USA > Ohio > Huron County > History of Huron County, Ohio, Its Progress and Development, Volume I > Part 12
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to keep out the cold. The furniture consisted of benches made without backs, from slabs, or the outer cuts from saw logs, supported by legs driven into auger holes For a writing desk for the larger pupils, a wide board, supported by heavy sticks driven into a log, at the proper height, at one end of the room, did duty.
Within such a house as this your pioneer boy and the children of his dis- trict were taught from Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, from Murray's English Reader, and from Daboll's Arithmetic, and other antiquated primary books for three months each winter for ten years, beginning with the year 1840. Near by were the woods and the river and the ample play grounds. Let no one waste any sympathy upon these children on account of this apparent dearth of opportunity. The defects in the opportunity are only apparent and made so by a comparison with the schools of the Firelands of today. That district never added a single man or woman to the ranks of illiteracy. Out of one enrollment of thirty-five pupils, now before the writer, more than one-half, after nearly sixty years, are known to be in life. No one of that company ever entered the ranks of the criminal class. So let no one despise these antecedents of this par- ticular boy, for be assured he does not, but glories in them, for from such sur- roundings came the Lincolns and the Garfields of loved American fame.
From out of these humble surroundings, which may be said to be typical school environments of the great majority of schools upon the Firelands in their beginning, came pupils armed with that best of qualifications, self-respect and self-reliance. Came also healthy young men and women, taught in the atmos- phere of morality and patriotism, to bless society here and in other states.
In this semi-isolated life, cut off from the far-off outer world, its faint eachoes hardly touched this particular family. Books were few, and for many months no newspaper visited the circle. From year to year the only changes were the changing seasons. They waited for the spring with eager longing, for it brought the sugar-making season, so loved by the youth; it brought with it the flowers, natural to our woods, and unlocked its treasures of life.
It may be said with propriety that the schools of the Firelands, from the first, though humble in their pretensions, were fostered by an enlightened and intelligent public sentiment. The pioneer, though poor, and from a poor New England or New York home, was not illiterate.
Your pioneer boy, like the school boys of today, improbable as it may ap- pear from the opportunities and surroundings above given, had ambition, and this passion pointed to the Norwalk Seminary, as the object to be attained. His few visits to the county capital, always looked upon with greater favor than a visit to Europe with the Paris exposition as a part of the attraction, would now be viewed, were always more desired by him, for the reason that he could look upon the seminary and indulge his fancies as to his future in that temple of learning ; but alas for human ambitions, for before the proper time came the seminary was a thing of the past, and he had to be satisfied with Berea and Oberlin.
He is in error who supposes that the poverty of opportunity herein deline- ated as the lot of the pioneer and his family was an unmixed evil. Poverty in no case is without some compensating benefits. The honest efforts of him who
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suffers from poverty to overcome its inconveniences, strengthens and builds up his character and renders him stronger for the conflicts of life.
The spirit of unrest by which this age and the century from which we are about to pass has been so much influenced, invaded the woods of the Firelands in those years of which we write, and seized upon the boys then as it does now. Here, then, now, and always, as Willis has expressed it,
"Ambition seeks the chamber of the gifted boy, And lifts the humble window and comes in."
And more than that it has lifted him out of this and other more eastern states, and that boy and his girl are moving beyond the Mississippi. The west is sapping the east of its best material, and if the fathers and mothers of the latter are asking themselves, "Where is my boy tonight?" the answer comes back from the far west, "He is here and is building up empires."
AMUSEMENTS.
Did the boys of that day have any fun, do you ask? Certainly. A healthy boy will manufacture his own amusements, if he does not have to work too hard. The boys of those times were mustered into the ranks of labor at an early age say at ten or eleven years of age, and made to contribute to the common weal of the family ; yet on rainy days fishing was permissible, when it rained too hard for work. So at night, after having performed all the work during the day that an ingenious father could get from a rather unwilling boy, fishing parties were com- mon to the mill ponds. Husking bees, coon huntings, logging bees, and house or barn raisings, called the young men and boys together.
