OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 21A ************************************************************************ USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. http://www.usgenwebarchives.org ************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 March 20, 2005 ************************************************************************** Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio by Darlene E. Kelley Tid Bits - Part 21 A +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Tid Bits - 21 A Cleaveland's Business Beginnings A distinction has been made somewhere along the line between trading with the Indians and commerce with the trader's own kind. Exactly how to make it is not easy to see. Conquering the populace, killing some inhabitants and making slaves of others for the purpose of grabbing off the gold was the Spanish method. The perpetrators saw nothing immorial in it. It had always been done. The only reason why it seems immoral today is that the Spanish Conquistadores who were so startlingly successful at it are so near in time to people of a different view of life. The French method shows an advance. The French were always thrifty and foresighted than the Spanish. They took another step. Instead of making for gold, the finished product they went after a souce of gold. They were wise enough to want not only furs and fish for today but furs and fish for tomarrow also. So instead of killing off the Indians they gave them a sort of friendship along with their exploitation. The English moved still further in the direction of doing things for themselves. Gold in itself was not their main ambition, and with them trading for furs and fish was merely an incident. If they could get land, they could produce for themselves, not only this year and next, but forever, all things that suited their more democratic needs. So as any story of the beginning of business by people of English descent, trading with the Indians counts little. It is comparable with cutting down trees for a cabin or planting wheat among stumps; it was not the beginning, but a prerequisite-- what had to be done before they actually begin. Like living in a one-room cabin and planting before the land is cleared, however, Indian trading lingers on and interweaves among the real beginnings. There was Indian trading in these parts pretty far back. A man named Meginnes had a cabin up the river near Newburgh some years before the Connecticut Land Company bought its land. A Frenchman had another. These are the ones known. Undoubtedly there were others before that. A little swapping went on the first summer, and Edward Paine made trading his business the first winter. Whenever a woman made white bread, Indians would give any amount of game for that delicacy. Squaws made a nuisance of themselves hanging around kitchens waiting for bread to come out of the oven, even if it were made of " rye an' Injun " for lack of milled wheat. Pioneer women often endeavored to teach their Indian visitors how to make bread for themselves, and were sometimes fairly successful. One of these instances occurred in the family of the present writer. The woman felt it was not fair to the Indians to take so much fur or game as they considered needful to give for what seemed to her such trifle as a loaf of home-baked bread. She told a squaw that if she would come on a Saturday ad watch a few times, she could learn to bake bread for herself. The result was that she had to do her Saturday baking for not one but many squaws lining the walls of her kitchen. They learned in time, but thir bread was seldom to be compared with her own. Perhaps it was a certain cleanliness in the preliminary processes, perhaps a recial deftness of touch, that was lacking. Teaching them to make the desired things for themselves may be perhaps be called the negative side of trade. At any rate, in these matters, kindliness of the white woman prevailed over any desire of gain by exploitation. The first four years of Cleaveland life were given up to the most primitive pioneering. There were but a few colonists, and they were using up the goods brought with them and endeavoring to make a beginning of getting food from the land. By 1800, however, there was more wheat than enough to carry over, and no market for it. Then David Bryant came along, with a still which he had in Virginia. He ans his son Gilman built a still house under the sand bank on the side hill about twenty rods from Lorenzo Carter's cabin and about fifteen feet above the river. This first business establishment of the city of Cleaveland was a house of hewed logs a story and a half high, twenty feet by twenty-six in size. Water was taken in a trough from springs coming out of the bank, along into the second story of the house. At first the whiskey was made from wheat. Later, when other markets appeared for the wheat crop, they used corn. The setting up of this still was a natural development. Whisky was considered an essential in every household. Wheat was begging for a market, and whisky had to be brought in at a high price for transportation. Converting wheat into whisky was an obvious solution of both problems. Whisky alo served as coin of realm in trading for furs. The latter use had its disadvantages when the Injuns got too much, but the state of affairs, too, was taken for granted at that period in the world's history. Prerequisite to the distilling business was the mill which ground the wheat which was made into whisky, but it can not be counted the first business in Cleaveland because it was built in Newburgh. Wheeler W. Williams and Major Wyatt erected it five miles east of Cleaveland on the trail to Hudson. David and Gilman Bryant got the stones for this mill from the Vermilion River and made them ready for use. The latter says: " The water was conveyed to the mill in a dugout trough, to an undershot wheel about twelve feet over, with one set of arms, and buckets fifteen inches long, to run inside of the trough, which went down the bank at an angle of forty-five degrees, perhaps. The dam was about four rods above the fall; the millstones were three and a half feet in diameter, of grey rock." One of these millstones has been preserved and was located at a place of honor in the Public Square. The first domesticated fowl were brought in 1799 by Timothy Doan's family -- a box of live geese. The boat overturned at Grand River and the geese were carried out into the lake, but the box burst and the geese swam back to shore and were captured. The first frame house built was Kingsbury's, on the ridge. Theirs also was the first crop of apples. The second of Cleaveland's commercial institutions seems to have been a store opened by Elisha Norton in