OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Gen. Parsons [3]
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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 28, 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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Part 3-- Gen. Parsons Buys Salt Spring Tract---

Sale Was Precious--

     Salt was the most prized product of the wilderness, west of the
Alleghenies.  From times prehistoric, animals of the forest drifted
through the wilds to reach the salt licks of Kentucky and Ohio, and in a
period long preceding the white man, Indians had resorted to salt
springs to boil the valued commodity from the water.  In Trumbull
County, in Weathersfield Township of today, in a thinly-timbered region
of clay land, almost marshy, was located the famous salt springs of the
Western Reserve.  Known to the earliest explorers, it is on Evan's map
of 1755, and in the Revolutionary times settlers from Washington and
Westmoreland Counties, in western Pennsylvania, erected cabins there to
make their supply of salt.
     From time immemorial, and during the period of the white man's
visits, the Indians took their turn at boiling salt and in later years,
when they had permanent camps near the strip, sold it to settlers, for
as high as $ 6 a bushel. In 1785, the year before Connecticut first
decided to survey the Reserve, Col. Broadhead, commanding the troops at
Fort Pitt, was given orders to dispossess them and the Indians burned
the cabins.

He knew of It--

     Gen. Samuel Parsons had learned of this tract, apparently before,
he had seen it. History makes no mention of his visiting the Reserve
during his journey to the Shawnees on the Ohio, though he had time to
ascend Beaver River and its branch, the Mahoning, to the springs. He
started in the spring of 1785 and was back in Middletown, Conn., by the
summer of 1786.  While still in the east, he organized a syndicate to
purchase several townships on the Reserve.  This was probably in
November, 1786, the month after he was appointed to survey it, for on
Dec. 12 he paid Connecticut's land committee about $13,700 in bills of
credit, State securities, and drafts.
     This it seems, was the syndicate's payment, made by subscribing
members, other than himself, to buy over a township, or 24,000 acres.
By an agreement with them, Parsons was to recieve 4,000 acres as
compensation for his services as promoter and manager. These acres could
be laid out anywhere in the tract, in one or two oblong parcels. He was
to locate the entire purchase and have it properly surveyed and marked
out. About this time he received authority from the State committee to
survey ' the two most southerly townships in the third range from the
Pennsylvania line, which included the Salt Springs Tract."

The Patent--

     There is strong evidence that Parsons did lay out the spring tract,
and that in doing so, he made a partial survey of the eastern half of
the Reserve. The patent or title to the land was issued by the Governor
of Connecticut, Feb.10, 1788. To understand its boundaries, one must
remember that Parsons' survey was to be made with six-mile wide ranges
and tiers, which made the township six miles square, or a mile longer
and wider than those surveyed by Moses Cleaveland eight years later.
     The patent says the tract was to begin at the northeast corner of
the first township in the third range--or six miles from the southern
border of the Reserve, and 12 miles west of the Pennsyvania line.  From
this point, it ran due north eight miles. The line crossed present
Weathersfield township a mile below its northen border and stopped at
its western edge. Following the township's west line it ran south two
and a half miles, then jutted straight west into Lordstown Township,
three miles. Running directly south from this corner,through Jackson
Township, to within a mile of its south border, it turned due east and
ran through Austintown Township to its starting point.
     The springs were about a mile south of Niles toward Meander Creek,
and are now crossed by a Baltimore & Ohio right-of-way. Parsons' private
4,000 acres is described in the patent, as an oblong tract extending a
mile on each side of the springs and running north and south, to include
the necessary acreage.
     On Sept.13,1788, Gov. St. Claire received a letter from Parsons
saying that he had discontinued the survey of lands on the Western
Reserve, oweing to an impending treaty with the Wyandots and other
tribes. History says that he began this survey soon after his arrival at
Marietta, in the last week of May, 1788. Though Parsons was present at
the inauguration of Gov. St. Claire on July 15, his last recorded letter
of that summer, from Marietta, is dated July 20 and his biographers do
not mention his presence at the seating of the two other judges of the
Supreme Court, in hall of the Campus Martius on July 26th.
      This would give him seven weeks of surveying on the Reserve, to
the day he wrote the Governor. The letter also fixes the fact, he was
running lines on Connecticut's reservation.
     No deed of the salt springs, with its surrounding thousands of
acres could have been satisfactory to the owners, without a survey
showing that the tract contained the valuable lands as was supposed to.
No accurate survey could be made, without first determining the lines of
the first three ranges, and those of the lower township tiers.

Death--

     Indian troubles in Ohio were quieted for the time early in 1789.
After a prolonged sickness, Gen Parsons started to resume his surveying
on the Reserve in the fall of that year. In a letter dated Nov.1, he
states that he expects to finish the survey of the Connecticut lands.  A
week later, he is at a block house two miles up the Big Beaver, on its
eastern side. From there, he rode by a bridle path to Salt Springs where
sick or exhausted, he turned back. Attempting to descend the river in a
canoe, he was drowned at the falls, Nov.17,1789.
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