It may seenf to the boy of today, who, with his surroundings of a beautiful country home, a farm productive of everything necessary, as well as of many lux- uries, where the labors of the farm are so largely performed by machinery, with the facilities for excursions to distant places, and with frequent trips upon the lake ; with concerts and lectures and theaters and conventions the year round, that he has all the fun, and that we of sixty years ago must have had only a dull round. Not so. While we combated roots and stumps in the soil, where the boy of today plows with no obstruction, while riding his plow, we had before us the virgin forests, an open book and a museum of unfailing resources of amusement. They furnished the small game, which we delighted to hunt, in abundance. They fur- nished nuts of every variety, delicious wild fruits and mandrakes and slippery-elm bark. They furnished the materials for his stilts, his dart, his pop-gun, his whistles, and his bows and arrows, as the season for each of these sports came around. Then the boy of long ago had the fun of chopping down little trees, be- fore chopping became a daily task, and of seeing them fall, a pastime of pleasure unalloyed, except by the admonition from his seniors to "cut close to the ground."
Then the streams, little and big, now so nearly dried up in summer, ran high all the year round, and never failed to furnish amusements of the rarest kind. In winter the boy sported upon the ice of the river or skated. if he owned the skates, and in summer he fished or bathed in the water or guided his raft or skiff there-
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on. No delight in the world is so welcome to a boy as to spend half of his time on a warm summer day in the water at his favorite swimming hole. I see it now, at the bend in the river, embowered by a spreading elm tree's shade, made more dense and welcome by the wild grapevine which has year by year clambered up it's rugged sides. The noon hour of the school day afforded the time, and the disposition was never wanting. Since that experience, in the long past, the Hoosier poet, who knew the joys of the "Old Swimmin' Hole," as the Clarksfield boy knew it, has put the whole story in poetic dialect :
"Oh, the old swimmin' hole. In the happy days of yore, When I ust to lean above it on the old sickamore, My shadder shinin' up at me with such tenderness. But them days is past and gone, and old Time's tuck his toll From the old man come back to the old swimmin' hole."
Yes, the old man has come back. He finds the river here, but the locus of the old swimmin' hole has yielded to the shifting sand bank : the old sycamore has also passed away, as have the boy playmates, without whose presence the visit is almost a blank.
The pioneer boy had little money, in fact he hardly saw enough of it to recog- nize the different denominations of the currency of the day. This was largely due to the fact that there was little money in the country. Business was largely car- ried on by barter. A pound of butter would buy a pound of cut nails. Two pounds of butter would buy a shilling hat. A good horse could be bought for from twenty five dollars to fifty dollars, and a cow for ten dollars. The little money that came into the family in big copper cents, sixpences and shillings, for dimes and half- dimes were rarely seen, had to be carefully saved for tax-paying time. In fact the boy had little use for money. Shows rarely came this way, and a part of our religious teachings was to the effect that a show that had a round ring in the tent, whatever else it may have had, was awfully wicked. The railroads of the day. all of which were corduroy roads, always gave free excursions, the passenger carrying his own lunch.
The gayest of all the year with the boys was the day known as "Trainin' Day." when the militia of the town were called out for drill. The bright red and blue colors of the privates' and non-commissioned officers' uniforms dazzled the eye of the boy : but the finer uniform of the captain and lieutenants, as they marshaled the men to the stirring music of the fife and drum, or by sharp commands put them through the manual of arms, drove his senses into something like a stupor. The grand event of the day was when the colonel, if he happened to be a near by dweller, gay in his iridescent garb of gray and gold, galloped upon the parade ground, sur- rounded by his staff, and in thundering tones gave orders to the battalion, which moved the men as a piece of machinery and terrorized and almost froze the heart of the dazed lad from the back woods. The movements of Sherman's army before Atlanta, or of Grant's in the Wilderness, could not have been more bewildering.
Some here will remember the coming through the county of the straggling recruits for the so-called "patriots' war," the uprising of a few disappointed men in Canada, in 1837, with arms and pieces of artillery, as does the writer, and of the
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alarm all felt at the prospect of a border war with Great Britain, growing out of the affairs upon the border at Niagara river. These alarms, with the calling out of the enrolled militia in 1846, when men were wanted for the Mexican war, were such as to awaken the martial spirit of the people and to set the boys at school to playing soldier.
