History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I, Part 31

Author: Williams, L.A., & Co., Cleveland
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio : L. A. Williams & Co.
Number of Pages: 814

USA > Ohio > History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I > Part 31

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further mention of "the owners of lots already drawn," and of "those persons whose lots have been laid off on Colonel Campbell's land," may as well refer to operations of 1778-79 as to the disposition of lots in any suppositious town of 1773. On the whole, we entertain no doubt that any half-acre or smaller subdivisions of the soil here date from some time contemporaneous with or posterior to the removal of Colonel Clark's settlers of 1778 from Corn Island to the main- land, and that there is no trustworthy foundation for belief in a Louisville of five or more years before. The survey stated in the act was in all probability Bard's in 1779, of which a rude map, dated April 20, of that year, has been preserved.

SODOWSKY.

A word further about Sodowsky, or Sandusky. It is a name somewhat noted in the history of Kentucky, and probably gave origin to the name Sandusky in Ohio. It was originally Sodowsky, but became corrupted into "Sandusky." In the American Pioneer, volume II., page 326, the autographs of two of the brothers appear, one of whom signed " Isaac Sodowsky," and the other "Jacob Sandusky." Their father, James Sandusky, as their letter to the Pioneer says, "came down the river in 1773, and again in 1774, with Hight [Hite] and Harrod. In the first trip they went down as far as the Falls, and returned. In the last they went down to the mouth of the Kentucky river, and up that stream to Harrod's station, where they cleared land and planted corn. This was the first improvement in Kentucky; but that settlement was broken up by the Indians. It may be worth mentioning that these trips were both made in pirogues or large canoes." He afterwards settled in Bourbon county, where James Sandusky, one of the broth- ers, was still living in 1843.

CONNOLLY'S GRANT.

On the 16th of December, 1773, according to Dr. McMurtrie and the writers generally (Colonel Durrett, however, says September in his Centen- nial Address), a patent of two thousand acres of the present site of Louisville, beginning about on the line of First street, and thence southward, including the sites of Shippingport and Portland, was issued by the British Crown to Dr. John Connolly (often spelt Connally), a "surgeon's mate," or assistant surgeon, in modern military

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parlance, in the general hospital of the Royal forces in America. It is believed that the lines of this tract were run by Captain Bullitt in the summer of the same year; and certain of the writers aver that his prime object in coming to the Falls was to survey for Connolly-who had the tract in view, although it was not yet pat- ented to him-as well as for others. Connolly took the land, as one statement goes, under a proclamation of George III. in 1763, granting land-warrants as bounties to soldiers in the French and Indian war, which had shortly before been concluded. Another theory is that while the latent forces of the Revolution were gather- ing and developing, and the colonies were mut- tering their discontent, he agreed with Governor Dunmore to secure a strong British interest among the whites and Indians of the border, in consideration of two thousand acres of land, to be obtained by the Governor for him at the Falls of the Ohio.

This original private owner, so far as is known, of the most important part of the site of Louis- ville, was born and brought up near Wright's Ferry, in Pennsylvania. His sire was a farmer on the Susquehanna; his mother, before her marriage to the elder Connolly, was a Quaker widow named Ewing. He traveled consider- ably in his youth through the wild Western country, and at Pittsburg, a few years before the Revolution opened, he fell in with Lord Dun- more, then Governor of Virginia. It was then, it is said, that he made the contract with the Governor before related. November 5, 1775, Dunmore commissioned him lieutenant-colonel commandant of the Queen's Royal Rangers. He was then provided with the secret instructions hereafter mentioned, authorizing him to raise a complete Tory regiment at Pittsburg or Detroit, and with it organize an expedition.

Connolly was a nephew of Colonel George Croghan, the British Indian agent who passed the Falls in 1765, on a mission to the Western tribes. He resided at Fort Pitt, or Pittsburg, and is mentioned in General Washington's journal for 1770 as well acquainted with the lands south of the Ohio, where he no doubt held large tracts, including this interest in the site of Louisville. Early in 1774, with a captain's commission, he had been sent by Governor Dunmore to assert the claims of that colony over the Pittsburg

