USA > Ohio > Montgomery County > Memoirs of the Miami valley > Part 42
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THE STORY OF LOGAN COUNTY
yet, sold under private label, but shipped to consumers by whole- sale, in casks or cans, according to the distance. It is chiefly used by bakers, ice cream manufacturers and confectioners. The casks are never used a second time for milk, but the cans are, of course, returned, being put through a thorough renovating process and finally sterlized with dry steam before being put to use again. Near by the condensery the Springfield Pure Milk Company main- tains a large shipping depot, from which a vast quantity of fresh milk is shipped daily from the dairy farms in the vicinity. A merg- ing of these two plants is whispered as being in progress. Two large elevators stand convenient to the railroad (the Sandusky di- vision of the Big Four)-the Hartzler and the Yoder-their ship- ments by conservative estimate aggregating, annually, one hun- dred and seventy-five carloads of grain, chiefly wheat, and one hun- dred and twenty-five carloads of hay. Fully one hundred carloads of cattle and sheep are shipped into Logan county at this point for fattening, while local exports of hogs, cattle and sheep are from four hundred to four hundred and fifty carloads each year. West Liberty is a recognized horse market, the Kelley Horse company, Hite & Buroker, Hill & Garver, and Secrist & Muzzy being the most prominent buyers and shippers. Twenty-five or thirty car- loads of horses have been shipped from the yards here in the season just past (1918). A large quantity of fine poultry also finds its way to market from West Liberty.
The Farmers' Banking company, established and incorporated in 1892, has become one of the most solid financial institutions of Logan county. Its first president and vice-president, respectively, were H. A. Hill and George F. Bailey. The capital stock is $50,- 000, and the surplus is equal to that, while the deposits run to about $250,000. The officers at present are: J. A. Weidman, president ; Donn C. Bailey and Harry A. Wilson, vice-presidents; A. B. Mc- Ilvain, cashier. Donn C. Bailey, always a member of the board of directors, has never missed a meeting of that body since the incor- poration of the bank. The great conflagration of 1880, when the larger portion of West Liberty was wiped out by flames, bore fruit in better buildings for the business of the town, and in a suitable fire protection, which is maintained in the rear of the old Town Hall, remodeled about twenty-five years ago, and constituting the usual headquarters of village government, and a central place for public meetings. The Mayor at this date (1918) is John C. Rock.
West Liberty has been the birthplace of various newspapers, none of which survived infancy, though several of them were very promising youngsters, and consigned to early graves with genuine regret. The first attempt at a periodical in West Liberty was The Democratic Club, a very small sheet produced during the campaign of 1840, jointly by Robert Bruce Warden and Donn Piatt, who were co-students in law in Judge Piatt's office at the farm gate where the printing was done, with, it is said, some assistance from William Hubbard. Young Warden had previously tried his hand at the printing business, and the tiny ramage press was his property. The youthful editors failed financially, and the "club" disbanded.
In 1850, when Coates Kinney was principal of the school, The
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West Liberty Banner was hoisted, and waved for a few years un- der his editorship, William Barringer being the printer. As might have been expected, the paper was too good, too literary, to suc- ceed, and failed for want of wider financial support. Its editor, however, achieved fame, and its printer was long a successful press man in other fields of action. About 1856, the Banner was revived by Sydeham Shafer and William H. Gribble, but it was only a feeble fluttering. West Liberty's journalistic day had not yet dawned. The Budget was opened in 1860 by J. W. Houx, and proved of pleas- ing content, but it, too, was soon exhausted. The Weekly Enter- prise was launched about the early seventies, by B. S. Leonard (the Dr. Leonard of today) and H. S. Taylor. It was a purely original sheet, meritorious, and of "home production"; but the home con- sumption was not equal to the output, and the Enterprise also suspended for want of appreciation. Then the Independent made a bid for patronage, frankly acknowledging its dependence upon "patent insides"; but its publishers, J. H. Fluhart and W. P. Marion, were, like their predecessors, dependent upon public patronage, which did not come in time to save them. In 1876 the Weekly News, owned by W. H. Gribble and edited by Clarence Hilderbrand, awoke to a sprightly existence of eighteen months. It was followed in 1878 by the Gazette, edited by Harry Hamilton, who later renamed it the Buckeye Blade. Hamilton went to Washington, D. C., and died there, and the paper was taken over by Donn C. Bailey, the assistant editor, who rechristened it The Banner, after the original newspaper of the town, and under this caption the paper has now for thirty years advanced the interests of the town in a masterly manner, as wide-awake a sheet as may be found in any town of the county, or of the same size in the Miami valley, and quite worthy to stand in line with those of the county seat, where its editor is as well known as at home. In the office of The Banner (where every- body works) the foreman printer is James Gribble ("Jim"), now the oldest printer in Logan county, and over sixty years in service at the type case. At one time Mr. Gribble was assistant foreman on the Cincinnati Enquirer, and was noted as the fastest "ad" com- positor on the force. Mr. Bailey does no small amount of press work himself, in these days when "all the boys" are in army service.