Carter's house in 1801. He carried staple dry goods and groceries for the white folk and giddy calicoes, beads and such matters of joy and desires for the indians. Three years later Oliver Culver-- who had been with the surveying party of 1797 -- came to start a store. He brought a boatload of dry goods, groceries and liquors, and paid three dollars a barrel for transportation from Black Rock, near Buffalo. He stayed only one year, so apparently his venture did not pay well enough to be repeated. Nathan Perry, who had come with cattle in 1796, brought his family to Ohio in 1806. He bought a thousand acres of land in what is now Lake County at fifty cents an acre, and also five acres in Cleaveland, in the block bounded by Superior, St. Clair, Water and Banks streets. He added to these investments a farm near the corner of Broadway and Perry Street (now East Twenty-second Street ) and another tract in what is now Lorain. In 1808, he decided Cleaveland was the best place to make a living, so he then started a little store with a Mr. Hanchet, next to the post office. ( This was Luke Hanchet, probably, of the surveying party of 1796 ). Soon Perry built a combined home and store, and a few years later a brick store. The first brick store anywhere in the region, however, was built by J.R. and Irad Kelley at Newburgh in 1814. Elias and Harvey Murray came to town in 1810 and soon became leading merchants. Lorenzo Carter about this time built a warehouse on Union Lane. Some of the prices of this period are interesting. Muslin was fifty cents a yard, Calico thirty-seven and a half. salt and flour were priced alike, at fifteen dollars a barrel. Butter was six cents a pound and eggs four cents a dozen. One Anna McCullough of Canfield, Ohio, whose father died, leaving small children, went out to work as household helper at the age of thirteen. Her salary was fifty cents a week. This was 1814. At a store in Windham, Ohio, in September, 1817, a bill of goods was sold by Deacon Isaac Clark, whose whole stock was valued at five hundred dollars, a great sum then, to John Seeley, as follows: To 1/2 lb. tea @ $1.50 ------------ $ .75 " 1/2 yd. cambric @ .80 cents .40 " 1/2 paper pins @ .25 cnts . 121/2 Jeriamiah Lyman was charged by Clark with goods purchased, to wit: To 51/2 yds Calico @ .60 cents -- $3.30 " 1 skein silk .09 " 2 1/2 yds fulled cloth @ $1.75 4.37 " 1/2 lb. pepper @ .50 lb .25 Apparently it was Mrs. Jeremiah who did the shopping, and it is evident she was finishing her summer fancy work, perparing to do her fall sewing and and putting up her autumn pickles in between. Almost everything purchased was paid for in barter of some kind. Elias Cozad built the first tannery, out at Doan's Corners, which was followed within the first year by one put up by Samuel and Matthew Williamson. In 1801 there was a Constitutional Convention at Chillicothe, with Samuel Huntington as representative of Trumbull County. In February , 1803, Ohio was made a state, seventeeth. The first state legislature met in Chillicothe, and Samuel Huntington was made judge of the Ohio Supreme Court. The first doctor was David Long, who came in 1810. When he arrived, the nearest physicians were at Hudson, Painsville, Wooster, and Monroe. He was geatly needed, and his practice soon became large. He was interested, however, in other ventures, as nearly every pioneer who succeeded had to be. He was a candidate for county commissioner when the location of a new courthouse was in question. Cleaveland was then but " a small village six miles from Newburgh," and the settlers of the latter place naturally hoped to get the new building with the ensuing convenience and prestige. Dr. Long was elected, and his vote went to Cleaveland, which decided the matter. The doctor lost rather heavily on a contract for building a section of the canal, but he got on pretty well none the less. He moved in 1836 to a farm on Woodland Avenue. He built a stone house on this property, afterward occupied by Erastus Gaylord , and later he built the brick house on the corner of Woodland Avenue and Longwood Avenue ( now East Thirty-fifth Street. Long was a director of the Commercial Bank of Lake Erie and was connected with the Cleaveland Pier Company. He was one of the organizers of Trinity, the first church. He was on a commitee to buy a hearse, harness and brier. He was a member of the early fire department. These are a few of his many activities. He married Juliana, daughter of Judge John Walworth. His daughter, Mary, married Solomon Lewis Severance, the first of the Severance family to make Cleaveland his home. Their son, Lewis Henry Severance, was the father of the John L. Severance . The benefactions of the Severance family to art and education in Cleaveland and the Reserve have been many. The last beautiful gift, is that of Severance Hall. The first dentist, Benjamin Strickland, did not arrive until 1835. The first lawyer was Samuel Huntington, who came in the summer of 1801, but there was not much law business to be done, so he engaged in many other affairs, and soon moved on into public service, later becoming governor of Ohio. The first lawyer to do a real law practice was Alfred Kelley, who came on horseback in 1810, along with Dr. Jared P. Kirtland and Joshua Stow. It was in 1801 that Amos Spafford resurveyed the city streets and lanes, planted fifty-four posts of oak, one foot square, at the principal corners, at fifty cents per post, and charged fifty cents for grubbing out a tree at the northeast corner of the Public Square. The original Streets of the village were Water, Ontario, Miami, and Erie streets running north and south, and Bath, Federal, Lake, Superior, Huron, and Ohio streets running east and west. These streets surveyed were not at once opened and cleared of trees and stumps. By 1812 the only street really cleared was Superior west of the Square. Ontario was passable for teams, north of the Square and south of the Square it was an open road, along the present Broadway to Newburgh . Water Street was scarcely more than a path. Lake and Huron streets were unopen while Erie Street was partly opened and cleared of underbrush. Superior Street was planned for the principal street of the city. It was the widest streets in America -- 132 feet. Originally it stopped at Erie Street . Fine houses were built on it between the Public Square and Erie Street and west of the Square it remained the principal retail district. Euclid was not in the original plan, but grew into a road because it was the most direct way of reaching the village of Euclid, the settlement laid out as extra pay for surveyors. Prospect was surveyed by Ahaz Merchant in 1881. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ to be continued in 21 B.