History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I, Part 8

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

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Types of Beveled and Serrated Knives found in Wayne County. About one-half natural size.

Upper Part: Types of Black Flint Arrow Points and Knives. Lower Part: Fancy Jasper and Chalcedony Artefacts. About one-half natural size.

Jpper Part: Effigy Artefacts representing Buffalo Skulls, Wolf and Fox Heads, Tadpoles, Fishes Etc. Lower Part: Jasper Implements with beveled Base. About one-half natural size.

Upper Part: Flint Digging Implements of Unique Shape. Lower Part: Jasper Implements of Unusual Forms. About one-half natural size.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

creek channel passes over carboniferous conglomerate that contained a vein of coal, and here is a breach through a fissure in the hills which shows them to have been cut through, as with pick and shovel, which is not consistent with their formation, but which is in accord with a law of physics, viz .: Dammed- up waters will select the point of least resistance in seeking a lower level; and here was an immense lake bounded by hard and high hills, and as the lake was still rising from the melting ice of the glacier's front, there must be found an outlet, and at last nature furnished it in two notches in the east hills, the one over Chippewa creek and the other over Newman's creek. Through these the rising waters rushed, disintegrating and transporting the obstructing material, until the two channels were formed that now constitute the west head of the Tuscarawas. In sections 26 and 25 of Chippewa town- ship coal mines are operated by drift less than a mile apart and the veins are on the same level, with the creek between them. These veins were certainly united in preglacial times, and my firm belief is that the waters of the Old Mohican went from the Orrville lake across the Chippewa channel, receiv- ing it as a tributary from section 26, through Chippewa Lake to Rocky river, and thence to the great preglacial river or channel in Lake Erie.

GLACIATION IN WAYNE COUNTY.

In calling attention to the influences of the glaciers-for there were several stages, each with an advance and retreat-I direct your minds to the agencies God made use of to beautify and bring more complete "seed time and harvest" to Ohio's Eden-Wayne county.

I will not speculate on the many theories that have been brought forth to account for the glaciers' formation and coming ; will simply say they are con- fined to two principal schools, first, that dependent on the procession of the equinoxes, which is supposed to induce alternates of intense cold and tropical heat twice in twenty-one thousand years ; second, the annular theory, which presuppose that the earth, in its earliest history, was surrounded with belts or rings, as Saturn is now, and that these belts of dense vapor shut out the direct light of the sun and so induced an even, warm temperature, as in a hothouse, from pole to pole, allowing the huge mammoth to roam amid giant palms up to the Arctic circle. That these belts-the distillate of the earth's furnace- successively came within the earth's attraction and fell to the earth ; the heaviest first; the carbons that gave nourishment to our coal forests. Later, and finally, the dense aqueous vapors, which by the earth's rotation were carried to the poles and fell as snow, to be converted into ice, which we call a glacier, and which must move through its own weight. My sympathies combine the two as causes. What we do know positively is that a broad

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

sheet of ice, many thousands of feet thick, formed in the north and moved south toward the equator, tearing off the tops of the Canadian highlands in its progress, and carrying a part of its load to Ohio, where, by the sun's heat, the ice was melted and its grist deposited in the form of drift and silt and till. This high mountain of ice, calculated by some to be eleven thousand feet in thickness, with gravity pulling and some inherent mysterious force propelling it, crept slowly south, having no respect for the igneous rocks of Canada, but leveled the ledges of her Laurentian hills, tore the pinnacles to pieces and took up and incorporated the product as a part and parcel of itself. As it proceeded south the sun's heat commenced its disintegration, and great rivers were formed on its top, over its front and underneath it. And in these rivers were rolled the angular blocks of Canadian granite, until they were rounded into boulders or "nigger heads" and cobblestones, to be deposited on Wayne county by the million. Nor was this all, for "though the mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small"; so the softer material, as shales, was ground to powder, and the crushed fragments of quartz, feldspar and hornblend were rolled into pebbles and deposited as boulders, clays and gravels. After leaving Canada with its load of granite and gravel, the line of direction of the glacier in its advance was largely determined, over what is now Lake Erie, by the deep and wide channel of a preglacial river, called by Newberry, in his geological report, Erie river, a river which "no man ever saw."

