History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I, Part 18

Author:
Publication date: 1910
Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen
Number of Pages: 1162

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may trace the patriot with his great and beautiful face and exalted bearing in the beginning of this Western empire, fashioned by centuries of struggle. And he was born amidst that tumult of popular revolution which then and thereafter ensanguined the battlements of every modern state.

An age of storms lowered upon the pioneers. Product of the evolution of political and moral causes, our fathers were felling oaks while the invention of Doc. Guillotine was felling the one hundred and twenty-five thousand heads of aristocracy, and monarchy, which had grown in France from law- less banditism, when there was no people but aristocracy, and feudal serfs, and enslaved citizens of municipal tyranny, and no judicial idea in govern- ment, and no executive power but the sword. The fathers of the pioneers were contending with savagery in a Western hemisphere while the feudal barons were slaughtering their poor peasantry in the Thirty Years war in the German provinces. Holland was struggling for liberty under the Prince of Orange, Switzerland by isolation, as much as by principle, was playing her political romance in her mountains fired by the story of Tell, the Austrian Gessler, and the immortal Winkelried, and the little republic of San Marino sat, like an American child, amidst the flaming and. bleeding contentions of the Italian cities. Beyond the analysis of all philosophy a composite English ancestry of Dane and Anglo-Saxon and Norman had risen to the awful dignity of beheading the usurping Charles I, and English democrats like Vane and Sidney and Pym and Hampden had perished on the scaffold, or in the tower, in the advocacy of constitutional restriction of royal oppression, and of the power of the representative assembly, the great House of Com- mons, to govern the English people. Fleeing from the revengeful axe of Charles II, the regicides and the ironsides of Cromwell, and from the religious inquisitions of the state, the revolutionists, the vanguard of the reign of the popular will, began to appear in Virginia, in North Carolina and in Mas- sachusetts ; the Quakers and German in Pennsylvania; the French began to appear in Louisiana, and all European populations of America were educated in the struggle of the Middle ages for the unity of government under the limitations of law. Under magistracy and judicial authority of government rose the pioneers. The great constitution of the United States is but the manifestation of the judicial elective principle which struggled for its ex- istence from the decline and fall of the Roman empire to the day of its adoption. The pioneers of settlement were also thoughtful pioneers of great principles of government.

But the science of pioneering demanded the supremacy of another great principle of life-religious faith. Vain would be the attempt to trace the

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history of that philosophy which attempted to spiritualize matter, to give it self-creative power, and to analyze the human mind into the faculties of in- comprehension. Disclosing the most abstruse and the most absurd schools of philosophers involved in the meshes of the agnostic fallacies of the great unknowable-from five hundred years before Christ-from Pythagoras and his disciples to Socrates, on to Plato and Aristotle, and Zeno, and Epicurus, and their disciples, Greeks, and Seneca, Lucretius and Cicero, Romans, to the Middle ages, when scholasticism attempted to adjust the Christian theory to the doctrines of Plato, reason became imbecile in the poison of infidelity, and, like government, religion was wielding its sceptre over a world of con- fusion. And then modern philosophy arose, and the German reformation, and the emancipation of thought, brought upon the stage Melancthon, and Eras- mus, and Luther, and Locke and Lord Bacon, and on the other hand Des- cartes, Spinosa, Voltaire, Leibnitz, Kant, Schilling, Hegel, and later followed by Comte and Spencer, and hundreds of others, the former supporting, the latter, in platonic renaissance, attacking the great idea of a personal God. And notwithstanding the cruelties of the church, its inquisitions, its destruc- tion of whole communities, the corruptions of its temporal power, and the deg- radation of its theology, which transformed our Heavenly Father into a savage, who took delight in the torture and death of the inquisition, and not- withstanding the almost universal influence in France and Germany of the infidel philosophers, Holland and Switzerland and England stood impreg- nable upon that promontory of progressive thought where God had erected the lighthouse of religious truth. In all the bloody contentions of Catholic, and Episcopalian, of state religion, Presbyterianism, and Puritanism, of Luth- eran and Jesuit, and notwithstanding the French infidelity which accom- panied French supplies and arms in the revolution, there flourished the great Christian merchants of Manhattan, the poor, but inflexible Puritan of Ply- mouth, the refugee of the Albigenses and Huguenots of the Carolinas, and the Republican Catholic of Maryland. God led the great republican hosts from wilderness to wilderness by the pillar of fire and pillar of cloud. The pioneer was a Christian and the prayerful worshipper of a personal Father.

