OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Gen. Simon Perkins [1]
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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 12, 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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Links---

     Gen. Simon Perkins, seems to have many links to the Kelley Family,
in some way for a century.  First of all, his part in the sale of
Cunningham Island to Datus and Irad Kelley, which resulted in Kelley's
Island, in Lake Erie, Ohio.
     Another link is the results of the Ohio Canals, which he worked
with Alfred Kelley as commissioners and his gift of land for part of the
Canals.
     Third link is the marriage of Charles Crantz Perkins, his direct
descendant, to Lucy Anna Kelley, daughter of Thomas Arthur and Eva (
Megrue) Kelley, our direct descendant, of Cleveland, Ohio.
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First in Series---

     General Simon Perkins was born in Lisbon, Connecticut in 1771 and
lived most of his life in Warren, Ohio, where he died in 1844.  He was
the fifth generation from John Perkins who came from England to
Massachusetts in 1631.  Whe Simon was seven, his father, also named
Simon, died from illness contracted while a soldier in the Revolutionary
War.
     After a few years' experience as a surveyor in upper New York
State, Simon was sent by his cousin, Joseph Perkins, and other
proprietors of the Erie Land Company, to represent their interests in
the Western Reserve of Connecticut.  From 1798 until 1803, when Ohio was
admitted to the Union, he would travel back and forth each year by
horseback to the lands of Northeastern Ohio. This is how it all began;
     May 22, 1795, was the first time he left home. He was a hardy 23
year old who liked an outdoor life and the exercise of riding on
horseback. He left his father's home in Lisbon, Conn., leaving his
responibility of his mother and bothers, who lived on the farm, to an
uncle. Simon had been responsble for them since a child, as his father,
also named Simon, had died from his wounds from the Revolutionary War.
He journeyed to New York State to survey and sell wild lands owned by
his Conn. friends and relatives.
     His knowledge of surveying, carefully recorded in a small
leatherbound book, he could carry in his pocket, was apparently
self-taught.  He learned by experience during the three summers of 1795
thru 1797, that he spent in New York. He learned how to make out land
contracts, record deeds, collect debts, and taxes. He soon learned there
were difficulties involved in land owning; but he was convinced, as many
man of that period, that land was a good investment.  He was willing to
gamble on this conviction, and he accepted land as part payment of his
services. By March 17,1798, when he was wintering at his Lisbon home, he
had established a small business in Tioga, New York, to handle the sale
of his own and his clients' lands in that state.
      It was very stormy that March day, but a short thick set man with
a broad face, rather dark or brown complecton, journeyed from his  home
to Norwich, Conn., on business with the newly formed Erie Company. Some
said this man looked like an Indian, and they called him Molak; others,
of course, addressed Moses Cleaveland by his Connecticut Militia title
of General. But it was said by his friends that he was capable of going
through thick or thin in the business in which he was engaged.
     Cleaveland's pressing business that stormy day was the employment
of an agent to handle the exploration, survey, and sale of the western
lands of the Erie Company.  Cleaveland, Daniel Lathrop Coit, and Joseph
Perkins held as Trustees of this Company, more than 125,000 acres of the
Connecticut's Western Reserve lands that had been drawn by nineteen
members of the Erie Company through their investment in the Connecticut
Land Company, a coalition of companies formed in 1795 to purchase the
property from the state of Connecticut.
The members of the Erie Company wanted an agent on their land early that
summer to meet the many buyers who were expected.  A Company meeting
had, in fact, already warned for April 2 to settle his instructions; and
so it was urgent that an agent now be employed by the three Trustees.
     Daniel Lathrop Coit, Treasurer-Trustee of the Company, lived with
his wife and five children in a white gambrel-roofed house in Norwich.
He was , at forty-three, a financially successful importer of drugs; an
he had combined with his brother-in-law, Joseph Howland and two friends,
Elias and John Morgan, to invest $81,863 in the Western Reserve Lands.
Like Cleaveland, Coit was optimistic about the future of the western
country.  He had pooled in the Erie Company, in fact over 29,000 acres
of his land.  A beak-nosed man with receding hairline, Coit, had a
gentle sense of humor and patience when Cleaveland and other proprietors
caviled over Company affairs or divisions of, as he called it, " the
promised land."
     The third Trustee, Joseph Perkins, was a cousin to Simon Perkins,
and a Brigade-Major in the Twentieth Regiment of Connecticut's Militia.
The Major, uniformed in his blue coat and buff trousers, inspected his
Regiment when it held its festive drills in front of his house on
Norwich's Town Plain.  The Majors occupation, however was general
store-owner and merchant-shareholder with his uncle Andrew Perkins in
vessels engaged in the West Indies trade.  Lumber, provisions, and
livestock were exported by Andrew and Joseph Perkins Company from the
wharf in that part of Norwich called Chelsea Landing; rum, molasses,
sugar, wine, coffee, cotton, tobacco, indigo, and salt were imported
from the West Indies to be sold by the Perkins Company at its store near
the landing.
     Daniel Coit and the Major (Joseph Perkins) knew of Simon's
experience as a land agent; and they of course knew that he came from an
old and highly respected family. Simon was descended from John Perkins
who, according to family records, arrived in America with Roger Williams
in 1631.  Descendants of John Perkins had first settled in Norwich and
then purchased, in 1695, a nearby thousand acre point of land between
Quinebaug and Shetucket rivers.  Here, partly because of the difficulty
of crossing the Shetucket to attend meetings in Norwich but also because
of their opposition to revivalism at one time encouraged by the
Congregational Church, the Perkins family founded a separate
congregation called the Newent Society.  Some members of the family,
like The Major ( Joseph Perkins ), eventually returned to Norwich to
live; but Simon's branch of the family had stayed on the point that the
townspeople called "Perkins Crotch" and that became part of the village
of Lisbon.
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Con't in part 2