region, and take possession of the country bordering upon the Monongahela, in the name of the King. He was an artful, ambitious, and intriguing fellow, well fitted for such a ser- vice, and at once issued a proclamation call- ing upon the people in and about Redstone Old Fort and Pittsburg to assemble about the 25th of January, to be enrolled in the Virginia militia. Arthur St. Clair, afterwards General and Gov- ernor of the Northwest Territory, was, however, upon the ground as representative of the pro- prietors of Pennsylvania, which had a prior claim upon that region, and he arrested Connolly before the meeting occurred, and shut him up in prison. He was presently released, upon his promise to deliver himself up again. This he failed to do ; but on the contrary reappeared at Pittsburg on the 28th of March, with a party of followers, and re-asserted the dominion of Vir- ginia there. He succeeded after much strife in getting possession of Fort Pitt, which he rebuilt and christened Fort Dunmore. He played the petty tyrant here for some time, arresting and imprisoning citizens and even magistrates, whom Dunmore for very shame was compelled to re- lease. It is said to have been a letter of his, written on the 21st of April, to the settlers along the Ohio, intended to stir them up against the Shawnees, that led to the murders by Cresap and Greathouse, and the Indian war which involved the friendly Logan, the whole of whose family had been wantonly massacred. When, during the troubles, three of the Shawnees had con- ducted a party of traders to Pittsburg, Connolly seized them and would doubtless have dealt hardly by them. He was defeated in his attempt by Croghan, his uncle, and then actually dis- patched men to waylay and kill them on their re- turn, one of these kindly disposed savages, it is reported, thus losing his life. " The character developed by this man," says the Annals of the West, " while commandant of Fort Dunmore, was such as to excite universal dctestation, and at last to draw down upon his patron the reproof of Lord Dartmouth," who was the British Secre- tary for the Colonies. " He seized property and imprisoned white men without warrant or pro- priety ; and we may be assured, in many cases besides that just mentioned, treated the natives with an utter disregard of justice." The follow- ing is related of Connolly in the same work:

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It was towards the close of this last year of our colonial existence, 1775, that a plot was discovered which involved some whose names have already appeared upon our pages, and which, if successful, would have influenced the fortunes of the West deeply. Dr. John Connolly, of Pittsburgh (he whom Washington had met and talked with in 1770, and with whom he afterwards corresponded in relation to West- ern lands, and who played so prominent a part as commandant of Pittsburgh, where he continued at least through 1774), was, from the outset of the revolutionary movements, a Tory, and being a man extensively acquainted with the West, a man of talent, and fearless withal, he naturally be- came a leader. This man, in 1775, planned a union of the Northwestern Indians with British troops, which combined forces were to be led, under his command, from Detroit, and, after ravaging the few frontier settlements, were to join Lord Dunmore in Eastern Virginia. To forward his plans, Con- nolly visited Boston to see General Gage; then, having re- turned to the South in the fall of 1775, he left Lord Dun- more for the West, bearing one set of instructions upon his person, and another set, the true ones, most artfully con- cealed, under the direction of Lord Dunmore himself, in his saddle secured by tin and waxed cloth. He and his com- rades, among whom was Dr. Smyth, author of the doubtful work already quoted, had gone as as far as Hagerstown, where they were arrested upon suspicion and sent back to Frederick. There they were searched, and the papers upon Connolly's person were found, seized, and sent to Congress. Washington, having been informed by one who was present when the genuine instructions were concealed as above stated, wrote twice on the subject to the proper authorities, in order to lead to their discovery, but we do not know that they were ever found. Connolly himself was confined, and re- mained a close prisoner till 1781, complaining much of his hard lot, but finding few to pitv him.

Connolly was exchanged and released in April, 1781. Washington wrote promptly to General Clark a warning that he was expected to go from Canada to Venango, at the mouth of French creek, with a force of refugees, and thence to Fort Pitt, with blank commissions for a large number of dissatisfied men supposed to be in that region, with whom the exposed frontiers would be attacked; but nothing seems to have come of this. The compiler of the Annals says that after the Revolution had ended he became a mischief-maker in Kentucky, though in just what manner is not stated. He had long before, in 1770, before a white man had settled upon the soil of this State, proposed an independent province that would have included all of its ter- ritory between the Cumberland or Shawnee river, a line drawn from above its fork to the Falls, and the Ohio river -which would, of course, have included the present site of Louis- ville. His title to one thousand of his acres here was forfeited on account of his treason to the patriot cause. Virginia assumed the owner- 1

ship of it, but delayed disposal of it until Colonel Campbell, the apparent joint owner, had re- turned from Canada, where he had been taken in captivity by the Indians in 1780. When the return occurred, by acts of the Virginia Legisla- ture of May and October, 1783, and October, 1784 his interests were guarded and secured, while those of his recreant and now refugee partner were sacrificed. In November, 1788, the latter reappeared in Kentucky, coming from Can- ada, ostensibly to recover, if possible, his former possessions in Louisville, but really, as was be- lieved, to aid the movement then in agitation for the separation of Kentucky from Virginia and its alliance or union with Spain, then holding Louisiana and cultivating disaffection in Ken- tucky. He was foiled in this, and now finally disappears from the page of American history.

