USA > Ohio > Seneca County > History of Seneca County, Ohio; a narrative account of its historical progress, its people, and its principal interests, Vo. I > Part 13
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Mr. President and Pioneers : In rising before an audience like this I am always touched by mingled feelings of sadness and satisfaction. We are marching and passing away. Yesterday I attended a meeting in Geauga county and the list of the dead during the past year amounted to ninety-three. Here you have over sixty. And yet it is surprising to see how long we live. It is not at all strange that we should want to live. I am very anxious to live myself. I do not care to what age we attain, we still want to hang on to life! We all have sense enough to know that we have a good thing here, and hence the disposition to cling to it. And it is a noble characteristic of human nature.
What striking transformations have taken place in the memory of many of us! What a marvelous century! At the dawn of this century a man might have stood on the heights of the Allegheny mountains and cast his eyes westward on a sparse population west of the Ohio river. I look today and count more than twenty million people in our commonwealth, stretching to the other sea, protected by the panoply of law and all settled within this century.
Pioneers, perhaps I ought to show you that I have a right to be here. I doubt whether many of you came here as soon as I did. A man wants to get right with his audience first, and I want to get there right straight. I was born in Jefferson county, Ohio. I was born in May, and just as quick as I could make arrangements I emigrated to Sandusky county, and settled at Honey creek, now Seneca county, which was then a part of Sandusky. Your county is not as big as it used to be. I lived in Sandusky three years, commencing on the fifth of October. 1821. Seneca was set off from Sandusky in 1824. From that time to this I have been a resident of Seneca county, two years longer than any other person.
How many of you were here in 1821 ? There may be some- but I am one of them-that's sure. Therefore I have a right to appear here as a pioneer. I was a young pioneer and I am glad of it, for if I had been old I would have had a worse time of it. I was quite a curiosity among the Indian squaws as a white baby.
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They presented me with pets of cats and dogs, and I have been fond of them ever since. That is the way I started in life.
At that time this whole northwestern Ohio was an unbroken solitude. Imagine, if you can, this whole region shadowed with deep, tangled forests, with only occasional pathways along which the sly Indian crept in pursuit of his game, and pioneers were guided by spots on trees made with an ax. I look out today, and what do I see ? A great tumultuous nation sixty-three millions strong! I hold my ear to earth and I hear the thunder of fifty- two thousand locomotives over one hundred and seventy five thou- sand miles of railway, with uncounted thousands of cars, and mil- lions of our people who live on wheels, traveling from sea to sea and hamlet to hamlet. I look out and I see beyond, the school houses rearing their beautiful forms, and twelve million children rollick- ing and playing in the yards, and I see the churches rising sky- ward. I look at this country, grander and vaster than any other in the world; as glorious as Lebanon, beautiful as Carmel and Sharon- and how comes it? You and I have come into a goodly inheritance, but the Samuels and Joshuas that led us through the wilderness and brought into it the wake of Christian civilization, and laid broad and deep the foundations of this country had to go through much tribulation.
There was not a cloud by day nor a pillar of fire by night to guide their footsteps, but they went on like heroes bearing the ark and planted it in their cabins. Talk about heroes! Who are the heroes of this earth ? Go where you will and you can see monu- mental shafts to their honor. You have one in your city. It is a beautiful memorial of the soldier in his intrepidity and valor. He hears the bugle notes, the roll of drums, the shriek of fife, the thunder of guns, and he touches elbows with his fellows, and they rush forward regardless of life. There is a thrill in him. But what is that compared with a man like my father, with ten chil- dren, who cut his way through the woods and came and settled where there was not one acre of cleared land ? He was obliged to clear away the trees and brush so that he could raise grain and get vegetables to fill the bodies of his children and inspire them with enthusiasm. I say here today, and I say it with pride, that they were the bravest men, and most heroic characters in all American history.
