USA > Ohio > Montgomery County > Memoirs of the Miami valley > Part 36
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berts, Yates, Pattons and other names still familiar in the county. The Reformed (or Covenanter's) Presbyterian church was organized in Belle Center in 1877, with a membership of thirty-eight. Its building, finished in 1879, is still in use. The United Presbyterian church is of later date in the town, and has the largest church edifice of any congregation there. The First Presbyterian congregation rebuilt their church in 1901; the Methodist congregation at no great interval previous; and the Disciple church (Church of Christ) has a very pretty chapel built in 1906, making five edifices to adorn the town of today, which has about eleven hundred inhabitants.
Three of Belle Center's streets are paved with brick laid in con- crete, and the rest are well "piked" or macadamized. Smooth cement sidewalks lead everywhere, giving the whole town a neat appear- ance, and the residence portions are very attractive and well kept. A new high school is building this year (1918), and the present building now houses the children from nearly all over the township of Richland, which has adopted the "consolidated" plan of public school administration.
Belle Center has had a fire department since "before the war" (Civil), when it operated with little hand engines. The "volunteer" system has been in vogue for the most part, but after being equipped with modern engines it was for a time a "paid company." This proved less satisfactory than was expected, and some years ago, under the present mayor, T. H. Elder, and a representative council, a new plan was adopted, with a paid chief and assistant and a vol- unteer force, which, owing to the co-operative spirit of Belle Center's male population, has shown itself a highly efficient method of dealing with the local fire fiend. Every man and boy in the village considers himself a fire laddie when the bell rings. No disastrous fires have occurred in many years. Water supply for fire fighting is obtained from several deep and seemingly inexhaustible wells, which, at Belle Center, may be drilled at almost any point.
From the days when the settlers had to pound their corn in a hollowed stump, using a round boulder for a pestle, and on through the period when hulled corn and maple syrup was the daintiest dish of festive occasions, and johnnycake made of cracked corn did duty for the pioneer brides-cake, to the day of the first steam grist mill at Belle Center, is a panorama which can only be passed in swift review, while its wonderful advancement after the advent of the railroad, which opened the rich acres of the northern prairie to the world of commerce, shown in the town of today, is a picture less romantic but of much more vital interest to the present. There is not in the whole Miami valley a locality which surpasses this farm country in productiveness, and but few which equal it. The lumber- ing industry passed with the steady years of clearing, and the saw- mills which once made the wooded districts populous with axemen and laborers are a thing of the past, though shipments of logs are still noticeable from this point. The old roads of black mud, passa- ble only by laying them thick with cross logs, are replaced every- where with stone or gravel pikes. The very pikes themselves are altering the landscape by depleting the gravel ridges which furnish the paving material. But everywhere the fields stand thick with
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THE STORY OF LOGAN COUNTY
corn, wheat, oats and clover, and the highways in harvest time teem with wagons and auto-trucks transporting to the warehouses and elevators at Belle Center the generous produce of the prairie. Only where grain gives way to grazing is difference seen. In addition to the sheep, hog and general cattle raising business among the farmers, a large number of sheep and lambs are shipped in for fattening, nearly ten thousand arriving in September alone of this year (1918). This little market ships out more sheep and hogs each year than are received by the railroad at any point between Springfield and San- dusky. Approximately a half million pounds of wool leave the local warehouses every year, the amount being handled, in 1918, by H. J. Mack and Harry Noble, in about equal proportion.
Not only pasturage, but the larger per cent of the vast corn crop of this region is consumed in the feeding of sheep, hogs and cattle, so that the corn shipments from Belle Center are compara- tively small, but other grains are sufficient to keep two large ele- vator companies busy. One of these is a branch plant of the Keller and Gebby company of Bellefontaine, and the other is the Otto Polter plant, a local concern. Both receive and distribute not only grain and other agricultural products, but lime, cement, and hard and soft coal. Local depots of the J. A. Long company and others handle large poultry and milk shipments. The Belle Center Lumber company is a Peter Kunz plant, but has local stockholders, and a local manager, Curtis Brown. The lumber is all shipped from the south. Building hardware of all kinds is also handled by the concern.
Three thriving hardware houses beside this are supported in Belle Center-the Harrod, domestic hardware ; Hover & Bridge, suc- cessors to Harrod & Hover, domestic and farming hardware, fencing and similar items, and T. H. Elder & Son, who handle general hard- ware, farming implements, and wagon and buggy parts.
