USA > Ohio > Darke County > The history of Darke County, Ohio, containing a history of the county; its cities, towns, etc.; general and local statistics; portraits of early settlers and prominent men; > Part 22
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The next settler in the county, although not within Greenville Township, to which he afterward removed, was Abraham Studabaker, who settled on the south side of the creek below the bridge at Gettysburg. He came with his wife and one or two children in time to plant corn in the spring of 1808.
In the summer of 1808, John Devor purchased from the United States the half-section of land which had been the site of Fort Greenville, and in conjunction with his son-in-law, Robert Gray, laid out, partly within and partly without the old fort, what may be called the initial part of the present town of Greenville, to which a dozen or more additions have since been made. Their town plat was executed and acknowledged on the 14th day of August, 1808, and sent to Miami County,
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which then included within its limits the whole of what is now Darke County, for record.
On the same day that Devor entered the town half-section, he also entered for his neighbor, John Bonner, of Montgomery County, a half-section some five miles down the creek below Greenville, and Maj. Murray, of Hamilton, entered the quarter-section on which Fort JJefferson had been built by St. Clair on his ill- starred campaign of 1791. Later in the year, Mr. Studabaker entered the tract on which he settled below Gettysburg. The patents for Bonner's and Studabaker's land were not issued for many years.
After the lapse of more than seventy years, it is a matter of considerable dif- ficulty either to state the order in which emigrants arrived in the new settlement, or even anything that would specify all who did come. It is also, at this day, a mat- ter of considerable uncertainty, if ascertained at all, to find out when what subse- quently became, by legislative enactment, Darke County, was organized as a civil township of Miami County. This much is known, that the new settlement was re-en- forced by the arrival, in 1808. of Thomas McGinnis and family from what was yet the new State of Tennessee, and Barnabas Burns, who was married to the mother of the wife of McGinnis, who was a native of either North or South Carolina, but emi- grated to Ohio from Tennessee. Both became land-owners on the west side of Mud Creek, between Greenville and the Prophet's town, as the Indian village was called, to which allusion has been made in these pages. The same year, or early in 1809, came Enos Terry, afterward an Associate Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and entered the quarter-section northeast of the town, and laid off upon it another town plat, also called Greenville, that, subsequently to the creation of Darke County, was established as the county seat, but so continued for a brief period. The town site occupied about twenty or twenty-five acres in the northwest corner of the quarter-section. It was then the day of small things ; no man ever built upon or dwelt within the limits of the town. Horatio G. Phillips, of Dayton, purchased two lots, for which he never received a title, but for which he received in lieu a deed in subsequent years of two lots in Devor and Gray's town, to purchase his acquiescence in the measures taken to remove the seat of justice of the county to the other town on the southeast side of the creek. In 1809, came William and Joseph Wilson, from the Little Miami, to which they had emigrated only a few years before, from Washington County, in Pennsylvania; both bought land settled north of Greenville, and, both being natives of the holy sod of "Ould Ireland," the name of " Ireland " was given to, and for many years retained by, that part of Greenville Township where they were located. William Wilson was located on a quarter-section but half a mile north of the Devor purchase of the site of the old fort, and one mile north of his quarter was the quarter-section of his brother Joseph. Both men had families of children, some quite young and others grown up to manhood. William Wilson died in 1821, and his wife several years afterward. Joseph Wilson sold out in 1826, and, with his family, sons and daugh- ters then grown up and married. emigrated to the West, somewhere. to "grow up with the country." Not very long after Devor and Gray had laid off the town of Greenville, probably within a year, Gray disposed of his interest in the newly laid- out town. and the residue of the half-section in which it was situated, to his aunt, Mrs. Rachel Armstrong, then a widow with four young children-the eldest not ten years old-who, with her family, removed to and settled in Greenville, about the close of 1809. Devor, the other proprietor, still continued to reside in the county of Montgomery. Mrs. Armstrong, with her nephew, William Devor, a son of the co-proprietor, who came and resided as a member of her family with her ; both died of a disease called the " cold plague." in January. 1812. Mrs. Arm- strong's children were then taken in charge by her relatives in Warren and Ham- ilton Counties : one of them. Samuel Armstrong. born in February, 1806, yet survives. unmarried and keeping bachelor's hall, at Walnut Hills, Ilamilton County.