The pioneers believed in domestic equality, one of the great principles of civilization, which emerged from the dark and bloody sea of the Middle ages. Disappearing in the convulsions of empire, the beautiful face and form of the Greek female, the dignified and lofty bearing of the Roman matron, is seen no more for fifteen enslaving centuries. As they were even in the hal- cyon days of their renown in the thoroughfares of Athens and Rome, they

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were the sport of the law-maker; and in the common perception of the so- called philosophers of the prytaneum of the one city, and of the Roman sen- ate, so inferior that they bore the personal blows of their husbands and the shadow of the harem; and legal brutality and death clouded the bright fancies of their exalted sex.

As prisoners of war enslaved, trampled to death by a brutal soldiery, the females of the dark ages gave birth to inferior men and women, and through all the tumult of cities stormed, and estates dismantled, the hideous process of depreciating populations made progress toward the mental and moral decreptitude of the race, and prolonged the darkness of the centuries. In his history of civilization, Guizot announces that marriage was, in the dark ages, less esteemed than continence or celibacy.

Aroused into moral enthusiasm by the Crusades, the creation of some unity and protection in government and the free thought and Christian light of the Reformation, the ancient mothers were rehabilitated in something of the tenderness and adoration with which remote antiquity had clothed them, and as the principles of free constitutions, and of the recognition of the true personality of God and the equality of all souls before Him, became the law of liberty and social life, they regained the queenly crown which had been beaten from woman's head in the ages of violence. And she, the ornament of the new world, was also a pioneer, and around her the protecting arm of her husband was placed in tenderness as the dangers of the woods uttered their weird voices, and her noble bosom warmed his heart as it grew cold in the hardships and struggles of the frontier.

The magnificent conditions of their freedom, their faith and their love inspired the pioneers with the noble philosophy of republicanism.

Washington was then President of the United States; the eulogies of history were ranking him with Cæsar and Fabius. Napoleon as First Con- sul was imitating his swift marches and sudden attacks, as he descended into the plains of Italy ; he had become estranged from the lordly Fairfaxes and the aristocracy ; his moderate education, his long marches in the woods as surveyor ; the fidelity of the common people, and the treason of the influential, had hedged him all about with deathless patriotism, and he, with the Otises, and Adams, the Morrises, the Putnams, the Carrols, the Jeffersons and Hamil- tons constituted a new and immortal race of great commoners. They had created the clective and popular system of the constitution; they had by the ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in all this Northwest territory; the common schools of New England had inspired the philosophical analysis of

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human rights; Webster and Clay and Silas Wright and Benton and Jackson, and the great statesmen and generals of the West, grew into majesty as the composite blood of the heroic commonalty swelled the heart and soul of a new nation of commoners; commoners who fifty years thence were to tie them- selves to the masts amidst bursting shells and cannon balls, or from some promontory won by blood pour the storms of resistless war upon the last surviving deformity of feudal arrogance and slavery. Such were the pio- neers ; heralds of a great nation, a great religion, and a great domestic life. Power could not frighten them; infidelity could not confuse them; divorce did not dishonor them. Believe not that anything of outward splendor marked the simplicity of their great appointment. Moccasins for shoes, homemade linen or woolen for clothes somewhat uncouth, the red wammus, the coon- skin cap, the uncut hair and beard, and the stalwart frame is the statue of the pioneer, as he stands in the background of the forest his shining rifle barrel across his arms; and she is the statue in flannel clad, with a quilted hood in winter, and a calico one for summer, and the blush of the clearing upon her cheek. Longfellow's Priscilla :

She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest, Making the humble house and the modest apparel of home spun, Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!

And they grew upward as they gazed at the stars through the tree-tops, and their steps were soft in the moss of primeval shade, and they were agile and fleet among the deer, and the speculation of wary watching was in their eyes at hostile identations of the leaves of prowling animals and Indian cunning. Near by some limpid spring singing in rippling monotone the subterranean song of cooling hills, rose their cabin of rounded logs and puncheon floors, with doors of wooden hinges, and windows glassed in oil, and tables, benches and bedsteads made by hand from the growing tree, and in the broad fire- place with its external chimney of sticks and mud, the housewife cooked with heated cheeks and baked her cornbread in the ashes, and sat her table with pewter plates; bunches of sage and medicinal roots were about the walls, and the rude ceilings were festooned with strings of drying pumpkins and hanging corn, and the cabin was noiseless in the shoeless feet of children, and upon a rude ladder they gracefully ascended garrets to their evening nests ; and the lullabys of the day were drowned in the hum of the spinning wheel and in the feathery songs of the surrounding shades; and their light was the tallow dip, and their clock was the sunbeam in the door; and the leaves pil-

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lowed and mattressed the muscles of daily struggle among the roots, and sleep had its dreams of home. Here was the dignity of prose amidst the romance and poetry of nature. Sallying forth, either of them master of the rifle, either of them dispersed the prowling panther or the bear from the stable or the pen :

Hidden in the alder bushes There he waited till the deer came, Till he saw two antlers lifted,

Saw two eyes look from the thicket, Saw two nostrils point to windward, And a deer came down the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow.