The business of which Belle Center has a monopoly in the county is that of Healy Brothers, wholesale growers of seed corn, and buyers and shippers of timothy, clover, alfalfa, oats, barley and rye seed. The business was established in 1906, and a farm of two hun- dred and fifty acres is devoted entirely to the culture of seven varie- ties of sweet corn, the yield being all packed and shipped as seed corn. Popcorn seed is also one of the specialties of the firm. All kinds of garden seeds are distributed, these coming from eastern growers, and from Europe. The alfalfa seed is brought from Mon- tana, as this climate does not produce a satisfactory seed harvest, but other grains are all from local sources, as well as timothy and clover seed. As high as twenty thousand bushels of field seed corn are shipped by this firm in a single season. Seed potatoes are in- cluded in the business, which requires two large warehouses to accommodate it.
McLean & Fulton have a practical monopoly of the furniture and undertaking industry, and are housed in a large and substantial brick structure well-adapted to their business.
The public is supplied with water, as yet, by the old-fashioned driven well in the dooryard, but the water is pure and cold. Round-
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head, Hardin county, has united with Belle Center in an independent electric light plant.
Every branch of commerce necessary to the life of a town is represented in the village; and its financial interests have been taken care of since 1886 by the Bank of Belle Center, established with a capital of fifty thousand dollars, and maintained with a surplus of equal extent. Its officers are: President, W. B. Ramsey; vice- president, D. R. McArthur; cashier, E. W. Ramsey; assistant cashier, M. F. Campbell.
Doctors Banning, Phillips and McNeill represent the medical profession, the first-named being still active after a practice of nearly half a century. Dr. Banning is the possessor of one of the largest privately owned collections of American Indian relics in the state. None of them is of Logan county origin, however, with the excep- tion of a single skull, which the doctor is positive is that of a white man, probably of some early and friendly explorer. His belief is founded upon the shape of the skull, and the fact that when exhumed -in the Spencer gravel pit, near the McClure farm, there were still fragments of a puncheon coffin near it, held together by two wrought iron nails, things unknown to Indian economy. The circumstance seems also to refute any suspicion that the mound in question may have been the work of ancient mound builders.
The first newspaper attempted in Belle Center was the Weekly Paragrapher, which failed for lack of support, about 1880. In 1883, Guy Potter Benton came to Belle Center and started a weekly paper called The Herald, engaging a local young man, George Wood Anderson, as printer, and Ralph Parlatte, scarcely more than a lad, as "devil." These three edited and published a paper that was worth while, and set it so firmly on its feet that after a few years, when they were called to wider work in the world, they had a paper to sell, and it was bought by a man named Long. Long, in turn, sold out to L. L. Lemon, who, in 1901, was replaced by C. R. Kring, brought here to conduct the paper in the interest of the "Drys" in the great agitation of that period. The Voice was started about the same time, as an opposition sheet. The fight waxed very fierce, but the "Drys" won in the ballot, following the campaign. The heat of the controversy was by no means cooled, however. The liquor traffic monster was still wriggling its tail, and the campaign had to be prolonged in pursuit of blind tigers and boot-legging, the climax being reached in the shooting of Robert Young by James Pergrin, a reputable citizen and member of the town council. Young recov- ered, and Mr. Pergrin was promptly acquitted. The blind tiger which Young maintained was several times raided by the women of Belle Center, and by citizens, but it was not driven out for some time. Young at last removed to Columbus, where, eight years ago, he became a convert to Billy Sunday's preaching, and during the "wet and dry" campaign of October, 1918, he was a leader among the "dry" forces. James Pergrin also went to Columbus, embarking in a successful heavy hardware business there, and one of his good friends is Robert Young.
Rev. E. P. Elcock and Rev. Huston, both of whom removed to
MAIN STREET, BELLE CENTER.O.
MAIN STREET, RUSHSYLVANIA, O.
RESIDENCE VIEW, QUINCY, O.
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THE STORY OF LOGAN COUNTY
points far distant from Belle Center, were prominent ministers there during the prolonged struggle between the liquor faction and those opposed to it. Thomas C. Danforth was the mayor of the day. It was about 1903, during the closing scenes of the excitement, that the present editors and proprietors, J. R. and M. J. Martin (Mr. and Mrs. Martin) bought in both local papers and continued their pub- lication as the Herald-Voice, a wide-awake paper, and devoted to the best interests of the town. Of the three founders of the paper, Guy Potter Benton has for years been the president of Vermont university ; Dr. George Wood Anderson, whose mother still lives at Belle Center, is a noted evangelist, and was in Y. M. C. A. service in France during the war with Germany; Ralph Parlatte, erstwhile printer's devil, and now a famous humorist and lecturer, is editor of the Lyceumite, at Chicago. Among other products of its fertile countryside-where, they say, the fenceposts must be burned before they are set, to keep them from growing-Belle Center mentions these three with pardonable pride.
