USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 108
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The township is intersected for about four miles, from northeast to southwest, by the Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis & Chicago railroad, which is joined at Valley Junction, midway between the Great Miami and the Whitewater, by the Harrison branch, or the Whitewater Valley railroad, which is run by the former corporation. The Harrison branch has about three and one-half miles in the township, in a general north and south line, fol- lowing pretty closely the abandoned route of the White- water canal. The Cincinnati and Harrison turnpike crookedly crosses the township in its northern part, leav- ing it on the east at Miamitown ; and the people seem otherwise well supplied with wagon roads
WHITEWATER JUSTICES.
1804, Ebenezer Hughes; 1819, Patrick Smith; 1825, Luther Hopkins, Richard Arnold, William Clark ; 1829, William Clark, Henry Wile, Hugh McDougal, Henry Ingersoll; 1865, A. E. West, Daniel Honder, S. W. Osborn, Uriah Stevens; 1866-67, Hender and Osborn ; 1868-69, Hender and Stevens; 1870, Hender, James Martin; 1871, Hender, E. G. Bonham ; 1872-73, Hen- der and Osborn ; 1874-79, Osborn and Charles Baxter ; 1880, Osborn and Charles S. Fulton.
ANCIENT WORKS .*
Two miles southwest of Miamitown, in this township, on the Great Miami, is a mound of nearly fifteen feet in height. It occupies a commanding position as a look- out post up and down the valley, and was undoubtedly
*The remainder of this chapter is almost exclusively from the pen of the distinguished Sunday-school and clerical worker, the Rev. B. W. Chidlaw, of the Berea neighborhood.
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
one in the series of mounds of observation that stretched from the mouth of the river far to the northward. Some of the mounds were formerly noted just above this, but they have been mostly obliterated by the ploughman. These were burial mounds, and skeletons are still occa- sionally found in this region, in a crouching position.
On the Whitewater river, near and east of the railway track, about three miles from the junction, and near the north line of the township, is a very regular and sym- metrical mound, which still retains a height of twenty to twenty-five feet. It also commands a wide view, and was probably a mound of observation.
From 1790 to 1795 the block-house and garrison at North Bend afforded protection to the adventurous pioneers seeking homes in the Northwestern territory. The land west of the Great Miami river had been ceded to the United States, but not yet conveyed. The Shaw- nees and Wyandots, reluctant to leave their favorite hunting grounds and the graves of their sires, still re- mained the occasion of danger and alarm to the squatter population at North Bend. The Indians gradually dis- appeared, and in 1795 the Nimrods of North Bend, at- tracted by the abundance of game in the unbroken for- ests beyond the Miami and Whitewater rivers, built their cabins, and with their families squatted on Government land. Jeremiah Chandler, from South Carolina, a sol- dier of the Revolutionary army, a bold, daring man, tired of the pent-up Utica at the North Bend settlement, built the first cabin in what is now Whitewater township. Its location was near the west end of the suspension bridge. A spring of pure water and the "salt lick " a mile away, where his sure rifle could almost any day bring down a fat buck, determined the site of this first civilized habitation in the bounds of the township. Dur- ing the spring of 1795 the following families squatted south of the cabin Jeremiah Chandler had built: John Burham, James Dugan, John White, and Joseph Brown. In 1796 Alexander Guard, Thomas Miller, Joseph Rolf, Joseph Hayes, James Buckelow and John McNutt; in 1798 Isaac Mills, Hugh Dunn, John Phillips and Daniel Perrine. From 1796 to 1800 the following squatters built cabins on the west side of the Miami; The first was built by Stephen Goble on land afterwards bought by Ezekiel Hughes; Hugh Karr, from Ireland, built near the Cleves bridge; Joseph Grey, Joseph Raingweather, John and Andrew Hill, I. Ingersol, E. Eades, Benjamin Welch and Hugh Bucknell. When the land was sold many of these families left, but, after the lapse of eighty-five years, descendants of John Benham, A. Guard, Thomas Miller, Joseph Hayes, Hugh Karr, Andrew Hill and I. Ingersol, who purchased land, are to be found, honored and useful citizens of the township.
SQUATTER LIFE
was marked with great sociability, independence, with many privations and hardships. The furniture of their log-cabin homes was made with an axe, a drawing-knife, and an auger. Nails and glass were unknown in the construction of their humble but happy homes. Their doors were hung with wooden hinges, and oiled paper answered for glass. A mush-pot and a skillet served for
kitchen utensils; the knives, forks, and spoons brought from the old settlements, with cups made by hand or gathered from the gourd vines adorned their tables.
