USA > Ohio > Women of Ohio; a record of their achievements in the history of the state, Volume I > Part 2
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"MAD ANN" BAILEY may have been partly crazed by the death, at the hands of Indian warriors, at Point Pleasant, on October 10, 1774, of her first husband, Richard Trotter, a volunteer in the expedition of Lord Dun- more, then governor of Virginia. She discarded feminine ways and, to an extent, woman's wear. She donned hunting shirt and moccasins, armed her- self with tomahawk, scalping knife and gun, set forth to get her man. Ann's complex was that a redskin must fall by her hand in revenge for her husband's death.
One did and probably more than one. For when a fort on the Great Kanawha, near what is now Charleston, W. Va., was badly threatened, its supply of ammunition exhausted, it was Ann who set out, alone, for help from Camp Union, now Lewisburg. She swam rivers, fought off wolves, found her way through the dense forests and got back with powder and bullets
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just before the attack was made. Ann fought right with the men and the attack was repulsed. Later she came, with a son, to the settlement of Gallipolis, Ohio and lived there, with, it is pleasant to be able to say, the esteem of the community, despite her antic ways, until her death in 1825.
Ann had survived her second husband also. She lived in a cabin alone but on friendly terms with her neighbors. She liked to tell of her adventures. Mad Ann liked liquor and, it seems, also chewed tobacco. But she did wear skirts, for all her leather coat and woodman's boots. Trousers, on women of that day and age, were, it seems, unthinkable, even for "Mad Ann."
LOUISA ST. CLAIR, daughter of General St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory, accompanied her father and her two sisters from West- moreland County, Penn. to Marietta in 1790. This meant leaving a fine plantation, plenty of balls and parties, for a frontier garrison and the rough life of the wilderness. But it suited Louisa. She could ride like a centaur, range the woods, fearless of Indians, kill a squirrel at the top of a tree, walk mile on mile of the roughest trails in any weather-and dance all night when stress and strain of circumstances relaxed sufficiently to permit such diversion.
Louisa was beautiful in face and figure and doubtless the reigning toast among her father's officers. Nor was toast an empty term. It was the day of hard drinking as well as of hard fighting-and hard praying. Seeds that sprouted, later, into the historic Women's Crusade were being planted plenti- fully at this time. But Louisa St. Clair adapted herself, like a sensible and intelligent as well as charming young woman, to her surroundings as she found them and when the time came for her to go back to a more sophisticated society, she is said to have left Ohio with keen regret, despite her natural chagrin at criticism of her father's defeat in his famous battle with the Indians at Ft. Jefferson, on the Wabash, in 1791.
REBECCA ROUSE,-mother of Bathsheba, the first Ohio school teacher -came all the way from New Bedford, Mass., with her husband and her eight children, in a covered wagon. They crossed the mountains on foot.
The children stuck in the mud, literally, time after time, yet it was im- possible for the team to drag any heavier burden up the gorge-like mountain tracks. They finally reached Ft. Pitt-now Pittsburgh, Penn., then a town of 500 human beings-and embarked on the unwieldy, roofless boat on which they were to voyage down the Ohio to the mouth of the Muskingum.
The men had to go ashore in the evening and were detained all night. At midnight the women discovered that the ill-calked hull was half full of water. Mrs. Rouse, however, managed to get her family and herself ashore, obtained shelter for the rest of the night. When the men returned, the voyage was begun. Dreadful storms drove them to the Kentucky shore. Then it turned cold. It was December when the eight week's journey of Rebecca Rouse, with her husband and eight children ended temporarily at Marietta
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and finally at the settlement 14 miles below, on the right bank of the Ohio, called Belpre.
As far as is known, all of the Rouse children survived their dreadful journey. What is more, they grew up healthy and happy and at least three of the girls-including Bathsheba, first Ohio school teacher-married men who became leaders in the Northwest Territory and known throughout the nation.
When MRS. SIMON KENTON, second wife of the Kentucky Indian hunter, (before her marriage the beautiful Elizabeth Jarboe), accompanied her husband to an isolated trading post near Springfield, Ohio, he was already famous. So much so that settlers, hunters, pioneers who, like Kenton, had been tragically unfortunate in obtaining right to the lands they had risked all to discover, established a beaten path to the Kenton doorway. They came -and stayed.
Nor was it for the wife of the popular General Kenton to betray that tradition of Kentucky hospitality which he carried with him across the Ohio. So Elizabeth endured in silence the greatest trial of any housewife-the dwindling of her family's meager resources in ill judged hospitality.
