bound. The Indian, being un- able to perform this feat, was compelled to go round the tree. This gave Moore a fresh start, and after a long and closely contested race, he reached White's station, with the loss of his gun and coat, and also his game.
EARLY RELIGION.
Two miles west of Montgomery, on Carpenter's run, is the site of the church building erected by the first
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
Baptist society, or religious organization of any kind, in the township. It was formerly a colony dismissed from the Baptist church in Columbia in 1797. Elder James Lee, pastor of the Miami Island church from 1799 to 1801, often preached at Carpenter's run. Mr. Richard Ayers was one of the laymen representing this church at the meetings in 1797-8, to form the Miami Baptist asso- ciation, and was one of the committee to draft "general principles of faith, practice, and decorum," as the basis of an association. The membership of the Carpenter's run church was reported at the associational meeting in Columbia, September 6, 1799, as thirty-two. The asso- ciation met with this church in 1801, when it numbered thirteen churches and four hundred and sixty-seven members, of whom one hundred and thirty-one, or more than one-fourth, had been baptized within a year. It is said that a very few members of this church were affect- ed with the "falling" experience during the strange New Light revival of 1801-3 in the Miami country, which is described in our chapter on Springfield township. Some of the early pastors of this church were: Elder John Soward (Seward?) 1800-1; Elder Stephen Gard, 1803; Cyrus Crane, 1811-26 (for one year, 1814, Abra- ham Griffiths). The Mount Carmel church, whose meeting-house is not far south of the Carpenter's run site, long since superseded the pioneer society.
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