History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I, Part 32

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 32

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The story of his expedition, in the reduction of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, has al- ready been related in our military record of Jef- ferson county, as also the story of his subsequent expeditions against the Indians, and for the building of Fort Jefferson, a few miles below the junction of the Ohio with the Mississippi. His headquarters all this time were at Louisville, and here his expeditions were organized. January 22, 1781, he was made a brigadier-general, by

HISTORY OF THE OHIO FALLS COUNTIES.

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commission from Governor Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia. He bore a part in the negotiation of a treaty with the Indians at Fort Finney, near the mouth of the Great Miami, in the winter of 1785-86, and, although he was unquestionably not the hero of the thrilling incident attributed to him in Judge Hall's Romance of Western History, there is no doubt that it was an impor- tant and even distinguished part he bore. In 1793, during the intrigues in this State of the French minister, Genet, to organize forces for the overthrow of the Spanish power in the South- west, General Clark, then in private life, was en- dowed by Genet with the sounding title of Major-General in the armies of France, and Commander in chief of the French Revolution- ary Legion on the Mississippi. He made some efforts looking to the recruitment of troops; but the action of the Federal Government, resulting in the recall of Genet and the ruin of his schemes, soon remanded Clark to private life. In 1783 the grant of an extensive tract of land on the Indiana side of the Falls being made by the State of Virginia to the General and his sol- diers of the Illinois expedition, the opportunity was given him to lay off a town at the Falls, be- tween the present sites of Jeffersonville and New Albany, which from him took the name Clarks- ville. Here his own cabin was built, and here most of the later years of his life were spent, with his servants, an old drummer, and an occasional visitor, for his sole company. His settlement proved unhealthy, and the village grew slowly and poorly. He fell finally into poverty, and to some extent into the miseries induced by intem- perance, rheumatic and paralytic affections. In 1814, in an unlucky hour when he was un- able to help himself, he fell into the fire in his cabin, and before he was rescued one of his legs was so burned that it had to be amputated. The operation was performed by Dr. Richard Fergu- son, of Louisville; and it is said that he had a fifer and drummer play his favorite march to mitigate his pains during the trying ordeal. He was taken to Locust Grove, a few miles above Louisville, the home of Major Croghan, whose wife was the General's sister, There he spent his last years, and there he died, as before noted, February 13, 1818. He was buried on the place, but on the 10th of March, 1869, the Kentucky Legislature made provision for the removal of

his remains to the cemetery at Frankfort and the erection of a monument over them. They were not taken to the capital, however; but on the 29th of October, of the same year, were re- moved to Cave Hill Cemetery, in Louisville, where they now repose. A few years ago his Journal of the Campaign to the Illinois Country was published at Cincinnati in a handsome octavo volume, with a valuable biographical in- troduction by Junge Henry Pirtle, of Louis- ville.

THE FAMILIES WITH CLARK.

It is frequently said, on the authority of Dr. McMurtrie, that six families came down the river with General Clark's expedition, and stopped at Corn Island, at the head of the Falls. This statement probably rests upon the fact that five heads of families are known by name, and that one other is known to have been of the party, though his name has not survived. Mr. Casseday, following Marshall's History of Ken- tucky, more than doubles the number, in his History of Louisville. He says:

It is estimated that Colonel Clark left in his new fort on this island about thirteen families, when he proceeded on his journey to Kaskaskia. And so brave, hardy, and resolute were these pioneers that, notwithstanding they were sepa- rated from the nearest of their countrymen by four hundred miles of hostile country, filled with savages whose dearest hunting-grounds they were about to occupy ; notwithstand- ing they knew that these relentless savages were not only inimical on account of the invasion of their choicest terri- tory, but were aided by all the arts, the presents, and the favors of the British in seeking to destroy their settlements ; notwithstanding all these terrifying circumstances, those dauntless pioneers went quietly to work, and with the rifle in one hand and the implements of agriculture in the other, deliberately set about planting, and actually succeeded in raising a crop of corn on their little island. It is thus that Corn Island derived its name.