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HISTORY OF DARKE COUNTY.
FORMATION OF DARKE COUNTY.
The Legislature of Ohio, then in session at Zanesville. by their act of Janu- ary 3, 1809, created the county of Darke out of territory previously forming a part of the county of Miami, and, within a year afterward, a commission appointed by the Legislature established the seat of justice of the newly formed county at Terry's, town of Greenville, north of the creek. This selection was procured, as it was soon afterward charged. by what fifty years later would have been denomi- nated "cheenanigen," practiced on the Commissioners by Terry and old Billy Wilson, the first of whom it was alleged had promised each of the Commissioners a choice lot in the new county seat, and the other had added strong persuasions in the way of a liberal use of whisky and some ready money, so that even at that early day, the corruption of men occupying positions of trust was not deemed to be a myth or an impossibility. Whatever the facts may have been, no investiga- tion was ever made, nor were any legal proofs ever offered, but the matter was subject of public talk and general suspicion.
And whilst speaking on this subject, it may as well be stated, that. by the enactment of the Legislature at the session of 1810-11, a new commission was created, to whom was confided the duty of relocating the seat of justice of the county. This commission, consisting of Messrs. Barbee and Gerard, of Miami County, and Lanier, of Preble, after considering the propositions of Terry. David Briggs, and Devor and Mrs. Armstrong, looking to the material benefits to the county, as proffered by the parties. accepted the proposition of Devor and Mrs. Armstrong, and selected as the future county seat the town laid out at Wayne's old fort, of Greenville.
The accepted proposition covenanted to donate to the county one-third of all the town lots then laid out, or that they or their heirs might thereafter lay out, on the adjoining lands in the west half of Section 35, in which their town plat was located.
Some years after. Mrs. Armstrong having died in the mean time, Devor, for himself, and on behalf of the heirs of Mrs. Armstrong, pursuant to the order of the Court of Common Pleas. excented their contract so far as the lots then laid off was concerned, by conveying to the Commissioners of Miami County, in trust for the county of Darke, when it should thereafter be organized, thirty-two of the ninety-six lots then laid out, but, although additional town lots on the adjacent land of the half-section have since been laid out by the heirs of Devor, and also by the heirs of Mrs. Armstrong, no further donation or conveyance has ever been made, nor have the Commissioners of Darke County ever demanded or required any further performance of their covenant.
After the creation of the county in 1809, a number of families emigrated to Greenville and its vicinity ; some remained only for a short period, whilst others resided here until their decease, or until, in after years, the glowing accounts of a " better land," farther toward the setting sun, tempted them to seek their fortunes on the banks of the Wabash. St. Joseph. Illinois and Missouri. and in the prairies of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. The names of some of them are no longer remem- bered, and of all that had attained to manhood or womanhood. who came prior to the close of 1812, not one remains ; all are gone, and even their descendants are as the forest leaves after the frosts and snows of winter have passed-lying in the ground, or blown away.
Among those who came between the spring of 1809 and the fall of 1810, the writer, at this distant day. can only name a part, and of that part were Moses Scott, from Southwestern Pennsylvania, who, with his son William, were afterward successive Sheriffs of Darke County. serving in the first, second and third regular terms of that office after the organization of the county ; John Studabaker and Abraham Miller, brother and brother-in-law to Abraham Studabaker. who had set- tled down the creek some two years before : they were located on lands on the old
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trace to Fort Jefferson, some two miles south of Greenville ; Scott purchased a quarter-section, a half-mile south of the Devor purchase, that has for the last thirty years or more been the property of David Studabaker, and also purchased two lots adjoining the public square in Greenville, on which he erected a two-story log house, in which for the period of from twelve to fifteen years, he kept what in those days was regarded as an A No. 1 tavern, or inn. where the weary traveler could be regaled on corn bread, venison, coffee, tea or whisky, as might best suit his appetite or mitigate his hunger and thirst. Scott and what were left of his family migrated to Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1824. In the Indian troubles of 1812, he had his powder-horn shot away from his side ; a number of years before, he had a narrow escape when engaged in the whisky insurrection in Western Pennsylvania, and his guests at the tavern in Greenville were always entertained by a recital of how lie escaped powder and lead in Pennsylvania, as well as a detail of the powder-horn adventure in the prairie above Greenville. About the time of Scott's advent in Greenville, came Charles Sumption, commonly known as the " Wax-works," with a family, consisting of a wife, two sons and four daughters. His son George settled on what is now the Bishop Farm. on Mud Creek, which he sold in 1829, and went to the St. Joe country in Northwest Indiana. Charles ultimately settled up the creek, about six miles above Greenville, in Washington Township. One of the daughters married Benoni Overfield, and was long remembered by the traveling public as the first-class landlady of the Overfield Tavern in Troy. Another was married to Jesse Rush, who also migrated with George Sumption to the St. Joe, in 1829. Another daughter married a blackguard named Henry Lowe, who came here from Kentucky on the hunt of runaway negroes in 1812. The elder Sumption having buried his his first wife and married a second, died near what is now known as Coletown in 1825.