Another appropriately chosen industry of West Liberty is the horticultural plant of Van B. Bailey, whose expansive greenhouses are set at the foot of Grand View, where the roads divide. Estab- lished about ten years ago (in 1908), a general florist's business is very successfully being carried out, the patronage increasing with every season.
West Liberty's medical history is ornamented with the names of men whom all Logan county holds in reverence, and whose serv- ice covered large territory in the county to the south as well. Dr. John Ordway, Dr. S. W. Fuller, Dr. B. B. Leonard, Dr. Fulwider- it is a roll of fame to inspire the present and future members of the profession there to emulation. Each was a prophet in his time, not alone as a physician but as a moral and civic leader. Facing death and the terror of it in the various scourges of disease of the past, not only medical skill but skill in dealing with panic-stricken human
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nature was required of them. Many scores of amusing and also pathetic experiences might fill a volume, did space permit ; but it is probable that they will be repeated in the intimacy of family his- tories only, for Dr. Fuller was physician to half the county in his day. His daughter, Mrs. E. J. Howenstine, of Bellefontaine, is still an active member of church and society. Dr. Leonard, the elder, was a man of remarkable gifts in many directions. He might have been a statesman, a poet or other literary light, yet no more nobly so than as a physician, which he was in pre-eminent degree, devoting his life to ministering to the sick and the afflicted. Born in Cham- paign county, near King's creek, he became a student under Dr. Fuller, preparatory to entering the Medical college at Cincinnati, after which course he formed a partnership with his senior physi- ยท cian, in 1847. As a public speaker on several memorable occasions, he will never be forgotten by those fortunate enough to hear him, and his memorial and historical contributions to the local and county press are on record. Dr. Leonard died June 15, 1911, at the close of sixty-four years of tireless practice. Three times during his long career it was his duty to write for the town of his choice their reso- lutions of grief for the death of a martyred United States president. There is in existence a picture, photographed before the death of Dr. Fuller, in which, side by side, appear four physicians of West Liberty : Fuller, Leonard, Fulwider and Henning, each of whom was the one time pupil of the preceding.
Dr. B. S. Leonard, who stands worthily in the position of his father, sustains, with Dr. A. C. Brindle, the burden of medical prac- tice for the village, for Drs. G. B. Hale and J. W. Croft are both in the United States army medical service, and Dr. Guy J. Kent lost his life in the summer of 1918, in an operation undergone in the hope of fitting himself also for national service in the army. Dr. Kent's life went out in the very prime of his professional career. As a physician he was skillful and trustworthy, pleasant and successful. The Dr. Leonard residence near the north end of Main street is one of the older homes of West Liberty, its position retired but inviting, and still the home of Mrs. Leonard and her daughter, Miss Carrie Leonard.