Once the door of Mrs. Kenton's cabin opened suddenly to admit a savage, stark naked and brandishing a tomahawk. Elizabeth did not quail. The Redskin then snatched up her eldest daughter and carried the child away. The child was returned. The mother was asked what punishment should be meted out to the Indian. "Nothing," said Elizabeth, with grim philosophy, "Just so he will promise not to do it again."
These few highlights, selected from innumerable such records, should illuminate the life led by the pioneer woman of Ohio in virtually every early settlement, from the mouth of the Muskingum to the mouth of the Big Miami, from what was to become the great midwestern city of Cincinnati to the little station on the Western Reserve that grew up to be the metropolis of Cleveland. This was their life. And this is the sort of women that many --- not all, but astonishingly many-of them were.
CHAPTER TWO
Women Home Builders
CHAPTER TWO
WOMEN HOME BUILDERS
One can picture the interior of the settler's home. It was usually just one large room but even so, it was more than living quarters. It was in reality a workshop, a primitive factory. See it in the early evening, cold enough to justify a blazing fire. Fortunately, of logs for fuel there was rarely any lack. Pine knots add light, perhaps a primitive lamp-bears grease in a saucer, with a rag for a wick.
In one corner the head of the family is shaping a plow-for quite a time the plough share was just hard wood, later it was iron shod. In another corner little Johnny is busy with his corn grater, scraping meal for breakfast. Mother is spinning or carding or knitting or sewing, with a quick ear for the baby's wail or perhaps for little Jackie's A B Cs.
Bed-time is early. It comes at dusk, for warmth, when the cold of winter really begins to bite into the bones. The little factory is soon silent, except for the heavy breathing of its inmates. The air, though bitter cold, is very close.
It must have been a major challenge to the good housewife's instinctive love of cleanliness and order, this cluttered room with its all too unwashed humanity. Well for her peace of mind that the gentle art of bathing was still practically in its infancy almost everywhere.
Still, there must have come moments when, spurred by innate instinct for their welfare and for her own, the mother must have thrust Johnny and Jackie and Mary and Elizabeth and perhaps even herself, by turns into the hollowed tree stump which constituted her washtub-and scrubbed their protesting bodies with grim determination.
The story is told in "Pioneer Women of the West" of an Indian alarm at Marietta, soon after the village was founded, which brought everybody running to the blockhouse, with Col. Ebenezer Sproat-surveyor-in his arms a boxful of papers for safe keeping, at the head. Hard behind was William Moultin, his leathern apron full of goldsmith's tools-and tobacco-and his daughter Anna, clasping to her bosom the china tea pot, cups and saucers. Daughter Lydia came next, with the family Bible. But where was mother? Have the Indians got mother ?
"No," reassured daughter Lydia, "Mother said she just could not leave the house looking the way it did." So, with redskins imminent, Mother stopped to put things to rights and presently pulled in safely, bringing with her the highly treasured mirror of her household and the equally important knives and forks.
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Records show that John Cleves Symmes, whose name leads all the rest in establishment of the "Miami Purchase," second settlement in what is now Ohio, had three wives.
They were, of course, successive. Moreover, he certainly needed that many. No one woman, it is obvious after perusal of the history of this great colonization promoter, could ever have carried more than her third of a share of the attainments and disappointments of his tumultous career. Even so, their experience must at times have gotten them down. The first wife was Anna Tuthill, who died in 1776. She as well as her husband came from Long Island. She was the mother of all of his children. The second wife was Mrs. Mary (Henry) Halsey. John Cleves Symmes married Susan Livingston, his third wife, in 1804 at Vincennes, Indiana.
Symmes also had five daughters, one of them, at least, destined to share a career as eventful as her father's and even more important, historically.
This was ANNA SYMMES, who became the wife of William Henry Harrison, later the ninth president of the United States. Of course nobody suspected that this would happen at the time of Anna's marriage, least of all her father, who frankly "did not think much" of the young officer. Since young Harrison had already shown good mettle, this was unjust as well as short sighted. But this need not be gone into right now, Anna would probably not mind waiting, she must have been well trained to patience by her im- petuous father, anyway.
For John Cleves Symmes was unquestionably an impatient man, a quick worker as well as a quick thinker. When Benjamin Stites-also a leading member of the Ohio settlement hall of fame-told Judge Symmes, then a member of the Continental Congress, living at Trenton, N. J., of the fine forests and rich valleys he-Stites-had seen when he was in pursuit of some Indians north of the Ohio River, Symmes lost no time in perfecting plans for a big land company, to finance and direct settlement of two million acres of this virgin land.
