USA > Ohio > The biographical cyclopaedia and portrait gallery with an historical sketch of the state of Ohio. Volume I > Part 5
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SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF OHIO.
by an earnest letter from himself. Failing; however, in the prayer of their petition, General Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, in January, 1786, called a meeting of soldiers and civilians to form a company for the purpose of securing a grant of land by purchase, on such conditions as would be acceptable. This meeting took place at Boston, March Ist, 1786, General Rufus Putnam presiding, with Winthrop Sargent as clerk. The "Ohio Company" was there organized, and Dr. Manasseh Cutler, one of the board of directors, was appointed to wait upon Congress, and endeavor to secure the purchase. Accord- ingly, in July, 1787, Dr. Cutler went to New York, where Congress was then in session, and succeeded in making the purchase on such terms as were satisfactory to the company. Immediately after the State of Virginia had ceded to the General Government its right to the lands northwest of the Ohio River, a committee of Congress, of which Mr. Jefferson was chairman, reported the ordinance already men- tioned for the government of the " Northwestern Territory," as these lands were then, for the first time, designated. In the exclusion of slavery from this fair domain the influence of Dr. Cutler may largely be credited. He reached New York July 5th. On the 9th the committee who reported the ordinance was appointed, and had frequent interviews with him within the four following days. He was a highly cultivated man, a graduate of Yale College, and a member of divers philosophical societies, pastor of a Church in Eastern Massachusetts at the time he attended the meeting in Boston, and, the other influ- ential men present being principally military men and officers in the late war, he was, with Generals Putnam and Parsons, appointed the committee to draft the articles of organization. After their adoption, these three gentlemen were elected the board of directors, and he was by the other two appointed the company's agent. To the influence of the Ordinance of 1787 may be attributed primarily the present
condition of human freedom in the United States. Daniel Webster said of it: " We are accustomed to praise the law-givers of antiquity ; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law, ancient or modern, has produced effects more distinct, marked, and lasting in character than the Ordinance of 1787." The evidence of Dr. Cutler's agency in the enactment of this immortal ordinance has been attested by a writer in the North American Review for April, 1876, who therein has said: "The purchase would not have been made without the Ordinance of 1787, and the ordinance could not have been enacted except as an essential condition of the purchase." This ordinance was the first under which any United States Territory was organized. President Andrews, of Marietta College, in publicly speaking of it, has remarked: "How great the obligations of the great Northwest, and of the whole country, are to this quiet Massachusetts clergyman are thus apparent. Far distant be the day when the county of Washington, the State of Ohio, and the whole Northwest shall cease to cherish the names and memory of Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler."
The purchase made by Dr. Cutler for the Ohio Company comprised 1,500,000 acres, and the con- tract for its sale was duly signed on behalf of the Treasury of the United States, October 27th, 1787, by Samuel Osgood and Arthur Lee, and on behalf of the Ohio Company by Manasseh Cutler and Winthrop Sargent. Payment was to be made "in specie, loan-office certificates reduced to specie, or certificates of the liquidated debt of the United States." The price was one dollar an acre, liable to a reduction by "allowance for bad land, and all incidental charges and circumstances whatever; provided that all such allowance shall not exceed, in the whole, one-third of a dollar per acre." Rights for bounties, or what have since been known as soldiers' land-warrants, might be used in payment, but not for more than one- seventh of the whole tract. In the survey of it this tract was bounded on the east by the seventh range of townships, south by the Ohio River, and west by the west boundary of the seventeenth range, extended so far north that lines running west and north from the Ohio River would embrace the necessary number of acres, besides the reservations. These reservations were section number sixteen for schools, section number twenty-nine for the support of religion, sections number eight, eleven, and twenty-six to be at the disposal of Congress as government land, and, of the whole grant, two townships to be reserved for a university. Thus it will be seen that of each township of thirty-six sections, or as many square miles area, five sections were reserved in manner stated, besides the university reservation. The general con- tour of this land, as surveyed, was in the form of a triangle, its southern or longest line being the Ohio River, and at present containing Athens, Meigs, Washington, and part of Gallia Counties. The con- tract authorized the settlers to enter at once upon half of the tract. The company paid one-half the purchase-money "down," the government agreeing to make a deed when the second half was paid; but