The publication of General Clark's letters and Journal of the expedition in more recent years enables us to fix with closer approach to certainty the number of families in this first band of settlers. In the book on the Campaign in the Illinois in 1778-9, published at Cincinnati as a number of the Ohio Valley Historical Series, one of Clark's letters concerning the expedition contains the following: "About twenty families that had followed me, much against my inclina- tion, I found now to be of service to me in guarding a block-house that I erected on the isl- and to secure my provisions." To this inci- dental, perhaps merely accidental mention, is

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the world indebted for the data wherewith to make an approximately exact estimate of the number in the first Louisville colony. It was probably not far from one hundred souls-rather more than less, since this allows but three chil- dren to a family-and, with the soldiers, even the small detachment of them necessary to erect or guard the block-house, must have crowded exceedingly the few acres cleared of the old Corn Island.

It is gratifying to know that the earliest whites to plant their homes upon the site of Louisville were in families. The first colony to land upon the site of Cincinnati on Sunday morning, December 28, 1788, was composed wholly of men. But it was true of the pioneers at the Falls, as of those at Plymouth Rock more than a century and a half before, that-

"There was woman's fearless eye, Lit by her deep love's truth; There was manhood's brow, serenely high, And the fiery heart of youth."

Unhappily, the names of but one-fourth of the heads of these families-if there were twenty- have been traditionally preserved. It would be a genuine pleasure to set forth the names of all, men, women, and children, in letters of gold. We have only the names of the following :

CAPTAIN JAMES PATTON.

RICHARD CHENOWETH. JOHN McMANUS. WILLIAM FAITH. JOHN TUEL.

These were certainly of the party. In addi- tion we have the names of Isaac Kimbly, upon the authority of his son, residing in Orleans, Indiana, so late as 1852; and of James Graham, on the authority of the veteran Kentuckian, his son, Dr. C. C. Graham, of Louisville. Dr. Craik, in his Historical Sketches of Christ Church, says that John and Ann Rogers Clark, parents of General Clark, "with their numerous family, came to Louisville with the first emigra- tion. They settled at Mulberry Hill, the present [1862] residence of their grandson, Isaac Clark, and are buried there, along with many of their descendants."

These and their associates, then, as we have often put the fact in various ways, were the first of civilized stock to rear their homes about the Falls of the Ohio. Not a single white man had

preceded them, to set up his household gods amid these lovely surroundings. The beautiful plateau, the picturesque slopes, were as yet un- broken, save by the stake or the tent-peg of the surveyor. The silence of the primeval wilderness was around them. They were alone with Nature and with God. The lurking savage, however, looked with angered eyes from the shore, and planned the solitary murder or the ferocious mas- sacre. Only a few days before their landing, on the 25th of May, a boat ascending Salt river had been attacked by the Indians, with disastrous results to its occupants. Mr. Casseday has well written:

Truly so bold and heroic an act as this of that feeble band deserves a perpetuity beyond what the mere name of the island will give it. Columns have been reared and statues erected, festivals have been instituted and commemorations held, of deeds far less worthy of renown than was this little settlement's crop of corn. But, like many other deeds of true heroism, it is forgotten, for there was wanted the pen and the lyre to make it live forever. The founders of the parent colony themselves did never greater deeds of heroism than did these pioneers of Louisville. And yet the very his- torians of the fact speak of it without a word of wonder or of admiration. Even in Louisville herself, now in her palm- iest days, the Pilgrim's landing is commemorated each return- ing year, while the equal daring, danger, and victory of the Western pioneer has sunk into oblivion. But it is ever so. Men may live for a hundred years within the very roar of Niagara, and yet live uninspired until the same sound falls upon the ear or the same sight greets the eye on the far-off shores of the Evelino or the Arno. Erin's bard has ever told the praises of the Oriental clime; the lord of English verse has tuned his lyre under a foreign sky; the Mantuan bard has sung "arma virumque Trojae," and the poet of Italy has soared even beyond the bounds of space in search of novelty ; so we must wait for a stranger hand to weave the magic charm around the pioneers of our forest land.

As has previously been noted, the first-comers found Corn island covered with a growth of tim- ber, beneath which were dense cane-brakes, which the troops with Clark, in the otherwise idle days pending the departure of the expedi- tion, helped the colonists to clear for their cabins and first crop of corn.