East of the village of West Liberty, along the lovely valley of Mac-a-chack creek, a stream celebrated in savage legend and the white conquerors' tales, early settlement was made picturesque and at the same time rather overshadowed by the advent, in 1828, of the Piatt family, whose expansive and ornamental career occupied, per- force, the centre of the stage for several decades. Judge Benjamin Piatt, born in New Jersey, and pioneer in Kentucky with his father, Jacob Piatt, had settled in Cincinnati-where he was the law partner of his contemporary of Nicholas Longworth-when the health of his young family made a change to rural life desirable. A farm in the Mac-a-chack hills was the spot chosen for a new home, and there the family was brought to the large double cabin of hewn logs, built with respect to beauty of site and outlook, and embellished as to surroundings with every touch within the range of possibility at that time. The grounds were parked with unquestionable taste, and planted with lovely shrubbery, and many blooms of local rarity
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were imported from the far east, making a garden of glowing beauty. Luxuries not dreamed of in other pioneers' homes graced the life of the Piatts, who were famous entertainers and frequently received visits, in the Mac-a-chack wilds, from distinguished literary and political personages. The eldest son, Wykoff, remained in Cincin- nati in the practice of law, and was never a part of the circle at Mac-a-chack. Twice during the thirties the Piatts spent a period of years in Cincinnati, for the education of the younger children, but the home was maintained, and eventually roofed them all. There were three daughters, two sons and two granddaughters who grew up beneath it. Mrs. Piatt was the founder of the Catholic church in Logan county, she having been re-converted to the old faith after two generations of French Protestantism. (The Piatts were of French blood with a slight admixture of Holland acquired during the migration of the family toward America.) Judge Piatt entered into the life of the pioneer with zest, during the intervals of business life in Cincinnati, building on his own farm a large sawmill, and, later, a flouring mill, and erecting tenant houses for the farmers he employed on the place, and as well as barns and granaries and other buildings required for a planter's industry.
At the same time he kept a law office at the farm gate, where his sons and other young men afterward well known in Logan county studied law under his tutelage. Judge Piatt himself was a Whig, but both of his sons wavered in their political views, and were at one period strong Democrats.
Donn Piatt, born June, 1819, and Abram Saunders Piatt, born May, 1821, were little boys of nine and seven respectively, when they came to the Mac-a-chack home. The younger, rather delicate as a child, grew to strong manhood and reared a large family of children, several of whom are living in West Liberty and elsewhere, while his son William Piatt occupies the homestead farm, and with his sons operates a garage in the old mill building. The brothers were tutored at the farm by an accomplished young priest of the Catholic faith, the younger boy, Saunders, being equally poetic and intellectual, and, though less spectacular, much more faithful in the performance of duties than his dreamy brother, Donn. Indeed, it is told that he frequently performed the tasks laid out by their father for both boys, rather than leave Donn to the penalty of his own neglect. Many of his poems saw the light of print, and very worthily. He once wrote a novel, but by the advice of his tutor, Father Collins, it was laid away with many other literary efforts, and never made public. In the meantime, he dutifully took up the study of law, became a daring and accomplished horseman, and an expert marksman and hunter. Of the law he said that he read "enough to eschew it as a profession." It in no way compensated him for burying his talent. The outdoor life, however, was his native element, and the outbreak of the Civil war gave him an oppor- tunity to develop hitherto unused talents which he gave without stint. He recruited, at West Liberty, a company which was the basis of the Thirteenth Ohio regiment, and was commissioned colonel, but relinquished this position to organize the first Zouave regiment known as the Piatt Zouaves, in which was one of his own
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sons, and which served throughout the war. Col. Piatt maintained this regiment for one month at his own expense. He was pro- moted, for gallant service, to the rank of brigadier-general, being the only Logan county soldier to reach that rank while in the service, and continued in the army until after the death of his wife, when he resigned to return to the bereaved family, and his aged parents. Afterward he wished to re-enter the army, but it was then too late. When Piatt was colonel of the Zouaves, quite early in the war, his men captured Jefferson W. Davis, after a skirmish in which the rebel officer was wounded. After having his wounds attended to, Col. Piatt extracted a promise from Davis not to take up arms against the United States government again, and released him-an act of good intent, but not, in the light of later times, of wisdom. Always a staunch patriot, he was swayed by sentiment rather than by sound reason, and his political views were somewhat unstable. But he was a brave soldier, gallant, resourceful and fiery, yet never insubordinate. Both as citizen and soldier his name is held in high- est honor in Logan county. He married again, in 1864, Miss Eleanor Watts, and built a beautiful home, following the French chateau manner, on the south Mac-a-chack heights, where he spent the re- mainder of his life in quietude, pursuing the literary and artistic tastes evinced in his boyhood, which had been laid aside for the sterner realities of the times. The mansion, built of rugged stone, and set on a commanding eminence, had an interior of equal interest, being a repository of heirlooms of beauty and value, as well as trophies of travel, chase and battle; and the life there was one of lavish and brilliant social character, the events of which are closely interwoven in the inside history of Logan county society. Since the death of Gen. Piatt, the great grey stone pile has become dis- mantled and empty, its treasures scattered, while the present family now occupies the more convenient and practical pioneer mansion of their grandparents. Approachable only from the gateway of the old farm, the most interesting view of the chateau is gained from the pike which skirts the northern bank of the Mac-a-chack creek.