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this, the final payment, was never made. The failure of some of the shareholders to pay for their shares in full, the expenses incurred by the company in waging war against the Indians on their lands, together with the losses sustained by the defalcation of their treasurer, Richard Platt, of New York, elected in August, 1787, so embarrassed the company that it was impossible for them to pay the $500, 000 required for the final payment. Consequently the directors met in Philadelphia early in 1792, and memorialized Congress for relief. So well pleased were the public generally with the conduct of the company, that the committee of the House of Representatives to whom the company's memorial had been referred recommended a release and deed for the whole tract; but this proposition was modified by making a deed for that half of the tract the money received had paid for, a conveyance for 214, 285 acres, or one- seventh of the original purchase, to be paid for within six months by warrants issued for bounty rights (military land-warrants), and another conveyance for 100,000 acres, which was to be conveyed in tracts of 100 acres, as a bounty to each male person of not less than eighteen years of age, who should be- come an actual settler. The act of Congress, as it passed the House, further provided that the company might receive a conveyance for the remainder of the original purchase by paying for the same within six years, at the rate of twenty-five cents an acre; but this provision was stricken out by the Senate, and that respecting the "Donation Lands," as they were subsequently called, was only saved from a like fate by the casting vote of the Vice-president. Approved April 21st, 1792, on the 10th of May, the three patents were issued to Rufus Putnam, Manasseh Cutler, Robert Oliver, and Griffin Greene, in trust for "the Ohio Company of Associates," and signed by George Washington, President, and Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State. The three bear date May 10th, 1792, and, except one made to the State of Pennsylvania the previous March, conveying to that State the northern half of it, which had been claimed by Connecticut, these were the first land patents ever issued by the United States Government.
The first party of emigrants to the lands of the company left Danvers, Massachusetts, December Ist, I'787, conducted by Major Haffield White. The second left Hartford, Connecticut, January Ist, 1788, under Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, and which party General Putnam overtook three weeks afterward. On reaching the Youghiogheny they built boats, embarked April Ist, and reached the mouth of the Muskingum April 7th, 1788. Forty-eight men landed on that day, and thus began the first permanent settlement within this State. During the year there were added eighty-four to their number, among these fifteen families. At the close of 1788, as we find it stated in the diary of General Putnam, depos- ited by his grandson, Hon. William R. Putnam, of Marietta, in the college there, not a single white family, with, perhaps, a few exceptions, could be found within the present State of Ohio, save those belonging to the Ohio Company, Colonel Harmar and most of his officers being members of it, and who were residents in the fort built by Major John Doughty in 1786 on the west bank and at the mouth of the Muskingum River. Such was the condition when General Putnam arrived in the Spring of 1788, and then the surveyors got to work and laid out a town with broad streets and squares and "home-lots" of eight acres each; and, as the site had on it much of the work of that pre-historic race called "Mound- builders," with rare good taste these remains were preserved in the public squares. The most remark- able building of the new town was a large fort, constructed with much care and labor, as a refuge for the entire community in case of Indian hostilities. They gave this inclosure the name of Campus Martius, and not until 1790 was it finished. The settlers regarded it with much satisfaction, and not without reason, when it became their refuge and a stronghold that defied the savages.
Of the numerous emigrants who, arriving at the head-waters of the Ohio, descended that river, those from Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas sought homes in Kentucky, a slave territory; while those, by far the greater number, from the Middle and Eastern States, where slavery, though once rec- ognized, never flourished, settled in the free territory northwest of the Ohio. While the former were principally hunters, skilled in woodcraft and the use of the rifle, having during their lives been accus- tomed to contend in portions of their semi-civilized native country with Indians and wild beasts, and were but little used to the restraints of law and management of civil affairs, the latter were for the most part men who had, prior to the Revolutionary War, followed the arts of peace and the pursuits of civil industry. From this cause wherever even a small number of them took up their residence, they at once established some form of local government for mutual protection and the maintenance of good order.