Another famous family, said to have settled in this vicinity this year, was that of the Hites. Mr. Isaac Hite was among the first to explore the Kentucky wilderness, being one of the renowned "ten hunters of Kentucky," of whom Daniel Boone was another. He settled east of Louis- ville in 1778, and there died seven years after- wards. Captain Abraham Hite, his brother, who held his commission in the army of the Revolu- tion from the hand of Washington himself, in

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1782 removed from Berkeley county, Virginia, the ancestral home of the family, and settled eight miles south of Louisville, on the trail which has since become the Bardstown road. The next year his brother Joseph became a neighbor two miles further to the southward; and still an- other year brought the father of all of them, the senior Abraham Hite, to live the rest of his years and die among his children. He passed peace- fully away in 1786. The younger Abraham sur- vived till 1832, leaving a son of the same name, who became a prominent merchant in Louisville. Joseph Hite died the year before. Their inju- ries at the hands of the savages are related in our chapter upon the Indians. Theirs is one of the most notable families among the pioneers of Jefferson county.

Likewise accompanying the expedition into the Illinois country, as a voluntary aid to General Clark, was a youth of eighteen, afterwards father of one of Lonisville's most useful physicians, the renowned Dr. James Chew Johnston. He was a native of Spottsylvania county, Virginia, born in 1760, and a graduate of William and Mary college the same year in which he came to The Falls with Clark. After the conquest of the Northwest, through the General's influence he was appointed clerk of Kentucky county, and upon the formation of Jefferson county he was appointed its first clerk. He was also land agent in this State, during many years, for people desiring locations here. During one of his land excursions his party was attacked by Indians, and he was wounded, taken, and kept eight months in captivity. In 1785 he married Eliza, the daughter of Captain James Winn, three days after the arrival of the family. Dr. Johnson was the first-born of this marriage, in 1787. The father died in 1797, at his residence on the cor- ner of Main and Sixth streets.

THE MILITARY PREPARATIONS.

Mr. Butler, in his History of Kentucky, gives the following account of the proceedings at Corn Island, when the forces had all rendezvoused there :

On the arrival of Colonel Bowman's party, the forces of the country were found too weak to justify taking many from Kentucky. Clark, therefore, engaged but one company and part of another from this quarter, expecting them to be replaced by the troops of Major Smith. Here Clark dis- closed to the troops his real destination to Kaskaskia, and, honorably to the gallant feelings of the times, the plan was

ardently concurred in by all the detachment, except the com- pany of Captain Dillard. The boats were, therefore, ordered to be well secured, and sentinels were placed where it was supposed the men might wade across the river [from Corn Islandj to the Kentucky shore, This was the day before Clark intended to start ; but a little before night the greater part of Captain Dillard's company, with a lieutenant, whose name is generously spared by Colonel Clark, passed the sen- tinels unperceived, and got to the opposite bank. The dis- appointment was cruel, its consequences alarming. Clark immediately mounted a party on the horses of the Harrods- burg gentlemen, and sent after the deserters, with orders to kill all who resisted. The pursuers overtook the fugitives about twenty miles in advance ; these soon scattered through the woods, and, except seven or eight who were brought back, suffered most severely every species of distress. The people of Harrodstown felt the baseness of the lieutenant's conduct so keenly, and resented it with such indignation, that they would not for some time let him or his companions into the fort. On the return of this detachment from the pursuit, a day of rejoicing was spent between the troops about to descend the river, and those who were to return on a service little inferior in danger and privation, the defense of the interior stations.

DEPARTURE OF THE EXPEDITION.