The presence in Clarksfield of two water gristmills and sawmills at the time this story begins made life there much more desirable at that time. The prime question was to get something to grind. With that the boys had nothing to do and little concern ; but the going to mill upon an ox sled with a little grist of grain, the operation of grinding the grist between the two great stones, the delivery by the dusty miller of the prepared flour or meal, and the great, wide mill pond were matters, once seen, to be told and talked over for a month and never to be forgotten by the boy whose experiences and observations had then been so limited. Later on in life, when his muscles and discretion could be trusted to do the busi- ness, the boy was himself made the supercargo of a grist of grain on its way to the mill. The grist was equally divided by the parental hand, one-half in one end of the sack and one-half in the other end, thrown across the horse, and the boy mounted on top, with directions to use care in balancing the grist, and he was dis- patched upon the errand. That boy has the most rueful recollections of his ex- periences of the grist falling from the horse in the woods road, away from help, and of his agonizing tears at the disaster. The grist had to be gotten upon a stump and the unwilling horse led between the stump and a near by tree which kept him from stepping to one side before the status of affairs had been restored, but success only awaited perseverance. The varied business ventures of the later life of that boy, with their adverse turns, bear no comparison to these weeping struggles with the grist in the wilderness.
TRANSPORTATION.
In the early days of our country hereabouts, the team work was mostly done with oxen, now almost a thing of the past.
Ox teams were used on the farm, for social visits, and for going to church. Your essayist well remembers of many occasions when the whole family went to meeting behind this kind of a team, upon a sled or in an old, squeaky wagon. In- deed, this was the rule among the pioneers sixty years ago, and caused no comment.
Before roads for wagons were made, horseback riding for both sexes was most common, and the horse-block before every door afforded the aid for mounting. The animal was often taxed to carry double, and this was the favorite mode with beaus and belles among the pioneers.
A farm wagon behind a span of plow horses showed the wealth and luxury of the owner, while the buggy and surrey, now so common, were unknown.
POSTAL FACILITIES.
The boy well remembers when Clarksfield's mail came but once a week, and then was brought by a post-boy on horseback with a leathern pair of saddle-
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bags as the mail car. When he arrived upon the east hill at the village, to warn Esquire Starr, the postmaster, of his coming, he most vigorously sounded his tin horn, which he carried fastened to his saddle. Mail day, though it brought little of interest to the people, was the day of the week after Sunday. Few newspapers were taken, and letters at eighteen and three-fourths cents or twenty-five cents each, were too costly a luxury to be often indulged in by such a people. The mail carrier often brought news from the outside world of the elections, of wars or rumors of wars, which was passed from mouth to mouth.
Now the mail is brought to Clarksfield's dwellers daily from the east to the west and from the west to the east, upon the fast mail trains of the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad; and instead of the horn of the mail-boy, is heard the scream of the locomotive engine and the thunderous rumbling of heavy trains of cars, bearing the commerce of the continent. Smith Starr, the first and long time postmaster of the town, who handed out to the boy in question, sixty-five years ago, the Western Christian Advocate, the family paper, sleeps with the neighbors whom he served upon the hill, while the mail is distributed and served to patrons by a woman postmistress, a descendant of Aaron Rowland. another of the pioneers of the town.
DEATH AMONG THE PIONEERS.
In those pioneer days people died as they do now only oftener and earlier in life : for the hard life of privation most of them lived reduced the average term of life, and the pioneer fell an early victim to the ague or to the fever which followed in its train.
As people wore home-made clothing in life, so their dead were encoffined in a home-made, walnut coffin, made to order from an actual measure taken, by the local cabinet maker or by a carpenter, the funeral always awaiting the con- venience of the mechanic. The account books of Capt. Samuel Husted, pioneer merchant and first manufacturer of Clarksfield, still preserved, furnish the only vital statistics of the town in the charges made therein for coffins, furnished for the dead among the pioneers.
