OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio:  And Then They Went West
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Darlene E. Kelley
http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374
June 3, 1999
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Historical Collections of Ohio
The Kelley Family Collections
Newspaper article, Plains Dealer
compiled by S.J. Kelley-- 1925
And Then They Went West
by Darlene E. Kelley  1998
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     People went west to have better farms, to make money, to get out
from under parents and grandparents and neighbors, who had known them
since they were born.  Of the people of Connecticut, who went to the
Western Reserve, a history over a hundred years ago explains,
"Connecticut federalism was the most ironclad variety anywhere to be
found. Old families were the pride and weakness of their respective
localities."  The history says that Connecticut had " shelled over" with
tradition and family.  To many emigrants, the west was not new and wide
open and free of past associations, it was holy, the place God wanted
them to go. Often they left districts where the only land yet to be
farmed was way up on the sides of hills, where everything was cleared
except the tops of rocky knolls, where getting firewood involved a
journey.
     When they went west, what they found on the other side of the
mountain, mainly was trees.  Much of Ohio was covered by a hardwood
forest that dated from the last ice age, interrupted here and there by
small prairies, swamps, or stretches of wind-down timbers.  Emigrants
rode through unbroken forests for days on end.  Some said you had to
have the experience to understand how solitary and unrelieved it was.
They called the tree covered expanses wastes and the occasional sunlite
openings oases.  Tree trunks often grew sixty and seventy feet up before
the first branch, in an unending series of columns receding into green
gloom all around. Squirrels ran on limbs in the leafy umbrella almost
out of shotgun range. A view extending two hundred yards was rare enough
to draw comment.  When travelers came out into and opening, where they
could see the sky and clouds and distance, they rejoyced.
     Settlers talked about the hurricanes of pigeons that passed
overhead in flights several layers deep, about shouls of whte bass and
pickerel in rivers so dense you could catch dozens by hand, about
squirrels so numerous the State of Ohio passed a law in 1817 requiring a
quota of squirrel skins from every tax payer on penalty of fine.
     But for most settlers, the trees made the personality of the
country. There were white, black, red, and yellow oaks, shagbark
hickory, beeches, butternuts, chestnuts, and elms--red, white and
slippery.  There were three kinds of maple, four kinds of ash, linden,
dogwood, locust, popular, black birch, white berch,ironwood,
sasafras,wild cherry,crab apple,black walnuts, pecans, cottonwoods and
sycamores grew in river bottoms, giant grapevines haging among them.
     Sycamores sometimes grew to great size and then in time became
hollow, a hollow sycamore could hold a dozen horses and thirty standing
men.  Trimmed, roofed, fitted with a door, a sycamore trunk might serve
as an outbuilding or a smokehouse.  People knew that chestnuts made the
most durable fence rails and second-growth hickory the strongest axe
handles and beech the best fuel, that linden blossom made the best
honey, that ironwood was almost impossible to burn or break, that
butternut hulls made a yellow dye and oak leaves leaves purple.
      Cabins of unfinished logs sometimes sprouted new shoots in the
spring until they were all over follage on the outside.
     The settlers did not just attack the forest, they smote it.  When
they founded towns, they generally cut down all the trees on the site
first thing: later. sometimes much later. they removed them.  Clearing
land of trees, stumps and roots took a long time.  Often farmers began
by girdling the trees on their property-- cutting a section of bark all
around the trunk so that the tree would die. When they planted corn
among the dead trees it came up lush and fine.
     They applied the timber verbs(words) almost extinct today;  they
frowed, they scotched, they hewed, they mauled, they rived. ( a frow is
a tool like an ax but with a blade at right angles to the handle used
for splitting, to scotch meant to trim the bark from the side on one
side only; to hew meant to trim the log all around; a maul is a heavy
wooden hammer used to drive wedges; riving is wrenching apart by main
strength.)  Always they used fire.  Setting a fire to burn the dead
timber off a field was called blackening off a field. They made big
piles of brush and timber and burned them;  for years, the smell of the
settlements was the smell of burning woodpiles. They got together for
stump pullings and log rollings. They had noticed how a strong wind
would sometimes knock down acres of trees at a time;  near Medina, Ohio,
axmen cut halfway through the trunks of trees on several acres, and then
a good blow came, toppled the trees by the hundreds.
     Some of the settlers began with no impliments but an ax.  In
conversation, the subject of axes-- their ideal weight, their proper
helves, was more popular then politics or religion.  A man who knew the
secrets of temporing the steel and getting the center of gravity right,
received the celebrity of an artist and might act accordingly.  Men who
knew how to chop became famous too.  An ax blow requires the same timing
of weight shift and wrist action as a golf swing, and as in golf, those
who were good at it taught others; sometimes all the men in one district
learned their stroke from the same axman extraordinaire.  A good stroke
had a  'sweetness' simular to the sound of a well struck gof or tennis
ball, and gave a satisfaction which moved the work along.