4
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SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF OHIO.
PERIOD II. THE TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT.
1787-1803.
HE settlers at Marietta, as already stated, were shareholders in the property of a com- pany organized in Massachusetts; but, according to New England ideas, they at once proceeded, as the articles of their organization had provided, to establish regulations for their civil government. The town meeting was ignored for a more congenial form, with officers and courts to be established by Congress. General Arthur St. Clair, who, from his position as president of Congress, had, in 1788, been appointed by President Washington the first Governor of the Northwest Territory, arrived at Fort Pitt, subsequently Pittsburg, about the Ist of July, a month that was to be forever memorable among the settlers. On its second day occurred the first meeting of the officers of the Ohio Company, nearly every one of whom bore some style of military title. At this meeting the prospective town itself was named Marietta (in honor of the then French queen, the unfortu- nate Marie Antoinette, who had taken a very favorable interest in the success of the Americans in the Revolutionary War), and names were given to all its squares and streets. A few primary regulations for the government of the settlement were written and posted on the trunk of a giant beech-tree on the 4th of July, which day was celebrated with such manner of rejoicing as the people were enabled to provide. The morning was opened with a salute from Fort Harmar, across the Muskingum, and a general holiday enjoyed by settlers and soldiers. Within a "bowery" constructed of young trees, on the bank of the river, their tops being interlaced to form a screen from the sun's rays, a sumptuous banquet was spread, and General Varnum, one of the directors of the company, who had also just been appointed by Congress one of the judges of the Territory, pronounced an oration, the prototype of many since delivered on the anniversaries of the day. On the 9th Governor St. Clair arrived at Fort Harmar, under escort of a detachment of troops, and was received with military honors becoming his rank. His arrival was hailed with great satisfaction, and arrangements were at once begun to inaugurate the new territorial government. Escorted by all the officers of the garrison, he crossed on the 15th to the newly made town of Marietta, and was received by the principal men of it in the "bowery," and there, in presence of all the people, the Ordinance of 1787, establishing the Territory, and the commissions of the Governor, Secretary, and judges were read. Then General Putnam formally welcomed the Governor to the seat of his government, and the welcome was repeated with cheers by the assembled people. Laws for the government of the Territory, and the necessary means for their administration, were then estab- lished-these laws, like those of New England, recognizing order, sobriety, decency, and a sacred observ- ance of the Lord's-day.
The settlement of the company's lands was conducted with system. They were carefully surveyed and laid off in townships and one-hundred-acre lots, and when, subsequently, these latter were under the terms of the patent donated to those settlers who came out under the auspices of the company, the conditions of the patent and the laws of the company were, by such settlers, strictly complied with. The settler was to release to the company any land in his tract required for highways; to build a sub- stantial house within five years; to plant not less than fifty apple trees and twenty peach-trees within five years ; to be constantly provided with a musket or rifle and ammunition for the same, and to be subject to perform militia duty when called upon by proclamation. They were to settle in companies of not
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SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF OHIO.
less than twenty men on as many contiguous lots, so as to be able to defend themselves from hostile savages, and each settlement was to have a block-house, within which, in case of general attack. they all could assemble in safety. In short, the conditions upon which these lands were granted were of a character to secure the greatest benefit both to the settler and to the whole community. The settlers were generally industrious and of good character, these qualifications being inquired into before any land was donated them ; and they worked energetically, building log dwellings, clearing their land, and plant- ing orchards. Though five years of Indian war seriously retarded their progress, proved disastrous to several settlements, and destroyed a few, the more fortunate persevered, increased the extent of their arable land, and with it the quantity of their crops. Under the liberal policy of the Ohio Company many emigrants were induced to come to Marietta-the settlements on the Muskingum River proving most attractive to those who ventured into the new Territory. Besides that at Marietta, other settlements on the lands of the company increased in importance-notably those at Waterford, Belpre, and Big Bottom. The largest accession at one time to the population occurred in 1790.