Mr. Collins gives the following account of the legal proceedings[which justified the confiscation of Connolly's property :

On July 1, 1780, an inquest of escheat was held at Lexing- ton, by the sheriff of Kentucky county-George May, escheator. John Bowman, Daniel Boone, Nathaniel Ran- dolph, Waller Overton, Robert McAfee, Edward Cather, Henry Wilson, Joseph Willis, Paul Froman, Jeremiah Til- ford, James Wood, and Thomas Gant, " gentlemen," jury- men, were empanelled, sworn, and charged to try whether John Connolly and Alexander McKee be British subjects or not. Verdict-that they were British subjects, and after April 19, 1775, of their own free will departed from the said States, and joined the subjects of his Britannic Majesty; and that on said 4th of July, 1776, said Connolly was " possessed of 2,000 acres on the Ohio opposite to the Falls," "and said McKee of 2,000 acres on the headwaters of the south branch of Elkhorn, and no more.

In pursuance of this finding, the estate of Connolly at the Falls was confiscated. It had already been described, in the act of May, of the same year, establishing Louisville, as "the for- feited property of said John Connolly," and upon it, being "1,000 acres of land," was laid out the new town. The Tory Doctor had owned as much as 3,000 acres here; but only 1,000 seem to have been available for confiscation. De Warrenstaff, or Warrendorff, mentioned below, had conveyed his 2,000 acres to Connolly and Colonel Campbell, which must have been in equal portions, since in 1775 the latter bought up the former's interest in this tract, which was an undivided half of the 2,000 acres. The 4,000 held by the two was then so partitioned that Connolly became owner of the uppermost 1,000 and the lowest 1,000, Campbell's tract of

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2,000 lying between. In 1778 Connolly trans- ferred the lower 1,000 also to Campbell, thus leaving but the upper 1,000 to be escheated.

THE WARRENSTAFF PATENT.

Very few facts concerning this are now acces- sible. About all that is known of it or him is that, on the same day the patent was granted to Connolly, December 16, 1773, and under the same authority in the King's proclamation, two thousand acres at the Falls of the Ohio, next adjacent below Connolly's, were patented to one Charles de Warrenstaff or Warrendorff, who was an ensign in the Pennsylvania Royal Regiment of Foot. He never, we believe, became a resi- dent of Louisville, and we do not learn that he was ever even a visitor here. The very next year he parted with his interest in the soil of Kentucky to Dr. Connolly and Colonel John Campbell, of whom the world knows something more.

COLONEL CAMPBELL.

This gentleman was of Irish birth, possessed of some property, and came in the vigor of his young manhood to identify his fortunes with the · infant hamlet of Louisville, where he was among the earliest settlers when the town was formed. According to Collins, he received a grant of four thousand acres from the Commonwealth of Vir- ginia, which was located immediately below and adjoining the grant on which Louisville stands. He was also a property-holder at Frankfort, where his name appears in a list of landed pro- prietors in 1797. Colonel Campbell soon be- came prominent in the affairs of the village and the State. He was a member of the convention of 1792, held in Danville, which formed the first constitution of Kentucky ; was an elector of the State Senate, under the peculiar provision of that constitution, in the same year, and was by the electors chosen to that body from Jefferson county, and was at one time its Speaker pro tem- pore ; previously to the formation of the State was a member of the Virginia Legislature, from Jefferson county, in 1786, 1787, and 1790 ; and was a Representative in the Congress of the United States from 1837 to 1843. In 1785 he established two of the earliest ferries allowed by law in Kentucky-one from his lands at the Falls across the Ohio to the mouth of Silver creek, and the other across the same stream,

from the Jefferson county bank to the mouth of Mill run. He was a Presbyterian in his religious faith, and his name appears upon the records of the first meeting of the Synod of Kentucky, at Lexington, October 14, 1802, as an elder from the " Presbytery of Washington." Campbell county, east of the lower Licking river, opposite Cincmnati, is named in his honor ; and an old paper published in that city, of date March 12, 1796, says that Colonel Campbell lived at Taylor's Creek Station, probably in that county. There can be no doubt, however, that most of his mature life was spent in Louisville. Mr. Collins says : " He was a large man, of fine personal appearance and strong mind, but rough in his manners. He never married, and, having died childless, his large estate passed into the hands of many heirs."