This river was largely made up of the great volumes of water pouring from the Old Mohican through Rocky river and through the equally deep channel of the Cuyahoga, supplemented by the flood from Black river and that from the drainage channels of the entire watershed of the south end of the lake. All these channels are supposed to have converged into one, form- ing the "Erie river," and its channel formed a path or mould for the viscous moving body of ice to follow in its advance, paralleling what is now Lake Erie. That such a mould will modify the course of the ice, I refer you to Professor G. F. Wright's "Ice Age in North America," page 335. When the glacier had passed from the soft shale, where it had plowed out a bed for Lake Erie to lie in, and had shaped and grooved the hard limestone for the islands near Sandusky, it met in its progress a barrier of massive and re- sistant limestone and waterlime, capped with firm Waverly, gradually rising to a height of eight hundred feet above the bottom of the lake, constituting the southeast watershed of Lake Erie. This obstacle had to be overcome or com- promised with, for there is nothing to stop such a moving mass of polar ice in its advance, save solar heat. Ice is commonly looked upon as a solid, and

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

a child has said, "Ice is water asleep," but ice is not a solid, and if asleep, it is somnambulistic, and walks in its sleep. Ice is no more a solid than honey, or lava, for its molecules move upon each other from some mysterious cause, aside from gravitation, inducing change of form and position, and here it must have acted against gravity, for the glacier crept on and up the obstructing mountain, crushed its strata, deepened its ravines, scored its rocks, as a plane grooves wood, and left its "hall marks" as striae on the hill- sides. Reaching the rocky summit, it seemed to hesitate before smoothing the crags of Waverly and dropped part of its load with its heaviest boulders on the north edge of the hill, and so changed the line of highest hills con- stituting the continental divide. It then passed on in nearly a direct line south as far as Newark in Licking county. A moving viscous body, meeting an obstruction that reacts against gravity, will, by a law of physics, manifest increased lateral pressure, and bulge, and the bulging will be in the line of least resistance. Now, at a point northeast of the resisting hills on the lake front, just where we would expect the reaction against gravity to be greatest, we find a low col made up of the basin of the Cuyahoga river, four and one- half miles wide, and the gorge of the Rocky river, three miles wide and only seven miles of hills between them-fourteen and one-half miles of space and seven and one-half miles of it open to below the lake's bottom. And this, supplemented by the wide mouth of Black river as a lateral, and, centrally, the channel of the Old Mohican to direct the bulb. Would it be in reason to suppose that nature would violate her own laws, reject the physical invita- tion and not send a lobe into the mouths of these hungry rivers? She did accept the challenge and projected a lobule into the fissure. In proof, I direct you to the present extension of glacial tongues in Alaska, which generally follow this law, and to Professor Wright's "Ice Age in North America," pages 174 to 235, demonstrated and recorded striae on the rocks, which on the hills of Summit county are directed southwest, and on the waverly of Ashland and Richland counties the scorings are directed southeast, and these scorings, if projected, would meet in the Old Mohican. The moraines are also in proof of this, for the terminals are deepest on the sides where the embarrassing hills modified the laterals, but did not prevent a marked central moraine for ten miles below Wooster, as well as to the north, and a silting of the lower reaches to Millersburgh. This valley of the Old Mohican and Killbuck furnished the groove of direction, with only gently curved variation from a right line across Medina and Wayne counties to Millersburgh, in Holmes county, where there is a more marked curve of the valley to the west, ending at the col near Killbuck Village. The width of this lobule of