Donn Piatt, nicknamed in childhood "Big Fire," by his father (who doubtless read him thoroughly), presented, during all his varied life, an interesting study in human nature. Undeniably gifted, he exhibited, very early in life, talents which might have made of him a great journalist, a poet, a novelist, a soldier, a diplo- mat, a statesman, possibly, had he steadfastly devoted himself to any definite ideal. He had a talent for publicity which kept him in a limelight of increasing circumference for full fifty years, yet it cannot be truly said of him that he was any one of the things which he might have been, though he was certainly a little of each. His political career is a phantasmagorian spectacle in which he skips from party to party and from policy to policy with the agility of a deer-or possibly only that of a poet or romanticist-always enter- taining, sometimes enlightening, seldom logical ; humorous, pathetic, exasperating; assuming interest where he felt it not, for the sheer love of exercising his rhetoric, and in a hundred ways gratifying his brilliant, if whimsical, wit. Against her father's will he married the beautiful and brilliant Louise Kirby, of Cincinnati. During the
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administration of President Pierce they were in Paris, Piatt as sec- retary of the legation, under John Y. Mason, of Virginia. Mason dying in 1859, Piatt became charge d'affaires for the remainder of the term. It was during this four years with the legation that the "Belle Smith Abroad" letters were published by Mrs. Piatt. Re- turned to America, Piatt stumped southern Illinois for Abraham Lincoln, and the following year entered the war as a captain of cavalry. Being transferred to another branch of service he was advanced to the rank of colonel, and placed on the staff of Gen. Schenk. In this position, during a temporary absence of Gen. Schenk, Col. Piatt issued an order to Gen. Birney, in Maryland, to recruit a regiment of negroes, enlisting none but slaves. This order, carried out in good faith, had the effect of immediately freeing all the slaves in Maryland, as fast as the news flew broadcast. How- ever much to be desired in the end, this result was at the moment a serious embarrassment to the administration, and Piatt was severely and justly censured by President Lincoln for the misuse of his posi- tion, being saved from disgrace and dismissal only by the interven- tion of Secretary Stanton, who was a cousin of Benjamin Stanton, of Logan county. But he was denied further promotion, and re- mained a colonel to the end of his military service.
The death of his beautiful wife, Louise, recalled Col. Piatt to Mac-a-chack in October, 1864. His mourning was sincere and deep, and though he married early in the following year Miss Ella Kirby, a younger sister of Louise, and was a devoted husband to the end of his life, yet his most perfect poems are those which he dedicated in after years to the love of his young manhood. Worthiest, indeed, of all his writings to be preserved are the inscriptions on the monu- ment surmounting the mausoleum which he built, in her honor, a half mile south of the old Piatt home, on a hillside overlooking the Mac-a-chack valley. The inscription reads : "To the memory of one whose voice has charmed and presence graced these solitudes." And on the reverse :
"She rested on life's dizzy verge So like a being of a better world, Men wondered not, when, as an evening cloud That grows more lovely as it steals near night, Her gentle spirit drifted down The dread abyss of death."