And when I want a monument built, I am going to have a piece of granite, and I will have represented on it an old pioneer father equipped with an ax, and his spouse sitting on the other side spinning flax and singing "Old Hundred." And that will be a heroic thing to do. How things have changed within my memory ! Talk about going to school ! I walked two and a half miles to school with the late Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts, who,
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later became noted in our history. That was the first school erected in Seneca county. And soon we built a church, and the logs were hewed, and they said the people were getting proud. We used to meet in log school houses; but they are gone ; then in log churches ; and they are gone; then we built a frame, and that is gone ; now we have a brick church, and it has domes and minarets and is stuck full of points. We have got through going to heaven from the log churches, and the frame churches, but our new ones are not a bit better than those our fathers had, to go to heaven from. We used to go to meeting in homespun clothes, but now we all wear store clothes! A young fellow would cut a pretty figure now to go to see his girl in homespun! I present myself as a young man who did that very thing-and the girl was mighty glad to see me at that.
Now it was not all grave-yard business in the pioneer times. I recollect the raising of the log cabin. I was there and I seldom failed to be on hand. The fellow that could carry up a corner was considered the bully. Every girl in the neighborhood wanted to kind o' side up to him. That was a great thing. My father was a carpenter and built the first frame barn in Seneca county. We went fifteen miles to get hands to raise it, and we requested them to bring a knife and fork. We had plenty to eat but not enough to eat with. They came fifteen miles. Every fellow had his knife and fork and would haul them out and pitch in, and when he got through would put them in his pocket again. We had Christ- mas every week in the year. We had it oftener than that, even, as we could get turkeys any time by going into the woods. Now these were pretty good times. There was often a great deal of fun.
Then, when log rollings were had the people were very clever. The whole neighborhood would come to help a man roll logs. If he lost a horse or cow the neighbors would chip in and get him another. Everything has changed. There is not a single thing in your house or on your farm like that of the old pioneers.
Where is your little spinning wheel on which you spun the flax, or that big wheel, six feet in diameter, on which the girls spun seventeen knots an hour ? I know one that spun eighteen once, and she was married in less than ninety days from that event. Where are they ? I can see them yet. my mother and sister, spin- ning in the evening as we sat around and told our stories and talked on politics and religion. Oh, how my good old mother sat and worked to get something out for the boys! It had to be done. And then do you recollect the tow linen, which was hatcheled from the best part of the flax ? I have always been a protectionist from that time. We would sow a patch of flax, and when it had grown up the girls would get together and pull it. I suspect that some
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of these younger ladies, who have gray hair, have also been in the scrape. And then the boys were invited to come in the evening. We would come after supper in time to beau the girls home, and if there was a fiddler in the neighborhood, we would have a shin-dig ! The people were all good hearted, honest. conscientious people. This is shown by the fact that they lived so long. I do not know why I have lived so long, except for the same reason. I hope to live to be one hundred and twenty years old.
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Well, then, the weaving; I can hear the shuttle and the loom yet, out in the little out house where my sister was weaving. I never had a single yard of store clothes until I was nineteen years old, and yet I thought I was well dressed. I strutted around like a dude. We thought that we were well off, and so we were. Genius and invention have come in, and we now make everything by steam. We spin and weave and do other work by steam. Steam is the mistress of every sea and queen of every river. It is a new creation.
Can you recollect how you did the cooking ? How did you
bake what we called pone, a corn loaf about eight inches thick, baked in that dutch oven? The dough was fixed up in the oven in the evening, when we went to bed, and the coals were hauled around it, or it was hung in a kettle on a crane. It was done by morning and then we shavers pitched into it, and it stuck well to our ribs. Now do you remember that crane, a piece of iron rod bent and hung on one side of the fire place ? And can you remem- ber how the pots hung on the hooks, and were filled with cabbage, pork, mutton, and potatoes, which made the whole cabin fragrant ? How is it now ? Why, you do not bake at all! You buy your bread at five cents a loaf and you have no corn bread. The cook- ing stove was unknown when I was a boy.
And then look at your silver dishes, knives and forks. You cannot say that you are sticking to the old track. The omnipotent and omnipresent movement of progress lifts up everything and you must move with it or get left. You have to get in fashion or be out of the world.