Huntsville, the trig little capital of McArthur township, lies about six miles to the northwest from Bellefontaine, being ap- proached from that city by three very direct routes, the Hunts- ville pike, which leads also, by a turn to the northeast, toward Belle Center, following the route of "Hull's Trace," the Sandusky division of the Big Four railway, and the Ohio Electric, which maintains one of its local power stations at this point. Connecting Huntsville with the towns of the north and east are other pikes, on one of which, a half mile to the east of the crossing of the two railroads, is all that remains of a once promising little village called Cherokee, now only a rural hamlet of ten or a dozen houses. Not dead, but sleeping-or a new house was built there only five years ago-Cherokee's story is that of being passed by when the rail- road chose its right of way, and of slow desertion by the elements which had begun to crystallize into a live town.
When the settling of the northwest territory began, the con- ditions were not different from those of all the broad prairie country sloping or rolling gently toward the upper Miami river. It was as pre-eminently an agricultural land of promise as any part of the county, and as little improved. Including the Indian reservation, there was no part of it which might not have made either Indian, squatter or settler well-to-do had either of the first mentioned been inclined to or acquainted with the industrious habits of the latter. As it was, the first settlers found the dense forests broken only here and there by small clearings barely large enough to yield subsistence. The squatter element faded out after the advent of real settlers, but few, if any, of them undertaking to follow the example of the newcomers. The Indians, transferred to the west, left the land about and to the northwest of Indian lake open, and after the conversion of the lake into a state reservoir, it became in time a circle of pleasure resorts bearing various designations, and still favored fishing and hunting grounds, though the hunting is not all that it used to be. "O'Connor's Landing" is named for the present owner of the farm it is a part of, the original settler of which was James Patterson. James Russell was the original owner
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of the land, where "Russell's Point" was established by his son. Other localities are known as "Turkey Foot," "Sassafras Point," and "Lakeview,' where a town is growing out of the resort, which offers exceptional fishing and boating advantages, but which for years has been the harbor of the only saloon in Logan county, keep- ing the better class of pleasure seekers away from this attractive resort, and contaminating a large district with its evil influence. However, Lakeview voted itself "dry" in the last statewide elec- tion, and this drawback will soon be removed.
To discover the real beauty of the lake, however, one must take the auto hack from Huntsville, and be driven by genial Dick Floyd to the Spencer tollgate, and through it to Lake Ridge, the delightful retreat created in 1890 by William Clarke, who built a pike across the shallows of the lake, converting what had been an island into a peninsula, and erected a spacious summer hotel facing the original body of Indian lake. The avenue leading to the island is lined on either side with wonderful old willows which meet far overhead and form what the resorters like to call "lover's lane"-but Mr. Clarke says it is the Way to Yesterday-and yes- terday it seems when one arrives there, where no sound strikes the ear save those of nature, the splash of water under the oars, the call of wild birds and the wind in the trees. Attractive little cot- tages line the lagoon to the east, and along the drive, which extends the length of the ridge, facing the lake and past the hotel, where an old-fashioned hospitality awaits the guest. No clock has ever ticked in that hotel. "Time," says Mr. Clarke, "was made for slaves." The cordial host has "never wet a line in Indian lake," either, although he has a fleet of rowboats from which others cast their lines. Flocks of domesticated wild geese and ducks are con- fined in ample enclosures on the lagoon in the rear of the hotel.
Near the lake front is a circular Indian mound about twelve feet in diameter and flat on top, which seems to point to at least temporary occupancy of this country by the mound-builders. The mound in question has been carefully preserved, but no investigation of its contents has ever been permitted. The resort is lighted by nature only (except for kerosene lamps indoors), for the proprietor wishes to preserve the atmosphere of rest, for which this place was intended. The bass-fishing is a lure to anglers, strong enough to draw a crowd of votaries, without the glare of electricity to pro- long the day to weariness. Mr. Clarke has made a determined stand against John Barleycorn, and no one is permitted to carry to the island liquor of any sort for any purpose whatever.