Early in 1810, came from Pickaway Plains; below Circleville, on the Scioto, James Rush, Henry Rush, Andrew Rush and Henry Creviston, and settled, the two first-named at and adjoining the Prophet's town, on Mud Creek. Andrew Rush on the West Branch, where it was crossed by what was known as the "Squaw Road" or Delaware Path. Creviston, after a year or two, and after his brother-in- law, Matthew Young, came out from Pickaway County, in conjunction with him purchased land northeast of Coletown, where he resided until 1825, when he went a few miles farther up the creek, and settled in Washington Township. On the organization of the county, in the winter of 1816-17, James Rush was chosen by the Legislature as one of the Associate Judges of the Court of Common Pleas, which office he held for fourteen years, being re-elected by the Legislature in 1824 ; at the expiration of his second term, Judge Rush with all his family-save one daughter who, in 1828, was married to the late John Deardorff-removed to Eel River, in Indiana.
Andrew Rush was murdered by the Indians in 1812, as will be elsewhere adverted to in these pages, and Henry Rush died in 1813, leaving a widow who was subsequently married to James Bryson, and four children, three sons and one daughter, of whom only his second son, Lemuel Rush. is now living, at the advanced age of about seventy-five years, about three and a half miles north of Greenville. With the Rush brothers, came their brother-in-law, John Hiller, and settled on the West Branch, adjoining AAndrew Rush. After the outbreak of the Indian troubles, in 1812, and the murder of Andrew Rush, Hiller and his family left and went to the Miami, a mile or two above Pigna, where he remained until about 1816. when he returned to his farm on the West Branch, where he died in 1828, leaving a widow, five sons and three daughters, all of whom are now dead, the last, Aaron Hiller, Esq., having died some two years ago on his farm adjoining the land on which his father settled in 1810.
The emigration in 1811 was very slight, and of those who came scarcely any remained ; but of those who found their way here, one name must not be omitted. Abraham Scribner. a brother of the Azor Scribner who has been previously
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noticed, came to Greenville in the summer or early fall of 1811. He had previ- ously been master of one or more vessels engaged in the navigation of the Hudson River, from New York to Troy, or in the coasting trade from Passamaquoddy to the capes of the Chesapeake, and, sometimes, as far south as Hatteras.
When he came to the county of Darke, he was about thirty years old. From exposure, while commander of a vessel a year or two before, he had nearly lost the sense of hearing, and this infirmity, in connection with some other peculiarities, made him a man singular and exceptional in his character and deportment.
Part of the time he spent in Greenville, in the family of Mrs. Armstrong, until her death in January, 1812, and part of the time in Montgomery County, in the family of John Devor. one of the proprietors of Greenville, whose daughter Rachel he married in 1814. What he engaged in to make for himself a living for a year or more after he came to this country, none now living knows ; he appeared to be always busy, and yet no one could tell what he was doing or whether he was doing anything. Being at Dayton in the spring of 1813, he enlisted in Col. Dick Johns- ton's mounted regiment, and with it went to Upper Canada, where, in the fall of that year, he participated in the battle of the Fallen Timber, where Proctor was defeated and Tecumseh was killed. After being discharged from the service, about the time he married Miss Devor, and having entered the prairie quarter- section above the mouth of Mud Creek, now owned by Knox & Sater, he erected a log house upon it, and brought his wife from Montgomery County and went to housekeeping.
In about two years, Scribner sold his quarter-section, on which he had only paid his entrance money, $80, to John Compton, of Dayton, for $1,600, and took his pay in a stock of goods at retail price, and opened out a store.