Well, then, go out on the farm. What kind of a plow have you got? Have you a wooden mold board with strips of iron on the land sides of it? Do you plow with oxen? I have plowed with oxen and gone to Sunday school at the same time. That takes a pretty heroic fellow, not to violate any of the commandments. Knock and rip goes the plow through the roots and then they spring back and strike your shin. If you do not violate some of the com- mandments you are pretty well inbued with the religious element. I recollect the first iron plow, the Peacock plow, made in New York state. We have gone on now until we are not satisfied until we have a polished steel mold board and cutters.
But how do we reap? The idea of reaping with a hand sickle.
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Great Lord! Our fathers dug out stumps and now, instead of walking after a Peacock plow, we sit upon a spring seat and draw in the reins on a span of Normans, and say, "Go in, boys!" Our dads fixed this for us.
How did you do your haying? Do you recollect about your scythe after you had knocked it on a niggerliead ? You didn't make any remarks ! You whetted that scythe and then you bent down and went on. If you made no remarks you thought a great deal. You mowed all day for fifty or seventy-five cents. That was a hard way of making hay for the cows. We do not do that now. American genius has contrived a mower and we sit on a spring seat and mow. Then we distribute the grass and when it is dry we rake and pile it into little stacks, and take it into the barn all by horse power. And then, instead of lamming it up by hand, we have a patent fork which we drop into the top of the load, and then we hitch horses to a long rope, passing over pulleys above and fasten to the fork, and we say, "Hup Jack!" and away upward goes the hay as if by magic. It is a new art.
Since the first comers of Seneca county there has been a new revelation in farming. It is a new earth. It may be a new heaven, for the earth is so totally changed.
And then cutting the harvest. Why there were men who used to do it this way (with a hand sickle) the way the Hebrews did. Then we got the grain cradle. That was a great invention at that time. The first hard work in my life was to take up grain after a cradle. A boy was not expected to make a full hand but to be a gouger. The boy would chip in to help a fellow that could not keep up his row. I used to carry a bottle of whisky for the men to drink, but I never got any and I am glad of it. I carried a bucket of water at one end of a pole over my shoulder and whisky on the other, so that the one at either end could take a sip. There was something peculiar and inspiring about that whisky. It helped on with the work.
Well, now, after the cradle, what next ? We make the horses do it again. Human genius gave to the world the reaper and self binder, and it moves on every harvest field of grain across our planet. In the great west no hand sickle or cradle is used at all. When reapers were first invented we had to cut it and then bind by hand; now a little boy will cut and bind and carry sheaves, and all the farmer has to do is to shock it. Is not this wonderful ? Take all the things that you and I have experienced in farming and ob- serve that all the terrible toil and labor of our forefathers has been changed to that which is lighter, easier, quicker and more inviting in every respect. We have also successful ways in tilling the soil in working the corn. . Everything is changed! We ride along on our machinery and our horses do the hoeing.
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How many buggies were in Fremont fifty years ago? I rec- ollect the first buggy ever brought to Seneca county by Eli Dres- bach. All of us boys went one day to see a circus several miles away, and we stopped to see a buggy, which to us. was as great a curiosity as a circus. How many buggies have you now? That depends upon how many boys you have. Count the number of boys and you know the number of buggies-or the buggies and you know the number of boys. Every boy now, when he gets to be sixteen years old. must have a buggy. It's the truth. And pretty soon he says, "that colt is mine, and dad and Jim shant use it." And after a while he gets a set of harness and a lap robe, and when about seventeen years of age he gets behind that horse and rig, which costs more than your whole farm did at first, and then he starts out to hunt his best girl.
That is a laudable enterprise. You didn't go that way. You went afoot and alone, and Nancy was glad to see you. Now your boy goes out and he don't ask his girl to have him, as you did, but he only asks her to take a ride. Now, be honest. He is afraid to talk with her, unless he can take her in a buggy to where there is no one to listen to him but the owls.
I was at a great picnic lately. There were 1,130 buggies on the ground. It was a strange spectacle to me. In 1821 there were not two hundred buggies in the state of Ohio. Now, we have all got them, and it is all right. I speak of it to show the contrast between our father's days and ours.