One of the first sales of land in the section of the county em- bracing the lake townships and the Cherokee district was the con- veyance, "by title bond," from Duncan McArthur to John and Samuel Harrod, of four hundred and fifty acres on Cherokee Man's run, which winds in a circuitous channel and empties into the Miami just below the lake. Thomas Scott was the first settler to bring his family to a home here, but the Harrod families arrived in the fall of the same year, 1820. A settler named John Watt came in 1821 and in 1823 Peter and Samuel Hover made homes near the Harrods. Samuel Lease was the next prospector, and he made a
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THE STORY OF LOGAN COUNTY
purchase of land in 1825, but as a settler he was preceded by George Hover, who with his wife and eight children came to occupy a tract of two hundred acres embracing a large part of the site of Hunts- ville. Hugh Bickham settled not far from this tract about the same time, and Isaac Cooper came with his wife in 1826, living near the Harrods until 1830, when he bought land near the spot where the Huntsville cemetery was afterward located. He built there the first tannery of the settlement, pursuing his trade for five years, when he removed to the vicinity of Lewistown. A second tannery was established by Thomas Wishart in what is now Huntsville, not long after Cooper's. Adcock Carter came in 1827 to settle on a thousand-acre tract acquired by Joseph Carter some years before, which embraced Solomon's Town and the famous "twin springs" of that place of many legends. The David Wallaces afterward owned a part of this land, said to be the locality where Hull's expe- dition encamped, and identified by many traces of the pause. All was a dense forest except a small clearing where a blockhouse stood during the War of 1812. Joseph Wallace came in 1833 with his wife and three children, and settled a little to the west of the site of Huntsville, and there their descendants still hold title and residence. John Shelby, Henry Hover, John Casebolt, and the Black, Grabiel and Williams families are also of the early period of settlement. About 1835, several important families arrived. Kemp G. Carter settled at Cherokee, while to the south of the Huntsville site Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Elder and their eight chil- dren made a home, and James Steen, John Russell and Thomas Pat- terson and others found satisfactory locations. Adan Yearn must have come several years earlier, for we find that he built the first grist mill on Cherokee Man's run in 1828. John Coulter came from Bellefontaine in 1835, and purchased the Isaac Cooper tannery and farm, married a daughter of Abraham Elder, and with the family they reared became an integral part of the life of this locality, and of the county. Of the three sons, James, John and Wood, James remained on the home farm, and the others came to Bellefontaine where Wood Coulter is still in business. Mrs. J. P. Harbert is a daughter of Dr. John Coulter.
The second grist or flouring mill built on the Cherokee was erected by Jonathan Woodward, who came to the Cherokee valley in 1836 and purchased from the Mahin heirs a tract of twenty-seven acres upon which stood a log cabin and a badly wrecked sawmill. Mr. Woodward's wife had formerly been Mrs. Sarah Robinson, and came originally from Delaware, while Mr. Woodward was a Penn- sylvanian by birth. He also was a practical miller and millwright, and the ruined sawmill was repaired at once and in it the lumber was sawed for the building of the gristmill. During the long sum- mer while the mill and the race or "overshoot" were building, Mrs. Woodward cooked the food and baked the bread required to feed a force of twenty men who performed the out-of-door labor. The bread was baked several times weekly, in a brick oven. It is there- fore to be remarked that Mrs. Woodward helped to build that mill. In later years she was rewarded in the possession of the first cook- stove brought into that part of the country. As an instance, how-
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ever, of the refinements which even the early settlers transported into the wilderness, these strenuous hardships were ameliorated, in the Woodward home, by the musical tinkle of an old-time "dul- cimer," which is still preserved in the Coulter home at Huntsville. The first "organ" brought hither was also in the Woodward home -one of the old-fashioned type, with four octagon legs. The mill began running in 1839, and sent out the first barrel of flour ever shipped from a Cherokee mill. In 1866 the old mill was sold to Brown and Douglas, who in turn sold out to James McCormick (now, 1918, a very old man of ninety years or thereabouts), who still lives at the mill and does a little sawing with the old machinery. Anna, a daughter of the Woodwards, married James Coulter, and lived on the farm and in Huntsville until 1910, when her husband died, after which the family removed to Bellefontaine, where Mrs. Coulter and her daughter, Miss Lulu, still reside. Miss Blanche Lawson, Mrs. Lyda Baker and Mrs. Maude White, of Bellefontaine, are also granddaughters of the Woodwards.