In the summer of 1821. Scribner lost his first wife, and, after an interval of a few weeks, married a second wife, Miss Jane Ireland, of the vicinity of New Paris, who also died in the summer of 1822. After the death of his second wife, he sold out his stock of goods, and, having placed his children among friends, went to the Maumee, where he purchased land in Henry County, and fooled away his money in half clearing some land and having several thousand rails made, about which, five years afterward, Jake De Long wrote to him that " they were lying in the woods, and getting no better very fast." In a few months, he returned to Greenville and resumed the mercantile business, in which he continued the residue of his life. In January, 1825. he married his third wife. He died in March, 1847, in the sixty-sixth year of his age.
This much time and space has been devoted to Mr. Scribner, because, during ten or twelve years of his life, he was "the power" in the county ; he was the autocrat and ruler of the Democratic party, and discharged all the functions of caucuses. primary elections and nominating conventions ; those he allowed to run for office ran and were elected. and those he forbade had to keep shady and hold their peace. But at last he forked off from Jackson Democracy, although he would be "right side up" now among Democrats, for he was an uncompromising adherent to the resolutions of 1798-State rights and Calhounism. His last wife survives, after thirty-three years of widowhood, living with one of her sons in Western Indiana. The only survivor of the children of his first wife, Mrs. S. J. Arnold, lives in Greenville.
It may be as well here as elsewhere. to relate an occurrence which tended, in its consequences, greatly to retard the early settlement, not only of Greenville and Darke County, but various other towns and counties in Western Ohio and South- eastern Indiana. The mission of Tecumseh to stimulate the western and southern tribes of Indians to engage in a general war against the whites was generally known from the Lakes to New Orleans, but it was not so well known that his efforts had been in the main unsuccessful, and people were alarmed and excited. He had as yet, owing to the good sense of Little Turtle, Black Hoof and the Crane, failed to enlist the Miamis, Shawnces or Wyandots in what those
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chiefs deemed a senseless and wild undertaking, that in the end would bring great calamity upon their tribes. when a witless freak of cruelty, cowardice and treachery backed his efforts and turned the scale.
A small stockade had been erected at Greenville, and was garrisoned by a few men under Capt. Wolverton and Lient. Fish. David Conner had a small trading- house in Greenville, where he dispensed blankets, calico, powder, lead, flints, tobacco; whisky, and other Indian necessaries, to the " noble red men." A Miami Indian, with his squaw and their son, a boy of some thirteen or fourteen years, were coming from the northwest to Greenville for supplies, and in the evening encamped beside what was afterward known as Irwin's spring, within less than a mile of the town. A white man. who had traveled with them for some miles, came into town and made mention of the matter, and it became known in the garrison. Wolverton, who was a man of some sense, was absent, and Fish, who had no sense at all, was in command. Here was an opportunity to acquire a character for bravery at small cost, and it was not to be thrown away, and he laid his plans accordingly ; and the old adage that "the greater the coward the more cruel the devil," was again to be verified.
At break of day the next morning. Fish, with three or four of his command, drew near the camp. The woman had risen, and was gathering wood for a fire to cook their morning meal, and was shot down. Her husband arose on the alarm, and was also instantly killed. The boy fled. but as he was crossing the point of the prairie. was shot at and wounded in the wrist ; he escaped, and such was the rapidity with which he and his friends spread the news of this dastardly act. and such its effect upon the Indian mind, that, before 10 o'clock the next day. Fort Meigs, a hundred miles distant, was beleaguered by 2,000 raging savages. The tomahawk was raised by nearly all the Indian tribes of the Northwest, and from that time until after Harrison's victory over Tecumseh and Proctor at the Fallen Timber. the settlers on the frontier were only preserved from "the terror by night and the arrows that flieth by day " by the most unremitting watch- fulness.