In a previous extract from the Annals of the West, the number of companies forming Gen- eral Clark's expedition is given as three. It is quite certain, however, that there was one more, which joined him at the Falls, and that the four companies were commanded severally by Cap- tains John Montgomery, Leonard Helm, Joseph Bowman, and the redoubtable William Harrod. The famous pioneer and Indian fighter, Simon Kenton, from his station near Maysville, also John Haggin, were of the party. Dr. McMur- trie, in his Sketches of Louisville, says that Clark's force numbered three hundred, and that he landed his troops and the accompanying families at Corn Island "in order to deceive the enemy." Mr. Collins is nearer right, however, and may have have the exact figures, in setting the number, at least of those who left the Falls, at one hundred and fifty-three men. We have seen the difficulties with which Clark struggled in the raising of his force, and his companies were doubtless small. They were probably larger than the figures last given would indicate, since some of the soldiers would be left on the island to hold the block-house and protect the settlers. On the 24th of June, all preparations being completed, the expedition ran down the Falls -- during a total eclipse of the sun, it is said -- and departed on their hazardous but suc- cessful and renowned expedition, with which it is an enduring glory to have the foundations of

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Louisville associated. We need not follow it further. The story has been told elsewhere. Return we to

THE SETTLERS IN 1779.

They were now upon the mainland, on the Kentucky shore. Corn Island was obviously but a temporary home. It was too strait for even the beginnings of permanent settlement, though it had served an excellent transient pur- pose, while the colonists were strengthening in numbers and energies, and awaiting the return of the soldiers from the Illinois expedition. In the spring of 1779 a few more families, immi- grating from Virginia, had joined the band. In October of the previous autumn, the soldiers discharged by General Clark at Kaskaskia, as no longer needed for his military operations, returned to the Falls. They were, however, under the charge of Captain William Linn (one of the voyagers of 1776-77, from Fort Pitt to New Orleans, for supplies of gunpowder), di- rected by General Clark to build a stockade or rude fort on the mainland, near the island. The site selected is believed to have been near and on the east side of the broad and deep ravine which, so late as 1838, marked the intersection of Tweltth street with the river. About this- whether erected in the fall of 1778, or, as some say, early in 1779-the movers from Corn Island began to cluster. Some doubtless came to the shore in the autumn and erected their cabins upon a spot which was said by Dr. McMurtrie, in 1819, to have borne the name of the White Home. The next year, undoubtedly, the corn product and all valuables being removed from the island, all the immigrants planted themselves in the new domiciles upon the actual present site of Louisville. The new-comers from Vir- ginia settled upon lots or tracts adjoining, but a little below, those occupied by the pioneers of 1778.

AN OLD SURVEY AND MAP.

In the spring of this year there seems to have been a survey of lots at the Falls, possibly exe- cuted by the draughtsman of a map which is still extant, dated April 20, 1779, and the work of one William Bard or Beard. It is just possible, also, that this rude, primitive map records the much-doubted work of Captain Bullitt, in laying off a town at the Falls nearly six years before.

It is certain that the stakes of a formal survey of lots were already here in 1779, and that Bard was a surveyor, for one of the early settlers, Asa Emerson, in a petition to the town trustees Oc- tober 27, 1785, expressly declared that in this year he drew a lot here, and that it had been sur- veyed by Bard. Colonel Durrett, who is per- fectly familiar with the Bard map, gives the fol- lowing interesting description of it:

This map shows that the city was first laid out along the river bank, from First to Eighteenth street. Ranges of half- acre lots appear on both sides of Main street, from First to Twelfth, and there they turn toward the river and run along its bank from one to three blocks deep, as low down as Eighteenth street. The triangle formed by Main street on the south, Twelfth street on the west, and the river bank on the north and east, on which stood the old fort, was not laid off into lots. The numbering of these lots was the strangest conceit that ever entered into the head of an engineer. It began with number one, on the northeast corner of Main and Fifth street, and proceeded eastwardly up the north side of Main to First street, wherenumber sixteen was reached; then crossed over Main street, and went back along the south side westwardly again to Fifth street, where thirty-two was reached. It then crossed to the north side of Main street again, and proceeded westwardly from thirty-three to forty- eight, where Ninth street was reached; then again crossed to the south side of Main, and went back easterly again to sixty_ four, at Fifth street. It then went back again to the north side of Main, at Ninth street, and proceeded westerly from sixty-five to seventy-two, where Eleventh street was reached; then crossed to the south side of Main, and went back again easterly from seventy-three to eighty, where Ninth street was reached. Then it began again on the north side of Main, at Eleventh street, with number eighty-one, and went westerly down Main street to Twelfth, then turned down Twelfth to the river bank, then went off westerly again to Fourteenth street, then along both sides of Fourteenth to the river bank, and then, wound round and about in the triangle formed by these streets and the river in such confusion as no engineer ever probably before cansed in the numbering of town lots. And then, to make the confusion of this mode of numbering yet worse confounded, this unprecedented map-maker began again with number one at Fifteenth street, and wound round backwards and forwards up and down Fifteenth and Six- teenth streets until number thirty-eight was reached, when he suddenly closed his arithmetic and left the lots on Seventeenth and Eighteenth streets unnumbered. These lots were all to be drawn possibly from numbers put into a hat and shaken together; and it may have entered into the head of the surveyor to prevent any juggling by so numbering the lots that nobody holding the hat or manipulating the drawing could understand by the numbers where the lots were located.