Scarce a twig moved with his motion Scarce a leaf was stirred or ruffled.

And the fearless and noble mother met the Indian at the doorway and cowed him with that sternness of penetration with which the divinity of a noble glance conquers all savage life. The pioneers were incomparably brave. And around them were prowling the nomadic butchers of the French and British wars, who veiled their clear purpose of assassination in the humble hypocrisy of a broken tongue, and a simulated friendship, and who never for a moment ungrasped the murderous weapon which their orators had chosen for savage arbitration.

A resident of Europe in pre-historic times, and crossing to America upon the isthmus of the fabulous Atlantis, or in the opposite of Behring Straits, a great race and government existed in America before the acorns grew to mighty oaks. Vicissitudes unwritten dispersed a dismembered rem- nant before the mighty presence of moral forces. Of native brain and ner- vous powers excelled by few of the human family, the noble virtues were ob- solete in the vacuity of moral will, and the cunning, artifice, and cruelty, with the inventive ingenuity of the Indian, were in the menacing shadows which enveloped the pioneer ; and he became learned in the simulated signals of the bear and the mocking bird and the owl, and heard their warwhoop in the adjacent wigwams, and looked with sacrificial bravery upon the terrors with which a confederacy had menaced the gathering civilization far-reaching from the woodland realms of King Philip. Pontiac, Tecumseh and Osceola. Upon the morning horizon of the pioneers rose the savage files, and he heard the savage murmur of their favorite retreats.

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Down the rivers, o'er the prairies,

Came the warriors of the nations,

Came the Delawares and Mohawks,

Came the Choctaws and Comanches,

Came the Shoshones and Blackfeet,

Came the Pawnees and the Omahaws,

Came the Mandans and Dacotahs,

Came the Hurons and Ojibways,

With their weapons and their war gear

Painted like the leaves of autumn,

Painted like the sky of morning;

In their faces stern defiance,

In their hearts the feuds of ages,

The ancestral thirst of venegance.

But danger lurked in the suppressed fury and in the warning glance of the pioneer, and his moral power, rather than his prowess, working in the providence for which he prayed, had the leverage and the pressure of a great victory over savage life; and the growl, and the chatter, and the rustle, and the crackling, and the ominous impressions, the savage undertones of nature, the song of the cricket, the hoarse bass of the frog, the dreadful chimes of the rattlesnake, the rhythmic pulsations of the night, the weird beating vitality of the voiceless woods, mingled with the echoes of the warwhoop, and the drunken chant of these barbarians, and grew by the moral chemistry of virtue into the sweet tenor of patience and endurance in the great soul of the pioneer. Before the gigantic savage chief, painted hideously for war, and with a tiger's eye, and armed with gleaming instruments of revenge and of death, the pioneer was the royal disarming angel of a new covenant of the family, religious faith and liberty:

In social relations the pioneer was great hearted. Benevolence and hos- pitality reigned in the cabins of the pioneer. Magnetic forces massed the incomparable few into raisings, and log rollings, and huskings, and the red ear of corn made fiery faces and rumpled frills. Little Killbuck bore upon his tortuous bosom the floating raft laden with skins of the coon, the opos- sum, the deer, the bear, and the wild cat, and a few Spanish or American silver dollars to exchange at Zanesville for salt and flour, tobacco and whisky, and the missionary with saddle bags on horseback, of Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran or Methodist, was welcomed at the cabin doors, smoked the pipe of peace, strengthened his inspiration with the bottle of tansy bitters, and related the news of long Eastern months, and how the government at Phila- delphia, at New York or Washington still lived, how the great commoners were still defying the world, and how John Marshall was electrifying the

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magistracy of the older continent, by his great luminous conscience and philosophical intellect ; and these early judges of the township exteriorly rough and interiorly refined, sat upon stumps and, as jurors, upon logs, and ad- ministered justice intuitionally according to the inspiration of the woods and the common law of necessity.