Well now, another thing. Let us go to the bed rock. How many blows did it cost to clear up this country? Where are the strong arms that felled the forest trees, and cleared up these fields ? The great majority have passed on, and today are marshaled be- yond the river. Ride along these fine roads. Look at that great stump of a tree and tell me how many sturdy blows it cost to fell it, and toilsome labor to log it. Count the number of evenings you watched the burning brush and log heaps. It was not only till ten and twelve o'clock at night, but from daylight to dark, and dark to daylight, when there was a good burning time. I have been there myself, I know what has taken place in the pioneer clearings. What a change! Now we can go out from here and see limitless fields crowned with corn and waving fields of wheat. Who cleared them ? We all admit it was done by somebody. Most of them dead ! But, thank God, we can cherish their memory and hold them up as examples to stimulate the young and animate the com- ing generations to noble deeds in all the future ages of this world.
We are changed as people. Now, I suppose that somebody that has the dyspepsia will say that it is not so. "The world is bad. it is going to the devil." But the world has been improving all the time. I say that the war of the Rebellion has made us better
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people. If it had not been for that war we would not have had this meeting. The soldiers are the ones that first got up these picnics. It was the offspring of the idea of the soldiers' reunions, of the boys in blue who had been comrades in camp and wanted to meet again. Now we pioneer boys, who were together fifty years ago, want to get together again. We are better people, too. because we are not so mean as we used to be.
I was once at Plymouth church on the Sabbath and Henry Ward Beecher preached. At the close of the sermon he took a colored lady and walked her out on a platform. He read a state- ment that that woman was the wife of one man and the slave of another in North Carolina. and she wanted to buy herself free. They raised the money for her in less than ten minutes. A woman-a person with an immortal soul, chattelized and obliged to buy herself! We are doing mighty mean things, but it took only forty-two years to reconsecrate this country to conscience, humanity and religion. It is now like the brazen serpent in the wilderness for the healing of the nations and inhabitants of the is- lands of the sea in the remotest corners of the globe. They all looked to America to be healed.
How did our fathers get to this country ? I recollect when we used to come to this country, hunting land. We came behind ox- teams, across the mountains and through the dense forest wilderness. We invaded this western country. We conquered it mile by mile. We moved like a vast besieging army. Now we have railroads, and we put our effects into a car, and get into it ourselves and take our families with us. The power of steam moves us along swiftly across plains, through forests, over rivers, through tunneled moun- tains, and hills, until we reach sight of our homestead, perhaps in Oregon-and it is all done in less time than it used to take to go from Cleveland to Sandusky with an ox team. We owe this to the improvement of the age.
We used to be jolted around in stage coaches at six cents a mile. They would often get fast in the mud and we had to help pry them out. We used to stage it about two weeks in going to Columbus, now we go it in less than a day. In going to Califor- nia we went around Cape Horn or by the Isthmus of Panama. Panama was a graveyard of travelers. Now we go across the continent in a few days. We have our meals served on board the train in a palace car. We can go in a smoking car if we choose. These are luxuries. One member of my family is a German girl that I took when she was eight years of age. She was six weeks on the ocean passage in coming to America. The other day a steamship crossed the sea in five days and ten hours. I have lived to see steamships forty rods long.
When I was a boy, in my old school district, and it was one of
In
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the best of the kind, a Mr. Marcus, from Pennsylvania, wanted to have a class in geography. We got Morris's old geography, and were making good progress. Some of the people said, "You shall not teach geography in our common school. It is too high a study. You must send the children off to Milan or Norwalk Academy for that." The dispute culminated in a congress of the parents of the neighborhood. My father and his brother-in-law were for retaining it, but it was voted out of the school, and that is the rea- son why I never understood geography. That is true.
Now what did we pay the teachers ? The woman is living now whom we paid $1.25 per week. Teachers boarded around and we fed them on pumpkin pie and sausage. There is a man, now cashier in a bank, who taught for a dollar a week and boarded himself. We are now hunting for men and women to take our mantles. We spend $130.000.000 a year in breaking the bread of educational life to our 12.000,000 children, and we employ 300,- 000 teachers; and instead of thirty-three colleges we now have more than four hundred. We say to the young people thirsting for education, "Let all come, whosoever will, let him come." We are going away from the old customs.