Their subsistence was secured from the rivers and the forests, and the truck patch cultivated with a hoe, pro- ducing an abundant crop of corn, potatoes, beans and pumpkins. In the spring of the year they luxuriated on wild onions fried in opossum fat and omelets made of wild turkey eggs, accompanied by delicious beverage known as spice-wood tea. The sugar-tree supplied them with sap; but for the want of kettles they manufactured but limited supplies of sugar and molasses. When ket- tles were obtained (brought to the North Bend on flat- boats from Redstone, Old Fort, and bartered for buck- skins, venison and peltries), the sugar and molasses made in the spring supplies them through the year, and the surplus was exchanged for goods at the traders' stores at the Bend, or Fort Washington. In these squat- ter times when kettles had been obtained, salt, a very scarce and necessary article, was manufactured at the "lick" a mile west of where Elizabethtown now stands. The well was sixteen feet deep and the supply of salt water enabled the boilers to produce a bushel a day, which could be sold at four dollars, hot from the kettles.
CLOTHING.
When the stock brought from the old settlments was worn out, necessity compelled the hardy pioneers to de- pend on their wit, invention and skill in producing the clothing needed. The skins and furs of wild animals, espe- cially the deer and raccoon, supplied the men with caps, pants, and fringed hunting shirts, and both sexes with moccasins. Cotton seed obtained from Kentucky and planted in their truck patches, afforded a valuable fiber manufactured by the use of hand-cards, spinning-wheels and the loom, furnished, with the help of flax, the mater- ial to replenish the wardrobe of these noble wives and daughters. In these early times the wild nettle, which grew luxuriantly and abundantly in the river bottoms, whose fiber was almost equal to hemp, was utilized and manufactured into a coarse linen suitable for use. The nettle, five to seven feet high, falling to the earth, would rot the stock during the winter and in the spring would be gathered and prepared for the spinning-wheel and the loom. Mrs. Guard, the wife of Alexander Guard, during one season manufactured two hundred yards of this net- tle cloth, which answered a very good purpose in meet- ing the wants of her large family. At the pioneer meeting, in Hunt's Grove in 1869, Dr. Walter Clark exhibited a well preserved specimen of this nettle cloth.
THE FIRST BIRTH
of white parentage was Rebecca, the daughter of Jere- miah Chandler and Jane his wife, and the second was Mary, the daughter of John Barham. These children were born in the autumn of 1795. The former with her parents removed to Illinois, the latter spent a long and useful life where she was born.
DEATH.
During the year 1796 death invaded the settlement and a malignant disease removed in a few days three
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
members of the family of James Dugan from time to eternity. In their early struggles, trials and bereave- ments, these noble-hearted pioneers bore each other's burdens and shared each other's joy. In case of death in the household sympathy and help came promptly to the rescue. In the absence of cabinet-makers and under- takers the coffins were made of hewn slabs skilfully pre- pared with the broad-axe and drawing-knife, and held together with wooden pins, and the bodies tenderly laid in the grave dug by loving hands and bedewed with tears of genuine sorrow.
PIONEER LIFE
was strongly marked with true friendship and genuine hospitality. The best chair of the cabin and the hearty welcome of its inmates greeted both neighbor and stranger, for they always had time to be social and enjoy society. Before the days of post offices and the news- papers, the arrival of a stranger answered for both. Neces- sity, and inclination made these pioneers a united and happy people. Creeds, politics and nationalities yielded to the claims of social enjoyment. Common dangers and privations developed the nobler qualities of human nature, they truly bore each others burdens and shared each others joys. In times of sickness, or accident, the whole settlement would respond in sympathy and kindly efforts to relieve the sufferers. No skilled physicians with medicines and surgical instruments could be called.
Some firm hand and keen eye would set and splinter a broken bone. When the fever and ague prevailed, or the ravages of a burning fever was wasting the sufferer, the simple remedies suggested by experience, such as lobelia tea, a decoction of burdock roots, and the tonic of spice bush, wild cheery, and dogwood bark would be provided and successfully employed.