     A generation of men choppd and burned and rooted until they made a
landscape,  which to judge from photographs, less wooded than today.
Strands of original forest became so hard to find that historians made
note of them. 
     Many of the settlers loved to borrow things from their neighbors
and to know their neighbors business.  Visitors from the east and Europe
found frontier people almost too nosy to endure; the frontier provided
solitude but not much privacy.  Men on the frontier often had to be
reminded to remove their hats indoors. Most said they believed that all
men were created equal.  Another observer noted that Americans loved to
lean their chairbacks against a wall. They said that if you put a
hundred Americans in chairs, ninty-nine would immediately shuffle
backward and lean themselves against the nearest prop.
     The settlers also liked to shoot their guns.  Many owned accurate,
long-barreled, small-caliber flintlocks, made originally by German
gunsmiths who migrated to central Pennsylvania in the mid 1700's.
Almost every cabin had a shooting tree nearby on which men sighted their
rifles and tryed out different bullets and charges of gun powder.
Social gatherings often involved shooting contests. They shot at
charcol circles marked on shingles of white pine for prizes, or they
shot at the prize itself, a live turkey confined behind a log so that
only its head was visible.  Hits on a birds bill did not count.
Everyone ate a lot of wild game, which made a tedious diet unseasoned,
as it often was, by salt or spices.  
     Once farmers had cleared the neighborhood of wolves, and other
predators, they raised skinny, agile hogs.  Hogs ran free.  The best way
to slaughter them was to stick them while they were alive, so they would
run and bleed themselves out.  They provided meat for salting, bristles,
lard, tallow; some made door hinges out of the bacon rind.  Also, hogs
kept down the rattlesnakes which they would gang up on and eat. Hogs
were said to be immune to snake venom.
     In a cabin without cupboards or much furniture, a person could see
the households possessions at a glance.  Some families kept a trumpet to
blow for people lost in the woods. on the frontier, it was hard  to
replace items that broke, so the condition of shoes and utensils showed
how long ago their owners arrived. A table setting might be augmented by
a half pair of sissors or a bonehandled straight razor.  If a mirror,
broke, the ownertook the bigger fragments and reframed them.  Because
the bed was the most prominent piece of furniture in the cabins one
room, women made pretty quilts for it, and because the part of the quilt
that rested on the top of the bed faded more quickly than the parts that
hung on the sides, they sometimes made the middle part with darker
colors.
    When setlers went to see a neighbor, they went to the front of the
cabin and yelled at the door. Indians, when they came to a cabin,
generally approached from the back, then looked in the window opening
and then knocked on the door.  Many recall hearing the whoops of Indians
resounding in the forest, Indians usually traveled single file in groups
that might stretch for miles, and they whooped to communicate along the
line.
     Many  indian villages were uninhabited by the first wave of
settlers.  Boys explored the villages and found them overgrown, except
for the hard packed circles of earth where the indians used to dance.
Indian burial mounds were dug up and were admired because of the
thickness of the skulls and the soundness and regularity of their teeth.
Some of the bones were burned or had stone arrow points stuck in them.
      Most frontier farms could be made to produce a crop of corn or
wheat within the first or second year but selling the crop and shipping
it were more difficult.  As whiskey, it traveled better,kept longer, and
could be sold or traded.  Many of the Scots-Irish settlers not only knew
how to distill whiskey, they were good at it.  People said that some of
the whiskey you got on the frontier--" Squirrel Whiskey ". one of its
names, tasted fine.  For years it was easier to find good whiskey than a
good coffee. In 1827 in Ohio, whiskey was drunk like water as well as
used to pay for groceries and wages. Politicians would leave barrels of
it in their names at groceries for customers to help themseves, to
influence their votes.  It was even watered down and given to children.
     In 1810, cultural attractions like lectures, debates, recitations,
and moving panoramas of the holy land painted on canvas began taken on
to replace religious revivals.  Old settlers said the country had gotten
all peopled up. Little towns had sprung up everywhere.  Railroads built
from the cities and connected with the east.  The endless tree-covered
wastes had disappeared.  Geologists who studied sediments taken from the
bottom of Lake Erie can identify with the year of 1850, approximately,
by a change in the sediments' pollen content: those from before 1850
contain pine pollin, but those from after contain less pine  pollin and
a lot more pollin of the ragweed plant, whch spread where trees used to
be.  Sediments from over a hundred years later contain the radioactive
isotope "cesuim" which settled to the earth after atmospheric testing of
nucler weapons, they mark the horizon of the year when they were born. 
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