A number of persons, moved by the example of the Ohio Company, organized themselves into what they called the "Scioto Company," and of their agent a company of French emigrants, men, women, and children, numbering more than four hundred, had purchased land; but, as the Scioto Company had not completed its purchase of lands in the valley of the Scioto from Congress, these poor emigrants, who had expended all their money buying land which they could get no title to, were, after also paying the expenses of their emigration to where their lands should have been, in destitute circumstances. The Scioto Company, to secure so advantageous a lot of settlers, had agreed to build houses for and furnish a year's provisions to them, and otherwise provide for them until they could clear fields and grow crops for their own support; but that company being, as it proved, totally unable to fulfill its contract, the emigrants besought the Ohio Company to assign them land; and, this being done, they soon erected a village on the bank of the Ohio River, in the more southern part of the company's purchase, and named it Gallipolis. Most of these emigrants were artisans and trades-people from the capital of France, wholly unaccustomed to farm-work; consequently, life in the wilderness was more pleasing to read about than experience ; and, during the years of the Indian wars upon the settlers they suffered much from privation rather than Indian attacks, for they were not at any time attacked after the Indians discovered they were French, but treated rather as friends. Some years later Congress, knowing how these French settlers had been defrauded, donated them a tract of 24,000 acres of land in what is now the southeast- ern part of Scioto County, fronting on the Ohio River, to which many of them removed, while others remained where they had first settled in what subsequently became Gallia County, and the descendants of both have shown themselves to be peaceable and industrious citizens.
The year 1790 proved a bad year for the crops, and the people suffered for food. The corn was blighted for want of rain in the season of tasseling ; the crop was scant, and much of it not fit for feeding even to cattle. No wheat as yet had been planted in the Territory. Good corn was held too high for the poorer people to purchase it; cattle and swine were yet too few to furnish meat, and the Indians, claiming all the game, had persistently hunted and driven away the deer, turkeys, and bears for many miles distant from Marietta. By May, 1791, the scarcity of food had to be helped out with the early shoots of edible plants, and decoctions of the roots of palatable shrubs served for tea and coffee. But such deprivation fell very far short of that which, one hundred and seventy years before, was experi- enced by the earliest colonists at Plymouth and Jamestown. The harvest of 1791 was bountiful, and "the starving year," as the year previous was called, soon ceased to be remembered.
In 1751 Christopher Gest, as agent for the English and Virginia company mentioned in the begin- ning of this sketch, explored the Great Miami River about a hundred miles from its mouth, and the year after built a trading station about where Piqua now stands, then in the midst of a Miami tribe called the Piankashaws. But the structure had only been completed when it was destroyed by the French, who at the time claimed the whole country west of the mountains; and thus began and ended the tenure of the Ohio Land Company of 1748.
We have followed the accounts usually given of the first settlement of Ohio; yet there is reason to believe that, prior to the Ohio Company's undertaking at Marietta, a station was established on the Little Miami, not far from its mouth. In 1787 Captain Abraham Covalt came to Ohio from Redstone, on the
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Monongahela, and, after prospecting the country, secured by purchase about six hundred acres of land in what was then known as the "Round Bottom," near where the town of Milford now stands. On the first day of January, 1788, he, with his own and several other families, left Pennsylvania for Ohio, and landed at the mouth of the Little Miami on the 19th of the month. After landing, they erected a temporary shelter on the bank of the river, where they remained one week, and then removed to their new homes on Captain Covalt's purchase. They constructed a fort, with seventeen dwelling-houses and four block-houses. It was named Covalt's Fort, and there was put up the first grist-mill in the Miami country. Captain Covalt served as an officer throughout the Revolutionary War, and was killed by the Indians in March, 1789. His widow lived to the advanced age of one hundred years, and died at the residence of her grandson in Fountain County, Indiana.
In the same year that Captain Covalt visited Ohio, Judge John Cleves Symmes, of New Jersey, with a small party, crossed the Alleghenies, and descended the Ohio River to its falls, for the purpose of exploring and purchasing land in the new Territory. While in the Miami country, Major Benjamin Stites, of Redstone, who had been pursuing some Indian horse-thieves, fell in with the Judge. Learning his intentions, and having seen the great richness of the country, he at once set about securing an inter- est in the proposed purchase of Judge Symmes. When the latter, who was then a member of Congress, returned East, the contemplated purchase was made.