Funerals among the pioneers were always formal affairs. The newest and best farm wagon of the settlement served as the hearse, and not until in the forties did our town furnish a pall for such occasions. A minister, if one could be had, must come, say a prayer and deliver a sermon. If no minister could be had, then some devout layman solemnized the occasion by a prayer. The old hymn begining. "Hark from the tombs a doleful sound," sung to the tune of China, by uncultured voices, made the solemnity of the occasion almost gloomy, and always awakened doubts of the reality of the resurrection.
The neighbors for miles around turned out and the funeral rites were decor- ously and solemnly performed.
The writer has a vivid recollection of his attendance upon a funeral in Clarks- field, the first that fell under his observation. It was that of a young mother who had yielded up her life in a forest home. The bereaved home was reached from our home by a tramp with mother and a neighbor, through a mile of dense forest. After the ceremony the burial took place upon a knoll in the deep woods
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near by. The sight of the dead mother and of the bereaved little ones made an impression upon the mind of the five-year-old boy which was deep and lasting. The little procession bore the body from the lonely cabin home to the grave where the neighbors filled in the earth and departed. For some years the mound reminded the observer of the departed, but finally all traces of the entombment were eradicated and the affair was was forgotten. The place of interment has long since been passed over by the stranger occupant of the farm with no knowl- edge of the burial.
Early burials were in most cases made upon the home farm, for cemeteries were not then established. In a few years, as in the instance above given, these places of burial were forgotten, so that now the plow and the reaper, unknown to the farmer in charge, desecrate the places once sacred to the pioneer.
CONCLUSION.
The story you have listened to contains nothing startling, and has, I fear, hardly been interesting. It is but a recitation of commonplace affairs, with an antique odor, of which every pioneer boy knows, and perhaps, yes surely, this is all it has to commend it. Be this as it may, the story has its counterpart in the history of every section of our country, which has, with such marvelous celerity, emerged from a wilderness, the dwelling place of the savage, to a densely populated empire of civilization, within the lifetime and recollections of many here. The story begins contemporaneously with the first term of Presi- dent Jackson, the seventh president, and runs to that of the twenty-fifth, counted consecutively, and covers one-half of the lifetime of our republic. It has seen the republic doubled and more than doubled in the extent of its territory, and more than quadrupled in its population ; while in material resources and national virility the infant has become the giant of this globe.
During this period the last of the men who at the beginning of the story grappled with the wilderness here, has passed to the beyond. The children of the pioneer have in many cases, as in the case of the families most conspicuous in the story, gone to aid in developing other states, so that the only memory of their names is to be gathered from the tombstones in your cemetries. But such is the glory of American life everywhere.
JOHNNY APPLESEED.
ADDRESS OF A. J. BAUGHMAN AT THE UNVEILING OF THE JOHNNY APPLESEED MONU- MENT AT MANSFIELD, OHIO.
John Chapman was born at Springfield, Mass., in the year 1775. Of his early life but little is known, as he was reticent about himself, but his half-sister who came west at a later period, stated that Johnny had, when a boy, shown a fondness for natural scenery and often wandered from home in quest of plants and flowers and that he liked to listen to the birds singing and to gaze at the stars. Chap- man's penchant for planting apple seeds and cultivating nurseries caused him to be called "Appleseed John," which was finally changed to "Johnny Appleseed," and by that name he was called and known everywhere.
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The year Chapman came to Ohio has been variously stated, but to say it was one hundred years ago would not be far from the mark. An uncle of the late Roscella Rice lived in Jefferson county when Chapman made his first advent in Ohio, and one day saw a queer-looking craft coming down the Ohio river above Steubenville. It consisted of two canoes lashed together, and its crew was one man-an angular, oddly-dressed person-and when he landed he said his name was Chapman, and that his cargo consisted of sacks of apple seeds and that he in- tended to plant nurseries.
Chapman's first nursery was planted nine miles below Steubenville, up a nar- row valley, from the Ohio river, at Brilliant, formerly called Lagrange, opposite Wellsburg, W. Va. After planting a number of nurseries along the river front, he extended his work into the interior of the state-into Richland county-where he made his home for many years.
