History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 11

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp; Williams, L.A. & co., Cleveland, O., pub
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio, L. A. Williams
Number of Pages: 590

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located at first by the commissioners at Lebanon, within the Purchase, but afterwards fixed by the legislature at the present village of Oxford, Butler county, where it has since remained .*

The troubles of Judge Symmes concerning his Pur- chase were endless, and embittered much of his later life. In 18II his house at North Bend was burned, presum- ably by an enemy who was angered at him for having re- fused to vote for the incendiary for some local office. In the destruction of this house also perished the certificates of the original proprietors of Cincinnati, upon which the judge had made deeds to purchasers after he was enabled to do so by the obtainment of his patent. In some cases they had been irregularly and fraudulently secured; in others deeds had been made to assignees of certificates, upon assignments asserted by the original holders to be fraudulent. It was also important to learn whether all deeds for lots in the town had been authorized by the proprietors; but, whatever the facts were, the loss of certificates, which was irreparable, shut off investigation, and operated as a quietus for the claimants in possession. The agitations created by the disaster, however, increased seriously the burdens of the now aged pioneer. Four years thereafter the enterprising adventurer and hero of the Miami Purchase found rest in the grave, where,

After life's fitfnl fever, he sleeps well. .

CHAPTER VI.

THE MIAMI IMMIGRATION.

"I beheld, too, in that vision All the secrets of the future, Of the distant days that shall be. I beheld the westward marches Of the unknown, crowded nations. All the land was full of people- Restless, struggling, toiling, striving, Speaking many tongues, yet feeling But one heart-beat in their bosoms. In the woodlands rang their axes, Smoked their towns in all the valleys, Over all the lakes and rivers Rushed their great canoes of thunder." -- H. W. LONGFELLOW, "Hiawatha."

THE FIRST PARTIES TO START.

By the winter of 1788-9 there were white settlements on all sides of the Miami Purchase, though some of them were distant. Pittsburgh was founded; the Ohio company's colony was set down at Marietta; Limestone Point, or Limestone, afterwards Maysville, was much nearer at the eastward, and Lexington and Louisville, in the same State, both founded already ten years or more, lay at other points of the compass; while Detroit at the

* Almost the entire account of the contract of 1788, and the subse- quent transactions, has been derived from Judge Burnet's interesting and instructive Notes upon the settlement of the Northwestern Terri- tory.

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

northward, Vincennes to the west, and St. Louis yet be- yond, might be said to complete a cordon, though some- what far away, of civilized settlement. In Kentucky, particularly at Lexington, as we shall see more fully in opening the history of Cincinnati, a lively interest be- gan to be taken, in the summer and fall of 1788, in the colonization of the fertile tract between the Miamis. Attention was especially directed to the eligible site oppo- site the mouth of the Licking, which many of the men of Kentucky had seen, as they crossed the Ohio going upon or returning from their expeditions against the Indians. In this region the first steps were taken for the planting of Losantiville, which became Cincinnati, the "Queen City." So far had the project gone in early autumn that the fifteenth of September of that year was appointed "for a large company to meet in Lexington and make a road from there to the mouth of the Licking, provided Judge Symmes arrives, being daily expected."

The first organized parties for the settlement of the Miami country, however, set out from the far east. A feeble scatter of emigrants had come to the Purchase and its vicinity on either side, from time to time, in the spring and summer of 1788; none of whom, however, dared at- tempt permanent settlement as yet, through fear of the savages and the total want of military protection. Some of them, on their return, remained at Limestone and joined the early expeditions back to the Miami country. Meanwhile the material of those expeditions was collect- ing, under the auspices of Symmes and Stites, away in the comparatively old districts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The latter started with his party, at just what date we know not, but probably in the early summer of 1788, and waited at Limestone until and for some time after the arrival of Judge Symmes. The latter left New Jersey late in July of the same year, with an imposing train of fourteen four-horse wagons, and, with the wagons and on horseback, sixty persons, including his own family. He travelled leisurely across the then difficult country to Pittsburgh, and thence to Wheeling, sending his horses by land to the latter place from Devon's Ferry, on the Mo- nongahela, while he embarked his people and their effects on the river. He regretted afterwards that he had not purchased ox-teams instead of horses, declaring that he should have saved three hundred pounds by it. He recommended his eastern friends proposing to immigrate to come with oxen, "as they are cheaper by one-half in the first purchase, not so much exposed to accidents- the Indians have never disturbed them in any instance (except in the attack on Colerain, when the enemy took all the cattle for the supply of their small army)-and after long service they are still of their original value." He was not troubled by Indians on the route, but was delayed somewhat by heavy rains and bad roads, which caused the breakage of several of his axles by the time Pittsburgh was reached. He remained in that city but two days, and pushed on to Wheeling, as before recited, from which the party floated briskly down, the Ohio being in flood at the time, to the infant colony at Marietta, and thence to Limestone, at which he arrived the latter part of September, two months from his departure from New