On the 18th day of June, 1812, Congress declared war against Great Britain, and the little fort at Greenville. which had been built and garrisoned on Indian account, some months previous, became a permanent establishment, until the close of the war and declaration of peace, in 1815. Its garrison was usually composed of men gathered from the neighboring counties of Miami. Montgomery, Greene, Warren, Butler and Preble, as well as of some who came to Darke County to spy out the land, and stay, if they liked it. Among these men. but few names can now be recalled. and they would hardly be remembered, but from events with which they were connected, or because when the troubles were over, they remained as residents of the county. Among these, can be enumerated John and Samuel Lor- ing. James Cloyd, David and Peter Studabaker (brothers of Abraham and John Studabaker, already mentioned), Jacob Miller (who for many years was known by the cognomen of "Proaps "), Joseph Gass. Asa Spencer, Thomas Briggs, David Riffle, Hezekiah and Lewis Phillips, and John Ellis. Some of these men were married. but for the time being had left their wives and children " below in the settle- ment," as the common phrase then was, and others, either during the war or at its close married in the vicinity. John Loring had entered a quarter-section adjoining Devor, as early as 1809. but had sold to John Stoner, who was killed by the Indi- ans near the first crossing of Miller's Fork, on the trace to Lexington, in August. 1812. on the same day that Elliott was killed by the same enemies. on the same trace, about three or four miles nearer to Greenville, from which place both had been sent by the officer in charge of the garrison, with dispatches to Maj. Price, requesting re-enforcement to the small garrison. deemed necessary in consequence of the murder of Andrew Rush and two children of William Wilson, which had occurred only a day or two before. A considerable part of the Loring. quarter- section is now part of the town of Greenville. Sam Loring brought his family to
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Darke County after the war, and located on the quarter-section on which a portion of the village of Palestine is laid out. James Cloyd, at the return of peace, mar- ried a daughter of Andrew Noffsinger, and remained a resident of German Town- ship, until his decease, some four or five years ago, at which time he was Presi- dent of the Pioneer Association of Darke County. John Ellis was in St. Clair's army at the time of the defeat at Recovery, in 1791 ; was with Wayne from 1793 to 1796, and participated in the defense of Recovery, at the time of the Indian attack, and in the rout of the Indians at Rouge de Bout, in 1794 ; after the second treaty of Greenville, in August, 1814, he brought his family and settled at Castine, where he resided for a number of years, and subsequent to 1840, removed to Mer- cer County, near Recovery, where, after some years' residence, he died, at the age of over ninety. Ellis, in his youth, had been a prisoner with the Indians, and exhibited, ever after, through his long life, many Indian characteristics. David Studabaker was killed in the army. during the war of 1812. Peter Studabaker, between 1825 and 1830, removed to the Wabash, below Recovery, and some years later, farther down the river in Indiana, where his death occurred some twenty years since. The Phillips brothers, about 1816. located on Miller's Fork, near the south boundary of Darke County, where both died in their old age. Joseph Gass, who was a near relation of the compiler of the journal of Lewis and Clark's expe- dition to the mouth of the Columbia River, at the commencement of this century, married a daughter of William Wilson, resided in several localities in Greenville Township, until about 1833, when he left and went to Wisconsin ; the last known of him, he was at Milwaukee, about forty years ago. Two of his daughters reside in Dayton, and are the only members of his family now known to be living. Asa Spencer married a daughter of Joseph Wilson, emigrated to the northwest about 1825, and in a brief period was followed by his father-in-law, with all his children. sons and daughters .. The last known of Spencer and the Wilsons was some seven or eight years ago. A slander suit was then pending, between him and one of his brothers-in-law, and John Wilson was here to take the depositions of the old inhabitants, to establish the character and standing of Spencer in this community, fifty years before, as a hog-thief. David Riffle, after the war, purchased land on Stillwater, above where Beamsville now is, and removed there in 1814. and after the lapse of a few years, died there about 1820. Thomas Briggs married the Widow Wilson, relict of the William Wilson who was distinguished by the name of " Little Billy Wilson " ; his uncle, William Wilson, the father of the children mur- dered by the Indians, being known as " Old Billy." His wife died between 1845 and 1850, and he followed her to the grave a year or two later. "Proaps " never married ; he lived about, from " pillar to post," among relatives and friends, until he had attained more than his threescore and ten years, when he passed away at Pete Studabaker's, on the Wabash. These personal reminiscences might be greatly extended, and probably interest the reader, but they must be brought to a close. The writer of these pages was personally acquainted with most of those of whom he has written, and his recitals of the events narrated derived from them or his personal knowledge ; is now in the "sear and yellow leaf" of age, and human memory fails to retain and be able to transmit, with any certainty, the persons and events of which memory alone, without the aid of pen or stone, and in the absence of all living, can now bear testimony.
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