The politician was a rara avis among the pioneers :

Then none was for a party; Then all were for the State; Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great; Then lands were fairly portioned; Then spoils were fairly sold; The romans all were brothers In the brave days of old.

For almost a half a century from the formation of the constitution, political parties were mere nomenclature, and but little less than depositaries of exploded suggestions of constitutional debate. Political independence now is retrograding to the more noble reflection and conservatism of the pioneer.

Supposed to have been gradually ascending the zenith of civilization, if the present age adorns its ascension with the universality of great physical condition, of education, of science, of art, of commerce, of architecture, of magnificent houses and great cities, and great churches and great popula- tion, then its ascension is incomparably true. But great principles have not been added to constitutional government, not one beam from the effulgent throne of God, not one throb to the love of domestic life, not one impulse to the noble souls of the pioneer! Patriotic, religious, pure, patient, suffering all things, and true and unchanging to the virtue of all future ages, my con- science, your conscience, at this hour, are full of the glory of a great ancestry, and we bow before them, with only less reverence than that we feel for the Divine Father.

Attended by thousands of people of Wayne and adjoining counties, this celebration involved a high condition of the sensibilities. As the anniversary of the first organization of the county, a hundred years presented a panorama in which, from the log cabin to the palace, from a few to thousands. from poverty to wealth, from humble patriotism to greatness, the reminiscences

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invoked the dearest memories. The then present was worthy of the past. Heroism had not died. There were present the heroes of the great wars.

The patriotic spirit of the people of Wayne county has been demonstrated in every war of the republic. Many of the early settlers had served under Washington ; they joined Gen. Reasin Beall in the war of 1812, and marched to the support of the frontier inhabitants of Wayne and Richland counties, and ultimately to Camp Huron; they enlisted and fought in the battles of the Mexican war of 1845; they volunteered by thousands and fought, and many of them perished, in the war for the preservation of the Union in 1861, and the same hereditary patriotism inspired a noble array of young men to enlist in the war with Spain in 1898. Splendid in courage, the fathers and mothers of early Wayne county transmitted their virtues to their posterity.

WAYNE AND ASSOCIATE COUNTIES PROLIFIC OF GREAT MEN.

That the counties of Ohio were and are, respectively, of early super- iority, leads to a broader suggestion and inspiration that solves the riddle of Ohio's great leadership and presidential glory among the states. The people were a distinguished composite race. The Celt, the Briton, the Dane, the Saxon, the Norman, the German, the Welsh, invulnerable to the attack of the Roman empire, the Virginian, the followers of Penn, Maryland's colonial great men, the Puritan, and the Dutch of Manhattan, the Scotch, and the courtiers of the Carolinas; this composite American conceived and bred a race too great for Britain, and transplanted the heroism and love of liberty, and the wisdom that attended Washington in his conquest of British soil and her great armies. From the races of the world there arises the new man, and the new woman, exalted to the intellectual dominion of govern- ment, and the progenitors of forty states. Of the third county of the North- west, this unrivalled race, whose men were fearless and wise, and whose women were good and beautiful, made their home here a hundred years ago. Government was the absorbing question and principles of government the absorbing philosophy.

Into the very nerves of men, into the very spirit and motive of action, into the very and only scheme of growth, individualism, personal liberty, patriotism, became incorporated elements. Liberty echoed in the crash of the falling oaks. She was delightful in the sunshine of the fields; she was aromatic in the odor of the flowers. She garlanded the determined faces of men and women with the bloom of orchards, and golden grain. She made

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them beautiful, strong and heroic, and great generations of eloquent, thought- ful people filled Ohio. The eastern division of the Northwest, and the wide territory of Wayne, the greatest of the subdivisions of the state, was un- equalled in the character of its founders in all the counties of the new states of the Union. This splendid inception and continuance for over a century of the government of the people, we may safely leave to the present and posterity, and repeat the invocation of Longfellow :

Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,

Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,

What anvils rung, what hammers beat,

In what a forge, and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!

Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the waves, and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

CHAPTER IX.

COUNTY, STATE AND NATIONAL REPRESENTATION.

The subjoined is a correct list of the various officers who have served from Wayne county, in various official capacities, since the county's or- ganization in 1812. The members of Congress who have represented dis- tricts of which Wayne county formed a part were :

Reasin Beall. 1813-1815

Harrison G. Blake 1861-1863

David Clendennin 1815-1817

George Bliss.

1863-1865

Peter Hitchcock. 1817-1819

Martin Welker 1865-1867

John Sloan 1819-1821

Martin Welker 1867-1869

John Sloan 1821-1823

Martin Welker 1869-1871

John Sloan 1823-1825

John Sloan 1825-1827

James Monroe.