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

the glacier extended from Canton, in Stark, to Loudonville, in Ashland county, and the lobe was arrested or ended just before reaching the conti- nental divide of the coal measures. It was stranded as a semicircle, its front presenting as a bent bow, which a little more than subtends the south front of Wayne county ; the bow string is about thirty miles long from Canton to Loudonville, while its central projection from this line is about eight miles, extending to below Millersburgh, with the Killbuck channel as a fixed arrow in the bent bow. On the outside of this bow from Dundee, in Tuscarawas, to near Brinkhaven, in Holmes county, where the north and south divide crosses the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus railroad, the landscape is the most picturesque in this section of Ohio, made so by the ravines of erosion created by the rushing waters of the melting ice, and the great masses of stone broken from the arresting hills and tumbled into the valleys. Near Dundee, blocks that I have measured are twenty-five by fifteen by six feet above ground, and how far below no one can tell, and any one who has trav- eled on the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus railroad from Millersburgh to Mount Vernon has wondered at the multitude and magnitude of the surface rocks along the track, especially near Glenmont, many looking like small houses, while the smaller ones render the ground untillable; and all these rocks were torn from the tops of the immediate hills by the force of the glacier just as its power of progress was spent, or arrested by the sun's rays. This lobe of the glacier seems to have been detached from the main body just where the coal measures end below Loudonville, for the main mountain of ice slid on south over the smoother face of the Waverly that skirts the coal measures to below Newark before it was deflected, a distance of forty miles. Now, it was this arrested lobe of the glacier that brought the load of material that changed the entire topography of the hydrographic basin described in this paper, from Cleveland to Millersburgh and from Massillon to Mansfield. But particularly in Wayne county was its burden of "Life in Death" put down, giving a new physiognomy and a new physiology to the landscape. The remodeled features of this perspective scene, with its fresh expression, made the face of this valley a thing of beauty to the eye and a blessing to agricultural interests. The angular hills and gorge-like valleys were rounded up into gentle swells and smoothed out into graceful undula- tions, and the food of the glacial grist was so disposed, digested and fitted for assimilation that hill and dale rejoiced in verdure unsurpassed, and there was left as our inheritance as fine a grazing and wheat growing section as the sun shines on. But our old waterways were obliterated, filled with drift hundreds of feet above their holding, and new drainage channels must be cre-

Types of Ungrooved Axes, or Celts, found in Wayne County. One- sixth natural size.

remonial Stones made from Black and Banded Slate. About one-half natural size.

Symbol of the Sun, used in Sun-Worship, showing Points of Compass and Rays of Light. Made of fine Sandstone. Found in a Mound near Wooster. About one-half natural size. 1 inch thick, Face rounded.

ypes of Grooved Axes found in Wayne County. One-sixth natura! size

Ceremonial Stones made from Black and Banded Slate. About one- half natural size.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

ated, a few of which, together with their mode of formation, I will attempt to describe. The Clear fork of the Mohican followed, in part, the old channel to near Perrysville, but was here obstructed in its course to the Black fork gorge by drift, the obliterated channel being now distinguished by two small lakes or kettle holes between the high gravel knolls that turned the waters. The deflected stream then cut a new channel southeast to the Mohican, its newness being demonstrated by numerous falls, the most picturesque being Lyons Falls, where the stream cuts down into the crumbling red sandstone of the Waverly immediately below the carboniferous conglomerate of an outlying coal hill, revealing many beautiful casts of fossil. The Black fork was blocked by moraine material where the Killbuck lobe of the glacier be- came fixed on the Loudonville hills, and its entire old channel-the Old Mohican-was filled to an insurmountable height with drift. But the pent-up waters formed a notch or low col in the hills one mile south of the village of Loudonville, where the diverted Clear fork rejoined it, and, uniting their forces, cut a narrow gorge through hills that now stand four hundred and twenty-five feet above the rock-bottomed and rock-banked Mohican. Here a mountain of sandstone and shale was cut in two, as you would cut a loaf of bread. The next new stream starts between Funk and Tylertown, where. because the old channel in the Big Prairie was walled up by a glacial dam three hundred feet high, creating the lake noted above, from Custaloga to Jeromesville, the Muddy and Jerome forks of the Mohican were compelled to mingle their waters and tear down a low breach in the north and south di- vide near Fort Tyler into a gorge two hundred feet deep and three miles long to gain, at Rochester Mill, a preglacial channel coming down from Mo- hicanville. Another glacial or post-glacial stream was created east of Orr- ville from the Newman's creek swamp to the Tuscarawas at Massillon, when the pent-up waters of the Orrville lake, whose flood plain was high as the surrounding hills-cut a narrow channel through a fissure in the coal hills and so reversed a preglacial stream, sending its water up the hill instead of down ; the immense morainic hills on the south held the waters of the melting glacier above, until sediment accumulated as high or higher than the gorge, when they cut through the carboniferous divide to the Tuscarawas at Massillon, the stream bed being fifty feet higher than that of Killbuck.