Colonel Campbell must be regarded as an origi- nal proprietor at Louisville. As already noticed, he acquired in 1774 a half-interest in the two thousand-acre grant to Warrenstaff, and the next year purchased an undivided half of the adjoin- ing tract of his partner in the Warrenstaff prop- erty, Dr. John Connolly; and when the partition of the two undivided tracts was made, his half of the whole, or two thousand acres, fell be- tween the two tracts thus cut off for Connolly. He became otherwise a large owner in this region, and finally devised all his real estate within five miles of the Beargrass creek to Allen Campbell. Colonel Campbell will come again into this his- tory.

1774.

The events of this year have been already anticipated, to some small extent. There is no story of colonization yet to tell, nor for several years to come. The birds and beasts and creep- ing things held their own upon the site of the great city to-be, and no sign of civilization was presented throughout the broad plateau, ex- cept here and there the simple stake or "blaze" and inscription of the surveyor. Indecd there is little to narrate of 1774 except of the surveyor.

In June, while Captain Harrod and his com- panions were setting the stakes of civilization at the first permanently inhabited town in Kentucky, Harrodsburg, two remarkable men came through the deep wilderness from their homes on the Clinch river, in North Carolina, to the Falls. They were Daniel Boone and Michael Stoner,

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who were charged with an important mission. Governor Dunmore had received timely warning of the Indian hostilities now threatening, and which very soon broke out, particularly in the severe conflict between the savages and Colonel Bouquet's expedition, at the mouth of the Kan- awha, in which the former were signally defeated. The Governor had a party or parties out survey- ing under his orders in the Kentucky wilderness, among whom were the celebrated Jefferson county pioneer, Colonel John Floyd, also Han- cock Taylor, Abraham Haptonstall, and Willis Lee (these three are known to have been survey- ing on the present soil of Jefferson county, May 2d of this year), with James Sandusky, John Smith, Gibson Taylor, and very likely others. It is probable that most of Captain Bullitt's party, who came to the Falls in 1773, had remained to this time in Kentucky. Dunmore became ex- ceedingly apprehensive for their safety, and em- ployed Boone and Stoner to make the long and perilous journey of about four hundred miles to the Falls to find the surveyors, and conduct them out of their dangers to the settlements. Boone received the summons on the 6th of June, and lost no time in setting out with his com- panion on the hazardous trip. Their commis- sion was faithfully and courageously executed, and probably the lives of the surveyors were thus saved, although Hancock Taylor, as we have seen, was mortally wounded while making his last survey, and died on the retreat. Boone and Stoner reached Harrodsburg June 16th, and found Harrod's and Hite's companies engaged in laying off the town. Boone rendered aid in this, and was assigned one of the half-acre lots, upon which a double log cabin was built soon after. The entire round of Boone and Stoner on this duty of warning and safe conduct to the settlements, covered about eight hundred miles, and occupied sixty-two days. Mr. Collins calls them the "first express messengers" in Kentucky.

1775.

This historic year, so rife with important events at the East, preluding the War for Am- erican Independence, was comparatively quiet in the Valley of the Ohio. In this region the dauntless surveyors were still pushing their way through the tangled wildwood, leading the van of empire. Many of their movements, and per-

haps of their surveys, remain unknown to this day; but, from depositions taken long afterwards, one may learn of a party at work in the middle of December, on Harrod's creek, consisting of Abraham and Isaac Hite, Moses Thompson, Joseph Bowman, Nathaniel Randolph, Peter Casey, and Ebenezer Severns, who were survey- ing. Early in the season Captain James Knox -famous as the leader of the "Long Hunters" into Kentucky four or five years before-must have been somewhere on the banks of the Bear- grass, since he was held entitled, October 30, 1779, to four hundred acres of land on its waters, "on account of marking out the said land, and of having raised a crop of corn in the country in 1775." So simple and brief is the history of the white man in this region for this year.