Benjamin Stites, to whom also is due great honor as a settlement founder and developer, was a New Jersey trader. His occupation took him to the Kentucky settlements-earlier than those of Ohio-and on one of the trips, in the summer of 1786, he happened to have been near Limestone, (now Maysville) Ky. He joined in pursuit of some Indians who had stolen horses and it was this pursuit that gave him opportunity of viewing the fine expanse of country between the Little Miami and the Great Miami Rivers.
Stites hurried back to New Jersey-reached there early in 1787-told Judge Symmes what he had seen. Reports had already reached New Jersey of the petitions of the Ohio Company, which later culminated in settlement of Marietta, first in what later became the state, at the mouth of the Mus- kingum River.
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Symmes, as has been indicated, was already a distinguished and suc- cessful man. Born in Long Island in 1742, he had gone to New Jersey and was prominent during the Revolution as colonel of a militia regiment in active service. He was for one year lieutenant-governor of New Jersey, for six years member of the Continental Congress and for a period a judge of the New Jersey Supreme Court. In addition to the outstanding ability which was recognized by these positions, Symmes had the pioneer instinct-the vision of a newer and still better America in what was then the great northwest.
His plan, quickly formulated, was to petition Congress for the entire tract of land between the two Miamis, using for payment to Congress the Federal certificates and military warrants which would be accepted by his group from settlers buying the land. The holders of these certificates and warrants-most of them former soldiers now at loose ends, would, of course, be the very persons most likely to settle in the new territory.
He was able to interest other influential men-General Jonathan Dayton, Elias Boudinot, Dr. Witherspoon, and of course Benjamin Stites. In the spring of 1787 Symmes, with Stites and others of the group, made a trip down the Ohio River to survey the extent of the proposed purchase. They went down, it seems, as far as Louisville and even up the Wabash River, having in mind the possibility of selecting a place for a colony north of what is now Vincennes, Ind. But realization of the danger from Indian attack made them dismiss this idea. It was on this trip, however, that they interested some of the Keu- tucky leaders-John Filson and Robert Patterson-in the Miami settlement.
Promptly on his return to New Jersey Symmes organized, in his own name, a land company, with a personnel of 24 men, those above mentioned included. It is true that Congress had not yet been formally petitioned and so their company was as yet without necessary sanction. But nobody seems to have bothered about that at the time.
In the winter of 1787-88 Symmes sold to Mathias Denman of Springfield, N. J., a tract of 740 acres opposite the Licking River. Now we are getting close to the actual settlement of Cincinnati, for Denman's specific plan was to lay out a town at the location of his purchase and to establish a ferry to the Kentucky shore. But Denman was not to have the distinction of actually making the first settlement. Neither, for that matter, was Symmes. Lady Luck was to have a hand in the game.
For a time chance seemed to be favoring Judge Symmes and his group very highly. Symmes had gotten his petition to Congress in August, 1787. It was referred to the Board of the Treasury. It was provisionally accepted.
Symmes made a provisional payment-$82,000, most of which had been advanced by his friends.
Of course the matter was by no means settled-but Symmes saw no reason why he should not issue land warrants. He issued one-marked "speshul" in the original document-to Benjamin Stites for 640 acres of land at the
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place where the Little Miami empties into the Ohio River. And now we are getting very close indeed to what was really to be the first settlement of the Miami country. But we have not reached it yet.
Under Symmes plan, the only reward for his efforts was to be the priv- ilege of himself buying 40,000 acres of land and selling the tract off at a profit to individual purchasers. His personal prestige was enhanced, very soon, by his appointment Feb. 19, 1788, as judge of the Northwest Territory. With two other members of this tribunal, he would sit with Governor Arthur St. Clair and administer the laws of the whole territory. Well, it was cer- tainly time to go westward ho. So Symmes left to Boudinot and Dayton the final straightening out with the Board of the Treasury of the status of their land company and started for the "Miami Purchase."
Anna Symmes seems to have accompanied her father as far as Ft. Harmar on this trip, from which Dayton and Boudinot tried to recall Symmes be- cause of a bad hitch that their negotiations soon reached in Congress. But Symmes was not a turn backer. He took a flat boat at Pittsburgh, went to Ft. Harmar, where the Ohio Company was now establishing the town of Marietta and then on down the river to Limestone, where he was met by Denman, Stites, Patterson, Filson and Israel Ludlow, the chief surveyor of the party.