You start a subscription for a church, the United Brethern, for instance, and succeed in putting up a good house. The Bap- tists. nearby say, "We will have a better one or bust!" The Methodists are a curious class of people. I am one of the broad- gauge kind, which is very zealous and very generous. If they undertake to build a church they will build it; if they undertake to establish a mission they will establish it. They have the sand.
Now the churches have got to be a great deal better. I have heard something about the higher criticism. I am a man who will say what he thinks-and I say higher criticism is a humbug. The other day I heard a stranger preach in my town and he said that the churches ought to come together. I said. that is a humbug. Said I, "Let them follow the church they see fit and the more the better." I illustrated it by a fact.
A Disciple preacher met me on the train. I asked him where he was going.
"I am going to Darke county to have a debate." "To have a debate on what ?"
"With Father Pempler the Dunkard preacher." "What in creation are you quarreling with him about ?"
"Why the Dunkard believes in dipping a convert three times. and we only do it once."
"Now aint that getting it a little fine?" I said. "If they think dipping them three times is necessary. let them do it. Some fellows may require a hundred dippings."
We want to belong to a church that will do right. Be a man.
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Let your religion affect your life. Carry in your conduct a re- flection of the image of the God that made you. I want to preach a doctrine that will save everybody that is worth saving; and for those that are not worth saving want a place to put them.
Now look at education. There have been more donations to schools and colleges in the last five years, than ever before in the history of our country. There has been more money expended during the last ten years for the propagation of Christian civiliza- tion for all the tribes of the earth than was given in one hundred years before. We have lived to see the coming glory of the Lord
in this land of liberty. We have lived to see monarchism and despotism trodden under foot by the popular will. We have lived to see the old Roman city come under a constitutional government and the crown of France give way to a republic.
The political ideas of liberty and equality born by our fathers of the east, cradled by our pioneers of the west. have proven so good and pure and practical that the nations of the earth are moved by our influence. We are a great people. We are in a great era and a grand epoch is opening out to the world. From this splendid prospect I can look back to the rude cabin and listen to the humble prayers and hymns and moral lessons that laid the foundations for this magnificent super-structure. Our young people are at once brought into full enjoyment of the possessions wrought out by the pioneers, and I hope that on each returning year the pioneers of Sandusky county will be welcome at. these reunions.
We get together in my county every year within eighty vards of the spot where I learned my A. B. C's. If you come up on the first Saturday of September we will show you a regular "blow out." The old folks get young again. Let us go through the world with our heads up. Don't go around with heads hanging down. Do not growl and say that the earth is going backward. I don't. God said, "Let there be light !" You may try to hold the world back if you will, but the grandeur of its progress will carry it on, and on, until from the rivers to the ends of the earth the nations shall lift up the standard of justice. liberty and equality and then when they all get together to celebrate their liberties, the other nations will stand up and call us blessed. They will point to us as the great political and moral forces of the world. And when the judgment is set and the orchestra of the universe assembles to the music of the spheres, our country and mine will still be chartered as first among the nations, the benefactors of universal humanity.
On the fiftieth anniversary of his being brought to Seneca county, General Gibson delivered a memorable address referring
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to this period, an excerpt of which is given, and which will be found to abound in touches of humor along with its capital good sense. It was delivered before the Seneca County Agricultural Society in the autumn of 1871. General Gibson said:
"As we contemplate the early history and the rapid develop- ment of our country, our first thoughts should ascend to Him who led our fathers to these fertile realms and who surrounds us with so many manifestations of his continued favor. Basing its title on Revolutionary success and winning possession by the argument of battle, the national government opened northwestern Ohio for settlement, selling its first lands in August, 1821, at Delaware. Ohio. The Seneca Indians and a remnant of the Mohawks settled on a reservation, embracing forty-one thousand acres and a half score of adventurous whites were here in 1820; but Seneca county had no place in the census of that decade. Regions now so attrac- tive with farms and homes and towns, reposed in the shadow of unbroken solitude; the deep tangled woods offered lurking places for untamed beasts and treacherous savages. What a grand transformation fifty years have wrought! And how pregnant these years have been with startling events in the history of civilization !
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