MILLS AND FACTORIES
were conveniences that did not belong to the squatter era, yet the inventive genius of the settlers provided primitive machinery that answered the purpose. The corn was prepared for the mush-pot and johnny-cakes by pounding it in a trough dug out of a log, using a maul as a pestle. Sometimes an old superanuated coffee pot, preforated with holes, would be utilized and the grinding done on the grating principle. In the autumn the new corn, rubbed on its rugged surface, yielded a superior quality of meal, which was manufactured by a slow but sure process. Griddle cakes made of this material, ac- companied with wild honey and venison steak, were lux- uries worthy of a palace. Nearly every cabin was a factory with its big and little spinning wheels, hand-cards, reels and looms; a tailor and milliner shop, but without Harper's Bazar or the latest fashion plates.
THE PIONEER SCHOOL-HOUSE.
This squatter population, appreciating the importance of educating their children before the school laws of Ohio were enacted, or Congress had granted lands for the purpose, built a log cabin school-house and employed a teacher. The school-house, built in a day, with its greased paper window, puncheon floor, clapboard roof, and door hung with wooden hinges, and furnished with
split log benches, was located near the present village of Elizabethtown. Billy Jones, at four dollars a month in trade, and boarding around, was the first teacher. The text books were Dilworth's spelling book and the New Testament. Billy was not a great scholar, nor an ex- perienced teacher, but the pupils liked him, and for three months, in 1800, his labors were successful, and at the close most of them could read the Testament and spell nearly all the words in the spelling book. These were the beginning of days in educational work, and the men that inaugurated the common school system in pioneer times deserve the gratitude of the present gen- eration.
THE FIRST PREACHERS.
To the honor of Christianity, and in accord with its spirit and teaching, its faithful ministers found their way early into the new settlements. In 1798 Rev. Mr. Dewees, a Baptist preacher from Kentucky, visited these smaller homes in the settlement and preached the Word of the Lord. The first service was held in the cabin of John Benham. The ten families constituting the settle- ment west of the Whitewater, parents and children, as- sembled, and with gladness of heart listened to the first gospel sermon delivered in the township. Mr. Dewees continued to visit the neighborhood for many years and his labors were blessed. He also preached in the settle- ments up the Whitewater as far as Brookville, and organ- ized a Baptist church at Cedar Grove, where he died in a good old age and full of years, and his grave is among the people for whose spiritual welfare he labored long and faithfully.
In 1799 Rev. M. Lower, an itinerent preacher, found his way to these squatter homes, and for several years visited the locality-a welcome servant of God, laboring earnestly for the moral and religious interests of the peo- ple. The first regularly appointed circuit rider who preached, and in 1806 organized a class, was Rev. W. Oglesby. The house of Alexander Guard was the preaching place, and there the first religious society in the township was formed.
In 1804 Rev. John W. Browne, of Cincinnati (the founder and first editor of the Cincinnati Gazette), com- menced to preach in the house of Ezekiel Hughes, and continued his acceptable labors until in 1812 he lost his life while attempting to cross the Miami river. Two of his granddaughters, Mrs. Curtis and Mrs. Dr. J. H. Hunt, are now honored residents of the township. These heralds of the cross by their zeal and abundant labors did a blessed work in laying the foundations of good so- sciety and religious life in the midst of the people when such services were so much needed, and so inadequately compensated.
The religious element prevailed in the character of the early pioneers. The Sabbath was well and religiously observed. The Bible and the hymn-book were found in their cabins, and when no preacher led their services they assembled together generally in the cabin of John Benham, and held meetings for prayer, praise, and Chris- tian conference. Thus they lived in peace and harmony. They needed no law to secure good order. Under the
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
governing power of mutual dependence, confidence and sympathy they were a law to protect themselves.
THE FIRST MAGISTRATE
was Ezekiel Hughes, appointed by Governor Tiffin in October, 1805, and his docket showed but little business during his official life of over ten years.
PERMANENT SETTLERS.
The Government land being surveyed, in 1802 it was offered for sale at public auction held in Cincinnati. The law required it to be sold in sections of six hundred and forty acres at not less than two dollars per acre. The sale was continued for several days, at its close the unsold land could be entered at one dollar and a quarter an acre. The first land sold, sections fifteen and sixteen, was bought by Ezekiel Hughes for two dollars and some cents per acre. At the sale competition for these choice sections ran high. Mr. Hughes, an immigrant from Wales, who had carefully noted the location and fertility of the sections, and a Pennsylvania German were the competitors, and eventually the Welshmen became the purchaser. All the rest of the land in the township was en- tered at Government price, and in a few years all Congress land was taken up either by speculators or by actual set- tlers. Among these were the Ewings, Mills, Piatt, Hunt, Oury, Perine, Cilley, and Andrews families. Mr. Piatt built the first frame house in the township, a part of which is now the parsonage of the Presbyterian church at Elizabethtown. Thomas Miller built the first stone house; Peter Perine built the first mill on the White- water, for which he received a bonus of a quarter section of land.