The Chippewa creek, which was the northern outlet of the great lake extending from near Orrville to above Chippewa lake in Medina county and across to near Smithville and Creston, cut a channel through the car- boniferous conglomerate to a lower level and now forms the west head of the Tuscarawas river.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

The Old Killbuck, which headed in Wayne township, was diverted by the moraine at Creston and cut a channel seven miles long to Burbank, from whence it found an outlet up the channel of the preglacial Black river to the divide near Overton, and here it cut its way to the present Killbuck.

LAKES AND SWAMPS.

The topography of Wayne county is rendered distinctly picturesque by the location of its lakes and swamps, and in this, as in all other descriptions, I include the area bounded by the surveys and acts of the General Assembly of Ohio in the year 1808. This extended the south line of the county to the Greenville treaty line, and the west line to include one tier of townships in Ashland county. This becomes an absolute necessity in presenting a topo- graphic picture, for the escarpments of Holmes and the rivulets and creeks that form the heads of the two Mohicans, the Adamic father and mother of the Big Prairie, are but parts of one great whole.

All the lakes of the county, both open and silted up, are found to have their centers in preglacial gorges and their lateral margins are the rock banks of the preglacial streams, covered light or heavy by glacial drift. They are mostly confined to the eroded channels of the Devonian island and the chan- nel of the Old Mohican, which runs exactly between the island and rock hills of the carboniferous. Odel's and Chippewa lakes are examples of the latter. while Greenlee's, Marthy's, Round and Long lakes, in Lake township, Ashland county, form a chain making a preglacial channel from Mohicanville to near Lakeville, where it entered the channel of the Old Mohican. Brown's lake and Manly's lake, though the former is very deep and fast closing over with turf, are simply kettle holes in the moraine where large masses of ice have become detached from the retreating glacier's front and so covered with gravel and sand that the sun could not melt them for centuries, but finally the sun was supreme-the gravel covering went to the bottom and the lakes were formed.

Fox lake and Patton's lake are located in the gorge that was drainage channel for the coal hills of eastern Baughman township; and there is much evidence that Fox lake is an immense artesian well. The waters flowing from the hills into the Tamarack swamp, through the preglacial channel noted above, into Patton's lake, and from here, in an undercurrent, to Fox lake, on the north side of which is found impenetrable morainic material, and the obstructed water rises through a gravel vent as it would through a drill hole. This would correspond to the great flowing wells near Sterling,

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

those at Fredericksburg and Apple Creek, and especially those along the Sugar creek in East Union township-in fact, all the flowing wells of the county are in such channels. The silted-up lakes spoken of above were, to the pioneers, impenetrable swamps, but many are now drained, and so con- verted into our most fertile plains, the principal ones being the Big Prairie. Killbuck Bottoms and the onion fields around Sterling and Creston. For centuries a rank vegetation grew on them, which falling each year and chem- ically and physically mixing with the silt of the glacier and wash of the hills, produces an inexhaustible soil, the richest in the county. There were many morainic islands in the swamp lakes which stood above the waters of even the spring floods, and bore a harvest of finest forest trees and verdure unsur- passed.

But the silting up of the lakes was not all; this gift of nature's God was smoothly spread over every inch of Wayne county's surface ; the old channels of erosion were filled beyond their holdings, in many of them the drift is over two hundred feet in depth, and near Sterling in the channel of the Old Mo- hican we find it four hundred and nine feet, in the Big Prairie the silt and drift and till measures one hundred and seventy-two feet. and Killbuck valley shows one hundred and eighty-four feet. The angular hills and ragged val- leys were rounded into graceful swells and undulations ; there is not an angu- lar nor jagged hilltop in the county, but all are domelike in their contour, with gently declining sides that enter peaceful valleys. The islands in these old lakes furnished cover for a great variety of wild animals. some fierce, some foul, but most of them the delight of the hunter and the joy of his wife and children when he could bring them home, and his wife set them steaming on the table. The elk and the deer. the bear and the panther. the wildcat and the wolf, the fox and the raccoon, the porcupine and the rabbit, made a forest family, with the pheasant and wild turkey, the quail and the wood- cock, but the birds of prey were also here, the bald eagle and fish hawk, the buzzard and chicken hawk feasted where they could, and the rattlesnake and copperhead lay in wait for the unwary. In the waters were found the beaver and the otter, the mink and the muskrat, and the finest fish for their food, and over the meadows that skirted the hills and surrounded the swamps the turf was trod into paths by the buffalo and pierced by the pointed hoof of the deer. Christopher Gist, in his travels for the Ohio Land Company in 1750 and 1751 and later in 1753, when he accompanied General Washington ( then Major) in an exploring trip through Ohio, mentions large herds of bison. thirty and forty in a drove, along the Walhonding and Mohican, and my old- time friend, old Tom Culbertson, had seven skulls of buffalo on his porch