Jersey. This place was to be his base of operations for some months. He paid an early visit of exploration to the Miami country, but was doomed to weeks of weary waiting, at first for a sufficient military escort to justify the completion of his journey and the execution of the Muskingum treaty pending with the Indians, which was delayed till almost midwinter; then for supplies. He complained bitterly of the delay of General Harmar in sending him troops from the fort at Marietta; and when, on the twelfth of December, Captain Kearsey reached Limestone with a force of forty-five men, the arrival was "much more detriment than use," as Symmes wrote, since he was not ready to start, St. Clair not yet having advised him of the conclusion of the treaty, and, the troops coming to him with very limited supplies and Harmar failing to send more, he had to feed them from his own stores. The purchases he was compelled to make from the surrounding country after a time were ef- fected with difficulty and at large cost, since the "amaz- ing emigration," as he called it, into Kentucky had al- most exhausted the Limestone region and put every kind of provisions up to three times the price at Lexington.

THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS.

There had been a numerous gathering at Limestone, waiting to go on to the Miamis. Major Stites, however, got away the twenty-fifth of November with the surveyors dispatched by Symmes into the Purchase, determined to wait no longer for the beginning of his meditated settle- ment at or near the mouth of the Little Miami. The two or three block-houses (Fort Miami) erected by the party, with the adjoining cabins, formed the nucleus of Columbia, now the oldest part of Cincinnati and the old- est white settlement in Hamilton county or anywhere in the Purchase. A sergeant and eighteen men were pres- ently sent to Stites. A sergeant and twelve men were also started with a party of settlers coming down the river for the "Old Fort" at the mouth of the Great Mi- ami; but all these were turned back at Columbia by ice in the river gorging it and damaging their boats, and re- turned, discouraged but in safety, to Limestone. Just one month after the departure of Stites's company, on the twenty-fourth of December, the throng at Limestone was further relieved by the exodus of the party led by Colonel Patterson, of Lexington-which, however, was composed much more of eastern men than of Kentuck- ians. Their objective point was the coveted spot opposite the debouchure of the Licking into the Ohio, to which they moved accordingly, and successfully arrived, though with some trouble from floating ice-probably on the twenty-eighth of December, 1788. The town they found- ed here took at first the name suggested by the pedantic Filson, who was one of the original projectors-"Losanti- ville," a name compounded of little words from several languages, and intended to signify "the village opposite the mouth of the Licking river." Thus was the second settlement in the Purchase made. The third was effect- ed by Judge Symmes himself and the party then over six months out from their New Jersey homes. He had taken a house for himself and family at Limestone, ex-