1873-1875

John Sloan. 1827-1829

James Monroe

1875-1877

John Thomason 1829-183I

William McKinley, Jr 1877-1879

John Thomason 1831-1833

James Monroe 1879-1881

Benjamin Jones 1833-1835

Addison S. McClure.

1881-1883

Benjamin Jones 1835-1837

Joseph D. Taylor 1883-1885

Isaac H. Taylor 1885-1887

William McKinley, Jr 1887-1889

Ezra Dean. 1841-1843

Ezra Dean 1843-1845

David A. Starkweather 1845-1847

J. D. A. Richards. 1893-1895

Samuel Lahm 1847-1849

Addison S. McClure 1895-1897

David K. Carter 1849-185I

John A. McDowell 1897-1899

David K. Carter 1851-1853

John A. McDowell. 1899-1901

Harvey H. Johnson

1853-1855

J. W. Cassingham 1901-1903

Philemon Bliss 1855-1857

J. W. Cassingham 1903-1905

Philemon Bliss 1857-1859

M. L. Smyser 1905-1907

Harrison G. Blake. 1859-1861

WV. A. Ashbrook.

1907-1909

MEMBERS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.

The members of the Ohio constitutional convention of 1851-52 were John Larwill, Leander Firestone, M. D., and E. Wilson ; in 1873-74, the sec-

M. L. Smyser 1889-1891 A. J. Pearson. 1891-1893

Mathias Shepler.

1837-1839

David A. Starkweather 1839-184I

James Monroe 1871-1873

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ond constitutional convention, the member from Wayne county was John K. McBride.

STATE SENATORS.

Columbia, Stark and Wayne District-Lewis Kinney and Joseph Rich- ardson, 1812 to 1814; John Thompson, 1814 to 1816; John G. Young, 1815 to 1817.

Stark and Wayne District-John Myers, 1816 to 1818; Thomas G. Jones, 1818 to 1820.

Wayne District-Thomas McMillan, 1820 to 1824; Edward Avery, 1824 to 1826.

Wayne and Holmes District-Joseph H. Larwill, 1826 to 1829, resign- ing the last named year.

Wayne District-Benjamin Jones, 1829 to 1832; Thomas Robinson, 1832 to 1836; George Wellhouse, 1836 to 1838; Jacob Ihrig, 1838 to 1840; John H. Harris, 1840 to 1842; Charles Wolcott, 1842 to 1844; Levi Cox. 1844 to 1846; John Willford, 1846 to 1847; Andrew H. Byers, 1847 to 1850.

Wayne and Ashland District-George W. Bull, 1850 to 1852.

Wayne and Holmes District -- George Rex, 1852 to 1854; James Hock- inberry, 1854 to 1856; Joseph Willford. 1856 to 1858; D. J. Perkey, 1858 to 1860; Benjamin Eason, 1860 to 1862.

Wayne, Holmes, Knox and Morrow District-Davis Miles, 1862 to 1864; Joseph C. Deven. 1864 to 1866; Frank H. Hurd, 1866 to 1868; Lyman R. Critchfield, 1866 to 1867, resigning after the first session of 1866; Robert Jus- tice, 1867 to 1868, filling out the unexpired term of Mr. Critchfield; George Rex and C. H. Scribner, 1868 to 1870; Hinchmen S. Prophet, 1870 to 1872; Henry McDowell, 1872 to 1874; Daniel Paul, 1874 to 1876: John Ault, 1876 to 1878; John W. Benson, 1878 to 1880; E. F. Poppleton, 1878 to 1880: J. J. Sullivan, 1880 to 1882; Benjamin Eason, 1882 to 1884; Allen Levering, 1884 to 1886; J. J. Sullivan, 1886 to 1888; J. S. Braddock, 1888 to 1890; John Zimmerman, 1890 to 1892; Hugh A. Hart, 1891 to 1892, vice Zimmerman. deceased : William G. Beebe, 1892 to 1894: N. Stilwell, 1894 to 1896; W. M. Harper, 1896 to 1898; Lake F. Jones, 1898 to 1900; N. Stilwell, 1900 to 1902: N. Stillwell, 1902 to 1904: L. B. Houck, 1904 to 1906; M. Vanover, 1906 to 1908; John M. Thompson. 1908 to 1910.

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History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I, Part 18

Author: Publication date: 1910 Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen Number of Pages: 1162

Author:
Publication date: 1910
Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen
Number of Pages: 1162