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

near Millbrook, found on the farm of D. Myers. one mile east of Millbrook village. But when numbers of wild game is considered, we must look to the ducks and geese and swans that stopped long in their migrations to frolic in the waters and feast on the bordering vegetation. To say the ducks were by the million, the geese by the thousand and the swans by the hundred is telling a truth with much modesty, for at times the sky would be obscured when they were lighting on or rising from the water. And the low thunder of their wings on the wind was a wonder, while their quacking was a whole Fourth of July with Chinese crackers. But the crown for numbers must be given to the passenger pigeon, whose habit was to feast in the daytime on the acorns of the "Pocock Woods" and at night go to the alderbushes of the swamp to sleep (the Pocock woods was a solid body of oak timberland of one thousand acres, with many associate tracts).

The best way I can illustrate "numbers" will be by relating my experi- ence in the fall of 1849, when, as a boy, I went with A. Call and J. Allerman, one night, to get a "mess of pigeons." We repaired to the alder swamp half a mile south of Millbrook, Call with a torch and I with a bag. When a rod in the swamp, we stopped, and while Call held the torch and the tip end of an alder branch to keep it steady and from flying up, Allerman picked off the birds, pinched their heads and dropped them into the bag, which I held open. The birds from five branches filled the bag, a large gunny sack with a wide mouth. The branches were bent half to the ground by the weight, and the birds were so blinded and dazed by the light that they could not fly. Even as late as 1862 a man by name of Schamp, living near "Sharp's Bridge," had a large net, in which he caught immense numbers, enticing the birds to his place by "stool pigeons," surrounded with food, then throwing the net over them. Many a morning I saw him drive into Shreve with a two-horse wagonbed full to the cover. He would sell them for twenty-five cents a dozen or a "shilling," if he could get no more, at Wooster. And yet the Killbuck swamp was not the only remarkable pigeon roost, for in a paper by Professor G. F. Wright, of Oberlin, describing a visit to Lodi and the "Harrisville swamp" (now the great celery farm north of Burbank), and which is almost a part of Wayne county, for its drainage to the south is into the Killbuck, says: "This swamp furnished one of the most famous pigeon roosts in the country, or, indeed, in the world. I trust some of the older people of Lodi will collect together and write out for the benefit of the world and future generations the facts concerning this roost. I am told that in early times, when the pigeons gathered to their resting place toward night, or flew away in the early morning, the heavens were darkened as by a cloud and the

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

noise of their wings resembled that of a strong wind in the treetops of a pine forest. It is said that after dark one had but to go to the edge of the bushes and startle the sleeping birds so that they should fly into the air, when he could kill them in almost any quantities by throwing a stick upwards at ran- dom. The birds must have been reckoned by the million. A company was formed in New York City to capture them in immense quantities for the New York market. -X- It is one of those remarkable phenomena which will pass out of the knowledge of the world, unless the facts are soon col- lected and put on record."

We think this a fitting place to briefly record them. The detail of their coming and going will never be written, and, if written, could not be under stood by the generations to come, for the passenger pigeon is gone forever. A late notice in the papers offers three hundred dollars for a single pair, hop- ing that in some wild region a pair may still be found. They are like the bison, the bear, the elk and the deer, and the associate Indian, together with all the "wild things of the swamps," lost eternally to Wayne county, in the evolution of the white man's brain, and the contemplation of it prompts the old inhabitant to say :

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History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I, Part 8

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