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

pecting to be detained there until spring. He waited vainly and long, struggling with the difficulties of subsist- ing the troops and his following there, for a boat-load of flour which had been ordered from up the river, and which had been promised him by Christmas at furthest, or for Harmar to forward supplies. But the last of Jan- uary bringing an enormous freshet in the river, sweeping out the ice and furnishing a current favorable for rapid movement down the stream, he determined to tarry no longer. This determination was hastened also by mes- sengers from Stites, who came on foot through the wil- derness along the river banks, to advise him of the ex- pressed friendship of the Indians and their eagerness to see him. A second message of this kind led him to fear that, if his journey were longer delayed, the savages would retire in disgust and anger; and he decided to leave. Collecting with much difficulty a small supply of flour and salt, he embarked his family and furniture, with Captain Kearsey and the residue of the force, and committed his fortunes to the swelling waters on the twenty-ninth day of January, 1789. Reaching Columbia, he found it flooded, with the soldiers driven to the gar- rets of the block-houses and finally to boats, and only one house, built on high ground, out of water. Passing on to Losantiville he found the people there entirely out of the floods; but, knowing from his previous observa- tions of the country at the mouths of the Miamis that the land about the "Old Fort" would be flooded, he abandoned his project of founding a city at the point between the Great Miami and the Ohio, and, at three o'clock in the afternoon, as he carefully notes, on the second of February, 1789, in an inclement season, his party stepped ashore at the site of North Bend. Im- provement here was speedily begun; and Howe, in his Historical Collections of Ohio, says that about the same time another beginning was made, three miles below this place and two from the Indiana line, on the tract which afterwards formed part of the farm of the younger Wil- liam Henry Harrison. This took the name of the "Sugar Camp Settlement," and at one time, says Howe, had as many as thirty houses. The block-house built here was still standing in 1847, though almost a ruin. Soon after the North Bend occupation, a site was select- ed by Judge Symmes for another town, which was des- tined to have a short career and a limited fame-South Bend, at the southernmost point of the Ohio in the pur- chase. North Bend, says Mr. Francis W. Miller, in Cincinnati's Beginnings, obtained its appellation from being farther to the north than any other northwardly extending deflection of the Ohio between the Muskingum and the Mississippi. Judge Symmes wrote in August, 1791, that "South Bend is pretty well established," and Mr. Miller says "the village which was started there soon showed such signs of progress as to be considered for a time a competitor in the race for supremacy." In September, 1791, it had eighteen or twenty families. The entire chain of settlements along the river, particu- larly Columbia, Losantiville, and North Bend, received rapid accessions of immigration. In the years 1789-90 the first-named had the largest population of any of them.

THE "STATIONS."

At all periods of its history, the vast majority of immi- grations to the Miami country has come in by way of the 'river Ohio. In the early day there was rarely an arrival by any other means of transportation, from the absence or paucity and poorness of roads in the interior. It was natural, therefore, that the settlements along the north bank of that river should be the first made in the Pur- chase. The policy of Judge Symmes, however, was to disperse settlers through the entire tract. In this he dif- fered from the Ohio company. He wrote to Dayton in May, 1789 :

At Marietta, the directors of the company settled the settlers as they pleased, on the New England plan of concentrating in towns and vil- lages, so as to guard against Indians. In "Miami" every purchaser chose his ground, and converted the same into a station, village, or town at pleasure, with nothing to anticipate but fear of the Indians. If ten or twelve men agree to form a station, it is certainly done. This desultory way of settling will soon carry many through the Pur- chase, if the savages do not frustrate them. Encouragements are given at every man's will to settlers, and they bid on each other, in or- der to make their post the more secure."

In accordance with this wise policy, Symmes was soon able to announce (to Dayton, April 30, 1790):

We here established three new stations some distance up in the coun- try. One is twelve miles up the Big Miami, the second is five miles up Mill creek, and the third is nine miles back in the country from Colum- bia. These all flourish well.

The first of these small forts or stockades was named "Dunlap's station," at Colerain, seventeen miles north- west of Cincinnati, about which a good many settlers early concentrated; the second, although at first called by Symmes "Mill Creek station," is better known as Lud- low's, and was at Cumminsville, within the present limits of Cincinnati; and the third was probably " Covalt's sta- tion." A few months later, in November, after Harmar's defeat, Mr. Symmes writes: "But for the repulse of our army, I should have had several new stations advanced further into the Purchase by next spring; but I now shall be very happy if we are able to maintain the three ad- vanced stations."

THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE NORTH.