This meeting was important, for it was then and there that the leaders decided what was what-or what they thought was what-and how it should be divided.
They agreed that Stites was to take over the region about the Little Miami, Denman, Patterson and Filson the middle portion, just opposite the mouth of the Licking and Symmes himself the region around the Great Miami -what is now approximately North Bend.
The men set to work immediately, collecting their little groups.
Benjamin Stites and his party had even decided on the name of their settlement-Columbia. They reached the location they had selected, just be- low the mouth of the Little Miami, on Nov. 18, 1788. They were the first actual settlers to arrive in the Miami region and therefore are credited with the very first settlement of the Miami Purchase.
Nearly a century later, in 1873, Columbia, which is five miles east of the heart of Cincinnati, became a part of that city. So we may accept the proud claim of the descendants of Benjamin Stites and the other settlers of this first boatload, that they were the earliest residents of what later became and remained for many years, the metropolis of the middle west.
There were 26 persons-men, women and children, in this historic boat- load. We know their names, for these are inscribed on a monument erected, in 1899, on a knoll whereon once stood the first Protestant church of the Miami Purchase-the old Baptist Church, established in 1790 by Dr. Stephen Gano and erected in 1792. The knoll contains two acres of ground, deeded
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to the Baptists of Columbia Township by Benjamin Stites, the erstwhile trader. It became the community cemetery.
The Stites family figures conspicuously in the list of names on the monu- ment. This marker has a history of its own. It played its first role as one of the Corinthian pillars of Cincinnati's early postoffice.
The names, as inscribed, are: Major Benjamin Stites, MRS. BENJAMIN STITES, Ben Stites, Jr., RACHEL STITES, ANN W. STITES, Greenbright Bailey, MRS. GREENBRIGHT BAILEY, Jas. F. Bailey, Reason Bailey, Abel Cook, Jacob Mills, Jonathan Stites, Ephraim Kibby, John S. Gano, MRS. MARY S. GANO, Thos. C. Wade, Hezekiah Stites, Elijah Stites, Edmund Buxton, Daniel Shoemaker, John Hempstead, Evan Shelby, Allen Woodruff, Joseph Cox, Benjamin Cox. To this list should be added leaders not with the group, John Riley and Francis Dunlevy among them.
The little settlement throve. Block houses were built first, for protec- tion, then log cabins for the families. Everybody worked. They raised corn enough in "Turkey Bottoms" to supply themselves and, when it was estah- lished, the Ft. Washington garrison at Cincinnati. It is said that from nine acres, 963 bushels of corn was produced the first season. Before they could raise corn, however, the women and children scratched up the bulbous roots of "bear grass" washed and dried the roots, pounded them to a sort of flour. But for these and other women's ways of meeting innumerable emergencies, things might have gone very badly.
Even then, women settlers realized that decent ways of living must be established within and without the home. Three women, MARY DAVIS, ELIZABETH FERRIS and AMY REYNOLDS were "constituent members" of the Columbia Baptist Church organized-first in the Northwest Territory -in 1790.
The women struggled to clothe their husbands, their children and them- selves, as fittingly as possible. They even did what they could to keep up with the modes of the civilization they had left behind them. Their bodices were neat, their petticoats numerous, to distend properly their bouffant skirts. Henry Howe, in his historical collections, tells how this is said to have saved the life of a Mrs. Coleman soon after she had joined the Columbia colony.
She was in a canoe with two of the men and a lad, Oliver Spencer, when they were fired on by Indians from ambush. Mrs. Coleman promptly jumped into the river. She could not swim. But her bouyant skirt floated her two miles down the river, to safety. The boy was captured, taken to the Maumee country and held eight months, when he was ransomed. But it took him almost two years to get back home.
Now for the second group to settle in the Miami Purchase. The three leaders, with their eager parties were together, you recall, at Limestone (Maysville, Ky.) eager to start. Stites got off first, with his settlers. Den- man's party-or Patterson's party or Filson's-historians vary in their in-
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dication of leadership-got off second. On Dec. 28, 1788. this group, about 20 men in all, arrived at what is now the foot of Sycamore St. where there was a small inlet, later known as Yeatman's Cove. It is true that a stained glass window above the main stairway in Cincinnati's City Hall gives the date, in picturing this arrival, as Sept. 22, 1788. But most historians seem to agree that this refers to the preliminary visit of Symmes, Ludlow, Denman, Filson and others, not to the date of actual settlement.