The tract henceforth known as "Symmes's Purchase " was supposed to cover about one million acres, but upon actual survey was found to contain less than 700,000. Soon after, Judge Symmes sold to Matthias Denman the entire Section 18 and fractional Section 17, in Township 4, and to Benjamin Stites 10,000 acres at the mouth of the Little Miami. Denman made Colonel Robert Patterson and John Filson, of Kentucky, joint proprietors with himself of the land he had purchased, and engaged the latter, who was a surveyor, to lay out a town upon it. Before the town-plat was made, Judge Symmes, with a view to survey the meanders of the Ohio between the two Miamis, and to explore his purchase, descended the river with a party to the mouth of the Licking, where, according to a previous arrange- ment, he was joined by Denman, Patterson, Filson, and others from Lexington, Kentucky. They made a hasty excursion through the new purchase, but had not proceeded far when Filson left them, to return to the settlements. As he was never afterward heard from, it was supposed that he had been murdered by the Indians.
Major Stites and his colony, consisting of twenty-six persons, descended the river to the mouth of the Little Miami, where they arrived on the 18th of November, 1788. After landing, they proceeded to erect block-houses as a protection against the Indians, and so began the settlement now called Columbia. This is regarded as the second settlement in Ohio, and the first between the Miamis. Towards the end of December Israel Ludlow, who, after the death of Filson, had become a joint proprietor with Denman and Patterson of the site of Cincinnati, left Maysville, then called Limestone, with about twenty persons, to commence a settlement on the purchase. The place had been named by Filson, a pedantic schoolmaster, " Losantiville," a hybrid term, intended to signify " the village opposite the mouth of the Licking." During the Winter Mr. Ludlow surveyed and laid out the town, at that time covered with a dense forest, blazing the course of the streets on the trees. This survey embraced only the portion be- tween Broadway and Western Row (now Central Avenue), and as far north as Seventh Street. The timber, consisting mainly of sycamore and sugar trees on the lower level, and of oak, beech, and walnut on the higher land, grew thickly, and the first clearing was made on the lower table-land, between Walnut Street and Broadway. An abundant supply of game and fish furnished fresh provisions. The Indians, though unfriendly at heart, as at Marietta, committed no act of hostility. In February of the next year (1789) Judge Symmes and his party, with a few troops for their protection, descended to North Bend, and there laid out a city on a magnificent scale ; but though they offered liberal terms to settlers, few accepted them.
Outside of all these settlements hostile Indians were continually prowling around, and annoyed the inhabitants by stealing their horses and killing their cattle. Some of the settlers themselves were mur- dered or carried away captives. To protect the new enterprise, the Ist of June, 1789, Major Doughty, who had built Fort Harmar, arrived with one hundred and fifty men from that place, and built four block-houses, to form a quadrangle within a lot of fifteen acres reserved by the United States, immedi-
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SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF OHIO.
ately on the line of Third Street, between Broadway and Lawrence Streets. With these for a beginning, he then constructed what was subsequently known as Fort Washington, built in the center of the space formed by the block-houses. This was a fort of squared timber, built in the form of a square, each side being nearly two hundred feet long, and the whole structure, forming barracks two stories high, con- nected with the block-houses first erected by a high and strong close fence, made of stout logs deeply set in the ground. At the center of the south or front side of the fort was the principal gateway, opening from a passage through this line of the barracks, twelve feet wide and ten feet high, and secured by strong wooden doors. Extending along the whole length of the south front was a spacious espla- nade about eighty feet wide, and inclosed with a handsome paling erected on the brow of the first table- land, from which the descent to the lower land was about thirty feet. The exterior of all the buildings being well whitewashed, the effect from a short distance indicated strength and durability. Before the close of the year the fort was nearly completed. On the 29th of December General Harmar, with about three hundred men, arrived, and assumed command. He immediately began to make preparation for an expedition against the hostile Indians ; but nothing was effected until late in the ensuing year.
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