One interesting character, however, for many years afterwards one of the most notable resi- dents of Louisville, came to the Falls this year- Sandy Stewart, the "island ferryman" named in the previous chapter, who long after noted the precise date of his arrival as June 5, 1775. He was a Scotchman, born in Glasgow twenty years before ; a young immigrant to this country so poor that his personal service was sold in Balti- more to pay his passage across the ocean ; a trav- eler westward with two companions as soon as he had served out his time; making a canoe at Pittsburg, and in it voyaging down the Ohio to the Falls; afterwards a settler here and for more than a quarter of a century the ferryman from the mainland to Corn island, until 1827, when he retired and died at the old Talmage hotel, on Fourth street, in 1833, aged 78, leaving a small fortune to his relatives abroad.

1776-77.

Even more simple and short are the annals of these elsewhere great years, as regards events at the Falls of the Ohio. We have but one to re- cord. Mr. Casseday, in his History of Louis- ville, assigns these as the years of the journey of George Gibson and Captain William Linn, who passed the Falls in boats going from Pittsburg to New Orleans, in order to procure supplies for the troops stationed at Fort Pitt. They obtained one hundred and thirty-six kegs of powder, which did not reach the Falls on the return until the next year, when the kegs were laboriously carried

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around the troubled waters by hand, reshipped, and finally delivered safely at Wheeling, whence they were transferred to the fort. Each man, in making the portage around the Falls, carried three kegs at a time on his back. Gibson and Linn were aided in this toilsome work by John Smith, who will be remembered as one of Bul- litt's surveyors here nearly four years previously, and who happened to meet the voyagers here. This is noted as the first cargo ever brought by whites up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, from New Orleans to Pittsburg.

1778.

We come now to the beginnings of permanent white settlement at the Falls of the Ohio-in- deed, in the Falls of the Ohio, for the first stakes were set just amid the waters at the head of the rapids, upon a little tract which has now wholly disappeared, except at low water, when, from the railway bridge and the shore, the underlying strata of old Corn Island, with the rotting re- mains of stumps here and there, may yet be seen.

The first settlement here was the result of a military movement during the war of the Revo- lution, and brings into our narrative again the renowned name of

GEORGE ROGERS CLARK.

A sketch of the early life of this famous hero of Western warfare, whose name will be forever associated with one of the most impor- tant and skillful movements of the Revolutionary War, as well as with some of the most successful expeditions of the border warfare, has already been given in our General Introduction. He was but twenty-six years of age this year, when his greatest feat of arms was achieved. Like Washington and many other notable men of that time, he was a land-surveyor in his youth, but soon got into military life in the troubles with the Indians, and in the affair known as Dun- more's War rose to the command of a company. At its close he was offered a commission in the British army, but declined it. He visited the infant settlements in Kentucky in the spring of 1775, remaining until fall, and, now bearing the rank of major, being placed temporarily in com- mand of the volunteer militia of the settlements. He came again to this country in the spring of the next year, with the intention of permanently

remaining ; but staid only a few months, when, seeing the dangers to which the frontiers were exposed, and being appointed at the Harrods- burg meeting of the settlers June 6, 1776, a member of the General Assembly of Virginia, he set out on foot through the wilderness to Williamsburg, then the colonial capital, but found the Legislature adjourned. He at once extend- ed his long pedestrian excursion to Hanover county, where Governor Patrick Henry lay sick, and represented to him the pressing necessity of munitions of war for the Kentucky settlements. Henry concurred in his views and gave him a favorable letter to the Executive Council. From this body, after much delay and difficulty, Clark obtained an order, on the 23d of August, 1776, for five hundred pounds of gunpowder, for the use of the people of Kentucky. He obtained the powder at Pittsburgh, and, after hot pursuit down the Ohio by the Indians, during which he was compelled to conceal the precious cargo at the Three Islands, near the present site of Mays- ville, he succeeded in getting it through to Har- rodsburg, where the pioneers were promptly sup- plied with the indispensable means of defense. Meanwhile the young major had been instru- mental in securing from the Virginia Legislature, which had re-assembled in the fall, an act erect- ing the county of Kentucky. He is thus to be regarded as in some sense the founder of this great Commonwealth. Thenceforth he was closely identified with the early history of the State and bore his full share in the perils, inci- dents, and adventures of border life. He was presently advanced to the grade of lieutenant- colonel. As the struggle for independence progressed, the great opportunity of his life pre- sented itself. His sagacious mind perceived the importance of the Western country to the cause of the American patriots, and he resolved upon its conquest.

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History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I, Part 31

Author: Williams, L.A., & Co., Cleveland Publication date: 1882 Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio : L. A. Williams & Co. Number of Pages: 814

Author: Williams, L.A., & Co., Cleveland
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio : L. A. Williams & Co.
Number of Pages: 814