It will be observed that this plat stretched from First to Eighteenth streets. About one- third of it, then, reached beyond the Connolly tract, and by so much lay upon the lands of Colonel Campbell-located there, it seems, with- out his leave or license. He objected, in a style so vigorous and effective that that part of the

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town-site was abandoned and the plat instead pushed out southward between First and Twelfth streets. Eighty-six of the numbers drawn in the lottery, however, which Colonel Durrett says occurred on the day of the date of Bard's map, remained in the hands of those who drew them. They were half-acre lots, lying on both sides of Main street, from First to Twelfth, They cost the owners but three shillings each, except a dozen or so, which came higher.

THE POPES.

According to the biographical work entitled Louisville Past and Present, among the colon- ists this year, of the settlement that was presently to become Louisville, were Benjamin and Hettie Pope, from Pope's Creek, Virginia, where their little son was born seven years before. He, Worden Pope, was destined to become one of the most prominent citizens of the place. He was one of the earliest lawyers in Louisville, and grew to be one of the very first public men in all other respects. He was appointed clerk of the supreme court of Jefferson county about 1796, and in that year, when but twenty-four years old, was also made clerk of the county court. He held the latter post forty-two years, or until his death April 20, 1838, and the former office until shortly before that sad event. As clerk of the county court he had superior opportuni- ties of acquiring wealth through the knowledge of town property thus obtained; but he refused to use his office in any such way for personal aggrandizement. He was a great friend and admirer of General Jackson, and was the gener- ous entertainer of the old hero when, as Presi- dent of the United States, he visited Louisville.

COLONEL BOWMAN'S EXPEDITION.

Some events of interest marked the year in the infant settlement. Before it was fairly set- tled upon the mainland-namely, in the latter part of April-it was called upon to contribute as many able-bodied men as would go volunta- rily, to the expedition organized by Colonel John Bowman, County Lieutenant of the county of Kentucky, against the Indian towns on the Lit- tle Miami river, in Ohio, for the purpose of in- timidating the Indians, and discouraging their incursions into Kentucky. We know not the exact roll of volunteers from the Falls-"we

were all volunteers," deposed one long afterwards, "and found ourselves" -but it is probable that a large part of Captain William Harrod's company of 1780, whose roll is published in our military record of Jefferson county, were already on the ground, and were out in this expedition. It is known to have arrived at the mouth of the Licking about sixty strong. From depositions taken in 1804, it is learned that such well-known pioneers, in this region and the interior, as Colo- nels Robert Patterson (one of the founders of Cincinnati), William Whitley, and Levi Todd, James Guthrie, James Sodowsky, Benjamin Berry, and others, were among the volunteers. No pecuniary inducement had they to the expe- dition, and little other than the instinct of self- preservation or of revenge upon the murdering and torturing redskin. For provisions they re- ceived but a peck of parched corn apiece, and some "public beef" upon arriving at Lexington, their trusty rifles and the teeming forest being re- lied upon for the rest of their subsistence. The requisition upon the men at the Falls included boats for crossing the Ohio at the mouth of the Licking. Two batteaux were obtained and manned, and sent up the river. The rest of the company took their way by the buffalo roads and Indian trails through the wilderness to the ren- dezvous on the present site of Covington.

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History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I, Part 32

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