BIOGRAPHICAL.
Bailey Guard, son of Alexander Guard, was born in New Jersey. His child life was spent amid the scattered cabins surrounding the block-house at North Bend, where painted Indians, uniformed soldiers, and adventurous hunters filled his young mind with horror, amaze- ment, and delight. When fifteen years of age, hav- ing spent most of these years cultivating the truck patches, fishing and hunting, he went to mill with two bushels of corn. His conveyance was a canoe paddled with his own arms down the Miami to the Ohio, then up the great river to the mouth of Mill creek to where Cum- insville now stands, where a corn cracking mill was found. The trip, and waiting for his grist required two days of toil and exposure. His school days were few and irregular, in which he mastered Dilworth's spelling book and learned to read his Bible. He was a man of good natural understanding and a true Christian. Under the preaching of Rev. W. Ellinger, an eminent Method- ist pioneer herald of the cross, in 1809 Bailey Guard professed religion and made a public profession by unit- ing with the Methodist Episcopal church at Elizabeth- town. Mr. Guard died on the 5th of June, 1869, at the advanced age of eighty-two years, and left a good name as a precious inheritance to his numerous descendants. Ezekiel Hughes was born August 22, 1767, on a farm called Cromcarnedd Uchaf, Llanbryormair, North Wales, on which his ancestors had lived for over two hundred
years. He emigrated to this country in 1795. He sailed from Bristol on the ship " Maria," and landed in Phila- delphia after a perilous and tedious voyage of thirteen weeks. His cousin, Edward Bebb, the father of the late William Bebb, Ex-governor of Ohio, accompanied him. They left Philadelphia in 1796, travelled on foot to Red Stone, Old Fort, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela river, thence by flat-boat to Fort Washington, where Cin- cinnati now stands. In a journal which he kept, several interesting facts are preserved: "After three days and nights floating on the Ohio, we reached Marietta at the mouth of the Muskingum river, and called on General Rufus Putnam, the present register, seemingly a worthy character. He gave us plats of the land. We spent three days exploring the purchase, but were not satisfied, so we left on a flat-boat bound for Limestone (Maysville Kentucky). The passage down the Ohio is safe-plenty of hills and narrow bottoms. The heavier the cargo, the faster the boat will float. The Ohio receives many trib- utaries but does not increase much in width. We reached Cincinnati and applied to Judge Symmes, who is the register and chief proprietor of this purchase, for plats. We spent three weeks traversing the five lower ranges and saw most of the land unsold. I bought one hundred acres, northeast corner of section thirty-four, second fractional township, and first range for two dollars and a quarter an acre [this was in Colerain township, nearly opposite New Baltimore]. My object in buying this, was to wait till the land west of the Miami would be surveyed and ready for sale, and that I might examine the land and make a good selection." He writes in 1797 "that boats go by here almost every day with provisions for the army at Greenville. The boatmen say that the Miami is navigable one hundred miles. Their crafts are long sharp keel-boats with a board fixed on each side to walk on, having long poles with iron sockets. They stand at the bow, fix these poles in the bottom of the river and push. By the middle of May, 1798, our corn and potatoes are planted in the clearing, and now we are clearing for a turnip patch. When we first came here, six months ago, we had two neighbors within three miles on one side and six miles on the other. Now a person from New Jersey has built a cabin within a hundred yards of ours. He is a very devout and religious man, and a minister of the gospel has already visited us and held a meeting" {the first public religious service ever held in Colerain township]. Mr. Hughes, and his cousin, Edward Bebb, lived on this tract of land for four years, when Mr. Bebb bought land in Dry fork, Butler county, where his son William, afterward governor of Ohio, was,
in 1802, the first white child born in Morgan township, and Mr. Hughes commenced life on his well chosen and valuable tract of land, on which a squatter, Stephen Goble, had made some improvement, for which Mr. Hughes paid the adventurous pioneer a fair compensation.