After the conclusion of the war, having turned his attention to politics, Piatt was sent, as a Republican, to the state legislature, where he distinguished himself as a supporter of negro suffrage, but "quit, by unanimous consent" (to use his own words), having defeated nearly every measure he supported. In 1874, in company with George Alfred Townsend (Gath), he founded and edited the Washington Capital, a journal in which he satirized and turned to ridicule every subject and personage on whom his capricious fancy lighted, including his friends. He was at last indicted by the fed- eral court for his personal attacks, and, while escaping a jail sentence (which, he said, "he did his best to incur"), he decided to retire to private life for a while, incidentally selling the objectionable period-
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ical at a handsome figure. This occurred about 1876, and for some time thereafter he found occupation in literary pursuits and in the designing and building of his country home, which was not finished until 1880. The situation, on the north side of Mac-a-chack creek, just east of the Ludlow road, is extremely beautiful, against a suc- cession of lovely hills rolling eastward up the valley, and much finesse was exercised in developing the surroundings of what he chose to call his "castle." Though built so long after the death of the wife of his youth, the place embodied the ideal of which they had dreamed together when drifting down "the castled Rhine" nearly a quarter of a century before, and in the interior decorations, executed by the French artist, Alexis Fournier, may still be seen memorial tribute to her, a faithful portrait of her being set in the ceiling of the library. In the quiet of this country mansion, facing the very meadows where he "heard the bob-white whistle in the dewy breath of morn," Piatt devoted himself by turns to magazine writing and politics, conducting his (unsuccessful) campaign for the governorship of Ohio from the "castle" terrace, from which point he addressed visiting delegations of followers. He emerged, in the later eighties, to edit Belford's Magazine, which he made a vehicle for free trade propaganda. A certain triviality of purpose seems to have marred his public writings, and makes his great talent appear a futile gift. Tempted, by his own brilliant wit, to attack today that which he had defended yesterday, out of sheer love for discover- ing how well he could oppose himself, this mercurial character re- corded himself as a Republican and a Democrat, a financier and a free trader, a patriot and a bitter critic of the greatest of patriots- was, in short, inconstant and inconsistent-yet, a warm and gen- erous friend, a delightful companion, a faithful lover (and "all the world loves a lover"), a tender and devoted husband, and altogether a magnetic and unforgettable personality. About the "babbling Mac-o-chee" he draped a glamour which is fadeless.
Of all the men of genius who visited him at the hillside villa, none was more graciously received than the then comparatively unknown Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley, who was nursed back to health under that hospitable roof, and whose delightful dia- lect poem, "When the frost is on th' punkin," was inspired amid the rural beauty of Mad river valley, and written in the little tower room that was his host's private study. A glimpse of the gracious inti- macy of genius harbored in the "castle" is noted in the title of one of Fournier's most successful landscapes, "When the Frost is on the Pumpkin." Donn Piatt died in 1891, as the result of accidental exposure and chill, which produced pneumonia. His wife, Ella Kirby Piatt, survived him, and still lives, though no longer in the Mac-a-chack hills, where the lovely home, which passed to stranger hands, now stands empty and dismantled, but in a cozy cottage in West Liberty, where Miss Birdie, a daughter of William Piatt, is her companion, their winters being spent, for the greater part, in Florida.
Along the Mac-a-chack (or Mac-a-cheek) creek several places are pointed out as the spot "where Simon Kenton ran the gantlet," and one may take his choice -- all seem eligible-at this date. An- other legend, much older yet more credible, attaches to a great
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boulder near the edge of the creek, known for more than a century as "Squaw Rock." It appears that the Indians, before the white invasion of the valley, had a superstition that when the blood of a slain deer should run past the rock into the waters of the stream, the white foe should drive the red man from his forest home. A warrior, whose maiden sweetheart awaited him in the shelter of the rock, witnessed his aim at a deer which approached the rivulet to drink, but she was unable to warn him in time to prevent the catas- trophe. The deer fell, and its blood trickled down the sands and mingled with the bright water. Weeping, the dusky maiden told her lover the story, and prophesied the doom of the Shawanoese tribes. At a later day, a squaw, presumably the maiden, grown older, watching from behind the boulder the struggle between the warriors and the white foe, was mistaken for a warrior and slain by a shot from a white man's rifle.
In the hills between Mac-a-chack and the Mad river country in Logan county, is the little hamlet of Pickrelltown, which, during ante-bellum days, became a well-known and much patronized sta- tion of the "underground railway," through which a large number of slaves made safe escape from southern pursuers. It is worthy of note that many of the colored race still keep their homes there, clustered around the little church on the high hill road, just off the main highway, which runs through the tiny town. This part of the county received, also, the first colored settlers who came in their own right and not as escaping slaves. Some of them attained wealth and were the founders of families which have representatives scat- tered all over the county. Darius Newsom, descendant of Henry Newsom, the first of all colored emigrants, was long an honored and faithful teacher there.
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