The next year, in September, General St. Clair, while marching to his defeat, established Fort Hamilton on the Great Miami, in the Purchase, twenty-five miles from Cincinnati, which speedily became the nucleus of a thriving settlement, and finally gave way to the town (now city) of Hamilton, founded in 1794. Long before this, in June, 1789, when the Mad river region was pre- sumed to be included in the Purchase, Major Stites and other Columbians, arranging with Symmes for the pur- chase of the seventh entire range of townships, drew a superb plan for a town upon the subsequent site of Day- ton, for which they proposed the name "Venice." The project failed, from difficulties in obtaining title from Symmes, and very likely also from fear of the savages. As soon, however, as the Indian troubles were pacificated this very desirable site at the mouth of the Mad river was occupied by a company composed of Governor St. . Clair, General Dayton, General Wilkinson, and Colonel Ludlow, who founded and secured a rapid early growth for their new town of "Dayton." They had negotiated

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

for the land with Symmes, but were compelled, of course, eventually to purchase from the Government, as, by the Judge's patent of 1794, it lay far outside of his tract. At an early day, also, Lebanon and other towns and country settlements in the Miami country, in and out of the Purchase, made their hopeful beginnings.

DISCOURAGEMENTS.

Thus rapidly, under the circumstances, was setting in the tide of Miami immigration. Some of those circum_ stances were specially formidable to the rapid develop- ment of the country. Notwithstanding the peaceful auspices under which the first treaties and settlements had been made, and the comparative freedom from attack which the little communities enjoyed for some time, the fear of savage inroads was ever present, and even afar off it deterred the intending immigrant from making his venture. The fear of Indian massacre, cap- tivity, and torture hung like a pall over the advance guard of civilization in the Miami wilderness. This was greatly increased by the disastrous defeats of Generals St. Clair and Harmar, and was not entirely removed until after the victory of Wayne at the battle of the Fallen Timbers, and the subsequent peace of Greenville. An era of security and peace then set in. The inhabi- tants could now leave their fortified stations and remove to tracts selected in the open country. Here they built their cabins anew, and began to subdue the forest and get in their first crops. Other immigrants rapidly arrived on the news of apparently permanent peace, to join them; and the wonderful growth of the region fairly began. .

Another cause operated almost as powerfully, early in the immigration, to deter settlement. This was the hos- tility of the Kentucky people, who, from being warm friends of the Miami country, had become its bitter ene- mies, and lost no opportunity to decry it. They doubt- less suffered "the piques of disappointment," as Symmes put it, at seeing the rich prize of the Purchase carried off by eastern men, after they, the leading Kentuckians, had fixed their longing eyes upon it. Nevertheless, many land-jobbers from that region had bargained with the judge for tracts of his land, and had been granted gen- erous terms-abundant time in which to pay the fees for surveying and registering required of land-buyers at that time, and to make their first payments. In most cases they utterly failed in these; and after waiting a reason- able length of time, their negotiations or contracts were declared void by Mr. Symmes. They consequently took especial pains, particularly at Limestone, where all parties of immigrants going down the Ohio called, to discourage settlers from locating in the purchase. Symmes writes to Dayton in May, 1789:

At Limestone they assert with an air of assurance that the Miami country is depopulated, that many of the inhabitants are killed and the settlers all fled who have escaped the tomahawk, adjuring those bound to the falls of the Ohio not to eall at the Miamis, for that they . would certainly be destroyed by the Indians. With these falsehoods they have terrified about thirty families, which had come down the river with a design of settling at Miami, and prevailed with them to land at Limestone and go into Kentucky. Nevertheless, [added the stout-hearted pioneer] every week, almost every day, some people

arrive at one or other of our towns, and become purehasers and set- tlers. . Many persons who have been with us, made pur- chases, built houses, and are fully satisfied and much pleased with the country, go baek and get their families.

But later the feeling in Kentucky seems to have changed, or the disappointed and pestilent landsharks there had lost their influence; for a large immigration from that very region northward to the Miami valley was promised. Judge Symmes wrote November 4, 1790:

Never had been finer prospects of speedy sales and settlement of lands in the Purchase, than were about the time the army marched to Harmar's defeat. Great numbers were arranging their business to emigrate from Kentucky and the Pittsburgh country; but the strokes our army has got seem to fall like a blight upon the prospect, and for the present seem to' appall every eountenanee.