In 1803 Mr. Hughes returned to Wales and married Miss Margaret Bebb, and in 1804, with his chosen com- panion, a lady of great worth, every way a helpmate for an adventurous pioneer in the wilds of the new common- wealth of Ohio, returned to make a home on the valu-
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HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.
able tract of land he had already purchased. In 1806 Mr. Hughes suffered a great bereavement in the death of his excellent wife. Her remains were interred in the first grave opened in what is now the Berea cemetery. In 1808 Mr. Hughes married Miss Mary, the daughter of Thomas and Mary Ann Ewing, of Northumberland county, Pennsylvania, who had settled on an adjoining section in 1805.
There lie before me two commissions appointing Mr. Hughes to discharge important public duties, signed by Governor Edward Tiffin, the first governor of the State of Ohio-one appointing him a justice of the peace (the first in the township), signed October 7, 1804; the other appoints him as one of the three commissioners to lay out a road from Hamilton, in the county of Butler, to the mouth of the Great Miami river, and this was signed January 28, 1806. In 1808 Mr. Hughes was ap- pointed, with two others, to select a school section in place of the sixteenth section in this township, which was sold before Congress passed the law appropriating the sixteenth section in each township for school purposes. This commission selected an unoccupied section in the adjoining township of Crosby. The choice indicated good judgment and an honest purpose to benefit the gen- erations to follow. Mr. Hughes, with his foresight and desire to, under the Government, grant a great advan- tage to the cause of popular education in the township, opposed for many years the sale of it, until in 1846 it was sold for twenty-five thousand dollars and the proceeds invested according to law in Ohio six per cent. bonds, so that now the schools of the township realize an income of fifteen hundred dollars per annum.
In early times Mr. Hughes leased several portions of his land, and thus promoted the settlement of the town- ship. He was a generous and upright proprietor, and al- ways treated his tenants with kindness and liberality. Descended from a godly ancestry, in mature life he be- came an avowed disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, and united with the Congregational church at Paddy's Run, Butler county, in 1803, and with his wife in 1830, when the Presbyterian church of Elizabethtown and Berea was organized, he united with this society and remained a faithful member until his death, in 1849, in the eighty- second year of his age.
Edward Hunt, with his wife, Charlotte, and eight chil- dren-Jesse, Thomas, Jacob, Edward, Mary, Susan, Charlotte, and Keturah-left Sussex county, New Jersey, in the spring of 1806, travelled in his own wagons to Wheeling, Virginia, and thence on two flat-boats to Cin- cinnati. During the summer of 1806 he selected and bought eight hundred acres of choice land around Eliza- bethtown, and settled on it at once. Such a family of re- ligious, enterprising, and industrious people was a great acquisition to the neighborhood, and after the lapse of so many years their influence is felt for good, and their memory cherished by the community unto this day.
Jesse Hunt lived in Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, and brought up a family of sons and daughters-useful and respected citizens. The survivors have left the neigh- borhood, and the aged father and mother are buried near
Lawrenceburgh. Thomas and Jacob Hunt always lived at the old homestead, and accumulated a large estate. They were members and liberal supporters of the Pres- byterian church. Thomas Hunt served the church faithfully in the office of a ruling elder for over twenty years. The Presbyterian meeting-house and parsonage in Elizabethtown are monuments of their liberality and Christian lives. Edward Hunt, still surviving at the age of eighty-one years, was educated for mercantile busi- ness in the city of Cincinnati, and has been in active business, farming and merchandising, until laid aside by the infirmities of age. He has been actively engaged in the Sabbath-school work, and in laboring for the advance- ment of religion in the township for over fifty years. In 1830 he married Miss Ann Hughes, eldest daughter of Ezekiel Hughes, esq., and their children- Thomas, Ja- cob, and Mary, who married Joseph Cilley, esq .- are living in the neighborhood, highly esteemed and useful citizens. George W. Haire, esq., of Elizabethtown, is a son of Susan Hunt. He has been in public life, as a magistrate, a county surveyor and engineer, and for many years superintendent of Sunday-schools, and an elder in the Presbyterian church. Another son, Rev. I. P. Haire, graduated at Miami university, Oxford, Ohio, and Union Theological seminary, New York, and is now settled in Janesville, Wisconsin. L. H. Bonham, esq., son of Charlotte Hunt and John Bonham, also graduated at the Miami university, was principal of a well known and use- ful female seminary at St. Louis, Missouri, for many years, and now devotes his time to cultivating a model farm near Oxford, raising fine stock, and with his facile pen is giving the agricultural world the benefit of his ex- perience in cultivating the soil.
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