James Stewart, born in County Tyrone, Ireland, came to America and in 1830 settled in the Cherokee district, on a tract of six hundred and twenty-five acres of military lands. He built the well-remembered Stewart mill in 1836, but he was not himself a miller, and his son Samuel conducted the mill from the start, con- tinuing through many years, with the help of his sons, to do a large and successful flouring business. The story of the Cherokee mills would be incomplete without mention of the sawmills which pre- ceded and accompanied them during the great clearing period, when the population of Logan county flourished as never since in point of increase. The loggers and other laborers who flocked to the timber districts were a necessary factor, but included a large pro- portion of "undesirable citizens," for the greater part transitory, but stamping the times with a roughness in great contrast to the character of the real settlers. Also it encouraged another industry which was in conflict with the ethics of the good people who made their homes there. While not the only spot so abused in the county at that period, it is with regret that the record is made of a dis- tillery to match every one of the Cherokee mills, and that the dis- tillers were also settlers. Hugh Bickham built the first, directly south of Huntsville. It was a hewn log structure, built early, and stood a long time. At the vicinity of the Yearn mill, which had passed into the hands of Jacob Anstine, another distillery was built in 1845 by Edward Harper, "a quite respectable building," to house a disreputable business-which, luckily, "did not pay." It closed in 1850. The third, last, and largest was built by William Har- land and Henry Anstine. It is claimed in extenuation of these set- tlers who catered to the rough element of the lumbering camps and at the same time thoughtlessly accomplished the ruin of many gifted pioneer sons, that there were few teetotallers then, and also fewer positive drunkards. Perhaps the popular mind was not so well educated then as now, but the distillers who brought so much sor- row and ruin into the fair land of Logan had blunt but eloquent old Habakkuk's warning, the same as now. It was doubtless the be- ginning of the great fight of later times for a "dry" Logan, when
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the settlers who suffered innocently set their wills to drive out the stills. And good was stronger than evil, for the millers, the tan- ners, the smiths, the wagon makers, and the honest farmers who subdued the prairie, ditched its lowlands, rid it of wild beasts and banished the yellow rattlers that made life a terror, scattered their flocks and herds among well-tilled fields, and built "underground railway stations" where slaves were helped to freedom and hope, survived the hosts of John Barleycorn, and their descendants have, by the ballot, removed the prophet's curse.
In all these early days the churches of this territory stood to- gether in fighting evil and fostering good. The Presbyterian church of Cherokee, organized in 1822, was the first of that creed to be formed in Logan county. Its first meetings were held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott, who with Mr. and Mrs. Peter Hover, Mr. and Mrs. George Hover, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Hover, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Edmiston, Mr. and Mrs. John Watt and Mr. and Mrs. James Stover, constituted the entire membership. About 1825 a hewn-log meeting house was built at Cherokee, where the settlers already seemed inclined to gather, and where, in 1832, Robert Edmiston, Dr. Samuel A. Morton and Alexander Thompson laid out the town. A second church edifice, built of brick and of ample size, was built at Cherokee some years later; and when that village de- clined, it was taken down and rebuilt in Huntsville, being the neat and substantial church standing at the present time. The rebuild- ing occurred in 1866, and the dedication took place early in 1867. The Methodists were the second religious body to form, a small "class" being organized following a series of meetings held during the summer of 1823 in the cabin of Solomon Richards, about a half mile southwest of Cherokee. So far as known, the families of Rich- ards, Pendergress and Lease constituted the membership. For a few years the meetings continued from one to the other of these homes until the membership had so increased that a meeting house was a necessity, and a small frame chapel was erected at Cherokee. This was in use until Huntsville had grown to be a town of con- siderable size, in 1866, when a new Methodist church was built there, replacing the old frame at Cherokee. The United Presby- terians organized in Cherokee in October, 1831, under Rev. S. Wil- son, of the Miami Presbytery. The society comprising the congre- gation were the families of Abraham Elder, A. Templeton, W. Langhead, David and Peter Dow, James and Isabella Hays, John McElree and James Patterson. Rev. James Wallace was the first pastor, continuing in service until 1861. Their first building was a brick, situated in Cherokee, and the work of the organization was directed largely against the widespread Sabbath desecration and drunkenness, as indeed were the efforts of all the churches. At Lewistown, a few miles west, a body of Indians lived, and all of these earliest churches endeavored to do some missionary work among them. The United Presbyterian congregation moved to Huntsville at a later date, and built a frame chapel there, the old brick at Cherokee being used for a time as a woolen factory. In 1833 the Rev. J. B. Johnston organized the Reformed Presbyterian (or Covenanters') church at Northwood, with Abraham Patterson,
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