Still another source of discouragement was found in 1791, in the arbitrary conduct of Governor St. Clair to- wards Judge Symmes, and of the governor and the military towards the citizens of Cincinnati and the pur- chasers of lands in the southeast corner and elsewhere in the Purchase. On the twelfth and fourteenth of July in that year St. Clair addressed somewhat dictatorial let- ters to the judge, on the subject of his continued sales of lands between the Little Miami and the new line es- tablished by the Treasury board as the eastern boundary of the Purchase, and on the nineteenth issued the proc- lamation of warning and threat mentioned in our Chap- ter V. Mr. Symmes wrote:

Every person must admit that the Governor has treated me and the settlers in a most cruel manner.

He also writes of the proclamation, which seems to have been preceded or followed by another placing Cin - cinnati, or some part of it outside of the fort, under martial law :

The Governor's proclamations have convulsed these settlements be- yond your eoneeption, sir, not only with regard to the limits of the Purchase, but also with respect to his putting part of the town of Cin- cinnati under military government.

The governor had shortly before summarily arrested a respectable settler from New England, named Knoles Shaw, although he lived beyond the limits of martial law, as prescribed by the proclamation, put him in irons, as the judge was "credibly informed," and finally, with- out hearing before judge or jury, exiled him and his family from the territory, while his house had been burned by the troops, under St. Clair's orders. The charges against him related to the purchase of some articles of soldiers' uniform and the advising soldiers to desert ; but they rested solely upon the assertion of a soldier who deserted and was retaken, against whom Mr. Shaw stoutly asserted his innocence, and they were not, even if fully substantiated, such as called for the severe penal- ties inflicted, had the governor legal power to inflict them at discretion. Some of the military officers, par- taking of St. Clair's spirit, had been guilty of other high- handed and unwarranted acts. One Captain Armstrong, commanding at Fort Hamilton, for example, ordered out of the Purchase some of the settlers at Dunlap's station, and threatened to eject them vi et armis if they did not go. Previously, under Harmar's command at Fort Washington, the regular officers at the fort committed "many other acts of a despotic complexion," "beating

HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO.

and imprisoning citizens at their pleasure," writes Symmes. When, late in the same year, the defeat of St. Clair by the Indians was added to the disastrous repulse of Har- mar, the combined discouragements certainly looked as if the Purchase would be ruined. Symmes wrote to Dayton :

I expect, sir, that the late defeat will entirely discourage emigration to the Purchase from Jersey for a long time. Indeed, it seems that we are never to have matters right. What from the succeeding defeats of our army, and the Governor's arbitrary conduct towards the settlers, still more discouraging at the time than even the defeats, many settlers became very indifferent in their attachment to the Purchase, and num- bers had left it on account of the Governor's conduct before his unpar- alleled defeat.

Yet the elasticity of the indomitable spirit of the pioneers and their leaders rebounded from all depres- sions, and the immigration, after a period of relapse, went bravely on. It is estimated that there were two thou- sand white persons already in the Miami country in 1790, and that ten years thereafter the number had jumped to fifteen thousand. In 1810 Hamilton county alone had fifteen thousand two hundred and four, and the entire Miami country about seventy thousand, or one-seventh of the whole population then in the State. By August, 1815, it was judged by Dr. Drake that one hundred thou- sand at least were in the same region, or twenty-five per square mile, scattered over about four thousand square miles. It was a remarkable growth for the first quarter of a century.

The expectations entertained of the whole Ohio coun- try, long before it was permanently settled, are well shown by an official communication addressed in 1770 to the Earl of Hillsborough, then attached to the British govern- ment as Secretary of State for the North American De- partment, in which the following passage occurs:

No part of North America will require less encouragement for the production of naval stores and raw materials for manufactories in Europe, and for supplying the West India islands with lumber, provi- sions, etc., than the country of the Ohio.

The writer then gives six excellent reasons for the faith that is in him, with observations that involve many com- pliments to and a high appreciation, of the beautiful fertile land watered by the Ohio and its tributaries.

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History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 11

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp; Williams, L.A. & co., Cleveland, O., pub Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio, L. A. Williams Number of Pages: 590

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp; Williams, L.A. & co., Cleveland, O., pub
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio, L. A. Williams
Number of Pages: 590