Chapman was enterprising in his way and planted nurseries in a number of counties, which required him to travel hundreds of miles to visit and cultivate them yearly, as was his custom. His usual price for a tree was "a fip penny-bit," but if the settler hadn't money, Johnny would either give him credit or take old clothes for pay. He generally located his nurseries along streams, planted his seeds, surrounded the patch with a brush fence, and when the pioneers came, John- ny had young fruit trees ready for them. He extended his operations to the Mau- mee country and finally into Indiana, where the last years of his life were spent. He revisited Richland county the last time in 1843, and called at my father's, but as I was only five years old at the time I do not remember him.
My parents (in about 1827-35) planted two orchards with trees they bought of Johnny, and he often called at their house, as he was a frequent caller at the homes of the settlers. My grandfather, Capt. James Cunningham, settled in Rich- land county in 1808, and was acquainted with Johnny for many years, and I often heard him tell, in his Irish-witty way, many amusing anecdotes and incidents of Johnny's life and of his peculiar and eccentric ways.
Johnny was fairly educated, well read and was polite and attentive in man- ner and was chaste in conversation. His face was pleasant in expression, and he was kind and generous in disposition. His nature was a deeply religious one, and his life was blameless among his fellow men. He regarded comfort more than style and thought it wrong to spend money for clothing to make a fine appearance. He usually wore a broad-brimmed hat. He went barefooted not only in the sum- mer, but often in cold weather, and a coffee sack, with neck and armholes cut in it. was worn as a coat. He was about five feet, nine inches in height, rather spare in build was large boned and sinewy. His eyes were blue, but darkened with animation.
For a number of years Johnny lived in a little cabin near Perrysville (then in Richland county ), but later he made his home in Mansfield with his half-sister. a Mrs. Groome.
When upon his journeys "Johnny" usually camped out. He never killed any- thing, not even for the purpose of obtaining food. He carried a kit of cooking uten- sils with him, among which was a mush-pan, which he sometimes wore as a hat. When he called at a house, his custom was to lie upon the floor with his kit for ? pillow and after conversing with the family a short time, would then read from a
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GENERAL READING ROOM. PUBLIC LIBRARY, NORWALK
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Swedenborgian book or tract, and proceed to explain and extol the religious views he so zealously believed, and whose teachings he so faithfully carried out in his every day life and conversation. His mission was one of peace and good will and he never carried a weapon, not even for self-defense. The Indians regarded him as a great "Medicine Man," and his life seemed to be a charmed one, as neither savage men nor wild beast would harm him.
Chapman was not a mendicant. He was never in indigent circumstances, for he sold thousands of nursery trees every year. Had he been avaricious, his estate in- stead of being worth a few thousand might have been tens of thousands at his death.
"Johnny Appleseed's" name was John Chapman-not Jonathan-and this is at- tested by the muniments of his estate, and also from the fact that he had a half- brother (a deaf mute) whose Christian name was Jonathan.
Chapman never married and rumor said that a love affair in the old Bay State was the cause of his living the life of a celibate and recluse. Johnny himself never explained why he led such a singular life except to remark that he had a mission-which was understood to be to plant nurseries and to make converts to the doctrines taught by Emanuel Swedenborg. He died at the home of William Worth in St. Joseph township, Allen county, Indiana, March 11, 1847, and was buried in David Archer's graveyard, a few miles north of Fort Wayne, near the foot of a natural mound. His name is engraved as a cenotaph upon one of the monuments erected in Mifflin township, Ashland county, this state, to the memory of the pioneers. Those monuments were unveiled with imposing ceremony in the presence of over six thousand people September 15, 1882, the seventieth anniver- sary of the Copus tragedy.
During the war of 1812 Chapman often warned the settlers of approaching danger. The following incident is given: When the news spread that Levi Jones had been killed by the Indians and that Wallace Reed and others had probably met the same fate, excitement ran high and the few families which comprised the popu- lation of Mansfield sought the protection of the blockhouse, situated on the public square, as it was supposed the savages were coming in force from the north to overrun the country and to murder the settlers.
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