The settlement had, at first, a grandiose name, "Losantiville." This was the idea of John Filson, former schoolmaster and already widely known as a historian. His "Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucky" had been published in 1784. His synthetic name for the new settlement was made up of three words in as many languages-"Os," Latin, mouth, "anti," Greek, opposite, "ville," French, city. The city-opposite-the-mouth. It was classic but a bit jumbled.
Anyhow, it did not last long. When Governor Arthur St. Clair came to Ft. Washington-the blockhouse and stockade which was soon built to pro- tect the settlement-he changed the name to Cincinnati, in honor of the Order of Cincinnatus, to which many Revolutionary soldiers belonged.
Filson never knew the name was changed. This fine and scholarly gen- tleman-who, it seems, had one-third interest as did Col. Robert Patterson, in the 740 acre tract of land obtained by Denman from Symmes, disappeared suddenly one day when on the outskirts of the settlement. It was believed that he had been captured by Indians. Nobody ever found out what really happened to John Filson.
So Israel Ludlow, another man of ability who was to play an important part in the development of Cincinnati, took over the task of surveying and laying out the little town. There were "in lots," which extended back from the landing and were between what is now Main and Broadway and "out lots" on which settlers had to pledge themselves to grow two crops suc- cessively, each crop to cover not less than an acre.
But we must leave Losantiville-it is not yet Cincinnati-and go down the Ohio to a point-northermost of any bend in the Ohio-about 16 miles below Yeatman's Cove. We must go there, because that's where John Cleves Symmes, last of the leaders to leave Limestone-he was waiting for assurance of military protection-landed with his group of settlers on Feb. 2, 1788. He had selected the location, had preferred it from the beginning, was confident that here, on the Great Miami, would rise the metropolis of the whole terri- tory. As a matter of fact, there seemed good reason for his hopes.
But John Cleves Symmes was not destined to see his ambitions fulfilled -he was destined, on the contrary, to a life of increasing disappointment and anxiety, as legal complications multiplied due to the confusion of claims to the warrants he had given out for land-and the fact that he had not really waited for Congress to act.
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The two million acres Symmes wanted originally was cut down to one million by Congress finally to about 400,000 acres-because in the end, it was all Symmes could pay for.
North Bend-this was the name Symmes approved for his great settle- ment-is today a little town whose "glorious future" is behind it. But there stands today, to emphasize the high hopes of the past, an old family mansion, still in fair preservation, the interior quite intact with winding stairway, brass doorknobs, huge metal locks and hand hewn woodwork.
It is the home of John Scott Harrison, grandson of John Cleves Symmes and son of William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States. It stands on high ground, about 300 yards back from the Ohio River. Closer to the river is the tomb of "Old Tippecanoe" and approximately a quarter of a mile to the west of the first President Harrison's tomb is the grave of his father-in-law, John Cleves Symmes, the man who dreamed but was no dreamer-who put forth all he had to make his dreams come true-to face, in the end, disappointment and disillusion.
Symmes died in 1814. His North Bend home stood at a point nearly a mile north west of where is now his grave. This home had burned in 1811 and many valuable papers had been destroyed. Think how this must have added to the confusion of his innumerable land transactions.
Symmes last wife was SUSANNA LIVINGSTON, the daughter of the governor of New Jersey during the revolutionary period. She is the "pretty Susan" of Major John Andre's "Cow Chase."
Susan Livingston preserved her father's (the governor's) papers when their house was entered by a party of British on the 28th of February, 1779, according to T. S. Clarkson, who wrote:
"Governor Livingston, informed of the approaching invasion, left home at an early hour to escape capture, having confided his valuable papers to the care of his daughter. She had them placed in a carriage box and taken to a room in the upper story of the house. When the enemy were advancing Miss Livingston stepped from the window of the apartment upon the roof of the piazza to look at the Red Coats. A horseman in front of the detach- ment rode hastily up and begged that she would retire, for there was danger of some of his soldiers from a distance mistaking her for a man and firing upon her. The young lady attempted to climb in at the window, but found it impracticable, though it had been easy enough to get out. The horseman seeing her difficulty instantly sprang from his horse, went into the house and upstairs and leaping out upon the roof lifted Miss Livingston through the window. She asked to whom was she indebted for the courtesy; the reply was 'Lord Cathcart.' She then, with admirable presence of mind, appealed to him, as a gentleman, for the protection of the box, which she said contained her private property ; promising if that could be secured to open her father's library to the soldiers. A guard was accordingly placed over the box while
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